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This Week in Anime
It's Anime Convention Hunting Season

by Christopher Farris & Steve Jones,

Some of the biggest anime conventions are just around the corner, but things are looking a little off. Chris and Steve discuss the changing convention landscape and smaller cons folding across the U.S.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

16bit Sensation: Another Layer is currently streaming on Crunchyroll, and Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro is available for rent on Amazon.

@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Chris
Steve, I'd like to formally invite you to be a guest of honor at the first annual TWIAcon! It's gonna be great. Nicky and Jean-Karlo are going to run Lucas through an anime-game gauntlet of Final Fantasy XIV and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Nick and I will be hosting a panel where we debate Macross vs Transformers. All taking place at the Oso De Oro Park Arts and Crafts Pavilion in scenic Fresno!
Steve
It's great to be here, Chris. All the stars are out. I just saw somebody cosplaying a cop, and let me tell you, they were very committed to the bit. Kept shouting something about "zoning" and "permits." Very funny chap. Incidentally, I've been looking through our books, and this pavilion is charging us one million dollars per hour to host this thing, so I'm gonna need everyone to go hog wild in the complimentary ball pit to get the most bang for our buck.
Incidentally, I've also just received a text message from the County regarding "Geese that bite weebs on sight," and I'm starting to think this cost might be sunk deeper in that ball pit than we were prepared for. So I'm sorry folks, but it looks like TWIAcon 2024 will have to be prematurely canceled!

Don't worry everybody, we remain committed to making it happen again in 2025!
It's just like our motto says. TWIAcon: Not Even God Can Stop Us. And He's Tried.

But if it's any consolation, we don't seem to be the only organizers feeling the crunch lately. I'd even go so far as to say that anime conventions, at least in the States, are in a pretty weird place right now. So, as we are wont to do, why don't we take this opportunity to look at the past, present, and possible future of these hallowed gatherings of weebs?

Right, discussion specifically seemed to kick up last week as long-standing Texan convention AnimeFest announced that they would be ceasing "large-scale" events after their 32nd convention next month.

For what it's worth, that's one hell of a run.
One of the longest! I only attended one AnimeFest myself. It was 2017, and both Sayo Yamamoto and Masaaki Yuasa were in attendance; it was also a hot mess because I don't think the organizers appreciated just how huge the Yuri!!! on Ice phenomenon had become. But I had a great time despite all that.
I was going to say, I never made it to an AnimeFest, personally. But a whole lot of people who run in our circles and Discord servers speak with a very familiar fondness for that 2017 gathering in particular. Something about a director allegedly saying, "Nobody's going to show up for queers on skates"?

Given we were discussing the Yuri on Ice follow-up also getting DC'd last month, it certainly speaks to how viciously the zeitgeist can shift across the board.
Certainly, but even in the most practical and concrete terms, when you pack a certain number of people into a certain area, unpredictability is a guarantee. Any convention of any size will be a conglomeration of logistical nightmares, and those nightmares increase exponentially as a convention grows. Let's look at A-Kon, another Texas convention often touted as America's oldest anime-focused one. Their first gathering in 1990 had 380 attendees. Counts from the last decade showed attendance of almost 100 times that. You're dealing with an entirely different beast at that point. Now let's look at how they're doing this year:

Uh oh.
Seeing upstart, inexperienced conventions flounder and fumble is expected. We've enjoyed stories about your DashCons and Glasgow Wonka Experiences for several years now. But when big, established names like these start shutting down, it indicates that broader issues are probably causing these ripple effects.

Okay, I say "broader issues," but there's one narrow, obvious one: money.
It's an election year, so naturally, there's been a lot of hullabaloo about whether the economy is good or bad. We don't need to get into all that. But if we were to focus specifically on the anime convention index (obviously the most important one), it ain't looking great.
Costs for convention centers, hotels, event spaces, pavilions, etc., have ballooned compared to rates from five years ago. Some of that could be put down to venues still trying to recover from years of revenue lost to the pandemic and good old-fashioned inflation. But much of it might also be bad old-fashioned price-gouging.

