The Anime USA convention returned for another year at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City (Arlington), VA from September 22-24, 2023 despite being waylaid by Tropical Storm/Depression Ophelia. This is the second year since returning to the Crystal City location after the previous venue in DC became a COVID casualty and closed down. As with previous outings, Anime USA definitely has its ups and downs.

As a small convention many attendees may like its cozy atmosphere and smaller, more manageable crowds. It offered attendees most of the things that one would come to expect at an anime convention and it pretty much delivers that except for one major distinction: this convention does not do cosplay gathering coordination. The hotel and convention center itself is a small venue so there really isn’t anywhere inside the venue for cosplayers to gather to hold photoshoots of their fandoms, and there really isn’t anywhere immediately outside the venue for that to take place either. I was kind of hoping that maybe the Anime USA staff would come up with some creative way to pull this off, but alas it may have been too much to ask for. For many people including myself, these cosplay photoshoot gatherings are what make anime conventions special and not having this definitely hurts the appeal of the event.

Another issue I had with AUSA this year was communication and planning, or sometimes the lack thereof. The release of the schedule and certain communications were kind of done at the last minute, and major announcements were basically only done via their Facebook page (sorry X/Twitter, you’re second fiddle here). This turned out to be a big problem because on Saturday morning they decided to adjust the start time of all of the events taking place in the Main Events for that day and since they only made a single Facebook announcement about it and made no real effort outside of that to get the word out (and it didn’t help that over half of the convention space had zero or extremely spotty cell reception), I arrived at the Masquerade event to discover that I had already missed half of the show which was a huge letdown as the Masquerade is always the highlight of most conventions for me.

Another issue that I had took place during the “So You Want to be a Voice Actor?” panel where they had a Q&A with five invited industry voice actor guests. The panel that was scheduled before them ran over their allotted time so the voice actor panel started a little late, and then towards the end of the panel one of the staffers cut the panel short saying that the next panel had a lot of audio/visual equipment to set up and needed to basically kick this panel out to make time for them. To me, this was extremely shocking and disrespectful. They made no attempts to kick out the previous panel who was running late and now they want to kick out a panel with actual invited guests of honor to the convention to make room for the next panel coming in because they needed more setup time? That’s not the voice actors’ fault that another panel needs more setup time and I sincerely hope that the convention staff apologized to those guests who were basically treated as second class citizens.

But hey, you know what was really cool at this convention? Doggies. Cute, frickin’, Shiba Inu doggies. There was a panel on the history of the Shiba Inu and was co-hosted by the DC Shiba Inu Rescue who brought in two Shiba Inu’s for people to fawn over which was a real treat. It was just too bad that I couldn’t stay for the second part of the panel where they turned over to the Akita doggies.

In the end, Anime USA is what it is. It’s a small anime convention that is a great place for those who want the smaller, more interpersonal atmosphere but lacks the polish that a larger, better managed convention may have. The lack of focus on cosplay is a major detriment to me and combined with the smaller offerings of guests, panels, and events it is really hard for me to justify coming back to AUSA unless they really hit it out of the park with an amazing list of guests.

Small gallery of photos from Anime USA this year: