Anime Mid-Atlantic 2008: The Fear
Richmond smelled like burning chlorine when we laid our tires across I-64 tarmac.
The idea that the trip began with the smoke of a Carolinian swamp fire seemed somehow fitting, since I often spend these ‘reviews’ doing nothing but talking shit for 3,000 words. In this case, though, the resultant smoke couldn’t have been better timed. The smoke from this fire, about 150 miles away, wasn’t visible in a traditional, “ooh, look, smoke,” way. It was, however, omnipresent in the stench that pervaded the outside of the con, and the way everything outside took on a hazy, dreamy, soft-around-the-edges quality.
The past two years of this convention…this poor, doomed, abortive convention were held at the Richmond Convention Center, where the con-goers were systematically harassed and abused by hotel and RCC staff. Hosting this convention in the RCC was like taunting us with a moist, delicious cupcake of fun and excitement, sprinkled generously with the rat poison and anthrax of totalitarian disapproval. But this year the RCC wouldn’t take us back. We fucked things up so bad, last time, they won’t have any part of us…or, that’s how we like to think of it…so it had to be moved. And, rather than move it back to the Koger Center, where we had always been most happy, it was moved across the state to Va Beach’s Holiday Inn Executive Center…the birthplace of KatsuCon, and a hotel SO well loved, it’s the reason NekoCon was born. I remember that first NekoCon with the fondness of a decade gone past, and some measure of that fondness was centered on this hotel.
But we arrive…and it all falls down, one brick at a time. These halls seem so much narrower than I recalled them to be. The ceilings lower. The lights dimmer. The corridors to the rooms strike me as labyrinthine and foreboding, where once they were inviting. Tables didn’t seem to clog the walkways, children didn’t seem to bottleneck every third meter, and security didn’t have to shove their way through milling throngs in the decade-old land of my memory. The crowds were thinner, the parking was available, the fangirls screamed in a more tolerable pitch. Things stayed kid friendly and family friendly. There was courtesy. In at least some small measure, there was a sense of Unity. The careful and canny reader will note my use of past tense.
Before I have located registration (which requires directions from three people and is hidden in a hotel room in which only the ‘Volunteer Sign-Up’ sign is visible), my faith in the event is starting to show the cracks and stress fractures of unrealized potential…unrealistic expectations. The ends fray and my hope begins to unravel-the hope for a good, relaxing weekend and a positive experience. And I’m not helping. Oh, sure, I say I’m willing to keep an open mind. I say that. But I still make a bee-line for karaoke, that first night.
After 17 conventions and ten years, my long-held belief that the Karaoke was the paragon of the convention was recently disproven by the Original Writing workshop. Still, unlike that paltry, condescending hour, this Karaoke is special. This is an endurance trial. This is the marathon of pain, firm and muscled next to the lithe sprinter of hatred, bile and disgust that will be my first panel, tomorrow morning. Karaoke might not be the most depressing thing, anymore, but staying for the whole thing is the act of self-destruction about which one can be most proud.
The first singer is, of course, the host, and I get the joke. She’s singing the j-pop of thirty years ago, dressed as the character who sings 30-year old j-pop in karaoke and is a slef-proclaimed otaku. I get this joke, because I’ve seen that series, and that I get this makes me sad. She’s not a bad singer, she’s singing like that because her character does, too. This would make me sad, except for the two vodkas I drank before I got here.
She’s giving away soap?
This, somehow, makes us happy?
She’s giving away soap…but only if you’re good enough to deserve it?
It opens like it always opens: with me screaming. The first contestant is an important and painful reminder that not quite all black people have rhythm, great voices or the ability to dance. But silly, silly me. I should have learned, more than a decade ago, never, ever, ever, EVER make fun of the first act…or the universe will punish me with the second. (Sensitivity Note: This is in no way an indication of my buying into any racial stereotypes about african-americans. I find the practice disgusting and am attempting to satirize it through absurdism.)
#3 is a group. There are small children. They are cute-thus, they get soap.
