Anime Weekend Atlanta 2023

Introduction:

Let me start off by saying this is going to be an extremely personal recap of AWA 2023 that details a lot of the specific things myself and my friends spent our weekend doing. If that doesn't interest you, this might not be for you, but it does include a critical assessment of the convention itself and how it was structured/organized. With that out of the way, let's get into it. 

I do not intend to do one of these for every single convention I attend but this one was particularly special. Anime Weekend Atlanta is my favorite con that I attend every year. I first attended it in 2007 while having a broken arm after being thrown off a horse mere weeks after Dragoncon 2007, my very first con ever. One of the biggest reasons I love this con so much is the venue itself, it aesthetically has a very cool vibe to it, the convention space and the hotel space are connected but feel just separate enough to allow you to escape from the crowds and there are some truly beautiful outdoor locations for photoshoots. Also the fall is my favorite time of year so the weather is also ideal, the fall scenery enhances the look of the outdoor photos as well. However, conventions in general have changed a lot since the Covid-19 pandemic. AWA in particular did not happen in 2020 and 2021 saw heavy Covid policies restricting what kind of activities you could do. In 2022, with the state of Covid still very much in flux depending on where you were located and the general rate of cases in your given county/city, the convention had a tough call to make as far as how severe of a Covid control policy they would put in place. There is a lot of conflicting stories and misinformation regarding what I'm about to say, so I will say the version that doesn't paint anyone in a bad light. There was a disagreement among the staff as to how strict these Covid policies needed to be, this combined with MANY other factors resulted in a schism which saw half of the volunteer staff rescinding their decision to volunteer that year and a registration process that took much longer than intended because of the extra steps for vaccine verification required. So on Saturday of 2022 the registration line backed up so far that it zig-zagged into the hotel and caused the hotel to get in trouble with the Fire Marshal. So with all of that being said, this inevitably resulted in some changes that needed to be made in 2023 for the conventions to continue to take place this year. Registration was moved this year outside of the hotel itself. The hotel also demanded that the convention abide by a policy that, if needed, would deny access to the hotel for non convention guests and if it became crowded enough, non hotel guests as well. The hotel would enforce this via wristbands given to hotel guests and the convention would have to pay for a 3rd party security company to be stationed at certain locations to implement and enforce this. 

Compounding all of our anxiety was the knowledge that the convention either was not able to, or not allowed to renew their contract with the Cobb Galleria and this would be their final year at this venue. They would be changing locations in 2024. So going into this year we were all initially very apprehensive about the changes and very on edge about how it would impact out ability to enjoy the con. If you're looking for the TLDR on how I feel about this year, now that it is all said and done, I feel like the organizers and volunteers did a phenomenal job executing everything this year. The change in location for registration worked brilliantly and there was almost never a line. The decisions to deny access to non badge holders was incredible, it significantly cut down on people showing up "just to party" as the convention did not allow outside alcohol and DJs, they would be in control of when the music ended and you had to purchase drinks on site. This means the people who paid to be here got to have a good time and the people who mooch off the convention space without a badge or "lobbycon" as they call it were eliminated from the equation, this cut down on crowd size and made the daytime of the convention extremely laid back and easy to navigate. It made the night life much more manageable as well when in comparison to the previous year. I felt extremely positive about all of the changes they made, the only problem is that you can't argue that "they should have been doing this all along" because paying the paychecks of the Titan Security people costs money and it's overhead that the convention probably couldn't afford. I should state as well that I am not a "party con" type of person. I did not have a drop of alcohol at this con and I think raves are a bit stupid honestly. I recognize not everyone is like that and does not share those same values, so the changes they made benefited the type of experience I enjoy out of conventions. 

Thursday:

On Thursday, Michelle and I arrive around 10:30am since I usually like to get there bright and early, I attempt to check in but the hotel doesn't have our room ready yet, we get our badges which takes no time at all. The con gave me a cool little goody bag with a thank you card for being a panelist which I thought was really cute and I definitely appreciated. I start running into some people I know and killing some time but our room still isn't ready yet. Thursday ended up being a bit frustrating because our in spite of being there at 10:30am we didn't get into our room until after 4pm. Now, I know that "check in time" for most hotels is after 3pm but for every other convention they usually accommodate you and get you into your room early so they can avoid a million people checking in all at once. The hotel did not do this, and the final time I went in line in which they finally "made something happen" to get my room, there was a line that stretched across the entire lobby. I missed the Super Happy Fun Sale entirely this year which is the first time that has happened since con introduced that event. Instead, I went to the Marietta diner with our 5 room mates and 2 other friends. If you've never been before, it's incredible. At least 3 of the people who went with us had never been before. 

