Nirvana for Nerds – Con 101
[Caffeine Note: Friend of the Brothers Omega Budrickton is a scholar, gentleman, and frequenter of conventions. He wanted a venue to share his thoughts and but of course we obliged. Hug him and give him a mug of your freshest mead.]
The young nerd’s life is often an unforgiving enterprise. Their trading-card-trading, Pokémon-playing, perpetually chunky and uncoordinated elementary years are just the beginning of a number of roads, many of which run off the edge of a cliff, socially speaking.
These rocky starts for my brethren are usually followed up with a high school life of true class; basement-dwelling, Han-shot-first, ‘virgin-forever’ years function as a training ground for learning how to work an innate and exuberant nerdiness into daily life, and possibly, actually interact with ordinary people!
There’s hope in these years; nerds either abandon their ways in pursuit of socializing, underage drinking, and the holy grail: losing your virginity before age 18. Or, they go full throttle, and become what they were always destined to be at the place where all nerds unite:
The Con.
The Con, a fan convention focusing on one or more of the various nerd proclivities — comics, science-fiction, animé, etc. — is basically, nerd graduation. For one’s passion for such things to be so boundless that they show up in costume, you could consider them to have graduated from their childhood with honors.
Fan Expo Toronto, Canada’s largest fan ‘multi-genre’ convention, has come and gone for the year.
In some form or another, this conglomeration of talent, fandom and insanity has been around for seventeen years, ten of which I’ve personally attended. The first time, back in August 2002 was the result of a classic nerd-on-nerd peer pressure situation. I wanted to impress my new coworkers and joined them on the trip down. The subsequent nine years took me to the con out of sheer anticipation, passion and necessity.
I fell in love with the Fan Convention experience in 2002, and have been deliriously infatuated with the phenomenon ever since. My tenth anniversary at Fan Expo in August was no exception.
This year, some 75,000 nerds, geeks, gamers, LARPers, horror freaks, cosplayers, anime addicts, artists, craftspeople, writers, producers and filmmakers descended on the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to celebrate genre fandom in all its shapes, forms and grotesqueries.
A good quarter of these beautiful people were unmistakably virgins. Another fifth socially incongruent with the world around them. A sizeable third belonging to a visible minority, countless more belonging to the hidden ones. An easy majority falling under the column headings of obese, lanky, short, disabled, acne monstrosities, generally unbathed or uncomfortably hyperactive.
Why is this show floor crammed full of society’s undesirables such a wonderful place to be?
Because every single one of them is filled to the brim with an unbridled passion for something.
A comic, an artist, a television show, an animé, a horror movie. It doesn’t really matter what that thing is. They give a tremendously large shit about celebrating their love for it.
I know this because I see them every year, traveling to this megalithic congregation of fellow nerds, either dressed in hats and shirts emblazoned with iconic and quotable proclamations (“Let’s be bad guys”, “It’s time for a sexy party!”, “What the FRAK”, take your pick), or graphic tees declaring their love for their favorite fictions. Hundreds more show up in full costume altogether.
They came from other cities and provinces of our country, or even across the border from the States. They dropped a fat $100 on admission, travel and food, and gave up a solid four-day weekend to make it happen.
I know they want to be here, and some of them just to spend more money and time reveling in their lifer hobbyist passions.
I’m one of them.
Why wouldn’t I want to be among my brutally awkward-but-loveable kind for a glorious four days of nerding the fuck out?
My roommate accompanied me to the con back in 2009, just for a day, just to get a taste, and found himself fascinated by the obsessions and passions practically oozing out of the convention centre walls. I think he was a little frustrated at the time that he wasn’t able to truly take part in the phenomenon of brain-searing fandom all around him.
Fast forward to this past winter. The kid discovered a video game he could fall in love with for the first time in his life. Oh, and he’s a graphic design graduate. A costume was inevitable. Let’s just say, he told me he’d be coming with me this year. Observe the man, as he attended Fan Expo all weekend:
Now he gets it. It didn’t get him a free 360 from the Microsoft booth or anything, but now the man gets it.
William Shatner probably described the phenomenon best at his main panel Sunday afternoon.
The Captain was on hand for panels, signatures, photo ops and lectures, among countless other guests representing a quintet of genre streams — comics (the original foundation of practically every multi-genre convention), animé, science-fiction and fantasy, horror and gaming.
“We all come here,” he intoned, to a throng of some two thousand attendees, “to participate in this ongoing cultural myth…We keep it going, like an engine. We are here to celebrate what we love, and we are not crazy!”
Cue well-deserved applause for a man that’s already set to work on his second project to actually document the con and fan experience. Who could ask for more than one of nerd-dom’s primary icons to be the guy reflexively authoring a doc all about the community responsible for his continued and current fame and relevance?
He asked the assembled fans in the audience whether the project should keep its current working title, ‘Get a Life!’, or take on the title of ‘Fanatics’.
‘Fanatics’ won it by a small margin of applause, which seemed to actually confuse Billy up on the stage. I think he realized in that moment what had actually been troubling me ever since he asked the question to begin with. Both titles managed to undermine the message he was trying to get across at all, that we have lives, and we’re just filling them to the brim with the shit we love.
