How To Enter

• Follow and mention our official Twitter account @918thefan.
• Like and post on our official Facebook wall.
• Comment below on what you’re excited to see at AM²!

The giveaway ends Saturday at 11:59 PM PST!

Back for round 3, it’s Kyle Hebert! Still big and bald as always, he’s still rocking the voice of Ryu from Street Fighter, as well as a whole host of personae so check it out!

How to stalk Kyle Hebert
Official site
Wikipedia
IMDB
Facebook
Twitter

When you’re feeling objectionable, sometimes it’s best to move to Japan. Ben Judd is probably best known for yelling OBJECTION! as Phoenix Wright, but now he’s moved onto to bigger and better things! Find out what by checking it out!

How to stalk Ben Judd
Official site
Wikipedia
IMDB

In my quest to view what Japan has to offer, I have unwittingly stumbled upon a few monstrosities. One goes by the name Sky Girls.

For those of you that have never heard of this series, the opening theme song is featured on Dance Dance Revolution Supernova 2 under the title “Baby’s Tears.” During the minute-and-a-half that it takes to play this song, you will notice a few things: this is obviously a lolicon show, there are mechas and everything you see makes no freaking sense.

I’m going to pause here for a moment, because one of the characters featured in this theme song is some dude with a blond afro. I honestly thought Nabeshin had found his way into the program, but no – this is an actual character who plays a “serious” role in the plot… by hitting on the girls.

Blond afro-guy hitting on a main character.

Moving along. I had the misfortune of viewing the first OAV, known amongst “fans” as Episode 0.

The narration in the beginning, which takes about three times as long as your patience does to wear thin, explains that these hostile aliens called The WORM waged savage war on humanity. We sent all our brave, strong men out to fight The WORM and it really looked like we won. However, victory cost us most of our military-aged men.

So as we started repairing the earth and trying to rebuild our population to epic proportions, The WORM returned to defeat us. But we had so few military-aged men left! What were we to do?

This story focuses on a little test group of three mecha-piloting women.

A mecha like that totally protects the pilot from damage. Yep.

Why are you looking at me like that? Of course women have never piloted mechas before! Women have never been in the military. And this is obviously a universe where Rei and Asuka don’t exist, despite the fact that the three pilots in Sky Girls look like they’re wearing sexy replicas of the Evangelion uniforms.

So the episode finally gets to its slow, half-dead start when we see a bunch of old guys in military uniforms sitting around, discussing how the project is going to lose its funding if they don’t prove that these girls aren’t useless.

We finally get the chance to see the girls…. swimming. Yes, on a military base in the middle of the ocean, they’re slapping on sunscreen and frolicking in the waves. These are our heroes, ladies and gentlemen.

The girls are doing what they do best.

And they carry on swimming for the next five minutes. Seriously. Nothing happens, and when it does happen, they’re still swimming.

It won’t come as a surprise to you that The WORM choose this moment to attack. Red alerts go around the base and they have to summon the girls, which takes way longer than should be deemed necessary.

When the girls finally show up for the debriefing, they’re told that they’re finally going to pilot the mechas and they seem earnestly surprised.

Then we get a review of the girls: Eika is the leader, Karen is the smart one and Otoha is the wild card that can use a sword. Good to know you’re fulfilling all the stereotypes, show. I was worried you might actually put some effort into this thing.

I don’t think they listened to a word you said.

So the base GETS ATTACKED and these girls still haven’t even suited up yet. They run around the base like they have no idea where they’re going, which gives you enough time to meet blond-afro-man, Ryohei. Ryohei’s special ability is to hit on Otoha and survive getting beaten to a pulp.

Let’s stop a moment. The military base got attacked about ten minutes ago and the girls haven’t even suited up yet. Meanwhile, Ryohei is a perfectly fit, military-aged man and what does he do on this base? He REPAIRS THE MECHAS. Yes, that’s right.

We also get to meet a boy named Takumi who must be around the same age as the girls. What does he do on the ship? Oh, he’s the chef’s assistant. He’s also the communications officer monitoring the mechas, so he’s not unintelligent. Surely if it takes the girls this long to get ready, they could just throw this guy in their stead?

Ryohei and Takumi are the two guys on the right-hand side.

So finally, blessedly, the girls suit up. And while they’re suiting up in the locker room, they talk. Like, endlessly. And it’s not even about anything pertinent – I’m pretty sure they talk about how Ryohei is a pervert.

Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen.

So they put on some weird nano-gel that protects them for only a limited time and, thank God, because otherwise they’d be out there fooling around another twenty minutes while the base sinks.

They go to get in their mechas and the ENTRANCE IS BLOCKED.

How long is this episode again? We’re seriously almost 20 minutes in.

GIRLS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Ryohei risks his life or something and gets the girls to their ships. They FINALLY pilot the mechas and fly out to confront the beast.

Immediately, Otoha gets tail-whipped and crashes into the water. She doesn’t come back up. … Well, so much for our wild-card guys!

Everyone is freaking out because Otoha is probably drowning (note: she is!) and the remaining two girls continue to stand around doing nothing as they panic about their friend.

Hey old military dudes: Ryohei and Takumi are still options and they probably won’t gossip about boys. Just a suggestion.

Karen and Eika decide to fight on without Otoha, when suddenly – aha! – Otoha wakes up and flies out of the water. She then slices the offending WORM until it is dead.

Peace is restored, so how does this episode end? We find the girls SWIMMING again!

It’s good to see the balance is restored.

So the majority of the episode is devoted to the girls frolicking, then panicking. It takes them about twenty minutes from the first attack to finally get out and fight the monster.

I have one suggestion for the old military geezers: CANCEL THE PROGRAM. Obviously these girls are not cut out for fighting monsters. You have two perfectly capable guys on your site and you have them feeding the girls and maintaining the mechas. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

This show is honestly so bad I almost enjoyed it. It awakened a feminist fury in me and my friend, Pyro, when I’m relatively certain that we’re both not feminists.

To share in our suffering, I texted a third party, telling him that he should watch this show. His response was, “This is pretty good, but when does it pick up?”

My response was, “Never.”

Laura Post has been pretty busy lately with awesome shows like Squid Girl and Redline. On top of that, you can kick some butt with her as Ahri in League of Legends and Valentine in Skullgirls!

How to stalk Laura Post
Official site
IMDB
Facebook

For all you folks into the fighting game community, you probably know GK Bowes. She’s been trading blows as Felicia in Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Asuka in Street Fighter X Tekken, so put your fighting gloves on and have at it!

How to stalk G.K. Bowes
Official site
Wikipedia
IMDB

It’s that time on Merry Melodies where we take a look at the more recent openings that Christmas bases his watch list on. At the top of that list, we have a great opening from a great series!

———————————————————————————————–

I’ve often mentioned how hard it is for me to keep up on newer series due to the sheer volume of titles I decide to watch. Jormungand is one of the series that stands out enough for me to keep up with it, and I’m proud to say that not only am I caught up, but I got Cerulaine to do so as well, which is a big deal for her since she doesn’t watch a whole lot of anime. It’s a very entertaining series for those of you who liked watch Black Lagoon. Less swearing, but at least twice as many guns. Not to mention Koko has all the wacky antics you could ask for from a slightly insane weapons dealer.

In order to learn more about how a series works, you watch the opening animation. What does this one tell you the series is about? Guns, and lots of them. Jormungand revolves around the weapons dealer Koko, her child soldier bodyguard Jonah, and the rest of their merry band of misfits. Each has their own unique talents, my favorites are the eyepatch knife chick and the old dude sniper.

I knew right from the start I would love Jormungand for one reason: Mami Kawada. Every series that mami Kawada does an opening for is amazing. Borderland is no exception to the rule, taking Mami’s style and putting a nice techno feel to it. Not a whole lot of heavy guitar like in some songs that I really enjoy, but this is probably my favorite Mami Kawada song, at least until I get sick of it from playing it over and over.

———————————————————————————————–

QUESTION TIME! Borderland is at the top of my Spring 2012 song list, but what about you guys? Next week we’ll take a look at my second favorite, so look out for that

You can watch Jormungand over on Funimation! While you’re at it, use our new Anime Directory to help you watch other stuff! http://bit.ly/AnimeDirectory

More then anything, the sakura has always held great symbolic importance in Japan. In fact, they celebrate the blooming sakura every year. In America, we too celebrate the blooming sakura to honor the Japanese culture and spirit. Cities all over America have cherry blossom festivals, and Philadelphia is no exception. Hence, the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia presents the Subaru Cherry Blossom Festival of Greater Philadelphia.

