I’m the first to admit it. I am the walking stereotype of my major. It doesn’t matter how many showers I’ve taken or how much grass I touch because I will never be able able to run away from my greatest shame love: Genshin Impact.
Since I was a frosh, I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to Anime Pasadena, an anime convention held at the nearby Pasadena Convention Center in Old Pasadena every November. And every year, without fail, I can be seen spending copious amounts of money on fan-made art and merchandise of Genshin Impact, along with various other animes and video games I enjoy. Someone actually needs to take my Venmo account away from me before I go in the red on literal pixelated men. I would ask my friends to do this for me, but I enable them and they enable me (we’re all going to be in the red at this rate)…
In this picture, you can find this years’ crew of enablers breaking for lunch at Pho Nha Trang (a Vietnamese restaurant featuring a mural painted by a fellow Caltech undergrad!). Our crew consisted of my best friend, some of my Caltech frosh friends, and my sibling who came to visit me. This crazy crew was up bright and early (in Caltech time at least) to line up in front of the convention center, which already wrapped around the block at 9:15 a.m. for an event that opened at 10 a.m. This might seem awful, but during MY frosh year, the lines at 9:15 a.m. wrapped around two corners and SNAKED through the convention center’s courtyard… and the sun was shining directly on me… so this was a great upgrade in comparison! Yippee!!!!!
Once we made it into the convention center, we grabbed our badges and headed directly into Artist Alley, also known as my personal heaven (and bankruptor). There were so many artists selling merchandise of all kinds: Jujutsu Kaisen-themed koi deskmats, Fruits Basket-themed press-on nail sets, Pokemon planters, and of course, PRINTS of all sizes featuring art from all sorts of shows and games. This year, I went absolutely feral on Genshin Impact content, and exactly nobody was surprised. I can’t help it, okay? I see Scaramouche from Genshin Impact, and the money just mysteriously drains from my bank account. To my credit, I also got some non-Genshin content: I got merch of an artist’s OC (including a T-shirt!), a Jujutsu Kaisen print, a Honkai Star Rail print, and a Love&Deepspace print. I will never beat the allegations, I’m afraid. At least the art I got looked really great on my walls!
Behold, my walls of shame pride. (If you can’t tell, I really love Genshin.) These prints have been carefully curated since 2022, and most of them came from Anime Pasadena. The dark green wall has expanded in content since I last took this picture, but there’s still definitely empty space…
Indeed, a curator’s job is never done! Like clockwork every year, we buy our convention tickets, arrange our car rides, and show up as the cleanest anime fans you’ve ever seen (or smelled) to fight dozens of fellow fans through the stands in order to buy our pins, buttons and other goodies.
If there’s any advice I would have given to prefrosh me who was deciding to commit to Caltech, I would have said, “There’s an anime convention right nearby,” and prefrosh me would have 100% immediately committed to Caltech on the spot. It’s bittersweet to think that next year will be my final year going to Anime Pasadena (at least as a Caltech undergraduate, if things go according to plan). The first time I attended, I was just a little froshling who was taken under the wings of my upperclassmen. Now, I’m leading my own entourage of frosh, and it’s definitely surreal to be tracking my growth as a Caltech student through my concerningly many purchases of fictional characters. I am, for better or for worse, just that kind of person, and I (and my hundreds of dollars’ worth of prints) would not change it for anything.
(Save my bank account from me please.)
