How Crunchyroll Made SDCC Worth It
It’s been one week since the writing of this piece that 2024’s edition of San Diego Comic Con has come to a close. Between getting the opportunity to have personal items signed by highly influential members of the comic book industry (FOR FREE!), the shared sense of community that comes with seeing your friends, and the growing list of controversies in the Mr. Beast camp, I’m happy I didn’t get accepted to be on Beast Games and ended up putting my SDCC badge to work.
For the amount of money I spent (mostly food, drinks, lodging) I needed a selling point to make what I was spending worth it. That selling point would come to me from the pier next to the Rady Shell Auditorium. America would get to hear LiSA sing for the first time in 10 years as part of a sound check about 4 hours before she REALLY brought it that night. I had no idea who LiSA was when I heard her singing but all I knew was that her singing alone was worth me trying to figure out how I get in to see her in action.
On the walk over I noticed it was part of a concert series Crunchy Roll held right next to the convention center and it turns out that premium members with the service could have front row seats for what I would later discover to be ‘the reason SDCC was worth it’. Crunchy Roll didn’t have to offer free trials for their premium subscription, but I (guilty as charged), signed up for the free trial and cancelled when I got to my wristband. What follows is the reason I reactivated my subscription out of the principal of Crunchy Roll bringing a quality experience to the otherwise mundane grind of a weekend.
FAKE STAR USA – James Landino, Hyper Potions, and VGR ushered in us attendees with a really remarkable vibe for a fairly wide spectrum of nerds which made for a solid hour of head bopping on my end.
At the moment I was expecting LiSA to be up next, I was then so surprised by Alice Longyu Gao absolutely owning her moment that I have to give her a standalone paragraph. The high level of experimentation with visuals, instruments, vocal range, and unabashed queerness really was something to be praised and I hope to see more of her in the future. While I know it was absolutely a coincidence that during the set, a building nearby with a Brazilian BBQ establishment was set fire, it’s more entertaining and in the moment for me to believe Alice was setting San Diego on fire with her high-level artistry.
Which leads us to LiSA’s first proper set in America for the first time in 10 years. My limited amount of research before her set didn’t prepare me for the stadium quality performance, she and the band brought with her for what quickly felt like an intimate one-of-a-kind experience. The energy grew from the stage and the crowd song-by-song to the point that my personal favorite song would come just soon after LiSA asked us, “Do you like Spiderman?” I wasn’t sure where this was leading but would soon come to discover she made a theme song for the Japanese dub of Across The Spiderverse. For the english native readers of this article who may not be familiar, imagine as best as you can what a live performance of the following song might look like with the following visuals being showed on screen:
An unbelievably hyped moment, right? As I said earlier, each song led us to an even better time. The night would lead us to the very smashed group of concert goers on my row leveling our seats with drunken antics and a 4th of July level firework show to close out the night. The value of that night honestly was worth the price of the SDCC badge alone in my eyes. Easily the best moment of the show for me and anyone who was not there to see those DJs, Alice, and LiSA play didn’t have as good of a time in San Diego as I did. Not an opinion, just a fact :) If you have yet to hear of any of the following acts, I’ve made a linktr.ee for you to check them all out on their respective platforms HERE