The Subaru Cherry Blossom Festival is a month long celebration of all things Japanese in the Philadelphia area. Over twenty events and gatherings were held, focusing on many aspects of Japanese culture including music, clothing, anime (of course there’s anime) and food. The one event that towers over them all is Sakura Sunday, held in Fairmount Park. It’s a one day festival where they try to cram in as many performances, demonstrations, vendors, and booths that a park can hold.

The first major performance on the main stage was the Tamagawa University Taiko Drum and Dance Troupe. They’re considered one of the highlights of the festival but I was skeptical at first. Turns out, I was wrong; their show really does live up to the hype. Sadly, explaining why is like describing the opening scene from Episode VII in Samurai Jack. Although the basic premise is fairly basic, it’s done with such style and mastery that you can’t help but be amazed. Words and writing are simply the wrong medium to convey how great it is. It’s best to go see them live but chances are you’ll have to settle for an online video. That won’t stop me from trying to describe it with words though.

What really sticks out to me is how disciplined the troupe really is. Getting five to twenty people on one stage in perfect sync doing complex routines is never an easy task. I get the impression that one of them getting shot wouldn’t stop the show for longer then a minute. Losing a drumstick or two isn’t even worth a pause. I didn’t notice that someone lost a drumstick until I saw it on the stage floor a minute later. I can only assume that the drummer tossed it, quickly drew his backup drumstick, and kept on playing without missing a beat. My favorite segment was with all the women using the hand shaker type drums. It was especially cool when they were throwing the shakers behind themselves in a synchronized pass line. What really gets me is that they did it all in kimonos. Kimonos are meant to restrict movement, not for a drum and dance routine. The show is so good, it’s worth seeing twice; which you could have done on Sakura Sunday since the troupe gave two performances that day.

A map of the day's events.

The event proceeding the Drum and Dance Troupe was the Harajuku Fashion Show brought to you by the Art Institute of Philadelphia. All of the designed clothes were inspired by the Harajuku area, world famous for being a mecca of clothing, fashion, and unique styles. The clothes were also produced and designed solely by the institute’s students. Everything showcased generally had a strong sense of style, being elaborate and featuring strong, showy colors. Listen, I have no fashion sense and no idea how to describe how pretty clothes are. Just check out the big photo gallery proceeding this article to see the clothes (and much more) for yourself.

After the fashion show was 10tecomai’s Yosakoi Festival Dance. If you don’t know what a Yosakoi Festival Dance is, don’t worry about it because I don’t know either. Good thing they provided ample exposition so that the audience wouldn’t be clueless. Yosakoi is a “newer” dance, originating during the 1950′s for celebrations between July and September. It’s an energetic dance that incorporates elements from other cultures. Yosakoi dance troupes are very open and welcoming, allowing people young and old into their ranks. This results in dance groups averaging between one hundred to a hundred-fifty members each. 10Tecomai has the distinction of being the only Yosakoi dance group in the US. That would explain why they only have seven members but they are recruiting so go try out if you live near New York City and got some moves.

For their show, 10tecomai did three dances. The first dance was called “Rebirth” which was about the seasons and how spring is a rebirth of life after winter. This dance was used for fund raising in response to the 2011 Japanese Earthquakes. Then they performed “Kaigo” which was a ninja themed dance. Ninja themed anything is something I fully endorse. Lastly, they did “Sorin Bushi;” a dance honoring the Japanese fisherman. This must be a crowd favorite back in Japan. It actually has audience participation in it, but the audience here more or less bombed that part because most of the people there (including me) couldn’t pronounce the Japanese phrases. It was still a good show though.

If that wasn’t enough for you, there was also a Shamisen and Buyo Traditional Dance and a performance by Sho Asano himself! FYI, Sho Asano has the honors of being a four time world champion Shamisen player as well as being the youngest person ever to earn said championship. He’s basically the Yugi Moto of shamisen playing. Talking about anime characters, there was also a Cosplay Fashion Show presented by Zenkaikon, eastern Pennsylvania’s premiere anime convention. Honestly, I didn’t really take many pictures of that because I’ll go to Zenkaikon anyway, where taking cosplay pictures will be a snap. Tying it all together was Rio Koike, Japanese comedian and MC of the day’s affairs. He did an admirable job of being funny and stalling for time in between events. Of course, everything I told you about so far was just the stuff going on in the Main Stage. There’s still a lot of festival fun left to cover.

