Conventional Wisdom

Oh boy, HERE we go.  If there was any one story that absolutely dominated AWA 2023 discussion, it was the saga of the arm bands.  Look, I deliberately keep myself a lot more out of the loop than I used to be, and this was my first time back to AWA in a while anyway, so I don’t know what the extended build-up to this situation was.  All I know was that, apparently, relations between the convention and hotel had apparently deteriorated SEVERELY, to the point that the hotel was STRONGLY opposed to having any more congoers wandering over from the mall side than they absolutely had to.  Thus, on top of the usual checking for con badges, the hotel staff also insisted on everybody actually staying at the hotel wearing these hospital-style wrist bands, so that anybody NOT staying on-site could be kept off the elevators and not allowed in at certain hours… sometimes.  Yeah, aside from the fact that the general attendance didn’t much care for having more restrictions places on them (because OF COURSE they wouldn’t), the hotel staff were SPECTACULARLY inconsistent in the enforcement of this policy, to the point that I was never really clear on what it actually was.  Sometimes there’d be a hotel employee standing right there in the elevator not letting anybody in without a wristband, sometimes there’d be a guy present but he wouldn’t give a crap, sometimes the elevator would be completely unattended.  The entrances to the mall side of the convention center weren’t QUITE so arbitrary, in that somebody was always there, but it was a constant toss up whether that particular person would even look for wristbands at all or stop the whole crowd from moving until you displayed one at eye level.  That was probably the biggest point of contention for everybody I heard talking about this stuff over the weekend, that sense of “Look, I’ll do whatever you want if you just MAKE UP YOUR MIND WHAT THAT IS!”

And again, I haven’t been keeping up with the ins and outs of the Atlanta convention scene by ANY sense of the imagination, so I can’t reasonably speculate what was going on here specifically.  But years and years of going to these things combined with some basic familiarity with human nature suggests a few possibilities.  I mean, even setting aside the obvious issues of crowd size AWA had been dealing with, it’s not like you need my help imagining reasons why a hotel would want as few anime convention attendees on their premise as possible, right?  I’m wondering if the hotel told con and staff alike that things would go one way, then the con talked them down to something else, but half the hotel employees just showed up and did what they were told the first time around because they couldn’t be bothered to keep checking their messages for updates.  Or, you know, the even more obvious possibility: they showed up with one set of instructions, looked at the size of the crowd they were supposed to be monitoring, thought about how much they were being paid to babysit these freaks, and half of them decided it just wasn’t worth the trouble.  I sure wouldn’t blame them.

There’s a whole other side of things I didn’t hear anybody talking about, though.  Apparently the big reason why AWA is actually moving to a new location next year is because they’re finally tearing down the Galleria’s old mall space to expand the convention center.  Now, I’d always heard that they whole reason they HADN’T torn down that part years ago was because the disruption such construction meant for the hotel would cost them more money than just maintaining a dead mall was.  That gets me thinking.  If they’re already set to take on a big, expensive construction project, were the Waverly people trying to keep as many convention people out because they just couldn’t afford to clean up after us?  I might be reading waaaay too much into this, but… well, just you wait, because my room in particular had an especially interesting experience that gave me extra reason to wonder about the state of things behind the scenes.