Geek Out Challenge Day 3 – My Favorite Convention Experience

Another day, another Geek Out post thanks to A Geeky Gal’s wonderful challenge.  Yesterday, I wrote about my most recent fandom, but today’s prompt shifts over to a different topic:  Conventions.  I’ll be totally honest here and state that I have only been to one event in the past and it wasn’t an enormous San Diego Comic-Con sort of affair, so I don’t have too many experiences to pull from.  Instead, I am going to list some of the reasons that I love convention culture and discuss why I hope to go to more in the future!

Image Source:  Wikipedia

Cosplayers Everywhere!

There is nothing quite like cosplay.  While I don’t actively take part myself, as my level of cosplay experience involves wearing Pikachu ears that I bought at a Halloween store one year, I absolutely love to snap photos of my favorite video game and anime characters brought to life by dedicated fans.  The amount of artistic ability necessary to recreate some of the intricate outfits I have seen must be astronomical.

Strangely enough, my favorite part of the convention I went to was actually leaving the main show floor and just wandering around the town.  When there are hundreds of people in costume around you, it can be difficult to keep track of all of the costumes and even register whether they are dressed up as beloved characters.  In the wild, however, I found that a lot of cosplayers do actually wander around town to get some pictures taken.  In other words, that’s how I ran into a Malcolm Reynolds cosplayer ordering food at a fast-food joint after a photo session!

Merchandise

I have a varied range of interests and it can be incredibly hard to find trinkets to show off my love of some of my favorite franchises.  Thankfully, conventions are here to save the day!  Between the talented artists selling their own artwork and the marketplaces offering more traditional souvenir items like bobbleheads and keychains, just about every niche interest is accounted for here.  During my last convention, I picked up a keychain dedicated to Teddie from Persona 4, a companion cube from Portal, and a replica of Arwyn’s necklace from Lord of the Rings from three different vendors.  One of the biggest motivators to getting to another event in the future is being able to restock my house with more geeky goods!

Community

Having geeky interests isn’t nearly as isolating as it used to be, but it’s still hard to find people in real life that share niche interests.  Conventions are a great place to meet up with people that have common interests because the odds are high that at least one person on the show floor loves the same things you do, no matter how obscure the topic.  I saw some cosplays and T-shirts representing all sorts of fandoms that I hadn’t even heard of previously, which also let me make a mental inventory of new shows and games that I wanted to check out in the future.

For me, a highlight of my convention experience was going to a Kingdom Hearts panel and getting to be in a room with at least fifty other people that all adored the series.  It was just an hour of bonding over how amazing the games were and swapping notes about what we wanted out of the next entry in the franchise.  If I have the opportunity to go to an event again in the future, I would love to attend a lot more panels for my favorite interests, just so I could meet some more like-minded people.

That’s it for day three!  I hope that I’ll be able to make it to more conventions in the future, as the last one that I went to was a lot of fun.  Definitely make sure to check out A Geeky Gal’s response to her own question here and maybe consider taking part in the challenge.  What is your favorite convention experience?  Let me know in the comments below!

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