Hey guys! I was indeed at I-Con this past weekend and things went pretty well. As usual for this con, I spent more time following my staff friends around than anything, but that's usually interesting in its way.
I-Con is an all-purpose geek con that had, for many years, been held in various buildings around the SUNY Stony Brook campus. The biggest problem this year was that Stony Brook was unavailable this year due to construction. The con had to move out to another locale, and this is a pretty big con, so it had to move out to three locales: this year I-Con took place between a community college and two hotels, each of which was about twenty minutes from the other by car. You can see how this got messy! You know how, at a con, you'll drop by the game room to kill some time? You can't really do that when the designated "gaming" building is a 20 minute drive.
As such, I mostly stuck around the dealer's room, killing time, for the duration of the con. I already knew what I wanted: the same dealer was here and at other area cons, every year, selling dead Central Park Media stock. I wanted Patlabor. All of it. I went straight for that table and then decided not to buy it for another day. That's just how I roll. A popular stop for me was the table displaying the Retro Duo SNES/NES clone, where I did some serious combo practice in the old Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. What a class game. The Retro Duo has messed-up sound, though. Wouldn't buy.
Friday night I ended up someplace very interesting: I was notified that the "Tentacles Don't Know When No Means No" panelists were, uh, they, uh... they didn't have any material. Anything. Thought the panel was Saturday. I had kind of wanted an 18+ spot in the schedule if I could get it, so this was a great opportunity to swoop in. I eagerly offered to run the Wounded Man anime, and so it was that the tentacle panel became the Wounded Man panel. I was a little nervous to start with-- I mean, how do you tell an unhappy crowd that they're not going to get to see the tentacle sex they came here for-- but it's easy to get comfortable when Wounded Man is horribly offending the sensibilities of everyone around you.
For the guys, it was one thing: Wounded Man is insane but it's not actually insulting to anything other than the logical faculties of the male viewer. They were chuckling without any particular regrets. The women, on the other hand, quite another expression. Disbelief mixed with offense mixed with horror. You have to understand, Wounded Man is ridiculously, insanely misogynist. A woman is raped by the protagonist (to protect her, it is explained), and falls in love with her rapist, promising to follow him anywhere, in the first episode. If Dave Sim were a big ol' bucket full of misogyny, Wounded Man would be the Hoover Dam. Misogyny is the core of its being. A PC edit of Wounded Man would just read "The End." In any case, everybody applauded when I was done, and when the tentacle panel still didn't really have any material I did an encore.
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