Mericon 2025 - I wish I could teleport

Hello everyone~!
The con year is almost over for me but luckily I can live the nice memories again in the form of these con summaries! ❤ This time it's about Mericon which was held on 2nd of August at Rauma city library for the third time omg my baby is a toddler already. Unlike previous years, this time I was only in charge of the cosplay competition - and somehow this still managed to become the busiest Mericon by far for me. How? Well, let me explain...

Con venue entrance.

(And, as per usual, every photo that isn't a selfie was taken by Shiro Samurai, thanks a lot! ^^)

We had driven to my parents' place after Nekocon. You see, there was no point to drive to the north since there were only two weeks until Mericon would be held (and I had a friends' wedding to attend a week before the con) - instead we decided to save some gas and money and spend those couple of weeks at Satakunta. Probably not the wisest decision ever since one of the worst heatwaves was going on during our stay and I have a feeling that at least my last two brain cells casually melted back then lol. 
The day before the con we drove to Rauma where we had booked a hotel room at Scandic Rauma. 

Tämä on vettä.

That... Is something I don't recommend, at least not during the summer.

I did mention there was a heatwave going on, right?
What if I told you we had no AC in our room? 
...yeah, you read that right :))) The hotel was built back in 1970s and to this day it lacks some... Quite important things. Literally the only positive thing about the room was the bed, which was one of the best ones I've come across during my hotel stays, but otherwise... Ehhh. The room was also very small which made the situation even worse since we didn't have that much space to go around - which resulted in "Mind moving yourself 5 cm to any direction away from me because your body temperature is practically melting me, thank you c:" conversations at least from my part even when we were on the opposite sides of the room lol.

The morning came after sleeping for like... What, two hours? I was quite nauseous when I woke up due to the room temperature and poor sleep, but managed to drag myself to eat some breakfast. I must give it a positive honorary mention tho; there were lots of different foods to choose from, some of them quite luxurious.
After eating back to the hotel room we went. I had decided to go for a random OC, Shiro Samurai wore his America cosplay again since, well, he kind of had two costumes to choose from and America is easier to wear while photographing than Gaogamon. We started to get ourselves ready...

...and at that very moment - or rather, after inserting my contact lenses - I noticed I had made a horrible mistake. I had taken a costume bag with me and most of my make-up products were there. Except for the brushes. Which were in my other bag.
Long story short: instant meltdown which affected the mood quite badly at the moment but thankfully didn't ruin the whole day, those can be very bad with BPD to put it slightly and I almost decided to go full casual. I can't even describe how much I hated myself at that moment - I had just successfully ruined my plans for the day. Eventually Shiro Samurai managed to convince me to wear something nicer than college pants and a hoodie and put on at least some mascara. At that point my thoughts ran along the lines "Why should I even try?" buuut little did I know that I would thank myself for not putting on the whole costume - especially make-up - later that day.

After getting myself into slightly better mood we left the hotel... And moved like 100 m to get to the library's parking lot :'D Had we walked the distance to the library's back door would have been like 15 m lol. We got there a bit after 11 - also known as a bit after the con had opened its doors.

The lobby, photographed from different angles.

I can't lie: literally my first thought was "Where are all the people?". You see, in the previous years the lobby has been crowded and it's been even hard to move around there. But now... There were very few people and I must say that I kind of felt my heart sink a bit.
That was before I realized something: the drawing workshop had been moved upstairs so the people very likely were either there or at the Artists' Alley (which was located in its familiar spot). And I was right; at the end of the day those who had been working at the drawing/pin making workshop looked like they definitely needed some rest ^^" I mean, it's good that an activity is popular, but that was something we didn't really expect lol.

Said drawing/pin making workshop. There was a drawing contest this year too and its theme was mermaids 💙

Since I was in charge of everything related to the cosplay competition (or, as we say in Finland, "cosplayvastaava", also known as "the person in charge of cosplay stuff") the first thing I did was to gather all the judges together. This year that meant Shiro Samurai, Springdeer and neponen.cos (who competed at last year's Mericon and a few months after that in Gingacon where we actually got to know each other - I asked them to be cosplay competition judge at this year's Mericon); I had decided to give up on being a judge so I could pay more attention to my other responsibilities. That... Turned out to be a very wise decision an hour or so later.
As per usual, Shiro Samurai acted as the photographing judge while the other two stayed in the judging room and did the more traditional costume judging. This year we had six contestants - or, well, we had five before one of them asked at the con if they could take part in the competition. This time we decided that it was okay; five would have been... Well, the minimum amount of contestants for a competition if you ask me.

