Katsucon 2015 – page 6
Shoujo Rock Heaven was scheduled very early. We were not pleased. At least we weren’t the only ones, though. I don’t think I encountered anybody who was happy with the scheduling this year. Yeah, there’s always That One Thing that’s at an inconvenient time, no matter what con you’re talking about, but EVERYBODY I talked to was frustrated with the schedule this year. As always, linear time is out to get us all.
By the way, you can really tell I was tired that morning since I was lazy enough to break out a Far Out There costume (the joke here being that’s my other webcomic, and I abused my Creator Privileges by destining characters I personally could cosplay with no effort)
(Historical Notes: Okay, I’ve already said pretty much everything there was to say on the subject by this point, but seeing as how this is the final Katsucon update, I need to reiterate just how badly the non-cosplayer panelists felt Katsucon was treating them. That’s why all my panelist friends stopped going, and why stopped making the trip as a result. The comments for this page over on SmackJeeves had several posts by other panelists who also got stuck at terrible times to make room for the cosplay events. Heck, just now I was Googling something else Katsucon-related, and one of the first results was a reddit post asking “Is there anything to do at Katsucon besides cosplay?” Apparently not, dude. And to reiterate, I’m TOTALLY FINE with running a convention that focuses on cosplay stuff, just so long as you openly bill it as a cosplay convention. Don’t brand yourself as “generic all-purpose Japanese culture con” and accept panels along those lines if that’s not actually what you WANT. Then you just waste everybody’s time, and eventually people decide to just not bother anymore. Also, for some reason, the original SmackJeeves posting of this page had a link to the last page of the Ichibancon update rather than any of the actually Shoujo Rock Heaven-related comics. I have NO idea what that was about.)
Yeah that year was the final dealbreaker for me with Katsucon. Honestly no convention needs to be running fan panel content between the hours of 2am-9am outside of very specific events. Katsucon had a bad habit of this, it’s a weird holdover of how old sci-fi/fantasy conventions were ran but for an event as big as Katsucon, it felt more like a punishment time placement than of any value. Course over the last few years I hear people who still attend the event say how bad the panel programming is there now and well, Katsucon put in their chips to be what they are now and it’s not what I’m interested in dealing with anymore. (end old man yells at cloud rant)
I do appreciate the few people who were rad enough to wake up that early with us to see the panel at least.
See, I can understand uber-late/early panels if you’re doing a lot of 18+ stuff, but not if you’re just gonna schedule the same kind of content you’re running during the day. But yeah, I still say the main problem is them not really committing to what they wanted to be, and getting a lot of poor sap panelists caught in the middle over it.