Our fourth is a special case, and worthy of mention…before I start fast forwarding to the good ones. She has a rich voice, possessing a great depth and sincerity. A dramatic soprano, she nevertheless swims effortlessly across three octaves like she was born to the stage. And there’s this vibrato quaver that would make Sleater Kinney’s Corin Tucker stand back and say, “Not bad, kid.” However awesome all this sounds, she is very obviously singing in the wrong key. She gets the soap. This works for me.
The fifth act gets soap. The fifth harms my love of music, yet she gets soap, and this seems to make us all blitheringly happy. Soap…beeeeeeeeeecause she’s going toooooo…wash out her FUCKING MOUTH for doing this thing to us?
Number eight is nervous. He’s not liking the attention…or the spotlight. The expectant stares. The sneers. But wait. Is that Cha La Head Cha La? Is that my fucking JAM? I don’t honestly give the faintest modicum of a shit that he’s popping his P’s…or that he has somehow discovered a way to pop both C’s and H’s. The simple fact is that I’m not clapping for him, I’m clapping for the song. I don’t even get pissed when he gets soap. She just doesn’t understand the iconic joy of the original Dragonball Z theme.
#10 lingers, and the Vodka has basically exited my system. This is it. This. Right here. This is the moment where the endurance trial begins. This is where we know…absolutely KNOW a number of things. 1) We are in hell. 2) We are in pain. 3) This guy is holding the lyrics…and if he gets soap, it will ruin my faith in the soap system of success and reward.
#17 is an important and painful reminder that not all asian people completely lack rhythm, great voices or the ability to dance-just this one. (Sensitivity Note: This is in no way an indication of my buying into any racial stereotypes about asian-americans. But c'mon...they seriously can't dance, right?)
#20 involves a booty dancing Zelda…this fucks up my childhood more than last summer’s Transformers movie.
#26 could be asked to rate, from one to ten, the flavor of every penis in the entire hotel… truly redefining the word Skank.
#27 would allow us to go out on a good note. She fools us by singing, poorly, a miserable, squeaky crap of a drama song, then cuts off in the middle with, “just kidding,” and switches songs. It’s not just that she has a good voice-she matches her voice well to her song choice…not everyone is wise enough for this. Combined with great showmanship, this would have ended the night with a perfection unmatched since NekoCon One. Would have. Would. But we ran out of soap six contestants ago. Beauty, grace, charm, wit and showmanship are rewarded by the last twenty masochists, too weary to clap.
The rest of Friday night will become a fascinating exercise in futility, because we have the unmitigated gall to play Mafia. Almost effortlessly, we find a perfect spot for Mafia: large, open, off to the side, out of the way, not in a walking path, not blocking a door, still central enough to recruit pedestrians. This area is all but made for our needs, so we hold a few rounds and build up a sixteen-player game. We have fun. Security feeds on this. You can’t be here this late. It’s not allowed. Maybe in a hotel room (limit of six people) or conference room (all locked). We sit at the tables around the pool, but that whole area is closed. We lose half our people when we go to sit outside, but everybody under 18 must stay inside after curfew. Abandoning them, we set up on a grassy patch, well away from any entrances or eyes. This time, it takes them an hour…before the crashing offense of people having unsanctioned fun is too much. They suggest the back corner of the employee parking lot…dicks…
Sleep is a laughable proposition after we load up on coffee and chase the tail of 7am. Besides, the writing workshop is in 2 hours. This interim is filled bumming cigarettes and watching a Naruto’s 50$ wig get thrown onto the roof of the lobby, then watching him sulk, rather than do anything about it. “You fucking dick. You threw it, you get it back.” Yeah…that’d be fair. Except the thrower walks away, and the Naruto is clearly having more fun sulking and being cooed at by that unique breed of bloodhound girl who can sniff out drama like blood in the water. Three cheers for complacency.
We’ve spent ten minutes talking about plot. Apparently-and I didn’t know this-plot is necessary to have a story, but it’s only interesting when something happens…but that something can’t happen too easily or immediately, or your plot is too short. So all these other things have to happen to complicate the first things and sometimes that leads to a totally different outcome than originally intended. Except, here on Earth, we sum all that shit up in the word, “conflict.” I’ll tell you if I happen to hear the word ‘conflict’ in here.