Friday: 

Myself and the other early bird in our group woke up at 7am to start getting ready and indulge in the fantastic hotel lobby coffee, a fun little quiet break from the chaos of the con. Next I woke up Michelle and got her ready because we were about to have a very busy day. Our friend Cody was going to have his panel on Evangelion at 10am and our panel on the Type-Moon works was at 12:15. The group split up for part of this because some of them have zero knowledge or interest in both Eva and Fate/. Cody did a fantastic job with the Eva panel, it discussed mainly Eva official and unofficial spin off works, most of which I had never heard of before. We then had a very finite amount of time to get together and prep for the Type-Moon Universe Fan Panel. This was not only the earliest in the day that we have ever had this panel but it's also the first time I've had it at AWA without it's founding hosts who, last year, decided to retire from the panel and give it entirely to me. In spite of this, we managed to fill up the room like we always do. I decided to cold open the panel with the OP for the Tsukihime remake which was received well by the Tsukihime fans in the audience. We had a small group of maybe 4 or 5 Tsukihime cosplayers who I'm sure were appreciative of the fact that this wasn't "just another Fate/Grand Order trivia panel" and was instead about the greater Type-Moon world. Next I asked who all in the audience had been to this panel before and about 75% of people said they have been to it before which is extremely reassuring that we're doing a good job. I said "for those of you who are long time fans of this panel, this franchise and long time members of this community, this is for you" and I played the 10th anniversary video I had made for last year and didn't get a chance to show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qD72NvDTRw Everyone was extremely receptive to this video, I heard lots of "oh wow look!" and "omg there I am" and lots of applause at the end. I had to hold back tears during that applause, I am not someone who enjoys being the center of attention, but that was an unbelievably reassuring pat on the back that told me "you've done a good job at fostering and maintaining this community over the past decade and you should be proud of it". The rest of the panel went great as we went through the other newer TM works like the Witch on the Holy Night localization and Fate/Samurai Remnant. We even did another Melty Blood match live on stage this time with the new Type Lumina on Switch. 

After that we had a few hours of down time to relax and eat lunch before the Type-Moon photoshoot at 4pm. Now I will say this about the photoshoots as it applies to all of the ones I attended and hosted this weekend; overall all of the photoshoots went great, a decent amount of people showed up and everyone had a good time. However, there were a few problems consistent with all of them across the con. This year there was significantly more people from each respective fandom cosplaying that did not make it to the photoshoot, this happens all of the time as I don't expect literally EVERY person cosplaying from a given franchise to attend the official photoshoot for it. But it definitely got under my skin this year the degree to which people did not attend the photoshoots and I think that comes down to the reasons why. There are many normal reasons why someone would not attend a photoshoot such as:

1: They don't want to, either because they have social anxiety or they put a lot of work into their cosplays and prefer to get a personal photoshoot done because massive groups don't capture all of the hard work they put into it or create photos that look presentable online. 

2: They didn't know about it.

3: They wanted to be there, but due to scheduling conflicts they had to make a compromise and chose to do something else. 

4: They couldn't find where it was taking place. 

I'm sure there are more reasons than this why people who cosplay from, let's say, Fate/ for example wouldn't go to the group photoshoot and I will be trying to collect data and feedback from as many people as I can to figure out what those reasons might be and if I can do anything that has any impact on those reasons. But allow to me air my grievances here and say what I had already done to address these problems leading up to this. As far as not knowing about it, I have posted and shared the event page and made announcements MANY MANY times to let people know before the con. During the con I talked to as many people as possible I found from those series letting them know when and where it was which ties into point 4. I was limited on where I could host shoots this year. Historically, all of the shoots gathered in the hotel lobby and then went outside together to the photoshoot location. This year, the hotel itself was not "part of the convention" so I had to select from a very scarce list of "official locations" that the con provided. Some of these are not intuitive, granted, but the con listed them and provided pictures on the website and the photoshoot facebook group. For the Fate/ shoot and the Fire Emblem shoot I booked the largest official location they could give me that is VERY easily recognizable and easy to spot and STILL I had people telling me they didn't know where it was???? so part of that I attribute to the changes that the con had to make to accommodate the venue this year and part of it I just attribute to the cosplayers being ill informed about what's going on due to the information not being easily found in an endless sea of spam, memes and clickbait on the con facebook groups. I feel like the internet's ability to help deliver and coordinate information about events like these is severely diminishing and general "social media fatigue" could be one of the biggest reasons why these events were harder to coordinate this year. The Facebook group pages for every convention are almost universally abysmal. Facebook as a platform is more focused on forcing adds in your face and getting you to watch videos about war footage or animal abuse to do anything that makes the information you WANT to see more accessible. Twitter is dying as Musk slowly strangles the life out of it, so no one is going to be looking for anything on there and people don't engage with anything I post on Twitter anyway. Instagram, once again is too busy shoving stolen "viral content" and animal videos in your face for it to be viable. Even Discord, as efficient as it is has people joining a hundred different servers and getting so overwhelmed with notifications that they just mute all of them and don't talk in any of them, rendering the fact that they use the platform at all completely meaningless. All of these things are extremely irritating and are the real reason I find myself frustrated when people don't make it to these photoshoots. I do not disapprove of or condemn anyone's personal choices for how they want to spend their time at a convention. That's their business and I can't change their mind. But these other outside variables, particularly just how noisy and frankly useless the AWA FB group can be, I can't help but feel like my efforts to host these photoshoots and build these communities have been undermined. 

