Yaoicon5The PilgrimageMost yaoi fangirls across the country sigh longingly at mentions of YaoiCon, particularly those under the age of 18 who have to wait until they pass the con’s age restriction in order to go. As a result, I think a lot of fangirls are dreaming of this con to the point of it reaching almost mythical proportions in their minds. I know I sure did. I don’t usually make con reports, but because of the specialness of this one, I figured I owed it to my fellow fangirls to bust a few myths while giving some idea of what we did and how much fun we had in San Francisco.
Our most simple statement of conclusion since getting back has been, “We had a lot of fun, and it was worth going, but I’m not going to bust my ass trying to get back.” I will say up front that I had a good time. There were some interesting and even informative panels, our costumes were well-received, and being in San Francisco was cool. I wish I would have had more time to spend in Japantown. And I really loved the 18+ factor, it made for a unique atmosphere that I wish I could have at every con. It wasn’t something obvious, I didn’t even realize it until the con was nearly over Sunday night, but having the age limit made for a different and altogether pleasing atmosphere. There were no squealing teenyboppers in the halls, everyone was more or less laid-back and low-key even when they did find something in the dealer’s room or artist’s alley that tickled their fangirl fancy. As much as I know there’s never going to be another con with that kind of mature, gentle, unhurried tone to it, since no one else is going to exclude the hordes of under-18 anime fans that make the con so much money, I can take a moment and remember with a content sigh. It’s my only chance to be ageist, since at 30, most of the time at anime-exclusive cons I feel so damn old. Perhaps me saying so is an opportunity to young yaoi fans to look at themselves and ask themselves whether they might be contributing to the reasons people say things like “squealing fangirls” with derision and not appreciation. One of the most fun things to experience at YaoiCon, since it’s not something you’re going to get at any other convention, is the bishonen auction. It was hilarious and wild and completely like nothing I’ve ever seen. “Auction” is sort of secondary in purpose, now, it’s become essentially a 3-hour striptease. I’ve never been to a “real” strip club (god no) and don’t plan to anytime soon, but watching a handful of very young and pretty men, some of them dressed in anime costumes but not all, doing their choice of performance and stripping down either immediately or gradually to their skivvies was worth the price of admission. After about a dozen of them, though – after Cid went for $1300 – the shouting was giving me a headache and I was growing disinterested in the auction part. I just wanted to see the boys dance. And strip. Stripping was a theme of the weekend, they had three events which required the assistance of the bishonen and somehow they managed to work taking their clothes off into all of them. And most of the bishonen were at least open, if not encouraging, toward smooching each other and groping in front of the screaming fangirls. They sure knew their audience. I could have used a lot more of that. I also really liked that the panels were, for the most part, firmly educational, or at least encouraging of discussion and contemplation. Of course, the Kyou Kara Maou fan-panel was not one of these, but it was fun because they had the karaoke contest like at Otakon and this time, I didn’t chicken out. KKM is becoming one of my favorite series and I’ve been singing the theme song to myself for weeks, I was prepared and apparently didn’t suck. I didn’t know I could actually sing – one can’t tell when one only sings to oneself in the car. I won the contest and am waiting eagerly for the panelists to mail me my prize. I hope it’s a DVD. If you haven’t checked out Kyou Kara Maou yet, what the hell are you waiting for?! It’s cute, clever, witty, action-packed, and shonen-ai! It has fighting, supernatural powers, cool costumes, an interesting world and concept, wonderfully well-rounded characters, a little angst, a lot of humor, and boys falling in love with boys. What more could you ask for? Okay, yes, I’m waiting for the unresolved sexual tension to resolve too, but the series is still running in Japan. Give them time. I also went to a panel on Yaoi in Academia, which was mostly just discussion of what themes academics seem to be covering in their studies of fangirl behavior and phenomena, and a very good one on writing smut. Not that I need help writing smut (as anyone keeping up with Queer As Tachi can probably tell) but it’s always good to hear other opinions and find out what tips other writers can share. We peeked in on the Anatomy for Yaoi Artists panel, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if they covered how to draw naughty bits. That’s about the only anatomy I don’t have knowledge on – I can draw the rest. I thought about peeking into a few others, but in the end, roaming the halls in our costumes or finding a nice corner to sit in and look cute took precedence. The funniest memory has to be the incident at the Yaoi in Academia panel. You’d think, at a convention where 3/4 of the attendees are female and the ratio of women to men among cosplayers is even higher, anyone in your panel audience wearing a costume is likely to be female, regardless of what costume it is. And yet, as I had my hand raised to make a comment, the panelist gestured toward me and without even hesitating said, “Yes, you, sir.” GreenFire burst