This is it. The writing panel is the single most depressing hour in the entire weekend. No moment presents me with a deeper sense of dread that to see the Writers in the Writing workshop being told, “dialogue is two people speaking,” and responding by nodding their heads sagely and going, “Aah…I get it now.” There is a desperate part of my shithead writerbrain that wants to believe that the only people who attend a writing workshop are the cream of the crop-already writers. She disabuses me of this quaint notion. This is like walking into grad school and being taught how to open a window.
And yet…and YET…not as bad as last year. The kicker back then was when our hostess was a question with a lobotomizing quality. When asked, “are we allowed to write about robot ghost dragons,” it was not the robot ghost dragons she had difficulty with…but the word ‘allowed’. She froze…blue-screened…baffled by the kind of mentality it takes to ask this thing. Somewhere in her mind, I know that bit of snarky asshole (read: my inside voice) wanted to scream, “No! If you write one word…ONE FUCKING WORD about robot ghost dragons, the plot police will show up and SHOOT YOUR COCK!” But she, true to form, was patient enough to respond, laugh a bit and play it off as a joke. This only led to a bombardment by other people making a slew of requests for various permissions…while blood and pure liquid disgust came dribbling out of my ears.
This year, nobody had that audacity. Nobody asked anything nearly that stupid. After my initial shock of relief, I actually found this abysmally disappointing. Last year, despite its best efforts towards rationale and normalcy, this panel went so far off the rails it became the most hilarious hour of the con. This year, it was simply depressing to watch a VCU grad teach other adults a one hour crash course in Remedial Middle School English for Fuck-Ups and Retards. My crew are all mesmerized by the degree to which we had just been condescended to by a self-publishing comic book writer who apparently considers “Magic” to be one of the key defining elements of Setting Creation.
…and she ends by asking that we all e-mail the convention to petition for her workshop to have more time…
This is when the weekend begins to get weird. Dangerously so. A new, unexperienced weird. And, sure, it could be that I’ve been awake for 27 hours-it could even be that poisonous swamp smoke making everybody outside cough and rub their eyes. But I know better. The Fear is in me…seeped into my bones, and god dammit but I can’t do a thing except hide on the couch and fool myself into a few hours of sleep. But what gave me The Fear, you ask? We’ll come back to that…for now…the back of my eyelids are singing to me…and I must report.
Saturdays at conventions are largely an odd duck. A third of the people stayed up until God-Awful O’Clock in the morning (if they slept at all), and have become zombies in costume while another third are just hitting their Zone…then there are the new arrivals. Saturday always brings, early in the morning, a wave of moms, kids and the wandering locals who just don’t have anything better to do. These are all, to a man, offensive to the red, cracked eye of the Saturday Morning Con-Zombie.
My last, rational line of defense is to find the busiest area in the entire convention: the rally point. Me and my 3 hours of sleep and my exhaustion-altered perceptions and my notebook all sit down and wait for stupidity to happen. Like 40 Naruto cosplayers posing for the rat-a-tat-tat of a hundred cameras. Like the breakdancing ninjas. Like the dance-a-thon. Like my thug suitemates using tape and pocky to fish from the 4th floor balcony. Like the aryan surfer shouting, ‘kill whitey’. Parades of ‘free hugs’ and ‘got glomp?’ signs. Thirty-one flavors of pre-determined, patterned teenage rebellion. I defend myself from the Saturday Surge-from despair and The Fear by immersing myself-desensitizing. Overloaded and tuned out, all the white noise become such a constant and disappears. As a plan, it is flawless.
When I come back to my senses, I’m sitting poolside and catching up on my writing. Then it hits me, all over again: The Fear. Something is dirty in Denmark, and it’s nothing sleep is going to cover like a band-aid this time. I need to talk this one out with random passers by. I need to take surveys-conduct interviews. I need to be active. I’ve found myself deeply confused and furtively watching at the equally confused looks of the crowds around me. I need to understand…I need to learn a cure to this confused malaise.
