Events and Convention Coverage

            I had avoided Anime conventions for a pretty long time now for a host of reasons. The last one that I was really invested in was Otakon back in 2004. I thought I had stopped going because I had outgrown going to conventions, but I have been going to Comic Book and Gaming conventions pretty religiously since then, so that wasn’t it. I only recently was able to nail down why I have avoided Anime Cons so stringently for the last few years, and it actually did not take very long for it to hit me at all once while I was at NYAF. My revelation actually started slightly earlier this year, at AnimeNEXT in Somerset, NJ. I didn’t attend because I had a bad feeling about it, but I met up with some friends who were there. Just being outside of the place confirmed my bad feelings… I felt incredibly creepy being there. Whether I was creeped out by the people there, or creeped out by my own presence amongst a bunch of 16-year-olds I wasn’t sure, I just knew I did not want to be there.

            Flash forward to the New York Anime Fest, and I am experiencing something of the same feeling, but far more deluded, probably because the space was bigger and less… intimate… than a hotel. Over the course of the weekend that same creepy feeling came back though, and this time I knew it wasn’t me because there were lots of people there my age or older, so I didn’t feel like the creepy old guy at the kiddie pool. It took me some time to process where this feeling was coming from, but I figured it out. What should have been a fun and enjoyable safe place for kids and grown-up kids, had a not-so-thinly veiled subculture of BDSM and Pornography to it.

            To anyone who is familiar with Anime, the sub-genre of Hentai is no secret. It was no secret to me before this; I love hentai. It is basically animated hardcore pornography. I knew it would be there, in face I was counting on it. What I wasn’t counting on was the seeming fact that hentai is so accepted nowadays that it was being sold pretty much side-by-side with regular anime. There were a fair number of children present at the Anime Fest; not a huge number, but some. Such children, who were probably there to enjoy Pokemon, Bakugan, or whatever their favorite anime is, where definitely exposed to a level of overt sexuality that they should not have been. That overt sexuality is now, for whatever reason, irrevocably joined at the hip with anime and the Otaku who love it. The people who religiously go to anime cons, I have observed, are generally very young, have boundary issues, engage in significant attention seeking behavior, and are for the most part hypersexual. The environment of a Con is like a pressure cooker for acting out on sexual urges due to the presence of half naked cosplayers, readily available hentai, and two factors that I have only noticed recently.

            Two more subcultures have found a comfortable glen in the Otaku Forest, one being the LGBT community, and the other the BDSM community (for those of you who are acronym-impaired, LGBT = Lesbian, Gay Bisexual Transgender, and BDSM = Bondage Discipline Sado-Masochism). When walking through the vendor area of the con, there were lots of thing for sale that, well, should not have been on sale considering the alleged focus of the audience. Handcuffs, corset’s, PVC gear, and leather wear are sort of incongruous for a Convention that’s supposed to be all about Japanese animated cartoons. There were a lot of Victorian and Steampunk clothes and accessories available as well, but there were marginally acceptable reasons for those wares to be available. I don’t know if the presence of all the bondage stuff is a symptom or a manifestation of the overtly sexual nature of the crowds that attend Anime Cons these days.

            Speaking of overtly sexual, there is apparently a helluva lot of hooking up going on at Con’s, something I am probably jealous of because I never got to do any of that when I was these kids ages. There has almost always been a lot of gender neutrality in anime, and now yaoi and yuri has exploded as well. Yaoi is romanticized boy/boy anime, and yuri is romanticized girl/girl anime. It’s not quite hentai, it’s more rated R than X usually. The yaoi and yuri fans are, shall we say, not shy about showing their enthusiasm for their favorite anime, and they advertise so loudly at Cons. It is a common sight to see people, usually under the age of 20, at cons with signs saying “Yuri Kisses Wanted”, “Yaoi Kisses Wanted” and of course, the ubiquitous “Free Hugs”. The most disturbing part is that a lot of the people with these signs are really young or really young looking, and they don’t really care who they get attention from. It makes me uneasy to think of what kind of picnic an anime con is for a pedophile, and even more uneasy to think of what every other person my age is thinking of me for being there… because that’s what I am thinking of them as well…

            An anime Con today is equal parts Gay pride Parade, Social Networking Party, Geekfest/Otaku-Orgy, and Miscellaneous whatever you want to fit in there. At the end of the weekend, I was glad that I went, and I would do it again. I felt very weird being around so many underage same sex kids making out, but you know, you get used to anything after a while.

