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Metrocon - Author's Notes - 2007 Thanks to the airlines, this site ended up in Florida instead of New Jersey on the second weekend of July. We'd planned to head to AnimeNEXT on July 6-8, but out of curiosity we looked at plane fares for both Newark and Tampa. The round-trip fares to Tampa for Metrocon were $200 less than for a trip to Newark for AnimeNEXT, so we traveled to Florida instead. It was less expensive and also fair, in a sense, because we'd already been to New Jersey and New York several times in recent years, including our trip to the New York Comic Con five months earlier. We hadn't been to Florida in a few years and not in the Tampa Bay area since our last Florida winter racing trip in 1997. Florida has developed a convention circuit of its own since then, and we needed to head south and see what it was like. What we found was an event that was busier than we expected, but not huge. After the long walks of Anime Expo, we had to decompress into an event that was entirely in one building and would have fit in half the space of the California dealers' room. There was enough space left over in the Tampa convention center that the Florida facility also had a gymnastics school in the half of their main hall not used by Metrocon. Whether because it was a smaller event or because of the usual Florida summer heat and humidity, Metrocon felt more laid-back than Anime Expo.  It seems like a contradiction to write that it was a busier event than expected and laid-back at the same time, but that's more of a reflection of the author's approach to the event than anything else. We were as busy as we've ever been on our noontime Saturday arrival at the convention, when we took over 200 pictures in the first hour, but the rest of the weekend wasn't desperately rushed. The fan enthusiasm was still present, but things felt more relaxed in Tampa than in Long Beach - even though there was a lot more fighting. The fighting was staged, of course, by several groups who held martial arts demonstrations in costume. Add a group that had a swordfighting display, and it was the most action we've seen at a convention since the first Pacific Media Expo had pro wrestling matches. The other big event at Metrocon was the Friday night costume masked ball. It was like something out of Un Ballo in Maschera, especially when the dancing was punctuated with a series of stage story vignettes. So many people were interested in the dance that the line to get in extended from the ballroom doors, down a concourse, led down some stairs and nearly reached outside of the convention center, Metrocon Main Page