 Katsucon 15. 15 years. 15 years ago Conan O'Brien still didn't know what he was doing on air, Bill Clinton had just become President of the United States of America, the Internet barely existed, and I was a barely-aware-of-the-world -around-me 12 year old. 15 years later Conan O'Brien is moving to the Tonight Show, the President of the United States of America is black, and I am far more worldly and world weary. Been quite a change, hasn't it? In that time Katsucon has grown from about 500 people to 6,000 and has wandered from Virginia Beach to Alexandria to Arlington, then to Baltimore, back to Arlington, to another hotel in Arlington, to Washington DC, back to Arlington this year and on to the new National Harbor complex in Oxen Hill Maryland next year. Having been a part of it for a bit more than half of this time it's been interesting to watch anime fandom change and evolve before my eyes as Katsucon has grown, evolved, and changed, though not always for the better in this reviewer's opinion. Then again, I'm weird by the standards of a modern anime convention.
Due to previous plans this year's Katsucon became a day trip for myself, which actually worked out really well since parking is free in that area on weekends and access is particularly easy when traffic isn't up. Unfortunately there actually wasn't very much that I found interesting going on during the day. Katsucon has always been oriented around their costume masquerade and this year was no different with the entire main events room being taken up my masquerade events for the day plus the Valentine's Day ball in the evening. Yes, a Valentine's Day Ball at an anime convention. Am I the only one kinda weirded out by that? Given the response to the ball, I guess I am, but it's still weird to me that an anime convention would have anything formal going on, much less something tied to Valentine's Day. Since when was an anime convention something people went to so they could dress up for a formal date? Seriously, I just don't get it. Even if I wasn't single I would still not understand it at all. We did not have a single guest from Japan, and we had what amounted to a geek prom. An anime convention, a major one, with no Japanese guests at all. Think on that for a while.
 Which is not to say that there was nothing interesting going on. Many panels made good use of the expanded 90-minute running time, vs. 60 in previous cons, to give much more in-depth presentations. The Japanese Modern and Indie Rock panel was exceptionally interesting, along with the Anime Parliament session where, among other things, "G Gundam" was declared the greatest of the non-Tomino directed Gudam series. Sadly, the always entertaining Bad Anime! Bad! panel was canceled due to illness. We did get a very entertaining Bandai panel run by former in house and current contract producer Toshifumi Yoshida that featured several episodes of the new production "Kuro Kame". Toshi also informed us that Bandai is working with Fathom events on another movie screening in the near future. NYAV Post producer and voice actor Mike Sinterniklaas dropped in on the panel for a little while filling us in on how the very fast production for the show was being coordinated as it was being broadcast in English a day after it premiered in Japan and Korea.
Unfortunately after that the convention basically ended for me. Other than the Valentine's Ball there was not much else really going on Saturday night unless one wanted to see the AMV awards ceremony or make origami. It's really rather discouraging to feel like the convention doesn't really want you there given how totally focused everything was around the Valentine's Day Ball. Maybe I'm just too old and single for all of this these days since more and more cons are putting on formal balls and other events aimed at the apparently large number of people who come to an anime convention for that kind of thing as opposed to, say, Japanese guests and fan-run programing.
Evolution of the convention and all that jazz, but I can't help but feel that the "anime" part of the "anime convention" seems to be slipping away very quickly in favor of just being a giant, slightly themed party. So here we stand a precipice between what was and what is to be, the distance between them growing farther every year. I can't help but feel a little bit sad that everything that got me into these kinds of events may soon not be a part of it anymore. Hopefully it is just a result of space limitations and some odd choices of the part of the Katsucon programing staff this year, rather than a concerted move away from fan-run anime programing towards more random geek-ish things in general. I think it would be a very sad thing to lose the "anime" part of "anime convention". If that were to come to pass, what would we be? A question I am not really sure I want an answer to.
(For more photos from Katsucon 15, visit Weatherman's photostream on Flickr.)
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