A-Kon's postponement post touches on several of these issues, alongside the problem that the funding from their investment board as well as state subsidies that could help events like this haven't been there.

Conventions are a business, but it doesn't take an economics degree to see they're not profitable. At least, anybody with their head screwed on straight isn't going to start a convention to rake in the dough. By and large, they're started by enthusiasts who want to bring like-minded nerds together for a weekend of geeky revelry. And you can see that attitude trickle down across years and decades, even as certain conventions balloon in size. Many still rely on volunteers to help run the show at a minimal cost. And even then, they're struggling.
The economy also affects the attendants, after all; people these days cannot afford to work for free as they might have back in the day. Enthusiasts can't pay for room and meals, so staff need more than a comped badge to make helping out at the con worth it. Now, several conventions offer those other amenities. Still, the question of how much those cost organizers comes back up, and we return to the issue of expenses they can afford.
The rising costs of running a convention will hurt the smaller ones harder and more immediately. While bigger cancelations like AnimeFest and A-Kon make headlines, I'm sure plenty of obscure local cons are hurting, too. And while bigger cons might be able to wield their reputation and popularity to keep afloat in some manner (AnimeFest, for instance, will continue to exist in some pared-down form), smaller cons are more likely just to disappear.
We mentioned the fan enthusiasm kicking the con circuit off when "smaller cons" was all there was. Getting 100 people together in a Dallas hotel to watch Space Battleship Yamato in 1983 was cost-effective enough that they only needed to charge two bucks at the door.

As the business side of anime has continued to creep through more proactive licensors, something as simple as getting those licenses has ratcheted up the price of simply watching anime at anime conventions! I've heard licensors asking as much as $5,000 per episode to be shown! Things were comparatively more affordable twenty years ago when a function like Fanime could run fansubs in showrooms with abandon.
This is where we get into the apparent paradox of the present state of anime conventions. Anime and manga have never been bigger in America, both in popularity and cold hard cash. One would imagine there should be more demand for conventions than ever! And yet, it's not that simple. It's that old philosophical quandary of "mo money, mo problems."
The visibility of the internet and social media can make it feel like there's more going on than ever, potentially competing for the attention of traveling weebs. Once upon a time, conventions would be the primary place to meet and get to know fellow fans. But here in the future, where I can connect with new friends over social media, my feed was showing them all over at gatherings like Anime North and Momocon (as well as non-anime congregations like Combo Breaker) the same weekend I was slugging down a drink named a "Jigglypuff" while attending Fanime.

A week later, I saw people I knew attending Colossalcon and OffKai Expo. Attendees are getting more spread out where they can and want to go, and with ticket prices rising to reflect the costs the cons are incurring, I can't blame them for being choosy.
I mean, that's the expected result of all of these rising costs. Smaller conventions get priced out, but larger ones that can weather the storm are likely to grow even larger. We're seeing the convention environment consolidate. And there's probably no better example of that than Anime Expo.
It's funny while lining up to be admitted to memory lane for this discussion, I found a classic Justin Sevakis-era Answerman column from 2016, where he remarks that prices for AX hadn't gone up that much, being "only" $65 for early registration for the weekend at the time.

Nowadays? Admittedly, we are past the early registration period, so it's not a direct comparison, but still, woof!