And there is my answer. Before I know what’s happened, I’ve taken a dozen surveys and I have this pretty young thing from the hotel staff cornered at the concession stand, asking her about her experiences with the convention staff and attendees. Joe finds another victim, and I go rushing back to the pool, that I may attend to their opinions. It all becomes rote, and I red out. When I rejoin planet earth, my feet are in the water. The wind has swept away the dreamhaze of Carolinian smoke. Jason is with me, and we’re sitting at the pool at 11pm, in 72 degree weather with next to no humidity, ordering Chinese food with our feet in the water. We have just reached the paragon of human existence. The apex of 50,000 years of human evolution, technological advancement, cultural achievement. And The Fear is gone…back in its cage, for who knows how long, this time.
Jason wants to volunteer for staff next year. Unexpected.
I’m outside the rave when Ant hunkers down and blows my mind. “Why don’t you write a thing about how much we lower our standards at anime conventions?” Now I’m just stuck trying to hold it together while this thought pings around my brain, destroying everything it touches-an idea like a slug from a .22…and that’s when The Fear takes hold for the last time this weekend. In another 12 hours, Ant and I will be driving home and talking about this rave…not about how it’s 300 people crammed in a 200 person room, working like hell at destroying every available atom of oxygen in a closed room. Not about how bad that sucks, not about how dangerous the closed room model is… we’re talking about the DJs. Because Ant DJs every week. Because Ant is damn good. Because he knows how to beat match, he has his own gear and he knows well enough not to talk through a voice-distorter and insert his unfounded ego over top of mediocre music. We’re talking about the DJ…not just to say, “oh they sucked…haw.” But to think, seriously, about why they weren’t very good. About the fact that 52 DJ slots a year grants one a great deal more experience than…say…5 a year.
We talk about how Ant could DJ for the next one of these…if he can get in good with the people who decide these things…which is unlikely.
And that’s the Fear, folks. I want to run the Original Writing panel next year. I want to petition for more time. Two one-hour blocks, so it can be divided between Beginner and Intermediate. I want a stool and a whiteboard…maybe a powerpoint presentation. I want to take something I know…something I do…something My skill-set is geared towards, and I want to donate my time to the convention to try to make that convention better. I want to conduct surveys and interviews and collate data. I want to teach writing to idiots, but I also want to work with other writers on writing. I want to host things, not because I want it to be me in front of the crowd, but because I want to make absolutely certain things get better.
Jason’s talking about security. Ant’s talking about DJing. Jack and Dave are talking about volunteering. And it’s not just for the free shit, anymore. It’s not just for the free passes or boarding or some lame t-shirt with some cutesy anime bint splayed across the back such that you can’t even wear it in public. This is about making things better. This is about how we’ve gone through three years of AMA stagnating in mediocrity, when 2005 was possibly the single best con I’ve ever attended. None of us know what happened, but it seems that we’re all willing to get off our asses and do something about it.
I’m not a joiner, kids. Never was. But I might be about to start. Because I saw the light, 3 years ago. I saw a truly good convention, and I’ve seen poop ever since. I know it can be great, and I know it isn’t…so it’s up to me to do my part, so that the other convention-goers aren’t assailed by mediocrity, complacency and badness. It’s up to each of us to see that things go smoother for all the rest of us.
We need Unity. We need Commitment. We need Action. We need to stand up and take it back!
I’m going to need some help on this one, snarklings. I’m going to need a whole HOST of fucking people for this one. We’re going to need to know where to write-where to petition to the convention to get the writing seminar extended. We’re going to have to ask that somebody competent be put in charge of it. We’re going to have to ask that Ant be allowed to try out as a DJ for the rave. I want to create a petition-launching MACHINE. I want to take this fire that’s been lit in my belly, and I want to set their fields to BURN!
These halls seem so much narrower, the ceilings lower, the lights dimmer. And it's up to me to brighten the lights, raise the ceilings and widen those hallways...not for everybody, but at least for a FEW somebodys. To revive courtesy. In at least some small measure, to regain the lost Unity.