Well, if you want some real pictures, scroll down!

The Demonstration Stage featured an assortment of marital arts demos including Kendo, Iaido, Aikido, and even some Ninjutsu/Ju-jitsu. The participates ranged in age from children showcasing basic maneuvers to adults undergoing formal sparring practice. At the end of the day there was the “Subaru Prettiest Pet in Pink Parade.” I draw the line at taking pictures of dressed up pets. I object to few things and dressing up pets one of them. However, they did take the opportunity to promote animal adaptions so some good did come of it.

If you wanted to actually do something instead of watch other people do stuff, you have several options. For one thing, if you filled out a survey about Sakura Sunday, you could get a nice tote bag from the the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia. For actual activities, you could make origami, try calligraphy, make a windsock or learn to play Go. It seemed that at least a few of those activities were designed with children in mind though. It’s to know that they had kids in mind when planning events for the day. There was also a good deal of shopping to be done if you have that mindset. Vendors were selling/promoting many different things, including a nice array of Japanese flavored goods. There were even Yukata on sale (I think, but it may be some other traditional Japanese clothing)! Of course, there was food there, but being a festival it was naturally over priced.

Even simply people watching can be a treat. The cosplayers did make their presence known on Sakura Sunday. I didn’t really focus on them though. Instead, I decided to take pictures of people in other Japanese fashions. It’s not everyday you have a reason to put on your kimono/yukata/etc. There were a few people who elected to wear traditional Japanese clothing and I was able to get their pictures. I also got a few sweet pics of women in Lolita fashions, which are gorgeously overdone. Lastly, It’s always a plus to get complements on your Gurren Lagaan T-shirt.

I’m know I’m glossing over a lot of stuff but I’M ONLY ONE MAN!! There’s only so much I can cover in one sakura festival! Mind you, everything that I described was somehow crammed into a single five and a half hour time period! The Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia poured everything they had into Sakura Sunday. There was a high concentration of Japanese culture; yet it was too short to fully enjoy. Perhaps that is completely intentional? Does not sakura itself bloom for a brief but beautiful time? It’s a temporary state; one that we must savor with all our heart, because it will be gone before we know it. However, the sakura will bloom again next year, as will Sakura Sunday. I hope to see you there.

123456►

If you have been any form of anime fan in the past fifty years, odds are you’ve at least heard of Lupin the Third. If you haven’t, just say you have to prevent immediate execution. Starting as a manga in 1967, this series has managed to find its way into almost every medium possible. Today we look at the most recent installation, the ongoing show “The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.”

After a minute and a half of a woman speaking dubbed over shots of a naked woman, we get into our show. Lupin is spying on a wedding of some crazy preacher who during the ceremony mass drugs his crowd with his mystic powers. Before the kiss, the bride slips a pill into her mouth, which she puts in the preachers mouth during it. The couple then heads to the secret room in the palace.

The preacher passes out from the drug, and Lupin sets off an explosion in the palace. Lupin walks in on the passed out preacher, and the bride pulls a gun on him. Before anything can happen though, the preacher cages and drugs the two, knocking them out.

Relaxing in his harem, the preacher decides to have the two executed in the morning. After waking up, the two grudgingly share their knowledge of each other as thieves. Fujiko also reveals how the preacher’s drug works, saying that her goal was to steal the drug to sell on the streets, as was Lupin’s. Fujiko strips to try and seduce Lupin, then trips the alarm and tells the guards Lupin tried to ravage her. While he gets dragged away, she subsequently seduces the remaining guard.

The next morning the two prisoners are executed. However it is revealed that Fujiko had the guard take her place, and Lupin used a dummy. Before running away, Lupin challenges Fujiko to see who can get the drugs first.

Back at the harem, Fujiko disguised as a belly dancer uses a sleeping drug to knock out the women. She reveals that the preacher’s drug is combined with chemicals then painted on the skin, and rubbed off to be used on the subjects. She forces the preacher to take her to the drug room, but is ambushed by guards when she gets there. Lupin from the other side of the door opens the chamber and brings her in, then locks it from the inside.

