Katsucon 2012 – page 11
Oh man, this was a somewhat stressful ordeal. Eventually the panel DID happen, though, and we’ll get a list of all the videos up on the Awesomely Bad fanpage soon. Oh, and you should totally go like the thing anyway. Subtle plug.
(Historical Notes: Okay, stuff like this is why I stopped going to Katsucon… or, more to the point, why all the panelist friends I traveled with stopped going. I obviously don’t know what was actually going on behind the scenes, but there was rampant speculation that SOMEBODY working on panels really wanted to be running a cosplay convention and only approved general asian culture panels under protest, probably because the con mission statement said they had to. Again, I have nothing even REMOTELY resembling proof of this, but it definitely felt like the con would bend over backwards to accommodate any cosplay-related panels while treating everything else -ESPECIALLY music panels- like an afterthought. I saw a LOT of really decent panels get stuck with crap rooms with crap equipment at crap times with crap staff support. And yeah, I know there’s never enough good rooms and times to accommodate everyone, and SOMETHING has to get stuck with a lame situation every so often, but this was more than just a one-off bad fluke. This seemed to happen every year, to lots of people, repeatedly, to the point that even people not directly involved with hosting panels started to notice. And, well, eventually they all got sick of it and quit going.)
It’s definitely rumor but I could honestly believe it, especially with how Katsucon has become since I stopped attending. I have friends who still go and say the panel selection is really lackluster these days and well, unless Katsucon offered to do things like Otakon does, they’ll never give me an incentive to try and host panels there ever again. Also it just eventually came down to “I have two cons within a month of each other at the same venue and one offers more of what I want than the other” made it easier for me. Course Magfest has now become it’s own monster of getting to these days.
Yeah, I keep hearing stories about how even the MAGFest staff don’t like how giant it’s become, but people just won’t stop coming. T’is both a blessing and a curse.
And I really do wish cons like Katsu could just come right out and brand themselves and being about one specific thing rather than sticking to the broad “geek/asian culture” thing. It doesn’t do much good to attract a broader audience if you aren’t gonna have programming to appeal to most of them.