So please. I beseech each and every one of you, Snarklings. Even the ones of you who don’t even GO to AMA…hell, especially those of you who don’t go to AMA. Send e-mails from every address you have to
panelsworkshops@animemidatlantic.com
to request that the Original Writing workshop be split into Beginner and Intermediate, that each one have 2 hours and that I be put in charge of this…ooh…maybe I should write a form letter…
The idea that the trip began with the smoke of a Carolinian swamp fire seemed somehow fitting, since I often spend these ‘reviews’ doing nothing but talking shit for 3,000 words. In this case, though, the resultant smoke couldn’t have been better timed. The smoke from this fire, about 150 miles away, wasn’t visible in a traditional, “ooh, look, smoke,” way. It was, however, omnipresent in the stench that pervaded the outside of the con, and the way everything outside took on a hazy, dreamy, soft-around-the-edges quality.
The past two years of this convention…this poor, doomed, abortive convention were held at the Richmond Convention Center, where the con-goers were systematically harassed and abused by hotel and RCC staff. Hosting this convention in the RCC was like taunting us with a moist, delicious cupcake of fun and excitement, sprinkled generously with the rat poison and anthrax of totalitarian disapproval. But this year the RCC wouldn’t take us back. We fucked things up so bad, last time, they won’t have any part of us…or, that’s how we like to think of it…so it had to be moved. And, rather than move it back to the Koger Center, where we had always been most happy, it was moved across the state to Va Beach’s Holiday Inn Executive Center…the birthplace of KatsuCon, and a hotel SO well loved, it’s the reason NekoCon was born. I remember that first NekoCon with the fondness of a decade gone past, and some measure of that fondness was centered on this hotel.
But we arrive…and it all falls down, one brick at a time. These halls seem so much narrower than I recalled them to be. The ceilings lower. The lights dimmer. The corridors to the rooms strike me as labyrinthine and foreboding, where once they were inviting. Tables didn’t seem to clog the walkways, children didn’t seem to bottleneck every third meter, and security didn’t have to shove their way through milling throngs in the decade-old land of my memory. The crowds were thinner, the parking was available, the fangirls screamed in a more tolerable pitch. Things stayed kid friendly and family friendly. There was courtesy. In at least some small measure, there was a sense of Unity. The careful and canny reader will note my use of past tense.
Before I have located registration (which requires directions from three people and is hidden in a hotel room in which only the ‘Volunteer Sign-Up’ sign is visible), my faith in the event is starting to show the cracks and stress fractures of unrealized potential…unrealistic expectations. The ends fray and my hope begins to unravel-the hope for a good, relaxing weekend and a positive experience. And I’m not helping. Oh, sure, I say I’m willing to keep an open mind. I say that. But I still make a bee-line for karaoke, that first night.
After 17 conventions and ten years, my long-held belief that the Karaoke was the paragon of the convention was recently disproven by the Original Writing workshop. Still, unlike that paltry, condescending hour, this Karaoke is special. This is an endurance trial. This is the marathon of pain, firm and muscled next to the lithe sprinter of hatred, bile and disgust that will be my first panel, tomorrow morning. Karaoke might not be the most depressing thing, anymore, but staying for the whole thing is the act of self-destruction about which one can be most proud.
The first singer is, of course, the host, and I get the joke. She’s singing the j-pop of thirty years ago, dressed as the character who sings 30-year old j-pop in karaoke and is a slef-proclaimed otaku. I get this joke, because I’ve seen that series, and that I get this makes me sad. She’s not a bad singer, she’s singing like that because her character does, too. This would make me sad, except for the two vodkas I drank before I got here.
She’s giving away soap?
This, somehow, makes us happy?
She’s giving away soap…but only if you’re good enough to deserve it?
It opens like it always opens: with me screaming. The first contestant is an important and painful reminder that not quite all black people have rhythm, great voices or the ability to dance. But silly, silly me. I should have learned, more than a decade ago, never, ever, ever, EVER make fun of the first act…or the universe will punish me with the second. (Sensitivity Note: This is in no way an indication of my buying into any racial stereotypes about african-americans. I find the practice disgusting and am attempting to satirize it through absurdism.)
#3 is a group. There are small children. They are cute-thus, they get soap.
Our fourth is a special case, and worthy of mention…before I start fast forwarding to the good ones. She has a rich voice, possessing a great depth and sincerity. A dramatic soprano, she nevertheless swims effortlessly across three octaves like she was born to the stage. And there’s this vibrato quaver that would make Sleater Kinney’s Corin Tucker stand back and say, “Not bad, kid.” However awesome all this sounds, she is very obviously singing in the wrong key. She gets the soap. This works for me.
