NekoCon 2019 Convention Report
/The Hampton Roads Convention Center
This past weekend I traveled down to Hampton, VA to attend my second NekoCon anime convention which took place from November 1-3, 2019. This year NekoCon 22 was scheduled for the same weekend as Anime USA which I had been attending annually since 2011. It was a hard decision to make as to which convention to go to but in the end I chose to go to NekoCon just for one day on Saturday.
My trip down to Hampton was unfortunately marred by various delays so I arrived at the convention center much later than I had anticipated. This meant that I missed out on voice actress Mela Lee’s morning panel which I had intended to go to. Given that it was now lunchtime I decided to walk downtown to find some food. One of the nice things about the Hampton location is the number of food options there are within a reasonable walking distance (even has a Vietnamese cuisine option with Pho 79, always a plus in my book!).
Anyways, back at the convention center I hit up the LAVA Lite panel featuring the Loud, Annoying, and Very Annoying voice actor gang of Ray Chase, Robbie Daymond, and Max Mittelman. The trio is always good for a bunch of laughs as they went through a bunch of “mini games” (that’s the closest term i can think of) which often involved audience participation. Later in the afternoon I also attended a lecture by Charles Dunbar about the Japanese views on death and Hell. In all my years going to anime conventions I’ve always wanted to sit in on at least one of Charles Dunbar’s panels but never quite got the chance to. I hear that Mr. Dunbar may be retiring or at least reducing his convention appearances in the future so this may have been my last chance to do so (I also went and bought a copy of all of his books).
The Dealer’s Room and Artist Alley weren’t very large but had a number of interesting things to buy. They even had a Wild Bill’s Olde Fashion Soda Pop stand there which was cool. I definitely tried to get my money’s worth of refills. The video game room didn’t have any arcade machines but seemed to make up for it by having a lot of variety in the video game and PC machines available to play on. And finally I ended my night by going to the cosplay Masquerade contest. They started kind of late but it was nice to enjoy a random group of people burst out singing to 4 Non Blonde’s “What’s Up? (What’s Going On)” while we were waiting in line and having a lot of people in line joining them in the chorus parts. There was a lot of variety to the Masquerade skits and weren’t all just idol song and dance routines (which is becoming the norm) so that was a nice change of pace too.
All in all the mid-sized convention is a pretty fun, if not quaint and relaxing, experience. They did have organized, scheduled cosplay photoshoot gatherings that are coordinated by the con although I noticed that most of them didn’t have a very large number of cosplayers attending them. I’m not sure if they just aren’t advertised enough or if attendees don’t know that they are on the schedule or what, but it was kind of odd to see so few cosplayers showing up for a lot of the photoshoots.
Speaking of the schedule, I’m not a huge fan of the Sched app that NekoCon uses instead of the more popular Guidebook app. The Sched app is just really lacking in a lot of features (no maps, no hours of operation or convention info, no easy way to see what’s going on at that moment, etc). And if I’m going to start nitpicking about things I also would have to say that I’m not a fan of NekoCon’s policy of asking the attendees to write their real name and phone number on the back of their membership badge. I know the purpose is to help an attendee who has lost their badge to hopefully recover it, but telling the attendees to write their personal information on the badge which can (and will) get photographed and published publicly on social media for all to see is not a safe thing to do.
In the end it may have just been for one day but I still had a decent time while I was there.
Click here to go to my YouTube channel where I uploaded my video recording of the Masquerade contest.