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Anime Weekend Atlanta Author's Notes 2004 Notes mostly written in the dreary new G Concourse of the Dulles International Airport after making a Sunday morning departure from the convention. The author of this site spent much of the weekend in the Anime Weekend Atlanta artists' alley, at a carefully-chosen spot that was right next to a vital power outlet. That corner location also turned the author's table into an unofficial information booth, and several times he was asked where the registration line was located. It took only a brief motion to show the questioner where the line of fans was located, and that line was longer than ever on the covnention's Saturday afternoon. At its longest, the line wound halfway around the convention's main atrium, snaked past the second atrium where the author's table was located, and reached the escalators that led to the ground floor of the hotel atrium. That line dissolved in an hour or so, leading to the conclusion that only part of the line was because of the way the convention handled registration. It looked as if there were just so many people at AWA that the convention was caught by surprise. The event, the tenth AWA, demonstrated the two faces of convention fandom. Most of the people who run AWA are old hands from the start of the convention in the old Castlegate hotel, but it seemed as if most of the fans were new. You had the contrast of veteran fans Fred Patten and Mike Toole co-hosting a panel on old-time anime, and the statement by the winners of the novice costume contest award that they had started cosplaying in February. As always, that's a good thing because fandom will continue to grow if new, young people are interested. Part of the newness was a fresh collection of dub actors as guests of honor. From the author's recollection, it was the first time that Larissa Wolcott was at a convention, which gave the second dub voice of Excel Excel from Excel Saga a chance to see the number of people who dressed as Hyatt and Excel. In her honor, one fan cosplayed as the briefly-spotted toilet-cleaning Excel. No one wore a Kekko Kamen costume in homage to Christine Auten, though, even though it has been done legally in the past. Vic Mignogna has turned into the hot dub actor of 2004, and Fullmetal Alchemist is the big reason. Mignogna all but glowed when he told how lucky he is to get the prime role of Edward Elric. In the same way that AnimeFEST had featured the dub Spike and Jet from Cowboy Bebop, AWA had the dub Mamimi and Haruko from FLCL. This writer bumped into Jennifer "Mamimi" Sekiguchi a couple of times, but he missed Kari "Haruko" Wahlgren on Saturday because he spent too much time at his artists' alley table. One of the high points of the convention was being able to purchase a copy of the freshly-pressed Wonderful People CD from Mari Iijima, a short time after her Friday night concert. IIjima had been scheduled to attend the convention three years earlier, but wasn't in a mood to travel a few weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks. However, too many fans kept begging Iijima to return to AWA (where she first had appeared in 1999), so the trip took place. IIjima mentioned that her next convention stop probably will be in California, at the second Anime Overdose in 2005. One welcome new feature at AWA was the cosplay gallery, an idea that wasn't obvious by the name but made sense once you went to the place. The convention took one of the hotel's smaller meeting rooms and turned it into a display place for costumes that had won major convention awards in the past. This site got its start at AWA in 1997, when the top prize went to an Iria costume from Zeiram the Animation. Legend had it that the costume was said to have been so good that the effort got the maker disinvited from participating in future AWA's, and a look at the preserved outfit let you know how that story got started. For a convention that some say is unfriendly toward costumers, the cosplay gallery was a big statement toward changing that impression. The most popular entrant at the Saturday night costume contest was a seven-foot Gundam, unusually mobile for a costume of that kind. the audience loved it, something reflected in the audience favorite award it got, but the outfit didn't get any of the top judges' awards. This is where the author takes off his fan's cap and tries to go back to the judges' mentality he showed in the previous week's Iowa trip; the Gundam had a great shape, but the details weren't as great, so the top prizes went to other entries that were better crafted. Second most popular costume of the weekend was probably the simplest, and it wasn't an anime costume: some guys made three of the colored, connected blocks from the Tetris game (remember, it originally was Russian), and people couldn't get enough of the blocks, which were only cardboard boxed tapes together and painted Tetris colors. That group also got a special judges' award at the Saturday night contest for popularity's sake. Lauren Goodnight managed to hold together the Saturday night show, although her high-heeled shoes weren't as comfortable as her (surprisingly economical) velvet dress. She took off the shoes midway through the contest and apologized for being shorter, but no one complained.    Anime Weekend Atlanta Main Page