Patrick McClanahan wrote:
Alas, for many of the anime showings were entirely in Japanese, without
subtitles! 'Tis a discouragement for one who lacketh knowledge of the
language! Strangely enough, many fans were in attendance of these
showings, though the subbed and dubbed showings were of course much more
popular.
This was pretty obnoxious, at least a full third of the showings were
untranslated. A separate room for these shows would have been better, I
Bah. Think of it as expanding your horizons. ^_^ I don't speak
Japanese(well, not enough for a conversation atleast), but I still watch
unsubbed stuff. The challenge is to pick out enough of the words to
figure out what's going on. It also helps you to pick up bits of the
language if you're trying to learn. ^_^
think. All around, I felt that the video rooms were pretty poorly set up.
Aside from the largest one having layout problems, and the fact that one of
them ran 15 mins offset from the others, there was the simple problem of
fragmentation. They never showed more than one consecutive hour of anything!
The 15 minute offset was a well intentioned error. I had a chance to
talk to the guy in charge of the video programming on Friday. The
_idea_ was to give people who wanted to go from one room to another time
to get there. Instead they got a SNAFU. He's not going to do that next
year. As for more than one hour of anything, I thought that it was a
good idea. I _like_ variation, I just didn't like the fact that
something was on a 3:00PM and the next two episodes were on at 5:30AM.
This, IMHO, was a not well thought out scheduling plan.
It was virtually impossible to catch all the episodes of a particular
series, particulary if you were commuting (like me :). Of course, I still
managed for Mahou Tsukai Tai, which is now one of my all-time favorite
OVAs......
Speak for yourself. I was coming down from San Carlos, and we managed
to make all the episodes of the shows we wanted to see... ^_^ Watching
Maho again was cool. If only for some of the audience reactions.
Basically, I was pretty disappointed all around. The last con I
attended, Otakon '97, wasn't much bigger (if at all), and yet it had twice
as much stuff going on! I remember, at Otakon, frequently trying to choose
between two good panels AND something interesting going on in the main room.
Part of the problem Fanime had was that they didn't get a big enough
place. They realized they were going to have a problem a while before
the con, but it was to late to do anything about it. Supposedly they're
going to go to a bigger place next year. Maybe the SC convention center
or something...
Fanime's central event seemed to be the Masquerade, which was offsite and
generally a bitch to get tickets to. No music video contest, no live
MSTs......blah. And let us not speak of the carefully policed line for the
dealer's room.
There were two reasons for the line. First, it wasn't that big of a
dealers room and I believe there were fire code regulations they were
trying to meet. Second, it cut down on shoplifting. If you saw any
Grunts(I swear, the security people all wore shirts with the word
"grunt" on it!) with green tape on their badges, it meant that they had
busted a shoplifter...
I'm in agreement about the lack of music videos and such though. That
was one of the highlights of AX, IMHO.
Equally unimpressive was a massive dearth of costumes. Maybe 1 person in
twenty was in costume (at least in the hotel, maybe they all saved their
costumes for the Masquerade), and most of those weren't too elaborate.
It has been said that West Coast fans are far less likely to go in
costume than Central/East Coast fans. Dunno why though...
The fanfic panel was fun, though - nice to hear from so many authors on
both sides of the table. An hour is definitely too short for any decent
level of discussion. While I was impressed with Joseph Palmer's efforts to
spread the tools of good writing around, I do have some issues with his take
on fanfiction vs. 'real' fiction, which I'll address in an upcoming
rant^H^H^H^H editorial.
Palmer was frightenly well prepared for the panel. He even had
HANDOUTS! ^_^
Everyone seems to have watched, and been impressed by, the same shows.
Card Captor Sakura was a definite hit - it's got more real story behind it
than most CLAMP. Yawara was good as ever, and everyone seemed to like Flame
of Recca and Hyper Police. Mayhap we can expect a few flegling fanfics of
these, perhaps after a 1-2 month gestation period? And I'm not sure how I've
I have a Card Captor idea, but I want to see more than the first few
episodes before I actually write anything about it.
-Josh