The fifth act gets soap. The fifth harms my love of music, yet she gets soap, and this seems to make us all blitheringly happy. Soap…beeeeeeeeeecause she’s going toooooo…wash out her FUCKING MOUTH for doing this thing to us?
Number eight is nervous. He’s not liking the attention…or the spotlight. The expectant stares. The sneers. But wait. Is that Cha La Head Cha La? Is that my fucking JAM? I don’t honestly give the faintest modicum of a shit that he’s popping his P’s…or that he has somehow discovered a way to pop both C’s and H’s. The simple fact is that I’m not clapping for him, I’m clapping for the song. I don’t even get pissed when he gets soap. She just doesn’t understand the iconic joy of the original Dragonball Z theme.
#10 lingers, and the Vodka has basically exited my system. This is it. This. Right here. This is the moment where the endurance trial begins. This is where we know…absolutely KNOW a number of things. 1) We are in hell. 2) We are in pain. 3) This guy is holding the lyrics…and if he gets soap, it will ruin my faith in the soap system of success and reward.
#17 is an important and painful reminder that not all asian people completely lack rhythm, great voices or the ability to dance-just this one. (Sensitivity Note: This is in no way an indication of my buying into any racial stereotypes about asian-americans. But c'mon...they seriously can't dance, right?)
#20 involves a booty dancing Zelda…this fucks up my childhood more than last summer’s Transformers movie.
#26 could be asked to rate, from one to ten, the flavor of every penis in the entire hotel… truly redefining the word Skank.
#27 would allow us to go out on a good note. She fools us by singing, poorly, a miserable, squeaky crap of a drama song, then cuts off in the middle with, “just kidding,” and switches songs. It’s not just that she has a good voice-she matches her voice well to her song choice…not everyone is wise enough for this. Combined with great showmanship, this would have ended the night with a perfection unmatched since NekoCon One. Would have. Would. But we ran out of soap six contestants ago. Beauty, grace, charm, wit and showmanship are rewarded by the last twenty masochists, too weary to clap.
The rest of Friday night will become a fascinating exercise in futility, because we have the unmitigated gall to play Mafia. Almost effortlessly, we find a perfect spot for Mafia: large, open, off to the side, out of the way, not in a walking path, not blocking a door, still central enough to recruit pedestrians. This area is all but made for our needs, so we hold a few rounds and build up a sixteen-player game. We have fun. Security feeds on this. You can’t be here this late. It’s not allowed. Maybe in a hotel room (limit of six people) or conference room (all locked). We sit at the tables around the pool, but that whole area is closed. We lose half our people when we go to sit outside, but everybody under 18 must stay inside after curfew. Abandoning them, we set up on a grassy patch, well away from any entrances or eyes. This time, it takes them an hour…before the crashing offense of people having unsanctioned fun is too much. They suggest the back corner of the employee parking lot…dicks…
Sleep is a laughable proposition after we load up on coffee and chase the tail of 7am. Besides, the writing workshop is in 2 hours. This interim is filled bumming cigarettes and watching a Naruto’s 50$ wig get thrown onto the roof of the lobby, then watching him sulk, rather than do anything about it. “You fucking dick. You threw it, you get it back.” Yeah…that’d be fair. Except the thrower walks away, and the Naruto is clearly having more fun sulking and being cooed at by that unique breed of bloodhound girl who can sniff out drama like blood in the water. Three cheers for complacency.
We’ve spent ten minutes talking about plot. Apparently-and I didn’t know this-plot is necessary to have a story, but it’s only interesting when something happens…but that something can’t happen too easily or immediately, or your plot is too short. So all these other things have to happen to complicate the first things and sometimes that leads to a totally different outcome than originally intended. Except, here on Earth, we sum all that shit up in the word, “conflict.” I’ll tell you if I happen to hear the word ‘conflict’ in here.
