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
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!
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......

    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.
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.
    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.

    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.


    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
missed Mahou Tsukai Tai all these years, but it's INCREDIBLE. I know E.L.
Lurker's written one MTT piece - anyone else have one out there or in the
works?

-patrick mcclanahan