Fujiko shoots Lupin with glow in the dark lipstick and cuts the power, allowing her to shoot at him in the dark. Lupin bests her, and the police arrive at the island, led by Inspector Zenigata chasing after Lupin. The preacher sets the island to sink itself, but Lupin escapes by attaching rockets to the pure-drug statue and flying away. Fujiko shoots down Lupin, sending the drug to be dissolved in the ocean, which the island citizens desperately run into to soak in the pure drug.

While driving away, Fujiko notices that Lupin left a calling card on her stating he will steal her. Lupin sees her as the cure to his boredom, and promises to get her next time they meet.

After a bit of an impromptu break, The Owl in the Rafters is back with a convention related update! Anime Central, one of the largest anime conventions in the U.S.’s midwest region was this past end of April weekend so I’d like to go over some brief highlights and address my usual concerns with the state of the convention scene and, to some extent, anime fandom in general. Let me start with a disclaimer, pointing out that my personal views expressed in this article and/or any of my articles for that matter are in no way reflective of the views of 91.8TheFan as a whole.

I’ll get this out of the way before my ranting muddles the fact, but I did in fact enjoy myself at ACen this year, as I tend to. In spite of anything I may say in what is to come, it really isn’t as if I have anything against anime conventions as a concept, or even as an over all experience. I go to anime conventions for pretty straight forward purposes and I almost always manage to get what I came for, my problem tends to stem more from the attitudes and behavior of other convention attendees. But before this devolves into bashing anime fans (which is not at all what I want this to come across as) I’ll just say that my basic issue with anime conventions is their growing lack of functionality.

Once upon a time, anime conventions were a means for fans to broaden their scope and reach in anime and manga as a hobby. Most often college anime clubs would host small local conventions as a place to exchange personal findings in an age without the far reaching expanse of the internet that many fans take for granted today. The screenings, the fan panels, and the guests (when there were any) were all geared towards getting attendees interested in new anime and manga. In regards to basic theories of communication, presentation, and marketing, this boils down to three major objectives under which any sort of panel ought to fall under at least one, if not all of: Information/Awareness, Education, and Persuasion.

To inform an audience is really pretty straight forward: it means to make your audience aware of the thing you are talking about. Putting it into context, an informative con panel would seek to reach out to an audience unfamiliar with its subject, and let them know that it is a thing that exists and that at their own discretion they may or may not choose to be interested in. The point being that there will be people out there interested in your show, but only once they know it exists. (I say this specifically because if they need to be convinced to be interested in the show, that falls under Persuasion, which I’ll cover in just a bit.)

You may realize that this is rarely a singular and solitary goal behind a panel, but an example of a very common and mostly informative convention panel would be things like Why Haven’t You Seen This Yet? or 15 Shows I Bet You’ve Never Seen panels. This year at ACen the My Favorite Anime That No One’s Heard Of and RPGs That -Don’t- Start with Final Fantasy panels were prime examples of this type of panel. There are of course other factors at work, but the biggest function in the panel is the rapid fire name dropping of shows that the audience may not be familiar with, letting them know of a dozen or more titles that they’ve never heard of. The My Favorite Anime That No One’s Heard Of in particular did a fantastic job in opening the whole thing up to recommendations from the audience, passing the mic around to let people talk about their favorite anime that they were sure no one would have heard of.

An important and subtle nuance of these panels is their panel names. For example, if you were to make something like say a Characters That Make Naruto Awesome with the intention of showcasing your favorite side characters then you’ve already shot yourself in the foot by narrowing your prospective audience down to Naruto fans, who presumably already watch the show/read the manga and know most of the characters. Your informative Naruto panel is now rendered uninformative. This is what people refer to as “Preaching to the Choir:” a scenario in which the people you are trying to inform, educate, or persuade, already know and/or agree with everything you’re saying, making your job in the speaker-audience relationship pointless. When your goal is to inform people of new material, name dropping a specific show in the title is almost always a bad move. Almost.

A fine exception is the RPGs That -Don’t- Start with Final Fantasy which plays upon the Final Fantasy reputation to draw in FF fans who presumably haven’t play many other JRPGs, as well as people who actively dislike FF’s reputation overshadowing other good JRPGs looking to find alternative titles. Another similar approach would be using a key artist or other creative name in the title and going over a selection of their work, drawing people in for the well known title(s) and informing them of the obscure ones. (Gee, doesn’t that approach sound familiar? wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean say no more) The key factor in either approach being that you are trying to get a crowd to come and find out about things they’ve never heard of.

