Anime NYC 2021 Convention Report - Lines For Days
/Throngs of people waiting to enter the Javits convention center late Sunday morning.
After taking 2020 off and holding an online-only convention due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Anime NYC promised to return bigger and with a bang in 2021. They were certainly bigger as they drew 53,000 attendees (two-and-a-half times larger than the 20K crowd from its first year in 2017) and they certainly had an impactful bang, just not the kind that they wanted. Everywhere you went there were lines, lines for miles, lines for days.
Anime NYC has historically been bad at line management and coming up with a sensible plan for funneling its attendees through the security checkpoints. This year it was made even worse by the ongoing COVID pandemic and the mandate that all attendees had to show proof of vaccination in order to enter the facility. It is understandable that the extra step of validating one’s vaccination status would slow down the process of getting attendees through the door. However, anyone could have seen that having just one or two vaccination checkpoints and trying to funnel literally tens of thousands of people through the scant checkpoints would be a recipe for disaster. And a disaster it was on Friday morning as some people ended up having to wait over four hours out in the cold weather to get through the door. Things got so bad at one point that a group of attendees decided to mob rush an entrance which caused the convention center to hastily set up a checkpoint there in order to distribute the neon-orange wristbands that showed your verified vaccination status. And if those long lines weren’t bad enough, the lack of communication or direction from staff or security just made the situation more chaotic. The lines on Friday wrapped up and down several city blocks. These lines were formed organically without any direction from Anime NYC staff which meant that people were constantly cutting in line at the street intersections (often times unintentionally).
All this chaos made Anime NYC to hastily draw up a new plan for Saturday (which at this point seems to be the normal modus operandi for this convention). This involved three color-coded lines based on whether or not you have a badge and/or an orange vaccination wristband. Those who had both were put into the “Red” line which allowed them to go into the convention center when the doors opened at 8am and wait inside a holding area until the convention officially opened its doors at 10am. Of course this holding area was all the way on the other side of the Javits center and naturally had some attendees running full speed across the entire length of the convention center in order to get in line for certain merchant booths that had limited merchandise. This system definitely worked better than the chaotic mess that was Friday, although there were still long lines outside the convention center during Saturday and Sunday mornings just due to the sheer number of attendees.
And during all of this chaos with lines to get into the convention center, things were hampered by lack of communication among the staff and security guards. Often times they either didn’t know what lines or entrances you needed to go to, or they would give you conflicting information. This included an instance Saturday evening when they inexplicably closed off all entrances to the convention center and each security guard pointed to a different entrance where they were supposedly letting people in.
Unfortunately the lines didn’t end with just trying to get into the convention center. They also extended to the waiting lines to get into panels and events and in some cases the lines for popular booths like Mihoyo’s HoyoFest (more on that in a second). Anime NYC only held a limited number of events and panels and some of them were predictably very popular. Unfortunately many of the lines for these events were capped off an hour or even two hours before the event was even scheduled to take place. Some historically popular panels like the Fate/Grand Order panel were inexplicably placed in smaller panel rooms which caused the lines to cap far earlier than they should have. Finally, some events like the My Hero Academia Live Concert required a free ticket to enter but those tickets were acquired first-come-first-serve online which predictably “sold out” quickly and led to tickets being scalped for a profit. I don’t pretend to have the answers to solve the size issue of this convention, but it has definitely grown to the point that they really need to utilize the entire Javits center and need to increase the size of their panel rooms.
And if I may, I’d also really like to rant about the HoyoFest merchandise booth that was run by Mihoyo (maker of Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact). As if the long lines at this convention weren’t enough, the lines to purchase merchandise at Mihoyo’s booth was equally atrocious. Despite knowing just how popular they would be, the booth inexplicably only had one (and sometimes two) cashiers set up to take orders. This led to excruciatingly long wait times. And to make matters worse, there was zero communication from the staff to let the people in line know if certain merchandise were sold out. You could literally wait 2-3 hours in that line just to get to the window and find out that your time was completely wasted because everything was sold out.
This year’s Anime NYC may not be the most chaotic line-con in existence (Anime Expo probably still holds that crown), but the poor planning, management, and communication is simply inexcusable. There were certainly lots good things that happened this past weekend: a lot of good panels, events, screenings, and cosplay gatherings happened. It certainly was not a complete waste of time and money but they really need to get their head out of their ass and either hire or recruit people who understand basic logistics in order to avoid the chaos that is quite frankly completely avoidable.
It was a tiring, trying time at Anime NYC this year. I most likely will continue to go to future ANYC’s but they really need to figure out how to serve a crowd as large as this one.
You can check out my YouTube channel where I uploaded my video recording of the Lupin the 3rd English Cast Q&A panel and also a full recording of the cosplay Masquerade contest.