Conventional Wisdom

Oh boy, I’m gonna make SOMEBODY mad with this one. There’s always somebody complaining about SOMETHING with every con, and most of the time I try to avoid getting caught up in the middle of it. Conventions are big, complicated weekends where a LOT of different things happen. It’s entirely possible for ME to only attend panels that turned out great and only interact with staffers who were awesome, while YOU encounter nothing but mismanaged events and crappy people. Neither one of us are “wrong”, we just had different experiences.

But THIS is a little different, every year, I seem to come across more and more people waxing nostalgic about “the way Animazement USED to be” when it was back in the Sheraton Imperial and attracted many thousands fewer people. The argument goes that The Olde Animazement was a much smaller, more intimate affair whereas the current convention is too big and impersonal and dedicated to gimmicky events or whatever.

Now, I’m not about to try and start a debate over which incarnation of Animazement was “better” (even though I’m sure I can’t stop one if anyone ELSE tries), partially because I think it’s an absurd thing to do. Case in point: for all the nostalgia people pin on the place, the last two years in the Sheraton SUUUUUCKED. The convention had suddenly, DRASTICALLY outgrown the facility, and everything was a mess as a result. Heck, during that last year, they were holding panels IN TENTS IN THE PARKING LOT ‘cos there just wasn’t room in the hotel. Is THAT really something to get nostalgic over? No, of course it isn’t, I’m deliberately picking on the worst examples to make the other guy look silly. Sorry, but that’s just what us cynical guys do.

(Historical Notes: I’ve got this weird feeling that I said this somewhere else recently, but looking back I kind of regret how this page turned out.  Namely, Past Me either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented what a lot of the “oldschool Animazement” fanboys actually meant.  Because they’re not wrong, early-to-mid-’00s AZ really was a drastically different feeling event than what it became after attendance rose.  That “old fashioned convention” was basically just a large, vaguely organized party; a bunch of regional clubs pooling their resources for a big meetup with minimal involvement from any major companies.  Even when I started going, AZ was still openly showing unofficial fansubs of shows with no distribution deal, and nobody cared.  People could literally just throw a panel at the spur of the moment if one of the rooms was empty and they were friends with the right staffer.  I totally get why somebody who liked that relaxed geek party atmosphere would be turned off by the big, corporate-looking, tightly controlled machine that Animazement had to become once it moved to the RCC.  Really, the only thing I object to is the impression that AZ had any choice in the matter, because all that stuff about how cramped and crowded things got are still true.  Old conventions could only be the way they were because they attracted so little attention, once the anime industry boomed, this sort of thing was going to happen whether anyone liked it or not.  You can be unhappy about it all you want, but don’t pretend that Animazement could just snap its fingers and magically make five thousand fewer people show up.  The world doesn’t rewind like that.)