Do not go to Anime Weekend Atlanta.

Day 1: http://www.crymore.net/2016/09/30/anime-weekend-atlanta-day-1-thursday/

Day 2: http://www.crymore.net/2016/10/01/anime-weekend-atlanta-day-2-friday/

 

Days 3/4 Guests of Honor:

• Darais – unironically cosplays Kirito
• Celia – yaoi enthusiast
• Calen – I don’t think his mom likes me
• One of Darais’s friends – I only jokingly invited him to hang but he went for it so now he’s cool
  • Not cool enough to get another mention outside of this section, though
  • I hate the wordpress bullet point font too

 

 

 

Saturday

Went about that well, yeah.

 

 

1:00 Walkcon

Guess this is where I’ll dump all the cosplay pics I grabbed throughout the weekend.

 

Most were taken under varying states of sobriety.

While wearing my ReZero shit on Saturday, I made sure to make eye contact with every Rem I saw just so they knew I was intentionally avoiding asking for their pics. Sorry ladies, but my heart ain’t a trash bin~ <3

 

 

3:00 AMVs

L O L

If you’re unfamiliar with the AMV scene, it’s probably the biggest circlejerk of any anime fandom. And it was put on full display here. Brace yourself for a rant about shit you do not and should not care about.

Normally cons have “AMV Contests”, where the audience members vote to determine the winners. Results are often bullshit, but at least the presenters pretend the votes were counted accurately.

What we got at this con dropped all pretense. Rather than having a Contest, the organizers just straight up picked random shitty AMVs their friends made, attached arbitrary contest categories to them, and then decided to waste three fucking hours of every attendee’s time by highlighting “winner” after “winner”. And considering the attendance numbers (not even half the room was fucking full — think I counted about 150 bodies, max), I guess most people do not like the veil of impartiality being lifted.

Look, I love AMVs, and every person I met at the AMV Editors’ Dinner on Thursday was a pretty chill character. Yet this kinda insular bullshit is why the only aspect of growth these kids focus on is the masturbatory kind. Why get better when you only have to specialize in being a kiss-ass to get everything handed to you?

Still considering the state of the scene, I guess I can’t blame them. Cons are their lives because that’s all they have to look forward to nowadays, so the protectionism comes out of a kind of relevance necessity.

These people spend months at a time on one video and maybe clear 10k Youtube views if they’re lucky. While they’re doing this, a group of 16-year-old wallweeds in Bumfuck, Idaho will slap together a Danganronpa MEP to Melanie Martinez in clear under a week and pull 200k hits in about the same time. Still better than BakaOppai’s shit, but that’s not a hard bar to clear.

But awards? No, those aren’t subject to the whims of dirty plebs. Friendship points are the true measure of AMV quality! Effort = justified.

Hell, I don’t even know where I’m going with this anymore. Have an AMV from the event I actually liked:

 

 

6:00 God is proven to not exist

I’m getting too old for cons. Let’s not even talk about the dabbing debacles I witnessed.

 

 

7:30 Swing Dance

 

 

7:40 Oh wait, no, fuck swing dancing

What the fuck is it with people who don’t know how to fucking dance trying to teach others? Christ, back to shitty Youtube instructionals it is.

Luckily we caught Celia just as she was heading into the maelstrom. Good deed for the year: done.

 

 

8:00 Rum ‘n Cokes

Mostly shot the shit and drank for an hour. This is how midwesterners party.

Calen traipsed in after the Garnidelia concert ended, so we did a couple shots and ran back to the con.

 

 

9:30 21+ Mixer, AKA: How many dudes can you fit in a room?

What an event. The odds of finding a nee-san would’ve been better at a truck stop gloryhole.

There wasn’t even any liquor, despite the ID requirement, so we bounced before Celia got mobbed by manatees.

 

 

10:00 Hentai Worth Watching Panel

I don’t know why sober people go to these, but I’m glad we did our part in driving some of them off.

 

 

11:00 The Rave

Celia had an AMV scene to save, so we split up right about here. Rave was going pretty strong when we entered, probably because they sensed the presence of gods.

All in all, went better than expected. Until I realized my wallet had been jacked (this kills the night).

 

 

 

Sunday

If ya recall back to one sentence ago, my wallet got nabbed at the rave. So I got to spend the entirety of Sunday following up on that bullshit instead of conning. Getting through TSA without ID was as fun as you can imagine.

 

 

 

Con impressions:

Anime Weekend Atlanta sucks. Everyone I spoke to that had to gone to prior years mentioned how significantly worse it had gotten. I can believe it, considering the level of quality didn’t really have anywhere else to dig itself to.

Con staff were unpleasant and uninformed, events were poorly managed, and my fucking wallet got jacked. So yeah, fuck this con. I could name 15 better ones off the top of my head and that includes fucking Anime Detour.

Whatever, everyone we talked to hyped me up about Youmacon 2016. Apparently it’s expanded since Soup and I last went, so I’ll give it another chance to wow me. I’m sure the M.C. Escher pathways won’t fuck us over this year~