The rise and fall of AVCon
--------------------------
Cat's recent posts at FAX SEX about his experiences at this year's Animaga con,
and his experience with Aussie anime cons in general, got me a little bit
nostalgic about my comparatively limited involvement in cons, so I thought I'd
write a bit about that here.
I grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, which has one yearly anime and video
game convention called (imaginatively enough) AVCon, for...Anime and Video game
Convention. Thanks to Cat (who coincidentally lived in Adelaide at the time and
attended the first ever AVCon), I now know this con started in 2002. I am
pretty sure the first I attended was 2003, or perhaps 2004, so not the first,
but still early days.
I have very fond memories of the early cons, which were held at the University
where I was studying. It was very much a by-students, for-students kind of
affair. Not that non-students weren't welcome, it was open to the public, but
it was a very low-key, low-budget DIY kind of convention that people either
learned about through word of mouth or, like me, through seeing photocopied A4
fliers posted around campus. The people organising it precariously strung
ethernet cable from building to building to get some kind of filesharing
happening to the lecture halls with projectors, and we watched mostly illegally
downloaded fan-subbed anime, which tells you a bit about how professional the
thing was.
The quiz nights in those days were genuinely some of the best fun I've ever had,
and I treasure the memories.
The con must have done well because it expanded in size and popularity. At some
point Madman, the big name publisher/distributor in anime and other Asian media
(martial arts films, etc.) in Australia and New Zealand became involved as a
sponsor, and the screenings started being dominated by Madman's official
licensed offerings. I wasn't terribly bothered by this, I still discovered some
really excellent anime through attending early AVCons at the uni, back before
anime in general became quite so obsessively focussed on the cutsey slice of
life subgenre and also before it became so self-referential, when there weren't
anime which were fundamentally about being somebody who watches a lot of anime.
Most notably, I saw Read or Die and Last Excel at early AVCons, which are both
fantastic and you should definitely watch them. I bring this illegal fan-sub
thing up only as one small marker of the slow but steady change in the nature of
the con which happened as it grew.
At some point things got too big for the University grounds, or at least the
parts of it that could be hired out for this kind of thing, and it moved to the
Adelaide Convention Centre, which gave it a bit more presence. At some point
the thing got big enough that it started being advertised on television. This
bought a lot of change with it.
For one, the focus of the con expanded and got a lot fuzzier. I suppose this is
a consequence of Adelaide and Australia in general not exactly having a huge
range of available conventions for different subcultures. But AVCon underwent a
shift from being about anime and gaming to becoming a kind of general-purpose
vaguely nerdy popculture convention, I guess a poor man's ComiCon. During some
of the last cons you would see people cosplaying as characters from Dr Who or
Harry Potter or Marvel superheros or whatever. And I suppose I shouldn't
begrudge those people that, those fandoms deserve their fun as much as any other,
but they *are* distinct fandoms (though surely with some non-trivial overlap)
who were never part of AVCon's original attendee-base, and somehow this change
made the whole thing feel a bit less special. I guess it just toned down the
effect of in-group psychology.
Another change which I did kind of begrudge is that it seemed like with every
passing year the people organising the con had more and more of a stick up their
ass about everything being done by the book. To be fair, this may have been
forced upon them as a consequence of becoming a big event hosted at a
high-profile venue, with mainstream TV news crews covering the event, etc. This
really hit me one year when I went with my wife and we sat in on the Anime Music
Video session (where people basically mash up music videos for their favourite
songs using clips from anime. Some of them are quite well done and can be quite
funny, and they're another aspect of the early cons I remember fondly). Before
they began playing any AMVs, the con representative organising the thing
announced over the mic that the AMVs were rated 15+ (a standard rating for films
and television in Australia, for things that aren't "bad" enough to be limited
to those over 18 only but which you still wouldn't want very young children to
watch), and that con volunteers would soon be walking through the theatre
checking IDs and anybody who couldn't prove they were over 15 would have to
leave.
I honestly thought the guy was joking, but I shit you not they really did it.
Not just the checking ID, but kicking people out, too. I know this because a 14
year old girl had sat down in front of us. She was...hmm, my memory is fuzzy
here, she was either cosplaying as Etna from the Disgea games, or maybe just
wearing a tshirt with Etna on it. Anyway, at this point in time my wife was, or
recently had been, playing the Disgea games, so we had struck up a conversation
with this girl, who was really friendly and energetic and outgoing and obviously
having a great time at the con. She was so sad she couldn't stay for the AMV
session, and I was really upset they wouldn't let her stay. Writing this now, I
kind of regret not walking out in solidarity.
I'm sure they just didn't want to get sued, and thinking back on it, I guess
they must have also been enforcing age limits for the actual anime screenings
themselves, but I didn't realise this because by this time I rarely went to the
screenings (because, well, you could get vaguely fast internet in Australia by
that time, and I had friends who went to big gaming LANs regularly, which were
also big filesharing events and so I got plenty of anime from them and no longer
had to rely on cons to discover new series). It just felt so much like the Fun
Police had come to town (especially because I didn't recall ever having seen
anything terribly offesnive at previous AMV sessions) and left a really bad
taste in my mouth.
I feel a bit bad making it sound like everything went to shit with AVCon,
because I don't doubt that a lot of people worked really hard for very little
financial reward on making it what it was, and I'm thankful for that, especially
because despite the changes there was still good stuff happening. Hell, one
nice side effect of the con getting bit is that the official website stopped
being in Flash every single year, which used to piss me off to no end as a Linux
user on dialup back in those days when the idea of a web based on open standards
was really heating up. I also don't doubt that a lot of my perception of the
life and "death" of the con is coloured by the fact that it's growth largely
coincided with myself transitioning from a stereotypical nerdy virgin living at
home to a married adult starting to wonder if he's getting too old to go to this
thing, with much less spare time and money to spend on anime.
Everything that I've described above is preferable to having never had any con
to go to at all, so at the end of this somewhat lengthy phlog, thanks to AVCon
for being what it was!
