Didn't spend much time at A-Kon this year, but I feel good about it.

It's always been a bit of an outlier - a big con run by people who would be much happier running a science fiction convention, who once did run a SF convention that later died, and who rolled the SF elements into the anime con. Come on, the guests of honor are Nabeshin and David Drake, not that the latter isn't one of my favorite authors or anything. It's got a reputation as an annoying, poorly-managed affair, though heroic efforts on the part of the video staff keep that running smoothly (and I'm not just saying that because all the folks I know are on video staff!)

First time I've been able to attend a con in a while where I didn't have any kind of financial restraint to worry about, so I splurged a little. Figure-heavy, picking up the GSC Nanoha, the Kaiyodo Rin and Dark Saber (who are currently locked in mortal combat over the monitor), a lil' Asakura I got out of a random Haruhi box, and a nice no-glasses Yuki that I got 'cause it was cheap. (And the Reinforce Zwei figure came in the mail this week, too...)

Non-figure swag includes a lot of manga I'd been meaning to get, the Haruhi and Gundam Zeta series on DVD, some Order of the Stick books, and quite a few pencil boards to join the collection. I use these things as cube/office decoration, and as a kind of secondary resume - so I only put up ones from shows I've worked on in the past. This year's haul includes Shin Getter, Steam Detectives, Orphen, and a nice Sakura Wars one.

Tough to socialize at the event, though. Relatively few of my random friends from online attend A-Kon in the first place - if they're going to travel to a con, they go to Otakon or AX or maybe Central or Boston. The friends I have on staff are all, of course, insanely busy and on the edge of breakdown trying to keep things lurching along; bad time to throw in with them unless I want to grab a cable and haul, and honestly, I know better than that these days. The ADV friends are all back in Houston, or voice actors with their own busy schedules as guests. So I figured that sliding in, borrowing a badge from video ops, doing a bit of work for form's sake, and throwing money around in the dealer's room was probably a good day.

Doesn't help that it's Texas hot (actually not a bad day, by local standards, but not exactly comfortable) and that the hotel's air conditioning is fatally overtaxed by the huge crowds. It just ain't very -comfy- to hang around.

All that said, I had a good time. It was nice to sit back and people-watch at a con where I didn't have any obligations or a schedule to keep. Lots of neat costumes, of course; the usual Wolfwoods and Ryogas and the like, enough Soul Reapers to put on a Bleach musical, and apparently 680+ video game costumers gathered to break the record for "most video game character costumes worn in the same place", which was previously 80 and thus must not have been trying very hard.

It felt like there was a spring of fandom there, though, a different kind than the sort one associates with online on the public fora. These were a bunch of people there to have fun, not to pose in dramatic postmodern fashion and decry the onrushing death of the industry or how every anime made in the last ten years is lousy or which fansubber said which unbelievable thing today. It was honestly invigorating to drop in and bathe in that atmosphere, metaphorically speaking. Or maybe I'm just happy to have spent some money. Some of both, probably...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 06:49 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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