Anime Apolyton: Anime Conventions

[:) Smiley]

so, convention season has pretty much wrapped up over here in the bay area, as we are about to enter the rainy season here.

why is that? well, overe here in nor-cal, anime conventions are no longer focused on being places to buy anime, since there are plenty of stores that carry it, not to mention the Internet. instead, the highlight has become the costume party, where people dress up as anime characters and perform comedy shows and dance all night to j-rock and techno.

anyone else here go to these things?

[SlowwHand]

I bet Tattila does. He's got that avatar. I bet he does.

[chequita guevara]

I haven't been to a Con in twenty years.

[Elok]

Anime conventions...wow. That sounds so many different kinds of creepy.

[LordShiva]

The only anime convention I know of is to make your characters close their eyes when they talk.

[SlowwHand]

Are all Indians as peculiar as you?

[LordShiva]

Yes, all 1.1 billion of us are exactly the same. Sometimes, when I've been drinking, I'll look in the mirror and ask "Hey, who put a window in my bathroom!"

[SlowwHand]

[Elok]

Yeah, I can think of tons of other anime conventions:

-Villain looks like a transexual pirate, is considered scary anyway
-tentacle rape
-deficit of normal hair colors
-annoying wacky fun girl characters
-yelling the name of an attack as you're doing it, just to keep the enemy informed as to what just blew his leg off
-tentacle rape
-people holding perfectly still against a moving background of lines saves money on animation and is apparently good enough for somebody
-tentacle rape
-abnormally large breasts on everyone...
-including some of the guys, creepily enough
-creepy cat/girl hybrids
-unidentifiable critters who talk by making repetitive noises and are considered "comic relief"
-tentacle rape
-absurdly non-functional mecha designs
-really, really big guns that charge up forever and then go boom and omg the next three miles are a smoldering crater!!!
-longhaired, passive-aggressively emo swordsmen who repress their tragic pasts but not so much that everybody doesn't figure it all out
-tentacle rape

[LordShiva]

Oh yeah, all of those too.

Also, tentacle rape.

[:) Smiley]

Hmm, Elok sure has some interesting taste in anime...

Yes, all 1.1 billion of us are exactly the same. Sometimes, when I've been drinking, I'll look in the mirror and ask "Hey, who put a window in my bathroom!"

I heard that in India the cities are so crowded that two apartments will share a bathroom window - your outside is your neighbor's inside.

[Tattila the Hun]

I wish we'd get con's here... We only have pro's. And ex-con's...

Here are 100 rules of anime... Might be usefull to some. Of course, I know them, if not by heart, then by soul.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~duongsaa/more_htm/jk_100animeRules.htm

#11- Law of Inherent Combustibility- Everything explodes. Everything.
First Corollary- Anything that explodes bulges first.
Second Corollary- Large cities are the most explosive substances known to
human science. Tokyo in particular seems to be the most unstable of these cities,
sometimes referred to as "The Matchstick City".

[Jon Miller]

from what I have heard they are popular among the young crowd..

JM

[:) Smiley]

yep, the average age is in the 20s, probably since anime hasn't been around the US for that long.

there was one time where I was invited to attend the local science fiction convention along with other members of this anime club... now there were people with gray hair and kids there, including an entire Klingon family.

[Wraith]

I go to a couple a year. I went to every UshiCon (since I live in Austin), but now that they're pretty much over I'll have to see about another one.

I also normally go to A-Kon, the third biggest US con and the longest-running con in the US. I've been liking them less lately, though. They tend to focus on getting big-name music groups from Japan as their special guests, and I don't really have a fondness for J-pop or J-rock (and there's no way they'll ever bring an Enka singer over). This leaves all their industry guests as being from US companies, which isn't a bad thing since both Funimation and ADV are in the area, but isn't as interesting as it could be with the budget they've got. The do have a lot of good panel discussions to help make up for it, though.

Highlight of this year for me was AnimeFest (don't normally go to this one, but it'll probably be my replacement for UshiCon). They had ABe yo****oshi and Yasuyuki Ueda as guests, so there was no way I could miss it. Got a bunch of ABe's stuff signed, including a rather nice message on my Japanese artbox of Haibane Renmei, since I loaned it to them during a panel so they could play the first episode (They brought one of their laptops from Japan, but only had US release DVDs for some reason).

Anyway, none of what you highlight as the main draws are what gets me to go ^_^ There are plenty of other people like me, although things like the concerts and cosplay contests do attract a lot more attention, so you can be forgiven.

Since I really only do Texas cons (won't fly with the stupid security theater we've got in the airports now), I've gotten to know an interesting group of people who tend to visit the same cons. There's a pretty good core of college professors in Texas (including an astrophysicist) with a heavy interest in anime, so there's some really good discussion. This is where Susan Napier was teaching, after all (she's been doing research in Japan lately).
For those with that kind of interest, check out Mechademia, a scholarly journal being published soon. Anime Research is another intersting site.

--"from what I have heard they are popular among the young crowd.."

Depends where you hang out ^_^ The stuff mentioned in the first post, yeah. Still, there's plenty of older people around, they're just likely to be doing different things and generally aren't as attention-seeking, so aren't as noticeable.

Wraith
"It was half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold"
-- Hunter S Tolkien ("Fear and Loathing in Barad Dur")