out laughing. I just kind of grinned, said thank you, and went on with my comment. Admittedly, I was in Kougaiji at the time, with the open-fronted shirt, but I don’t think I look as much like a guy in that costume as in, say, Hiei or Sanzo. Upon relating the story to some friends we found standing outside in the hall, another girl turned me around, gave my chest a once-over, and said, “Very nice job.” Another amusing anecdote revolves around who was sharing the hotel. It didn’t surprise me that the hotels both sold out for the weekend once I saw the size of them, but it became even more obvious why when we were sitting in the Clarion and found ourselves suddenly swarmed with young people carrying “UCLA” garment bags. Five busloads of marching band. As if that weren’t funny enough, we discovered as we stood in an elevator with a very tall and broad gentleman that he was on the football team. Yes, the UCLA football team was staying in the Westin, with YaoiCon. I really hope we traumatized them. Badly. On a more curious and interesting note, there was a conference room on our floor where I could have sworn I saw flashbulbs going off all weekend. I thought it had something to do with the football game, but it turned out, it was being used by a photographer preparing an art show and eventually a book containing portraiture of cosplayers. She asked GreenFire and I to come up and be photographed while in Kougaiji and Homura on Sunday, and it was really fascinating. The photos she emailed us after the con was over were breathtaking. Looking at that, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that the panelist thought I was a guy. It was definitely a highlight of the weekend. And now for the mythbusting. Myth #1 – if you can’t find it anywhere else, you can find it at YaoiCon. FALSE. The dealer’s room was pathetic. There was only one dealer who had racks upon racks of doujinshi, and yet they somehow still managed to have not a single thing we were looking for. No KKM, no Gravitation Remixes, and the Yu-Gi-Oh selection made me sick to my stomach. At least GreenFire got to pad out her already large collection of YYH doujinshi, but that’s because she knows what she wants and hey, Hiei/Kurama stuff isn’t hard to find. Two or three other dealers had much smaller boxes of doujinshi, but again we came up completely empty. There wasn’t even hardly anyone, either in dealers or fan-market, who had the selection of yaoi-related trinkets that I’ve seen at other conventions, like pins or stickers or anything else that proclaims “I like yaoi” to the world. I spent under $15 in the dealer’s room – I got a Krillin plushie and a “got yaoi” bumper sticker. And a Saiyuki badge from a fan artist. That’s it. I have more yaoi art and text in my living room than in that dealer’s room. And yet, I couldn’t figure out how more than half of the con attendees were spending literally all day in there. You could tell, because when the dealer’s room closed for an hour lunch break in the midafternoon Saturday and Sunday, the halls which had previously been rather quiet and laid-back were suddenly filled with people, and the minute the dealer’s room reopened, the place was deserted. Myth #2 – cosplayers are constantly making out in the hallways at YaoiCon. FALSE! I read a blurb in a thread on cosplay.com where someone was complaining about girls dressed as boys making out with each other all the time. We didn’t see a one. There were some Kyou Kara Maou cosplayers who played with each other for photos before the masquerade, and if you scroll through Eurobeat King’s galleries on cosplay.com you’ll see that he managed to encourage other cosplaying pairs to pose in yaoi form. However, the halls were not a land of debauchery as some might expect, with girls dressed as boys kissing and groping and generally contributing to the yaoi factor. GreenFire and I roleplaying were just about the only ones – and we didn’t even get attention for it! No one noticed! I don’t know, maybe people thought we really were a couple and didn’t want to ask us for photos of what might have been normal affectations in a normal relationship. After all, we did run into several lesbian couples who happen to be such yaoi fangirls that they like crossplaying together. Maybe the two of us pulled it off so well that people thought it was real. Too bad! We did make a few fangirls squeal, particularly the Kaiba/Alastair one who declared “that pairing, those two are just made for each other” while scrambling for her camera, but even Eurobeat King was surprised when he asked us on Saturday if people had been asking us to make out for photos. We were Kurama and Hiei, he fully expected us to say “oh yeah,” but the answer sadly was no. He was the first – and got what he asked for. But I think only one person besides him actually asked. I don’t know if, in the past, people have blown one or a handful of incidents out of proportion, or think EBK’s pictures were indicative of what everyone in a costume was doing, but contrary to popular belief, YaoiCon is not rife with crossplayer smooching. Or groping. Sadly. No one seemed to be cutting loose at all. Myth #3 – the dance. Granted, we didn’t stay to find out if it got anywhere near debauched and insane, but that should tell you something right there. Anyone who knows us knows that GreenFire and I both love to dance. AnimeCentral and CONvergence have THE best con dances ever, I could dance the night away even at my age to a good sequence of trance DJs anywhere. The two of us were fully expecting that after the wild bishonen auction, we’d pop back to our hotel, change into our Hiei and Kurama dance outfits (she