I said “find out” there and not “learn” because learning falls under the objective of Education. The act of educating an audience on a subject is not nearly as boring or strictly academic as it might sound. Educating on a subject is the simple act of explaining what it is, what it does, how it works, and/or how it came to be. “Naruto is a show about ninjas” is an informative statement, but not an educational one. (also a highly misleading one depending on how much the person I’m talking to actually knows about ninjas) “Naruto is a show about a boy with a monster sealed inside of him, outcast by society, trying to learn to gain acceptance and make friends. Also he is a ninja. Sort of…” Is a more adequate educational statement on the show.

Obviously a better educational presentation of the show would go into more detail, but more detail is not always better. More important that the sheer number of facts or amount of detail is how relevant you can make the detail to the people in your audience and their interests. The over arching goal in an educational panel ought to be to give insight and clarity on a subject, presumably the kind that the audience was not familiar with prior to your panel. This particular goal also applies very heavily in the case of a workshop panel, for obvious reasons: you are not just educating an audience on how something works, but on how to replicate the action themselves.

Some great examples of educational panels that I attended this year at ACen included the Making Anime Educational For Your Anime Club and Fight The Stigma: Stop Bullying In Anime Clubs panels, both hosted by the same Arizona high school teacher and her husband, as well as a Wait a minute, smart people care about this stuff too? panel hosted by an enthusiastic college anthropology student intent on convincing people that anime is chock full of academic relevance in various fields of study.

Okay, so I admit that my personal interests in educational panels are more academic than not and I would love to go over some decent educational panels with a more general appeal, but… I didn’t attend any this year, and I’m not about to cite examples as “good” if I didn’t see them myself. What I will go over is a prime example of an educational panel done wrong, that I can vouch for: the Introduction to Japanese Mahjong panel.

When attempting to educate on a subject the first and often biggest hurdle is to engage your audience; even assuming that they are attending out of a pre-established interest in your panel’s subject, you need to find a way to really keep them attentive as you work at the nitty gritty foundations of the subject. In the case of this mahjong panel, the presenter did nothing of the sort, and approached the entire panel with a single power point presentation. Interactivity is a huge component to learning, especially with a subject as complex as a game like Mahjong. While I didn’t really expect him to have half a dozen Mahjong sets on hand to set up walkthrough games with, even a simple demonstration of different phases of gameplay in motion would have been sufficient.

Still, resources can be limited and even without some form of live or hands on demonstration, an instructional panel on a game like Mahjong could still be done well. The second major fault I saw in this panel was that the entire presentation was essentially just reading off a standard rule book on Mahjong. It was not comprehensive and failed on many levels to really tie the different elements of game play together in a practical way. It covered individual rules and sometimes the events they followed, but made no real effort to show how it all related to the over all flow or experience of the game. For all the mechanical explanations, it really didn’t do anything that would help any of its audience members to actually get through a game of mahjong. If anything, what it did manage was to actively dissuade some of the audience from even giving the game a try.

This brings me to the final communication objective: Persuasion. This is a trickier subject, and one that more often takes the backseat to one or both of the other two goals in a panel. As the name suggests, the point of a persuasive presentation would be to convince the audience of a particular idea or set of ideas. This naturally necessitates an Informative introduction to the idea being argued, as well as some Education on the nuances of the idea(s) before persuasion can even begin. The more powerful and prominent forms of persuasion are most obvious in things like debates where the end all goal is to convince a jury or audience to concede a certain point of view. In the case of anime convention panels, persuasion almost universally argues for the audience to read or watch a particular piece of work, which as you can imagine is generally just a passive effect achieved in the course of pursuing either of the first two goals.

When it comes to persuasion, the most logical way to go about things is to identify the key defining aspects of the show in mind, and then identify the values of your expected audience. If you’re expecting to get a crowd of 13-16 year old kids with minimal experience or range of interests in anime, you had better be ready with something matching the basic profile of shows they already like. So, if you expect your crowd to be mostly older males (who aren’t parents), and you try presenting a bunch of young children’s and young girls’ oriented series, then it might be safe to say that you’ve misaligned the values of your product and audience. It’s a square-peg-in-round-hole problem, really.

