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Boys, bear with me a moment here, this opening is going to be very girlie, but if you can stick it out, I promise you it will become relevant to your interests.
Girls, remember your favorite Barbie dolls when you were kids? You don't have to pick a specific one; just the name "Barbie" should conjure up a mean average of all the Barbies you ever had pleasantly blended into one face. Let's take Crystal Barbie, for example--she's the first one I remember getting. Pleasant face, glamorous clothes, winning smile, classic Barbie.
Now, girls, have you seen the new Barbies lately? Let's take 2009 Holiday Barbie as an example. How do you feel about her? If I had to bet, I'd put even money that at least half of you are going, "Ugh! She's so much uglier than my Barbies." And I believe there's some justification for that. Arched eyebrows that seem much darker than her unnaturally platinum hair, botoxed lips that are set in really more of a smirk than a smile, she looks to me like every woman who has thought, "I'm better than you" towards every man or woman she passes on the street.
But--am I biased? Perhaps. Maybe the real reason I can't appreciate the Barbies of today is that I'm comfortable with what I'm used to, and I'm using them as the standard to which all things are compared and which will, unfairly and inevitably, come up short. Certainly I'm not biased all the time, there are some toys now that are SO MUCH COOLER! than what we had as kids. Hasbro is going to release the semi-automatic Nerf gun any day now. And the costumes! Do you remember what Halloween costumes looked like in the 1980s? Cheap plastic masks that immediately cracked that were sort of like the face of whatever you were dressing up as with huge eye holes cut out, and then a plastic smock that featured the logo of whatever you were dressing up as on the torso. Now? I can be She-Ra. Holy shit.
Why do I bring this up? It's not because I've suddenly decided that fuck it, I'm not broke enough, let's start collecting Barbies on top of everything else. No, this actually has to do with anime cons. (And here's where the boys tune back in.)
After almost literally every single con, there is always a deluge of con reports flooding LiveJournal--con reports I read (or at least skim) whether I went to the con or not. Some of you have probably caught where I'm going with this, but think about it--what do you MOST read on your Friends page after a con? "This con SUCKED!" "I'm glad I saw my friends but the con itself was SO LAME!" "I tell you, kids today--" Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's what I want to know: how do you tell? How can you be absolutely sure that Genericon Number One was so much more superior than Genericon Number Ten? Number One was ten years ago, is your memory really that good? (It might be; mine sucks, but shouldn't be used as a standard of judgment.) Or is it at least possible that after a decade, the good memories have outworn the bad ones? Is it possible that the glamour of going to your first con, and all that entails--whether it was one of your first "vacations" away from home without constant parental supervision, or whether it was your first time in Gotham City or wherever, or whether it was your first time actually interacting with other fans in person, rather than having to explain to your increasingly bored friend that the timeline of Sailor Moon isn't all THAT hard to understand, the past, present, and future are pretty definitively separated, with only minor time traveling? Aren't you wondering even the least little bit if your real problem is that you want those damn kids to get off your lawn?
I'm not saying that none of the problems that crop up at cons are real; sometimes the hotel staff sucks. Sometimes the con staffers let their power go to their heads. But really, I think those problems were always there, they're really kind of hit or miss depending on the individual personalities you have to all throw into the mix. And yes, there are ten million Bleach cosplayers--just like there were ten million Inuyashas before that, and ten million Chiis before that, and ten million Clouds before that, and ten million Sailor Moons before that. Those ten million Bleach cosplayers are dressing up for the exact same reason you are; to have fun with their friends, and meet new people. Maybe they made their costumes, maybe they didn't, maybe they're overcosplayed, maybe they're obscure; the underlying reason is still very much the same. And yes, maybe there is an influx of jailbait that's driving us crazy for varying reasons, whether it's because they act it's like 3 PM in a school yard on the last day of school, maybe it's because you feel like you need to check IDs before you even exchange e-mail addresses, maybe because it sends you flying to the mirror to check for gray hairs and crow's feet the way I do. But how old were you when you first started cosplaying? Are you really positive you didn't create the exact same reaction in the older veterans?
Now, maybe I'm even correct in my disdain of poor Holiday Barbie above; I don't like her expression and maybe it's not just because I'm stuck in 1985. But both Mattel and convention committees are in the business of figuring out what The Peepul want; they have to, or they won't be around next year. Crystal Barbie must not have been selling, so they tweaked her and they tweaked her and they tweaked her and they monitored sales and Holiday Barbie was the result, no one is being forced to buy her (she's certainly not the only game in town!) but she's selling well. Anime cons seem to be doing pretty well despite this wretched economy, and gone are the days when there was one every two months, and if you were lucky, they were only about three states away. Somebody's going. You're going. And, as much as you bitch and moan, honestly--to yourself, you don't have to tell me--honestly, don't you know you're going to go back next year anyway?
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