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!