He changed his tone moments later and suggested that the project should probably be called ‘Give a Life’ instead, to represent all the misshapen, forgotten, rejected or otherwise dejected members of fan communities who found themselves on the outside, and ‘won’ a new life for themselves by joining a fandom. The notion that genre art in all its forms can grant belonging and a strange new sense of purpose to people otherwise self-classified as outsiders, well, it’s a powerful one.
It’s a cultural self-transformation I’m elated to be a part of. I’m a member of more minorities than I have fingers to count on. Afflicted with this, visibly part of that, secretly a member of a third, proudly part of a fourth, and so on. It was only natural that I’d find myself drawn to stories like, for example, those stories that the X-Books tell, rife with searches for belonging and dealing with being different.
Step one for me was finding common ground with the characters in these stories.
Step two, was actualizing it in reality with other readers who felt the same way. That’s what the con experience has managed to become for me. It’s corny as shit, but it’s real, and it’s the reason these magnificent events exist and grow with popularity and attendance every year.
There’s my speech about how the con experience will worm its way into your nerdy heart and change your life. If you feel the same fanatical way about some kind of art that’s changed your life, I encourage you to experience what it’s like to share that with other people in the same way.
There are cons, expos and all manner of other similar events happening all over North America in the world throughout the year. Multi-genre conventions, like Fan Expo, are the cream of the crop as far as variety of content goes.
Fan Expo plays host to what used to just be the Canadian National Comic Book Exposition, now merged with CN Animé, CN Sci-Fi, the Rue Morgue Horror Expo and the G4-sponsored CN Gaming Expo.
The spillover from one part of the larger con to the other is thrilling; Sailor Scouts in costume marching through horror booths; comic fan dudebros discovering sexually titillating animé for the first time; sci-fi veterans seeing how gaming culture is transforming the newest generations of nerds. It’s a beautiful marriage of fandoms, and only these kinds of events bring them all together. Where else will you find Mario tradin’ tips with the terror that flaps in the night?
If just one of these things is more your speed, find the nearest single-genre expo and revel in its specificity. Cons are everywhere that exclusively focus on just comics, or just animé, or even individual franchises, like Star Trek or Warcraft.
Entry prices are all over the place, but at anywhere from just $10-25 a day, and $40-80 for a weekend, the cost is relatively low to bask in the aura of nerd culture, or just meet your favorite writer or actor, and it’s a truly rejuvenating annual welcome home for the hardcore fan in all of us.
I’ll leave you with my favorite story from the weekend: getting the chance to meet the amazing Katee Sackhoff, and deliver with her my favorite ridiculous drunken Starbuck line from Battlestar Galactica.
It’s terrible. We look and sound terrible.
Katee looked at me when I posed the idea and smiled. She knew the line, she knew the scene I was thinking of. She said to me “alright, but I can’t yell it, ok?” Then she saw me smile my nerdiest smile, and she yelled it with me anyway for the camera.
A simple little moment like that works for me, not just because I was a little star-struck, but because I got to remind one of the many contributors to a work of art that some of the most insignificant shit that made up her work mattered to someone.
It’s a dumb line. Starbuck rockets down about two dozen shots of something green and boozy, gets completely hammered, screams out the line, and vaults her drunken ass over a table. Ask any Battlestar fan for their favorite Starbuck moment and you’ll doubtlessly have them say something else. But for me, that was it, that was the perfect moment where I understood what the fuck Starbuck was all about. The con let me share that for half a moment with the woman herself.
I witnessed countless interactions like that between fans and their idols, whether they were comic writers, actors, directors, or anything else. “What’s your favorite panel in the issue?” I heard Brian Bendis ask the fan in front of me once, as we lined up to meet the writer. The guy caught him off guard with something different, and mentioned a panel Bendis probably thought unremarkable. But I distinctly remember him saying, “Wow. I’d never looked at what I’d written that way before.” And the geekdom comes full circle. Auteurs and their audiences meeting and exchanging ideas in a common place, and loving it.
New York Comic Con is the next big event of the year, running from October 13-16, 2011. If you’re in town or nearby, and any nerd blood flows in your veins, consider popping your cherry there! Many more fill the calendar throughout North America. Go forth, enjoy the con nearest you. It’s a Pride for nerds, and you need it!
More moments captured by yours truly at Fan Expo 2011:
The 501st Legion representing. They’re an international fan organization dedicated to Star Wars cosplaying, and in particular, imperial roles and costumes. They’re accurate to their onscreen counterparts and always impressive in person.
Sad Optimus. He (or she!) was unfortunately upstaged by someone else who had a fully functional transformable costume. This is still serious dedication to an outfit though, so I’m giving him or her the internet fist-bump.
Black Cyke figured the coming trend out before Morales touched Spider-Man.
The first and only Carnage costume I’ve ever laid eyes on in-person, beating out a Venom appearance at the cons I’ve been to. Red paint slathered over a black skin-tight suit proved to me that a simple design could result in a sweet, visually appealing (and relatively accurate!) costume.
Proof; it ain’t just Trek nerds, Jedi wannabes, comic buffs and gamers in attendance. Any fandom is welcome.
