Con Report: Anime Boston 2008 « Press The Action Button

So I attended Anime Boston 2008 on Saturday and it was plenty fun. It was very good but it was also very annoying in many aspects. Oh yea, and I have pictures, but they’re all after the break.

The main reason I was very pissed off at Anime Boston this year was the sheer number of children, narutards, Bleach fags, FMA fangirls, and other assorted riff raff. There are way too many thirteen year old girls dressed up as Naruto in costumes that they bought off of eBay thinking they’re so freaking cool because they watch dubbed anime on Toonami and go to cons so they can buy replica Death Notes and giggle while they’re in school showing them to their equally mentally impotent friends who wind up getting found out by a teacher and put on the news for being a part of some “death cult” and then the entire industry has to suffer. It’s absolutely disgusting. They’re not actual fans, anime is just some childhood fad for them.

Another reason children shouldn’t be there is the content of the entire con. Say you’re in the dealer’s room looking at Full Metal Alchemist pocket watches or some other junk, and then all of a sudden the next thing on the table is hardcore porn. There are doujins everywhere! Or what about the half naked cosplayers all over the place? Personally I love these things, and I don’t want some parent to complain to the staff that their child has been scarred because they saw a naked boob and have all the doujins pulled from the showfloor and have the cosplayers cover up. God damn it, if you don’t want them to see that stuff don’t let them go to the con in the first place! Why do we have to suffer because of bad parenting?

On a different note, did I mention that this years convention was extremely understaffed? I know someone who stood in the registration line on Friday for 10 hours! He had to buy a Saturday only pass because that Friday was already over. Not only that, but I rarely saw anyone even checking badges at the entrances to the dealer’s room, game room, or artist’s alley. What was the point of even registering if you could sneak in everywhere. It’s not even sneaking, you could just walk right in. Occasionally there would be a convention center security guard standing at the door but they obviously had no idea what they were doing. It would have been simple to walk by them with last years badge, they wouldn’t have known the difference, not that I saw them checking badges anyway.

The game room was a joke this year. They put video games and board games in the same room this year which was adjacent to and the same size as the dealer’s room. This huge room was divided into the video games on one side and the board games on the other with a huge gap in the middle and tons of the room left over. Why the hell did they cram all of the TVs and game systems in such a confined space when they had a whole freaking room to use! No wonder there were so few people in the room, all of the tables were so crowded and the games were so sucky it wasn’t worth it. I heard there was a snafu with the gaming room staff from last year winding up with most of them leaving, so this explains why it blew so much this year. But seriously, the people who left were the only ones who knew how to arrange tables and consoles correctly?

I was also depressed by the lackluster cosplay at the con. Don’t get me wrong, there was some good stuff, but no where near the quality that I’ve seen before. This is mainly due to the number of people who really phone it in by buying pre-made costumes of the flavor of the month characters. In a way, the bad cosplay detracts from the good because you’ll start to block out looking at cosplayers having seen so many bad ones that you might miss some really good ones. I only took pictures of ones I thought were good, if I’ve seen the show/played the game they’re in, or if they’re hot.

Ashley “Ash” Williams from Evil Dead