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2003 at AnimeIowa, there was talk that the Cedar Rapids convention was
getting so big that there would be no choice but to move it to a larger
location. That led to rumors that the event was going to quit Iowa and
travel to another state, and talk was hot that it was going to
Minnesota. The talk was only half right. AnimeIowa did move, but only a couple of hours away to Des Moines. When it was time for Minnesota and the Twin Cities to get an anime convention, it was a new event, Anime Detour. Two weeks earlier, that area of the upper Midwest had a convention, but the No Brand Con was an hour's drive east in Wisconsin. Big Ten sports fans already know that Minnesota and Wisconsin aren't the same. The rough part of the convention weekend came for car-less fans. Three weeks earlier, union drivers at the area's Metro Transit bus system had gone on strike. It was no factor for the author, who rode an airplane, but it was bad news for those who didn't have an automobile or a ride to the convention. Anime Detour was in Bloomington, a southern suburb of the Twin Cities and a long walk for anyone who lives north of the river. The convention came on the big Spring Break weekend, a big travel weekend and a time that - in theory - should give the students most likely to attend the convention extra time to travel to the event. The new convention was larger than the organizers had expected; they hoped to get a few hundred, but had over a thousand for the weekend. In most ways, Anime Detour felt like other anime conventions, with a lot of young, enthusiastic fans and a surprising number of parents on hand to keep track of them. But there was one place where the event wasdifferent. One of the longest lines of the weekend was for a Shinkage Ryu martial arts demonstration by the Chikara Dojo; the audience filled two large meeting rooms for the swordplay show. Anime Detour is just north of one of the biggest tourist attractions in the U.S., a place with an attraction so strong that any anime convention must be exceptionally powerful to keep fans from drifting away. The Mall of America and its 330 stores, said to be one of the largest shopping malls in the world, is across the street from the convention hotel. For an anime fan, passing the Mall for a convention must have been like a gambler's driving by a casino on the way to the grocery store - was it too much of a temptation? Yes, there were some anime convention fans who went to the mall. The author discovered that fact when he had to make the trip on Friday morning, after he unpacked his bags and found that his printer had broken under standard airline treatment. There was enough time to head to the mall, look at the amusement park rides at the indoor atrium "Camp Snoopy," find a photo store, buy a printer and get back to the convention hotel. The need to buy the printer was offset by the discovery of a useful wi-fi signal in the hotel's meeting room concourse. You know this anime convention stuff is driving you crazy when: you see a tall and slender woman in a white blouse and purple skirt, and think that she would make a good Summoner Yuna from Final Fantasy. Or when you see a woman in a black sweater and skirt, and think she looks a lot like R. Dorothy Waynewright from The Big O. Of course, the strange feeling really came when the author of this site looked at the listing of events on the previous reports page and started counting. The Anime Detour trip marked the 100th fandom event that this site has attended: 95 anime conventions, two sci-fi cons, two model conventions and a gaming event. That included various editions of 30 conventions in 19 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. Documenting those trips has taken 67,000 files that have filled just short of a gigabyte of disc place, and has cost...oh, who knows. The expense and work pays off when you read messages such as the one, written by a fan from South Dakota on the Anime Detour bulletin board, asking if "...the author from fansview.com is coming to this convention?" It's pleasant that someone would be interested in seeing this site's author show up at an event, but it's even more amazing that it the interest would come from South Dakota. There are barely 750,000 people in all of that lightly-populated state, compared to 1.5 million in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. If someone from South Dakota would be an anime fan, that says a lot about the increasing popularity of anime. And then there's the amazing combination of good luck that this writer encountered at the start of the trip. It began when the the author bumped into a couple of auto racing buddies who were on the same flight to Minnesota, using it as a connecting flight for a big bonus race in California. That gave the author a chance to catch up on what happened at the previous weekend's race in Arizona. Then, the author's seating strategy took an unusual twist. Boeing 757 airliners have exit row seats with unusually large legroom, so the author chose one of those seats. He reached his row, only to find a man, a woman and a flight attendant already there. They explained that the manand woman were husband and wife who wanted to sit together in that row, including the author's seat. To make up for being dislodged, the man offered to give the author his original seat - in first class. Damn. The author had to ask the flight attendant three times if that swap was all right, and each time the answer was yes. So the author got a premium seat at coach fare, the first time he's been in a first class seat in years - way before this web site got started. Things got better, if that was possible. The author had only a short wait at baggage claim, called the Bloomington Airport Marriott for a shuttle ride and was told there would be a half-hour wait. Reasonable on a busy day, thought the author. So he casually strolled to the shuttle pickup lane - and found the shuttle bus already was there. Get to the hotel around 9 a.m. and immediately check into a room, one of the closest first-floor rooms to the convention. And the registration clerk gave the author access to an upper floor with a free continental breakfast, complete with some of the best pineapple slices thiswriter has eaten in a long time. Sorry folks, nothing to complain about here. The inaugural anime convention in Minnesota leads to thoughts about how that form of fandom has expanded, about how the number of U.S. conventions has roughly quadrupled since this site started in late 1997. Once it was unusual to have three conventions in one month, but now it's more unusual to have only one U.S. convention on a single weekend - as was the case for Anime Detour. From the four U.S. conventions on the weekend following Anime Detour, this site's author plans to head to the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention, where he expects to have an artists' alley table to sell books and pictures. The following week is reserved for a trip to Anime Boston, where the convention organizers have been kind enough to allow this site to have a fourth-floor board room for pictures and books. That room might be a little hard to find, though. Then there will be a journey to Seattle, where the author will concentrate on stories about guests of honor (the convention has their own photo vendor, and the author promises not to get in the way). After a trip to Anime Central in May (with another photo room to handle), there's the Memorial Day weekend and its four U.S. conventions. The author has looked at the list of the four events and...has no idea what he's going to do. |
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