After giving them instructions it was almost time for the judging to begin - and after that all I can remember is running back and forth for at least an hour, searching for our contestants to get them to the judging room in time! 

What do you mean I was sweating like a pig? And even though I apparently looked quite sick, I wasn't lol. I also decided to take my contact lenses off, they would have looked quite weird without make-up.

The next thing I can actually remember clearly is that Maria H. (we had three Marias among the staff sos) approached me and told me that cosplay catwalk didn't have that many participants - and by "that many" I mean "there are no more than three". Yikes. Then... The following conversation happened.

Maria H.: "Do you think that it would be possible to convince Shiro Samurai to participate? His costume is pretty awesome."
Me: "Uh... Ask him? He has some stage fright but then again this is a small convention..."
Maria H.: "Hmm. I could go there with him. Would you come with me to try to convince him?"
Me: "Sure 😁"

We weren't that far from the photo booth so there we went - and both of us were grinning like Cheshire Cats, which was totally not suspicious at all. I could see that Shiro Samurai realized in less than two seconds that we were up to something :'D Well, the conversation was had and eventually the two agreed to go to the stage together - gotta save the cosplay catwalk! 

And after this...
*insert at least 30 minute long "I have no idea" here*
I was seriously so busy that I can't even remember anything else than running back and forth! D: I mean, I'm not complaining lol, I actually enjoyed my duties, but this summary feels like I'm just describing a supermassive blackhole massive blackout :'D 
Oh, there was one minus to the schedule I had made for the pre-judging. You see, this year Mericon actually had a guest of honor, also known as Merenneito Riia who is a professional mermaid! I've had a huge interest in mermaiding for... Like... At least ten years but have never really got around it and right now I would sink like RMS Titanic anyway since I don't really know how to control my mid-section muscles properly. Her program unfortunately overlapped with my schedule very badly so I totally missed it since I was guiding the contestants to the places they needed to be at :( 

Some serious mermaid talk.

That amount of empty chairs makes me cry.

My next clear memory is... 
The cosplay competition.
Yup, I'm missing chunks there. And not just a bit.

This year I actually had requested to have those cards behind which my lines were written. In the previous years I had just written down the contestant name, character name and series - everything else was just winged lol. I wanted to level up my game at least a bit and, well, I must admit I felt a bit more professional. Notice one of Mericon's mascots, the cat called Meri, on the cards ❤ Speaking of the mascots: there are two of them, the cat called Meri and a young sailor man called Rauno. Back in the days I asked Shiro Samurai to create them - when I was still in charge of multiple things and in a good enough position to negotiate project-type/short 'job contracts' - and this year these guys were used for Mericon's marketing (along with a chibi mermaid version of Rauno created by Janika Wahlman, one of Mericon's amazing organizers) for the first time! 💙

This year we also managed to find some copyright-free background music for the cosplay competition and it did wonders to the overall atmosphere during it.

(I'm still laughing at the fact that my shirt says "Serial k*ller documents and chill" and one of our contestants cosplayed Jason Voorhees :'D)

After the catwalk part of the competition was over I spotted a familiar face in the crowd - namely FreakyAngel with whom I chatted for a good while. Fun fact: we were almost neighbors at one point but never managed to cross paths back then :'D But I'm very happy that it eventually happened, meeting her makes me happy each time! ❤
We parted ways after a while and I decided to go check out the merchants near the info desk. Yes, this year Mericon had three merchants too, namely Pinklazercat, Pelivaari and Print Nordica.

There were a lot of people around the merchants basically all the time!

Yes, when I said "near the info desk" I quite literally meant "turn around and you will see the library staff 2 meters away from you" lol.

I bought some stuff from Pinklazercat and after that made my way towards Café Käpälä - I seriously needed some mineral water to stay hydrated enough lol. This year there weren't that many decorations or anything but I heard the café staff had basically just gotten back to work after a summer holiday - and some were there even if they still had some holiday days left! - so it's more than understandable.

The café area.

The guest book was there this time too - directly next to the café area.