This all may seem pretty obvious to you, especially if you have any sort of basic logical processing power, but if you could look at a convention panel schedule right now and check the listings, you might suddenly be surprised to find how totally pointless most convention fan panels really are. Even the ones that may have some basic value in content often fail to market themselves to a proper audience, and often execution is sloppy and lackluster. What we get are entire weekends of panelists preaching to the choir, patting each other on the back, and shameless circle jerks. (if you don’t know what that last one is, go and ask your parents) Rather than informing people of anything they weren’t familiar with, educating people on anything they didn’t already know, or persuading people of anything they didn’t already agree with, panels resort to cheap empty validation to foster a sense of belonging and a kind of crowd hype that makes people feel good about things they really have no right feeling particularly good about.

Imagine for a moment a basic dog training class; in this class the instructor allows for owners to feed their dog one treat for every time the dog successfully follows a command: this positively reinforces good behavior by having the dog associate something it likes and wants, with doing things that are good for it. Now imagine for a moment that one owner does not seem to grasp this concept and insists on feeding the dog a treat every single time the dog responds to the owner’s voice. So the owner says “Inuyasha! Sit, boy!” and the dog lays down and rolls over onto its back. The owner feeds it anyway. The owner then says “Inuyasha, shake!” and the dog perks its ears up and stands up. The owner feeds it anyway. “Inuyasha, lay down!” The dog just sort of cocks its head to one side. The owner feeds it anyway. The dog now responds not to any good behavior, or any behaviors at all, but simply to its own name. Many anime fans similarly respond, not to any sort of intellectual or even mildly rational discussion or content in social interaction over anime, but simply to the familiar names of things they recognize. And like an excited puppy dog they get antsy and hyper and don’t sit still unless they’re being given constant unmerited validation for their lack of productivity. An exasperated metaphor, but I think it still makes my point. (I really do hope you can appreciate the irony in all this.)

Of course there is a 4th approach, which is generally more effective than any of the three central ideas, but somewhat controversial on account of it hinging on the assumption that your audience is made up chiefly of idiots. This 4th backup objective is of course Comedy. If what you have to talk about isn’t interesting, if you aren’t interesting, and/or if you assume that your audience is just too dense to pay any attention for more than 3 minutes at a time, the easiest and shallowest way to keep attention is to crack jokes about as frequently as a valley girl says the word “like.” It doesn’t matter if you aren’t a comedian either, because geeks will laugh at just about anything: it doesn’t even have to be an actual joke. No set up or punch lines necessary. All you need to do is drop a few names, reference familiar titles or terminology in a sarcastic or sardonic tone and anime fans will start to giggle like 6 year olds at a poop joke. (I said it before but there is some irony in here if you can spot it. Hint: It’s everywhere.)

As I said at the start of this, once upon a time there was no high speed internet and countless sloppily researched wikis over-saturating people’s think-spheres with an over-abundance of arbitrary factoids with pointlessly derivative citations. With the advent of the modern internet community as we know it, certain aspects of the humble old fashioned anime convention have become obsolete, but rather than develop any new means to really take advantage of the size and breadth of anime convention crowds, convention administrators have merely struggled to hang on to their patrons with every ounce of strength, rather than taking the time and effort to scale back their events to more manageable sizes and focus on innovating new ways to entertain and unique hooks to gain and maintain a new audience. But I digress…

I apologize again for my somewhat directionless and cynical rambling, and for giving ACen something of a backseat in this whole article, but what I really want to get at with all of this is that I implore you all to consider what it is you love about anime, manga, Japanese video games, Japanese live action drama, film, music, etc. and think back to all those times you’ve shown a friend something they’ve never seen or heard of before. Remember the excitement that lit up your friends’ face as they fell in love with whatever it was you showed them, and remember how you felt when you saw them enjoying themselves and knowing you were the cause. This is what anime conventions are supposed to be about, spreading your interests as an anime fan to other people and letting others share in your enjoyment of a show, manga, film, song/band, etc…

If you’ve ever felt what I just described and you are passionate about your hobbies and want to find that feeling again, I urge you to consider organizing a panel for the next convention you attend. If there is an aspect of anime and/or manga, or any other Japanese media, that you feel has an unappreciated or unknown level of fascinating detail to explore, share it! We’re geeks and nerds, our wealth of arbitrary information is our strongest defining feature, why not put it to some use?

As a small notice: my updates this month will both have been pushed back, so my next update will be the 23rd and not the 16th.