Yep, Anime Boston broke the 17,000 person barrier this year, racking up 17,293 attendees in the Hynes total. That is the warm body count, not the paid attendee count, so that includes all the staff and press and dealers and whatnot, but the paid count was still somewhere over 16,000. That's enough people to just about fill the big arena in Boston. That's big. That is very, very, very big. Down right monstrous, even. To give some more context to the explosion of Anime Boston and anime conventions in general, ten years ago "In the year 2000..." one of the more popular convention guests, Mr. Steve Bennett, went to 10 conventions. In 2010 he has committed to 156 conventions, or over fifteen times as many as ten years ago, and there are a lot of conventions he doesn't get to. For that matter, Anime Boston didn't even exist in 2000, having come into existence in 2003. These stats come to you courtesy of the Gone Connin' panel and former Anime Boston chair Patrick Delahanty, also coordinator of The Chibi Project and Animecons.com. He's a busy guy.
So it was convention Sunday, the lightest day by far. People who have been wearing costumes all weekend scale back to maybe a mask and street clothes, or just plain street clothes as they pack up and make their way home to get ready for the next con. That's not to say that there is no cosplay at all on Sunday, only that it tends to be far less than the other two days since most attendees no longer have a place to change their clothes. No particularly big events on Sunday. There is the Cosplay Chess event, which is exactly what it sounds like; people in costume acting as living chess pieces. But that's not a particularly large event when compared to a costume masquerade which will have over 6,000 people watching it in total. The Chess match only needs the lower part of the main events room, not the balcony and an overflow room where you may watch on a projection screen.
With the successful conclusion of this year's Anime Boston, I can honestly say this was one of the best conventions I have ever been to. That opinion seems to have been shared amongst the other attendees. Very few showed up for the con gripe sessions after closing ceremonies and even then the complaints were not particuarly...complaint-y. Most were actually quite complimentary. That does not happen very often... or ever really. Even great cons usually have a bunch of issues, but Anime Boston 2010 had almost none. That is one well oiled machine up there, and next year should be even better. April 22-24, 2011 right back at the Hynes and the Sheraton. I'll be there, will you?