A mere 165 smackers to spend a long weekend roleplaying as a tin of sardines? Sign me up!
Honestly, pricing aside, those fabled crowds are the main reason I don't know that I could ever bring myself to attempt to attend AX, even with the now-massive list of talent and promotional pull they have. Would I even be able to see fine folks like Shoji Kawamori if I elbow into their panel spaces?
It's the main thing that bums me out about where the convention environment may eventually settle. If all we're left with is a handful of massive and heavily corporatized expositions, then that removes most of the intimacy that brought me into the convention scene in the first place. Heck, the last few cons I went to, the real appeal for me was getting to hang out with my Twitter oomfies.
Offline meetups have been a core component of the con experience for ages. Being in town for Fanime has been the way for me to meet up with Nicky outside the TWIA dimension for a couple of years now. But like you said, that underscores the divide in the purpose of conventions in the modern era. People who still want to cram together to roam through dealer's halls or file in for industry announcements moments before they're revealed on Twitter will do so. But there will be less incentive for folks to pay triple-digit ticket prices if they only want to spend time in town with their friends from the computer.
For me, there's a sweet spot where a convention is juuuuust big enough to host a decently large artists' alley, pull in creators with appreciable clout, and have the panel space to support niche/interesting presentations—but not so big that they have anxiety-inducing crowd sizes. It's a happy medium. But once you get into Anime Expo territory, all I can think about is how much I'd rather be chilling anywhere else.
That's exactly why the move away from those mid-range gatherings to the giant corporatized chaos engines hurts so much! A lot of the artists filling out those alleys rely on the business of these weekends during the con season to strongly support themselves. With competition for opportunities and space at events intensifying (and prices for even getting a booth rising with everything else), it's genuinely hurting the livelihood of the very creators these venues are meant to support!
That's the rub, though, isn't it? While these conventions may have started as fan-forward affairs, corporate buzzards will swoop in and try to claim all that space for themselves as both costs and the industry grow. Cons stop being celebrations and start becoming commercials.
Even though I've enjoyed spending time with my friends at them, that's been my main, sadly negative, takeaway from assessing the current state of anime conventions that's led to this landscape. The biggest ones don't feel like they're primarily for the fans anymore, being instead more business-side concoctions that see fans as customers at best and a resource to be burned through at worst.

That extends to the volunteers and staff that keep them running. I alluded to it in earlier resources, but this year's Fanime saw a significant walk-out over concerns of safety, support, and numerous other alleged issues. They're currently calling for a boycott of the 2025 convention.

And to be fair, one needn't look far to see examples of con mismanagement across the past three decades of their existence. Like I said earlier, these are logistical nightmares by nature. But if the cons of the future are to be these big "professional" affairs, they need to extend that professionalism to the people on the ground taking care of the minute-to-minute needs and problems. Big money comes with big responsibilities.
We can and should expect better, especially as the excuse of "Oh, we're a scrappy fan-run weekend event" has well dried up. Navigating these massive public gatherings can already be tricky before you find out that there's little support or recourse from the group hosting it. The irony is that failing to fulfill those needs results in less confidence and less business from the fans you're trying to cater to—and thus, at least in terms of my colloquial observations at this year's Fanime, smaller crowds attending.
Before we wrap things up, I should couch my doomsaying with the fact that, as always, I don't know what I'm talking about. I haven't run any cons myself. I've only attended a handful, and I have yet to return to any of them post-pandemic. Just as COVID and the economy conspired to put a hit on anime conventions, other unforeseen factors could arise to keep them chugging along. But right now, from my vantage point, things look pretty bad. And that sucks! I think a healthy and diverse convention environment is a good thing for anime fans. The internet might have helped the whole community-building thing, but it's still no replacement for shooting the shit face-to-face.
I understand these big gatherings have a place in fandom and the appeal of that physical presence. I probably would have loved to have been in the room going nuts when Discotek announced they'd licensed Gunbuster at Otakon or when Trigger dropped Panty and Stocking 2 news at AX. And lord knows I'll always appreciate a thematic excuse to hang out with my long-distance friends and online pals.

But yeah, it's also not within our purview to figure out the solution to the commercialized conundrum of conventions. Heck, we couldn't even get a fictional convention next to a ponding basin off the ground. But as someone who's been attending anime conventions for a while, I can confirm that things can and have been better.
It's always a bummer to do one of these columns where the conclusion is "Welp! What can you do?" But them's the breaks. Hopefully, there will be some silver lining to this that I can't see yet. Or maybe this was all just hopeless prose about cons.
An awful pun like that is exactly the kind of defiant energy we're looking for in our industry guests! We're not out yet, folks. See you all at the Clovis Veterans Center for TWIAcon 2025!
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