This is it. The writing panel is the single most depressing hour in the entire weekend. No moment presents me with a deeper sense of dread that to see the Writers in the Writing workshop being told, “dialogue is two people speaking,” and responding by nodding their heads sagely and going, “Aah…I get it now.” There is a desperate part of my shithead writerbrain that wants to believe that the only people who attend a writing workshop are the cream of the crop-already writers. She disabuses me of this quaint notion. This is like walking into grad school and being taught how to open a window.
And yet…and YET…not as bad as last year. The kicker back then was when our hostess was a question with a lobotomizing quality. When asked, “are we allowed to write about robot ghost dragons,” it was not the robot ghost dragons she had difficulty with…but the word ‘allowed’. She froze…blue-screened…baffled by the kind of mentality it takes to ask this thing. Somewhere in her mind, I know that bit of snarky asshole (read: my inside voice) wanted to scream, “No! If you write one word…ONE FUCKING WORD about robot ghost dragons, the plot police will show up and SHOOT YOUR COCK!” But she, true to form, was patient enough to respond, laugh a bit and play it off as a joke. This only led to a bombardment by other people making a slew of requests for various permissions…while blood and pure liquid disgust came dribbling out of my ears.
This year, nobody had that audacity. Nobody asked anything nearly that stupid. After my initial shock of relief, I actually found this abysmally disappointing. Last year, despite its best efforts towards rationale and normalcy, this panel went so far off the rails it became the most hilarious hour of the con. This year, it was simply depressing to watch a VCU grad teach other adults a one hour crash course in Remedial Middle School English for Fuck-Ups and Retards. My crew are all mesmerized by the degree to which we had just been condescended to by a self-publishing comic book writer who apparently considers “Magic” to be one of the key defining elements of Setting Creation.
…and she ends by asking that we all e-mail the convention to petition for her workshop to have more time…
This is when the weekend begins to get weird. Dangerously so. A new, unexperienced weird. And, sure, it could be that I’ve been awake for 27 hours-it could even be that poisonous swamp smoke making everybody outside cough and rub their eyes. But I know better. The Fear is in me…seeped into my bones, and god dammit but I can’t do a thing except hide on the couch and fool myself into a few hours of sleep. But what gave me The Fear, you ask? We’ll come back to that…for now…the back of my eyelids are singing to me…and I must report.
Saturdays at conventions are largely an odd duck. A third of the people stayed up until God-Awful O’Clock in the morning (if they slept at all), and have become zombies in costume while another third are just hitting their Zone…then there are the new arrivals. Saturday always brings, early in the morning, a wave of moms, kids and the wandering locals who just don’t have anything better to do. These are all, to a man, offensive to the red, cracked eye of the Saturday Morning Con-Zombie.
My last, rational line of defense is to find the busiest area in the entire convention: the rally point. Me and my 3 hours of sleep and my exhaustion-altered perceptions and my notebook all sit down and wait for stupidity to happen. Like 40 Naruto cosplayers posing for the rat-a-tat-tat of a hundred cameras. Like the breakdancing ninjas. Like the dance-a-thon. Like my thug suitemates using tape and pocky to fish from the 4th floor balcony. Like the aryan surfer shouting, ‘kill whitey’. Parades of ‘free hugs’ and ‘got glomp?’ signs. Thirty-one flavors of pre-determined, patterned teenage rebellion. I defend myself from the Saturday Surge-from despair and The Fear by immersing myself-desensitizing. Overloaded and tuned out, all the white noise become such a constant and disappears. As a plan, it is flawless.
When I come back to my senses, I’m sitting poolside and catching up on my writing. Then it hits me, all over again: The Fear. Something is dirty in Denmark, and it’s nothing sleep is going to cover like a band-aid this time. I need to talk this one out with random passers by. I need to take surveys-conduct interviews. I need to be active. I’ve found myself deeply confused and furtively watching at the equally confused looks of the crowds around me. I need to understand…I need to learn a cure to this confused malaise.
