So I did what is likely my last I-Con this year. This is simply as a result of a good staffer friend resigning. I had a lot of fun doing I-Con, but if it wasn't for my buddies I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be making the trip year after year.
I'd like to thank the Most Dangerous Anime audience for coming by and having fun. Your reactions validated all the work (okay, not a lot of work) I did on these panels. I'd also like to thank Joe and Sarah for their hard work on the con, their continuing support, and for talking me into doing this stuff in the first place a couple of years ago. I'll still be paneling, of course.
I got into the con Thursday night for dinner and drinks, and I was pretty well-rested for Friday. After all, the con doesn't start until 6 PM. I was only there Thursday because hey, why not?
Friday afternoon I met up with my fellow ANN columnist Mike Toole, and while he prepared panels we talked a bit about the day's panels and the con itself. The booklet has a couple of weird things about it: while there are no descriptions of panels or events at all, for example, there are four pages of letters to the reader by staff, all of which can be essentially boiled down to “I've been staffing I-Con for 15 years and it's perfect”. I-Con has always felt a little narcissistic: I can't think of another geek con that has as many hours of programming about itself. Also, the con's bootleg policy-- which would be proven in force at the dealer's room-- is “We have a strong stance against bootlegs, but there will be bootlegs in the dealer's room and if you buy them you're screwed.”
The day's first panel was “Anime '81”, for which Mike had simply assembled videos of every single anime that ran on Japanese TV 30 years ago. Imagine trying to show clips of every anime that ran this year in an hour, and you'll understand how much slower anime production was back then. I don't remember the numbers, but we're talking about maybe 30 works. Quite an interesting panel. Shame about the AV setup, though: AV arrived twenty minutes late, we only had laptop speakers for audio, and the projector screen was misaligned. AV problems and big delays would continue throughout the panels, and this wasn't even the worst of them.
We hit the dealer's room straight after to catch up with Ed Chavez and James at the Vertical booth. It's always a pleasure. Honestly, at the last couple of cons I've been to I've found myself in the habit of killing dead time by chatting with Vertical. The rest of the dealer's room was the same as the I-Con room I've been seeing for years now: it looks very close to a typical anime con dealer's room, save a booth or two. Bootleg items were rampant, with some of the largest tables (a DVD seller and a vendor of anime trinkets) stocking almost exclusively counterfeit wares. I recalled the same damn tables from previous years, and recalled the bootleg policy. A strong stance against bootlegs doesn't mean you're no longer willing to make money off them.
(Protip: If a shop happens to still carry older Nendoroids from series that American anime fans like, like Black Butler, Death Note, or Gurren Lagann, it is almost certainly a bootlegger.)
I spent a couple hours at the Marvel 3 tourney. You guys know I love that stuff, and I have worked out some nasty tricks for my Spidey/X-23/Haggar team. Spider-Man's a great and underrated character in this game: what he lacks in control of the screen, he makes up for in mobility and versatility. Getaroundability. It's not an exaggeration to say that the Ultimate Web Throw reset trick won me the $50 gift card that was up for grabs. The team is built around him: Haggar's invincible lariat is a godsend for any close-range fighter, and Spidey needs an OTG (hits on the ground) assist for big damage. Spidey's Web Ball makes it easy for X-23 and Haggar to get in when they're on point. As an extra bonus, all the characters' Hyper Combos chain neatly into each other, making switching easy. I may swap X-23 out for someone else (like Viper, if I feel like putting that amount of time in), but even as is the team is quite strong. But enough about that! The important part is that I won. The crowd was like “YOOOO”, and I took my victory as an opportunity to plug my panels.
At 11 there was this panel called Con Horror Stories: I found out that this panel consisted of me just a few days before the con, so beforehand I had asked Mike to sit on the panel with me. I opened with my favorite con story, the one that starts with the girl I was going to room with calling me weeping on the morning of the con to cancel her and all her friends' reservations, and which ends with me and my buddy kicking our other roommate out for trying to bone a 15-year-old girl in our room and then us leaving on a Greyhound at three in the morning. Believe it or not, I kind of bombed this story. Nobody was really impressed. I was still jittery, I guess.
What I realized in retrospect about my con stories is that rather than being horrific, they're just kind of awkward and depressing. Like the phone conversation between myself and the aforementioned roomie, a stranger before this weekend, trying to convince me to leave the room for a little while and let him screw a 15-year-old. The time a Morrigan cosplayer (to be polite, unflattered by her costume choice) approached me with a “looking for cute boys” sign and stared silently at me. I decided to think of other material, like the second-hand “I know a guy who knows a guy who almost cut someone's arm off with a sword at a con” story.
Anyway, Mike really saved my ass up there with old con stories and funny video clips. Eventually we worked out a rapport with the crowd, and by the end it was going really well. We still ended early (you just can't fill two hours with this) at the peak of the panel, a famous clip from the amazing Megaforce.
And then we were done. The only thing left was drive-through McDonald's in the middle of the night, and sleep. Saturday was when it got exciting.
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