Saturday: 

Saturday morning myself and the early bird got up once again to get coffee at 7am, only this time they headed back to the room and I wandered around the venue with my camera Vlogging to it some anecdotes about things that have happened at conventions in the past. This was to get some B roll for an upcoming cosplay ettiequte video I have planned in the future. Half of our room went ahead and changed into their Fire Emblem cosplays for that evening as they were comfortable enough to wear the entire day. We wandered the con for a while until close to lunch time when I had to change into Auron for the Final Fantasy photoshoot. Originally, I wasn't able to make it to this photoshoot because it was at 2:30 and the FE shoot was at 4. But apparently the FF shoot was actually at 2 and the convention asked me to move the FE shoot back to 6pm to accommodate another shoot, so I was able to fit Auron into my lineup. There was a pretty big turnout for this even though the location they chose was suboptimal. Not being at the staircase meant that you couldn't stagger people behind each other in two rows for height and everyone basically had to be side by side. I ran into an old friend who otherwise does not talk to me, but she provided a friendly smile, wave and hello which I was definitely taken by surprise by and gave her a polite greeting in return but didn't push the interaction too much just in case. Overall that photoshoot was good but once again my frustration was the people I saw throughout the con who didn't show up. In particular there was a Tidus, Yuna and Lulu who never made it meaning I was one of a scarce few FFX cosplayers although the other two were a totally badass Seymour and Shiva cosplayers. 

After changing out of Auron I had about an hour to relax and cool down before changing into my brand new cosplay for the Fire Emblem photoshoot. Brave Alm from Heroes, an upgraded version of his design from the original famicom FE Gaiden game. The affectionately known "Dong Armor" had been completed literally on Tuesday of the week before. We gather up the group and head over to the shoot location and we have about an hour still to vibe and hang out before we can start our shoot. It's at this point I realize what group I had accommodated by moving the shoot back from 4pm-6pm. It was One Piece and their group was MASSIVE. So we were forced to stand back and wait for them to finish clearing out before we could move in which did give our group a good chance to vibe for a bit but the sun was rapidly setting so we had to start our shoot on time and make the best of it. Thankfully it turned out great and we had a good variety of characters. 

After the shoot we were finally able to change out of our FE cosplays and get dinner. We ordered the excellent Davinci's Pizza and our room plus a few additional members of the Fire Emblem group all ate pizza and played Jackbox games on the TV until we passed out. It is impossible to tell you the specific nature of the inside jokes that were created that night, only that I was laughing so hard I though I was going to throw up at some moments and choke and die in others. We were having the time of our lives and there was not a single drop of alcohol involved. We paused the games to repack the car for Sunday morning and kept on having fun until we got too tired. 

Sunday: 

Sunday morning we got up and finished packing the car and changed into our Yugioh cosplays. Michelle this time breaking out a brand new one she had made, Incredible Ecclesia the Virtuous from the TCG lore. Sunday, as it usually is for AWA, is extremely chill. We just waited around for our photoshoot which had by far the most lackluster attendance of all the shoots. Lots of the people we were looking forward to seeing from Momocon didn't make it but we did have a really awesome Dark Magician and Flame Swordsman which was cool to see. We also got to meet a YGO content creator/cosplayer that we follow and she was extremely nice and appreciative that we went out of our way to find her. Most of my interactions with her have only been online so that was really awesome to get a chance to speak to her for a bit in person. 

and so, as always, Sunday draws to a close. I don't think we wanted it to end. We stayed pretty late this year. Even though we were driving separately, the different members of our group all agreed to leave together at the same time to cherish those final moments together. No matter where or when AWA goes or what happens to it in the future. Nothing will ever take away the beautiful and meaningful memories I have and the formative experiences I've had at this place. Weather it be meeting my first fellow Fate/ cosplayers in 2012, getting stuck in the elevator for 3.5 hours in 2013, walking out of the SHFS with arms full of Zoids in 2016, proposing to Michelle in 2018, hosting a panel on Fate/, FE and YGO in 2019 or laughing my ass off over "Honse" in the hotel room with my best friends in 2023. I love this place and this convention if for only because it introduced me to the most meaningful and important thing I have in my life. My friends. I love you guys. Here's to many more years at many more events and many more experiences with each other far outside the walls of any hotel or convention center at all.