There weren't that many people when the photos were taken but I spoke to the café staff and they told me that they had sold plenty of stuff so yeah, the café wasn't that empty all the time. 

This year there were no paintings or anything in the lobby; in the past year there has always been some sort of an art exhibition going on during Mericon but this time that didn't happen. There was something else instead...

These were in the lobby...

...these near the photobooth...

...these next to the stairs to the 2nd floor...

...and finally one on the 2nd floor!

And these were not the only signs; some others can be seen in other pics + there were the ones that Shiro Samurai painted back in 2023 when Mericon was held for the first time! You see, we have gotten some feedback along the lines "there should be more signs to tell where you can find and what" in the previous years so this time it was made sure that we won't get the same feedback again - thank you Maria H. for this! ❤
Though I must mention that this made me chuckle at first :'D But we didn't get any complaints about this topic though!

Very soon it was time for the award ceremony for the cosplay competition & the drawing contest - congrats to all the winners! 💙 Oh, and before I forget: this year there was one prize sponsor too, thank you so much Talking to myself jewelry! 💗

And a huge thank you to all of my lovely judges, you're gold! ❤

Okay, so finally now I could re---
Hahaha nope.

You see, after the award ceremony it was time for Shiro Samurai's panel about seafaring. And did it go smoothly? 
...well, the panel itself yes - except that the audience was close to non-existent but that's something that is very hard to affect.
But the technology... Wasn't exactly on our side. You see, Shiro Samurai had used LibreOffice Impress to make the presentation instead of Microsoft Office PowerPoint. These two programs are basically the same, except that Impress is free and has less features than PowerPoint. One can usually open Impress presentations on PowerPoint (this can't be done the other way around) buuuut this time it became a huge problem. For some reason the library's laptop tried to push us to use the desktop version of PowerPoint - to which we didn't have a license for. Great.

Next I tried to open the presentation with Adobe Reader but since the presentation hadn't been converted to a PDF beforehand I, obviously, couldn't do that. 

The clock was ticking, there was some general hassle and I was just trying to come up with a solution after we had tried another laptop which didn't work in our favor any better. Until finally I felt the bulb light up and I asked Maria H. if the library staff had access to the cloud version of Microsoft Office 365 which includes PowerPoint. Turned out it indeed was an option and via that I FINALLY managed to open the presentation...

...which looked nothing like it should have looked like. I really don't have the words to describe how awful I actually felt about that; I had seen Shiro Samurai work on that presentation for literally hours (if I counted correctly, close to 17) and now all that work went down the drain. But, unfortunately, there wasn't really anything more I could've done on the spot; we were already behind the schedule and fixing the presentation would have taken hours, so it was literally a no can do situation.

During said panel I also did my basically first and last round around the Artists' Alley. Normally I wouldn't disappear in the middle of a panel but I realized that it was getting quite late and I hadn't had time to properly check the artists so I did a speed-run there (and ran into one of my former colleagues who had come to the library and thus check the event after saying the final goodbyes to her late husband...).

Before Shiro Samurai could actually finish his panel, the clock was already ticking the con's final minutes. It sure was a bummer that he didn't get to finish it, but that couldn't have been helped - technical difficulties ft. too short program slot to begin with don't go well together. However, as someone who had heard some of the stories long before the con itself I must say that I still found the panel very entertaining. If - and hopefully when - Shiro Samurai hosts a panel again I strongly recommend going to listen; even though he isn't really in his comfort zone in these situations, he doesn't let the audience see it. On top of it all his style of speaking is entertaining and unique - and clear, which is extremely important when speaking to the audience (I myself don't hear all that well, so clear delivery is very much appreciated). 

This coming from someone who quite regularly does that at job in a form or another and very rarely praises anyone in this context.

This time we weren't required to stay at the library after the doors closed so we basically just took our mountain of stuff, thanked everyone for the great con and drove back to my parents' place before driving to Eura to fetch some kebab since both of us were starving lol to relax for the evening and pack our stuff since there was a long drive ahead of us on Sunday, namely driving back to north.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that we got back home since my car decided to break down  immediately after the trip 😶

And that's the end of this summary~!

Next post will be Matsucon's summary... And after that I will write about a con I attended a very first time this year! 👀 Stay tuned!

Until next time.

-Firith