Geekery 2011 – Otakon Follow-up

Otakon was awesome and one of the things that always strikes me – one of the guys who came with me had the same thought: Where are all of these people outside of conventions like this? And more, which I noted, if people are this enthusiastic about Anime and eastern Asian culture, why is it that in the normal course of the day we don’t see this sort of enthusiasm?

As one of the waitresses we spoke to said: “I think it’s pretty fascinating how passionate people are… It’s different, but it’s a lot like how people are really into their sport teams.” But are we Otakus, or, more generally, Geeks, as passionate as those who are about sports? I consider the analogy and I see a great deal of parallel. We have stars, we have luminaries and game-changers and with each passing generation, we have the old fogies who remember the ‘good ole days.’

But it saddens me a bit to know that unlike sports, anime will remain on the sidelines (forgive me for the odd metaphor location) of popular culture. It’s generally accepted that fans of football or basketball are allowed to feel deep sadness when their team trades off one of their star players, feel betrayed even. It’s accepted when a man openly weeps at such an occurance (well, to some degree). But when a geek experiences the same emotions over a favored manga series suddenly being cancelled or the art change of a beloved anime, only in the anime/geek community is such a depression accepted and understood.

I am constantly amazed and pleased how more and more people are coming to embrace the term geek and the culture surrounding it, as easily evidenced by conventions around the world. From Trek conventions to Anime, to the mega ComicCons around the nation, geekery is no longer a word or a phrase to imply some sort of social deficiency. But we’ve got a long way to get to a point where I can put up several figurines of anime characters at my desk and have it just as accepted as another co-worker’s sport figure bobble heads.

With all of that said, I have a huge number of pictures that I’ll be linking to in this post. This is the first Otakon that I’ve made it a point to take a lot of pictures and I am generally happy with how many I took. In total, I took 179 pictures, most of them duplicates of the same image (I like to make sure I get a good version of each thing). But I do want to take a moment and share a little geekiness with you:

There were a crap-ton of The Doctors at Otakon. Most of them were Matt Smith’s Doctor, but I saw a few Tennant, one Eccelston, a Dalek, a K-9, and there was a picture of a group of Doctors surrounding a Dalek. So. Cool. I also saw a TARDIS! (not the actual police box, but…)

So, I will be following this up with a trip to Dragon*Con this Labor Day weekend at which I will be missing another geeky event in favor of it. I am really looking forward to seeing what Dragon*Con has to offer. I understand that there is a crap-ton of more diverse geek-tastic events and panels happening there so I look forward to it.

Right now, I am exhausted. Crowd and Andrew do not mix. That and I spent two hours playing DDR and its clones yesterday. On hard mode. For those of you who have never played DDR on Hard mode, let me save you the trouble: Don’t. First, you have to understand how the arrows work, then you have to come to grips with the fact that while your brain might recognize all of the patterns, your body is like “WHOA WHOA, there, Tiger. Just what the frak do you think you’re doing!?”

That said, I’ve got a bunch of things I’m planning to do on the horizon: I’m working on my post-otakon podcast. Working on LastMage again. Developing a web show. Recording a voice acting demo and a few other things. Hopefully develop an Anime