I went to the New York Anime Festival under the pretense that I was going to re-connect with anime. I had let my interest in the genre lapse, and to be honest, I missed it. I missed my Naruto, I missed my Bleach, I missed my Bebop, and I missed my FullMetal Alchemist. So I wanted to go to NYAF to get all of this back, to find out what was going on in the world of anime, and for once, to be caught up with, for lack of a better phrase, the new shit, instead of constantly playing catch-up.

This was my intent.

As you may have guessed, what happened was nothing like that. Not only did I not become the up-to-date anime savvy otaku that I had intended to, I actually regressed in my knowledge; that is I began a love affair with all things old school. When I say old school, I mean my appreciation for the anime that I originally liked came back with a vengeance. I longed to see Voltron, Project A-Ko, Gunsmith Cats, Ranma… hell, maybe even a little Golgo-13. What I wanted to see the most, however, was Robotech. Yes, I am a lapsed Robotech fan, and that weekend I was brought back into the fold, largely through the efforts of a man named Kevin McKeever. Kevin works for Harmony Gold, the fine, fine people who have always brought us Robotech in America. He is a Robotech missionary, getting the word out that the Robotech Defense Force is back and better than ever. I was completely unaware of this. As Kevin said, there were a couple of different types of Robotech fans; the new generation, who only knew about Robotech from the latest movie “Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles” (which is available on Hulu and you should go watch immediately), and there were the “lost fans” people like me who watched the original Robotech series, and maybe even the Macross sagas, but knew nothing of all the new developments going on. What completely leveled me was the news that there is a new full-fledged live-action Robotech film in the works. That blew my mind.

If you recall, in “Independence Day” with Will Smith, there are a couple of gigantic air battles between the USAF and the Alien Fighters. Both of these battles took place with the backdrop of a giant alien starship in the background. When I watched that, all I could think was “wow, this looks exactly like what a Robotech movie would look like”, except, you know, the F-18 Hornets didn’t transform into Giant Robots. The failure of machines to turn into giant robots is endemic in our military, and something needs to be done about it immediately… but I digress. The point is in my mind the groundwork for such a movie was laid way back then. Only now, when Warner Bros. is realizing that they have milked Harry Potter for all it’s worth and hey! People seem to like Giant Robos, has a Robotech movie been floated down the river. Robotech was my, and a lot of other people’s first introduction to anime, maybe other than Voltron. I remember vividly the first time I saw it because it was a cartoon where people actually died… and stayed dead… like for real… no coming back! This was definitely a watershed moment in my life. Robotech is, to paraphrase Mr. McKeever, an animated Soap Opera in Space with Giant Transforming Robots. Think Battlestar Galactica with more believable acting.

Robotech is ripe for spinning as many stories as possible, and Harmony Gold is determined to make sure that Hollywood doesn’t spin straw into crap. They want to spin that straw into, well; Gold, and they are doing everything possible to make sure that happens. Kevin did a great job of getting that point across, as during the two Robotech panels that he did, he was peppered with doubts and misgivings from an audience that had obviously seen the Transformers and G.I. JOE movies. This was an audience that had seen those movies and were, let’s say, less than pleased. Basically, I think we are all a little gun-shy about having our favorite series and memories brought up and “re-imagined” into unrecognizable crap. Kevin is very good at his job however, and I think all of the fans present left feeling reassured that Harmony Gold would do it’s level best to make sure that no movie put out would be bereft of story, character, and plot. Warner Bros. did an admirable job with the HP movies, so there is some reason for optimism in this area.

Long story short, the Anime Fest brought about a lot of feelings in me, some great, some… well, fairly uncomfortable, and I will definitely get to those stories as well. But for three days, I was living in the days of Robotech, Irresponsible Captain Taylor, and the days when anime didn’t consist almost solely of soul-rending emo-madness that made one want to cut themselves (Deathnote, Berserk, Battle Royale, I’m looking at you…)