even made Kurama’s black outfit just for this purpose), and come back to dance like mad for hours and hours until we were exhausted. After getting a little up-close and personal at AI, I think we were looking forward to letting Hiei and Kurama dance like lovers should. Yeah, well…we left after five minutes. FIVE minutes. We honestly gave it a chance, we decided to wait around to see if the first song was just a fluke and the music would be improving. Well, it didn’t. I then looked over to find that our DJ for the night was a goth boy with a Mac. Playing goth music. We didn’t even consider going out and hanging around, and coming back later, we just left in disgust and went back to the hotel room. Five minutes. What a worthless pile of crap. Now I won’t get a chance to dance my little heart out till Acen again. I mean, for crying out loud – you’re in San Francisco! At a gay porn con! There must be some gay club DJs who wouldn’t mind coming down for the night and spinning! The bishonen danced to better music at the auction! Being as the dance was one of the things we were most looking forward to, to say that we were disappointed was an understatement. If there’s anything I’d rant angrily to the YaoiCon staff about, that would be it. But since we don’t plan to go back, there’s no need. Let the people who go every year dance to the goth music and suffer. Now, don’t get me wrong. I did have fun. It was a good con. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than the disaster that was Otakon, though it still wasn’t as fun as AnimeCentral. It was worth going, to say that I went and to experience it, and to show off our costumes. I was glad to see so many people recognize Alastair (though more called me Amelda) and comprehend the pairing. And the atmosphere was very nice. But the things that disappointed us were things we were really hoping would prove true about the con, and didn’t. Had the dealer’s room and the dance been better, and people been a little more outgoing in the world of cosplay, it would have been THE perfect con. But until those things improve, or change, I’m not going to worry about saving up $500 every year to fly out to San Francisco for YaoiCon. I was also a lot put off by the fact that pretty much every main event was a fundraiser for the con. If the con is that expensive to put on, maybe they should think about, hm, not having it in California? For the size of the con, they need to be more cost-effective. I would have thought about participating in the auction or the bishonen bingo if the money being collected was going toward a charity – like PFLAG or a breast cancer charity or something. But no, it was to offset con expenses. That bothers me. I know it is a niche-oriented con and as such will never be 20,000 attendees strong, but I’m sure there are other ways of handling finances than turning every event into a fundraiser. It was also, at times, a little TOO laid back. I appreciated the quiet, compared to the noisy ruckus at places like Otakon, but even I would have liked a little more fun and action. The daytime was consumed with serious panels and library-like hallways, it wasn’t until evening that “fun” happened. Unless we were making our own fun, like finding a nice couch to curl up on and make out. Which is really saying something for two straight girls! And even then, really, it’s only a two-day con with some opening events Friday night. That was also a big disappointment for me. I wanted more bang for my buck, I would have liked to have more to do Friday leading up to some fun events, but when it got started, there was only one thing to do. It was either go to opening and bishonen bingo, or go back to your room and sleep. A game room, something, anything! Room parties! Were there even room parties allowed or held? I didn’t hear that there were any. This con could really have done with some parties. I’m not a super party girl, I don’t even drink, but after the disappointment of the dance I could have really used a couple of room parties to go hit and socialize. That, perhaps, is the summation I can reach. YaoiCon is a good place for yaoi fangirls to gather and talk about yaoi in the safe confines of like-minded individuals, where all the programming revolved around yaoi instead of just one flaky panel late one night. However, it is not a good place to socialize with those same fangirls. Everyone seemed rather close and cliqueish, and while I admit to some of that behavior myself, it was mostly a response to others around us. So that Youko didn’t want to come over and talk to us? Well fine, screw her, we’ll just be the Hiei and Kurama hanging out with each other alone. So Kuronue bailed on the YuYu Hakusho photoshoot she asked us to meet for? Fine, we’ll go make out in a corner. There was plenty of yaoi stuff to do, but unless you had friends there you intended to hang out with, it wasn’t the place to be social, which is very sad. I don’t know if that’s an indicator that underage yaoi fangirls are the ones with all the social skills, or what. I hope not. I’d rather not sacrifice maturity just for some fun. But hell, people…we’re at a gay porn con. A gay Japanese anime porn con. If you can’t grin and laugh and party, what the hell is so good about being at a gay Japanese anime porn con with other people who like it as much as you do?! So, I won’t be going back. Anyone who’s thinking about going in the future, make sure you save up, and give yourself extra time to sightsee in San Francisco when you go. But don’t expect YaoiCon to be something it’s not. Be prepared and realistic. And stock up on Pocky in Japantown, because there’s none in the dealer’s room. |