The line to get into New York City’s first big anime convention after the Covid-19 lockdown stretched actual unambiguous miles. Food trucks ready to feed the growing crowds struggled to make their way into the Javits Center’s parking lot, for want of the ability to navigate the over-dense sea of Otaku waiting for them. Some exasperated press covering the event remarked that they’d “…never seen anything like it”: the sheer numbers of people waiting to get in. Personally, the exhaustion at the hordes of Bakugo, Himiko Toga and Tanjiro cosplayers speckled in a dark gray ocean of screen-printed hoodies and bookbags with Skullcandy Headphones hanging off of them was old hat. I’ve been attending New York Comic Con since ’06 and covering it with ComicAttack.Net since 2011. I’d seen these crowds before but not for an Anime convention in New York City. It became clear over the weekend that AnimeNYC was doing things differently and in many ways, better.
AnimeNYC is a relatively new convention to New York City. Created by LeftField Media in 2017 (the same people who host AwesomeCon in DC), their president, Greg Topalian, was former senior vice president of Reed Exhibitions where he founded New York Comic Con in 2006. AnimeNYC bills itself as a three-day experience that “…showcase[s] the best of Japanese pop culture in the biggest city in America.” Boasting a large number of unique exhibits, exclusive screenings, extensive panels with appearances by Japanese creators, American voice actors and some of the most elaborate cosplayers in the tristate area, AnimeNYC is extremely attractive on paper. It’s when your boots are on the ground though and the tall glass doors of the Jacob Javits Center opens that you get to see if the press hype is real, and it’s on the show floor where LeftField Media’s pedigree with New York conventions really shines.
The floor space, lacking the shear glut of vendors present at NYCC, was opened up wide to hundreds of shoppers and onlookers, each with enough personal space to not have to be on top of each other. Everyone could comfortably look down the more densely packed aisles for the vendors’ wares without having to venture into them. Truly, I have never seen so many people having so little difficulty finding their misplaced friends and partners in a convention hall. At times, the crowds felt like the ones at trade shows, with inquisitive faces investigating products for the next quarter, but at other points the excitement of a fan convention was present in excess. Dancefloors were opened up for energetic attendees and multiple DJs were spinning Anime themes songs carefully remixed to the point of being a bop. Behind every surgical mask was a set of world-worn yet excited eyes. What truly took me by surprise was the effortlessly diverse population of attendees. There were enough queer kids, POC’s, people who self-identify as neurodivergent and physically handicapped present to swing an election in a red state. This is not to say I didn’t run into a literal Karen in a Kimono harassing the press office and heard about another on a panel, but those experiences were virtually non-existent compared to the kinds of nonsense you find yourself dealing with at your typical comic convention. You know the dudes online who are kind of the worst? The guys who complain about diversity in media and for whom the phrase “cosplay is not consent” was created? I’m not saying they weren’t present at AnimeNYC but if they were around, they were outnumbered.
To be clear though this was not a shining utopia despite the organizer’s best efforts. It’s ultimately people that make a con comfortable and rest assured there were no cuddle puddles to be found anywhere on the premises. The same kids with social anxieties that use anime as a way to cope with a world that doesn’t always get them were still out in force with all the prickly edges and unintentional rudeness you’d expect from people codified as “Nerds”. For instance, the board game lounge was an amazing idea for a different group of strangers, if there were also a bar on the premises. As it stands, Brain Game’s table top area served mostly as the gateway to the multi-service cosplay area, replete with open spaces for staged photos and an entire station of eager and knowledgeable cosplay crafts people acting as costume EMTs. There were rows and rows of tables designed to be the perfect place to mix and mingle with the otaku community, where you could borrow games as straight forward as Uno, as socially dangerous as Cards Against Humanity or as elaborate as Settlers of Catan and then take a laminated blue or red sign to announce to all passersby that you were either looking for people to play with or looking to learn how to play. Functionally, the blue “looking for players” sign did more to keep people away from your table than a hacking cough and a MAGA hat. I found this out firsthand when I conducted an experiment to see how welcoming the lounge really was. I gave up an ID to the organizers, got a cool looking game and some hand sanitizer, found a half empty table and grabbed a seat.
I then posted the blue sign up to announce my intentions and started a stopwatch to see how long it would take to make new friends. For nearly 30 minutes no one would even make eye contact with me. A table that started with four unconnected guys at a six-seat table emptied out to just me and stayed empty in a crowded room full of tired people with few other places to sit. At one point a group of four sat down one table over and mentioned amongst each other that they wanted to play the game I had. When I asked them if they wanted to play with me or even if they wanted me to just give them the game so they could play by themselves without me, they gave me the “smelly homeless guy asking for money on the subway” treatment, only to then go ask for another copy of the game from the organizers to find out I had the last one. In the end they all sat across from me, shooting me anxious, grimacing side eye and they struggled through Pandemic while trying to ignore my existence not playing the game the truly wanted because they didn’t feel comfortable enough to play with a stranger. I stopped the experiment at 28 minutes and 37 seconds feeling like the only box of raisins in a bag full of candy; it was a noble idea but if you know this crowd, you would have seen that coming.
The jittery, sometimes smelly fan boys, girls and thems that brought the “comic interested” such infamy, seems to have migrated away from Marvel and DC to find new homes in Crunchyroll and Shonen Jump. Once upon a time, those kids would have seemingly only been present in comic conventions and comic book stores, sustaining a category of pop culture being created explicitly with their sensibilities in mind. But Jesus Christ how times have changed. The counter culture I came of age in has moved so far center to the social norm that people’s grandmas are now arguing “Thanos was right” in Facebook shit posts. When I was a kid, I didn’t quite understand the allure of manga over comics but I always respected the punk energy of avoiding like the plague the way things are. Perhaps anime is the last transgressive frontier for young minds these days. When all your gangsta rap is made by upper middle-class white kids with face tats and you watched Captain America’s bestie choke out Iron Man’s mom on the big screen with your own parents, maybe the last subversive thing to do is start stanning animated almost porn in a language you will never speak.
At the end of the day AnimeNYC had the kind of convention experience that I’ve been longing for since even before the lockdown began. Instead of huge main stage panels hosting television actors plugging projects without the slightest whiff of comic book connection, there was a full-on concert playing some of the most exciting music from Japan, while huge screens showed off the gorgeous animated fight scenes for which they were created. Instead of seven different vendors selling nearly identical merchandise crowding up the show floor, there were car shows and Japan exclusive arcade machines and a booth that just straight-up sold hentai. The artist alley and the celebrity autograph booths were on the show floor, bringing back the novel idea that conventions are an opportunity to have everything you could want to do and see existing in the same physical space. For extra bonus points the staff were courteous and helpful and the prices for the debatably Asian food on-site didn’t feel like assault. Plus, I actually did make some new friends. After the most recent New York Comic Con I thought to myself that maybe I’m done with the scene for a while, all of the people and the drama wasn’t worth the exhaustion I felt at the end of the weekend. Well, I was still exhausted at the end of AnimeNYC weekend but all I want to do is queue back up on that big ass line and do it all again next weekend.
