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OtakuCon Author's Notes 2004 The new Miami Beach event is one of several changes due for anime conventions and anime fandom in the new year. This site and its author already have seen the change of advertising, and we'll see more changes in the coming months when our material starts appearing in Super Manga Blast from Dark Horse. That'll make three magazines - SMB, Animerica and the promised-to-restart Protoculture Addicts - that will run material originated from here, and mean editions of nine magazines have published pictures and stories we've created since the site started in 1997. (Too bad that two of those magazines are no longer published.) The existence of the new OtakuCon is another change. Its promoters say they're ready to run several new "Kunicon" conventions in 2005. Some of the new events already announced are in new markets (St. Louis, San Diego) while others (Colorado and Georgia) are in markets with established, successful conventions. Through the growth of anime conventions, nearly all have been fan-run events. While convention volunteers work several events in a year, it's rare for convention organizers to run more than a single event. Staging multiple conventions in a year is something done only by a few sci-fi organizers - and those organizations, frankly, haven't had the greatest reputation among the fan groups. Slanted Fedora, for example, went out of business in 2004 after a long series of complaints and legal moves. Knowing the way that anime fans react, there's certain to be complaints about the Kunicon organization trying to take advantage of convention growth sparked by fan groups' hard work. But Kunicon's success is going to depend on more than convention history. They'll have to show that they can run their conventions in ways that offer fans value for money. The Kunicon organization got off to a rough start in Miami Beach, and gave the impression they're no better organized than any other fan-run convention. The registration lines opened late on Friday and main events constantly ran at least an hour late, the typical sign that things could be better. Sadly, the costume contest offered one of the low points of the convention season. For inexplicable reasons, the convention organizers decided to let the contest "judges" not only have a gong to stop entries they didn't like, they also chose to let them make disparaging remarks about the entrants when they left the stage. It got bad enough that at one point, the contest's announcers were overriding the judges and having the entrants finish their stage presentations. Once, the audience loudly booed the gonging of an entry. This writer has judged costume contests, and while he has to be deliberately overcritical of the entries in the pursuit of fairness, he's never considered himself more important than the show. OtakuCon's "judges" acted as if they were convinced the crowd had come to see them and not the costumers. At OtakuCon, the childish behavior was bad enough that we chose not to post the award winners, figuring that "judges" who insist on humiliating the entrants on stage couldn't be trusted to yield a reasonable decision. Suggestion: assume the paying customers don't want to be insulted. The Fontainebleau Hilton where the convention was held showed that they're fully organized, with a large staff that gets results. The food could be less expensive, but that money hopefully goes into the pockets of its employees. One example of that organization came when the author tried to get a late room-service meal after watching Johnny Yong Bosch's band. The author was told the turkey sandwich would take about a half hour to deliver; the knock in the door with the food came barely five minutes later. That Bosch concert produced one of the weekend's interesting moments. Some guy standing near the front of the crowd yelled at Bosch to "get off the stage." The convention staff quickly surrounded the guy, and as they chatted with him about concert etiquette, Bosch's response was to walk right to the edge of the stage, a couple of feet from the scrum, and start playing his guitar. It was the sort of subtle, defiant gesture you would have expected from Vash the Stampede (and from an accomplished martial artist who most likely can take care of himself). Another observation that lasted far more than a moment: actor Scott McNeil's well-attended panel discussion ended at 1 p.m. Every time we ran back to the same room to catch another actor's presentation, McNeil was still in the foyer, signing autographs and chatting with fans. As far as we know, he's still there...but that's why Scott is so popular. Make of this what you will: there were no long waits for the elevators during the author's Friday-Saturday stay. Apologies for missing the David Kaye, Joshua Seth and Carrie Savage presentations, but we got caught serving customers at our photo sales table. Business was good on Saturday (and thanks to the other "Seth") for a usable location), but we had to head home on Sunday. We'll have the same sales setup at Ohayocon in January. We won't have the Atlantic Ocean outside our hotel window in Ohio; that's something that still impresses this dweller from a land where the largest body of water is no wider than a football field. It's typical for Floridians, but fascinating for the author to watch cruise ships sail to the horizon and out of sight. The month before OtakuCon, the author saw a powerful lesson of what happens when fandom doesn't grow. On the weekend immediately after Thanksgiving, there was a Star Trek convention not far from where the author lives, and he decided to head over and see whether it was worth the $40 to pay for a one-day membership. What the author saw wasn't worth $4, let alone $40. The first hint came when the author had no trouble finding a parking spot near the entrance to the hotel conference center. Inside was a large dealers' room that had barely a dozen people inside. Ahead was a hall with a scattered few people behind tables. At the end of a hall were a few fans in an autograph line. There was no crowd, no intensity. the author walked through the conference center, stopped to think for a few minutes, then walked straight back through and out the door. The Star Trek event might have chosen the wrong weekend for a fandom event, since most of the area's intensity was at shopping malls. But there's also the chance that Star Trek fandom is burned out from too much age and too many disappointing pay-per-event conventions. That hasn't happened with anime conventions, but the organizers of the fan events still need to step back and seriously address their flaws. That'll be more important now with the rise of competition. Another change came in the weeks before OtakuCon, when a Japanese company started asking that American fansubbers stop distributing their copyrighted product for free. Too many anime fans acted shocked - shocked! - that this would happen, but it all had been laid out, chapter and verse, over the previous year. The playbook had been revealed on Aug. 1, 2004 at an Otakon panel by Matt Greenfield of ADV Films, and listed in a story on this site: "`...the Japanese companies are pushing us hard to crack down on the fansubbers. Within the next couple of months, you're going to see some fansubbers hit hard...it's ugly.'...Greenfield said Japanese companies are going to start suing some fansubbers...The difference with these predicted legal moves is that they would be pushed by the Japanese originators of anime and not by the independent American importers, he added. `In Japan, they're trying to set up a process where anything that goes on the Internet will be handled by the Japanese themselves. They're the rights holders, they have no restrictions at all,' said Greenfield." Some of the fansubbers said they'd defy the cease and desist messages. They're going to need some good lawyers with that attitude, which is going to invite the sort of heavy legal action already launched by the Motion Picture Association of America against online filesharing operations. This action is coming because anime is a big niche business in the U.S., and the rights holders are losing money to piracy that uses fansub material. They're not going to leave cash on the table. And that cash is a reason for another December change, which became public when ADV's The Anime Network tried to get fans to ask that Comcast leave the service alone. Again, it's a sign that anime is big business. Talk is that Sony might want to spread its Animax cable service to the U.S. through Comcast. Animax already is a big factor in Asia, and Sony has an English-language channel that is pretty much ready to be dropped into American cable slots. Sony's already put big money into anime through distributing the Cowboy Bebop movie, and that big company is likely to want to hit the U.S. market hard. If it happens, no one should be surprised...especially those with memories long enough to remember the September 2003 announcement that Sony and Comcast were going to launch new cable channels in the U.S. Just as with the fansubber crackdown, nothing happened right away, but the path already had been announced. ADV won't like the chance of having their cable TV gamble undercut, but that's the way of cable TV, where every idea has a competitor.  OtakuCon Main Page