Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Things I Learned at Animefest


It only took an hour to pick up our badges - after an hour long drive to get there. 
  • Did you know Robin is apparently a girl? I saw one male Robin and 4-5 female ones.
  • The one male Robin was part of a full Teen Titans lineup that was posing for pictures including a pretty impressive Cyborg and a very green Beastboy.
  • I saw one male Loki and 3 female Loki's. Some of them were pretty interesting.
Heck, there are at least 3 Robins just in this picture!
  • Every con I've ever been to has included Star Trek costumes. I was a little worried about this one, but within a couple of hours on our first day I ran across a trio of young ladies sporting TOS uniforms. I suppose they might have been new movie uniforms, but either way the red-gold-blue miniskirt look never quite goes out of style. Thank you ladies for keeping the streak alive.
  • So ... many ... Doctors ... if you were looking for A doctor I'm not sure what kind of luck you would have had but if you were looking for THE Doctor well you had plenty of choices as there were a crap ton of them at the con
  • Lots of Steampunk outfits - I know it's turned into a thing the last few years and Austin has a fairly big crowd that's into that, but I didn't expect to see so much of it at an anime event. Lots of suppliers in the dealer room too.
Oh yeah - this guy was there too

Gaming notes - gaming isn't a huge part of this con but here's what I did find:
  • No 40K! I didn't see one table of 40K or Fantasy or Warmachine/Hordes or anything else. There was very little miniatures presence here.
  • Reaper did have a paint and take room so there was something.
  • Battletech had a room with mini's and some terrain going most of the con. I ended up not playing it but they were there.
  • Fiasco was listed but every time I walked by the room doors were shut so I can't actually say if it ran or not.
  • There were some other one-off RPG's on the program but I never saw them either
  • No D&D at all as far as I could tell
  • The one shining beacon was Pathfinder - the Dallas Pathfinder Society branch was set up in a decent sized room and ran all 4 days. I played some of this and I'll have more on it tomorrow.
Did I mention Minecraft is popular with the kids these days?
Anyway, it was fun - the kids dressed up and Apprentice Twilight in particular got a lot of attention for hers. It was good and we will probably go back next year. In fact they're all fired up about going to some other area cons so we will probably have to look into it in quite a bit less than a year.

3 comments:

Jay Murphy said...

First I want to say I am soooo relieved to find out Robin is a she. So relieved. Second... well, actually I think that is just it. So relieved.Forever now I can feel no shame when I instruct the fiance into role play as Robin.

The elasticity of gaming characters sexuality is a fascinating topic. I find the blog posts of sexuality in game play intriguing. I can't wait to go to my first con and hump a leg:)

Adam Dickstein said...

I have been to tons of Anime conventions over the years (some for fun, many for work - which was also fun), but I'm not especially familiar with Animefest.

Were you expecting a big gaming presence? Gaming is barely a thing at Anime cons here on the East Coast and if you do find any games they are going to be Anime/Manga themed.

When you said you didn't find one D&D game I wasn't surprised. The fact that there was even a Pathfinder game is more amazing to me.

Blacksteel said...

i knew there would be some gaming as their web site said so - I just wasn't sure what all would be there. Most DFW area cons include some mix of gaming, costumes, video rooms, and dealer's room - the differences lie in the relative proportions of each. Even Fort Worth Wars, a dedicated wargame & miniatures con had a few guys in Trek uniforms when it was running a few years back.

That said Battletech has been a mainstay at area cons since the 80's and it fits the theme to a degree so I wasn't shocked to see it.

The lack of 40k was a surprise - some local group almost always piggy-backs a tournament onto any convention that doesn't already have one.

D&D is at a low point right now with the lack of an in-production edition so I probably should have expected it. Pathfinder has their sh*t together when it comes to organized play so they put on a good event.

There was also a boardgame checkout room, a computer/videogame room, and the battletech VR pods were present too.

Lots of pickup games of Magic going on. Not as much Pokemon as I would have thought and I didn't notice any other card games.

Also about every third person had a DS - I thought those were almost dead but apparently not.