And there is my answer. Before I know what’s happened, I’ve taken a dozen surveys and I have this pretty young thing from the hotel staff cornered at the concession stand, asking her about her experiences with the convention staff and attendees. Joe finds another victim, and I go rushing back to the pool, that I may attend to their opinions. It all becomes rote, and I red out. When I rejoin planet earth, my feet are in the water. The wind has swept away the dreamhaze of Carolinian smoke. Jason is with me, and we’re sitting at the pool at 11pm, in 72 degree weather with next to no humidity, ordering Chinese food with our feet in the water. We have just reached the paragon of human existence. The apex of 50,000 years of human evolution, technological advancement, cultural achievement. And The Fear is gone…back in its cage, for who knows how long, this time.
Jason wants to volunteer for staff next year. Unexpected.
I’m outside the rave when Ant hunkers down and blows my mind. “Why don’t you write a thing about how much we lower our standards at anime conventions?” Now I’m just stuck trying to hold it together while this thought pings around my brain, destroying everything it touches-an idea like a slug from a .22…and that’s when The Fear takes hold for the last time this weekend. In another 12 hours, Ant and I will be driving home and talking about this rave…not about how it’s 300 people crammed in a 200 person room, working like hell at destroying every available atom of oxygen in a closed room. Not about how bad that sucks, not about how dangerous the closed room model is… we’re talking about the DJs. Because Ant DJs every week. Because Ant is damn good. Because he knows how to beat match, he has his own gear and he knows well enough not to talk through a voice-distorter and insert his unfounded ego over top of mediocre music. We’re talking about the DJ…not just to say, “oh they sucked…haw.” But to think, seriously, about why they weren’t very good. About the fact that 52 DJ slots a year grants one a great deal more experience than…say…5 a year.
We talk about how Ant could DJ for the next one of these…if he can get in good with the people who decide these things…which is unlikely.
And that’s the Fear, folks. I want to run the Original Writing panel next year. I want to petition for more time. Two one-hour blocks, so it can be divided between Beginner and Intermediate. I want a stool and a whiteboard…maybe a powerpoint presentation. I want to take something I know…something I do…something My skill-set is geared towards, and I want to donate my time to the convention to try to make that convention better. I want to conduct surveys and interviews and collate data. I want to teach writing to idiots, but I also want to work with other writers on writing. I want to host things, not because I want it to be me in front of the crowd, but because I want to make absolutely certain things get better.
Jason’s talking about security. Ant’s talking about DJing. Jack and Dave are talking about volunteering. And it’s not just for the free shit, anymore. It’s not just for the free passes or boarding or some lame t-shirt with some cutesy anime bint splayed across the back such that you can’t even wear it in public. This is about making things better. This is about how we’ve gone through three years of AMA stagnating in mediocrity, when 2005 was possibly the single best con I’ve ever attended. None of us know what happened, but it seems that we’re all willing to get off our asses and do something about it.
I’m not a joiner, kids. Never was. But I might be about to start. Because I saw the light, 3 years ago. I saw a truly good convention, and I’ve seen poop ever since. I know it can be great, and I know it isn’t…so it’s up to me to do my part, so that the other convention-goers aren’t assailed by mediocrity, complacency and badness. It’s up to each of us to see that things go smoother for all the rest of us.
We need Unity. We need Commitment. We need Action. We need to stand up and take it back!
I’m going to need some help on this one, snarklings. I’m going to need a whole HOST of fucking people for this one. We’re going to need to know where to write-where to petition to the convention to get the writing seminar extended. We’re going to have to ask that somebody competent be put in charge of it. We’re going to have to ask that Ant be allowed to try out as a DJ for the rave. I want to create a petition-launching MACHINE. I want to take this fire that’s been lit in my belly, and I want to set their fields to BURN!
These halls seem so much narrower, the ceilings lower, the lights dimmer. And it's up to me to brighten the lights, raise the ceilings and widen those hallways...not for everybody, but at least for a FEW somebodys. To revive courtesy. In at least some small measure, to regain the lost Unity.
So please. I beseech each and every one of you, Snarklings. Even the ones of you who don’t even GO to AMA…hell, especially those of you who don’t go to AMA. Send e-mails from every address you have to
panelsworkshops@animemidatlantic.com
to request that the Original Writing workshop be split into Beginner and Intermediate, that each one have 2 hours and that I be put in charge of this…ooh…maybe I should write a form letter…