Ohayocon 2024: So far, Unsinkable.

Or maybe just still afloat. POTEMKIN! POTEMKIN! POTEMKIN!

I’ve been very critical of Ohayocon over these past few years. Maybe too critical. In my defense, I am a hater. A professional hater, even. Through an odd turn of fate, I ended up attending this convention despite claiming the opposite. I had a lot of fun, and made a lot of new friends.¹ I’ll probably go back again just to see if the ship finally sinks.

Real Quick, A Recap:

Ohayocon has been around for a few decades now. They’ve had schisms and issues in the past; one of these resulting in the now well established Matsuricon. There’s been some animosity between the owners and the volunteers for some time, and it all came to a head at the tail end of 2023. A bunch of volunteers and attendees decided to boycott the 2024 convention due to a number of staff being let go/fired early, a dispute over the logo that involved copyright infringement with the red cross and an insurance company, and longstanding animosity. This resulted in the volunteers unionizing, despite the fact that most of them weren’t actually employees, so such a thing didn’t work. The whole thing seems to be rooted in deep misunderstandings and the current culture war this country has found itself in for the past decade. No one on either side of the conflict has ever given me a straight answer as to how it started, and the real nature of the conflict was only revealed to me weeks later by an uninvolved third party. Attendance was down at Ohayocon 24, and despite the con being a lot of fun, it was to be the last con at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. The circus packed up and moved an an hour West to Dayton.

Dayton, the Ravaged City

If I had a nickel for every time a Columbus area convention moved to Dayton and then began to die, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. With the current con leadership at the helm², I’m sure this plane will miss Dayton and slam right into the LeVeque. Or the One World Trade Center.

-StuGLyfe

I made this post a few days after the move was announced. I was incredibly disappointed at the move as a Columbus native. It was the one fun thing that happens in this city in late January, and now it was all the way out in Dayton, arguably the worst major city in the whole state. It’s a dying city, filled with abandoned buildings and forgotten industry. Don’t get me wrong, Columbus is hardly a looker, but Dayton is most definitely an eyesore. The attached hotel to the convention center is nearly abandoned, and the interior is nearly bare save for a handful of curtains. The convention hotel is a few miles down the road, and was only accessible via a charter bus. I had no interest in going and was content with skipping it up until the Thursday before the convention.

My Experience

That Thursday, I was getting drunk and shitposting. It had not even occurred to me that the convention even was that week, I was more preoccupied with a mountain of medical bills and a hearing problem that the doctors seemingly could not assist with. I was on my fifth bottle of mead when I got a text from a gentleman I had not met before; he and I had a mutual friend that ran an anime discord server. He graciously and selflessly offered to drive the hour and a half to my home from his own and allow me to sleep on his couch for the con. I was damn near broke and very inebriated, but I needed the adventure. I’ve never been one to pass up the opportunity to do something stupid for the chance at getting a good story out of it, and even in my diminished state, I decided that I would stay true to my nature and see where this could take me. After hastily throwing my bag together and making myself as presentable as possible, he pulled up outside my door and we drove off into the night.

For the sake of his privacy, we’ll call him Jerry. Within the course of an hour, I could tell that he was a good guy. He’s recently married, financially stable, and hopefully, content with his current life. We spoke about some of our shared work experiences, our favorite anime, and the con itself. He’s a stand up dude, and any good that comes his way, he has most definitely earned.³ After arriving at his house, we had a few drinks and eventually went to bed. His two cats made it apparent that night that I was sleeping on their bed, and that they would use me as a step to get up to the windowsill to peer out into the street.

At the event itself, we met some great people and did some wild shit. During lunch on Friday, we saw that there was a pipe wrench hanging out of the ceiling, with a handful of people standing around gawking at it. Being a couple of strapping young guys, he picked me up and I managed to free the pipe wrench from the ceiling. It was our trophy for the rest of the day; we quoted the engineer from Team Fortress 2 every time we referred to it. The dealers room was surprisingly well equipped, Jerry ended up buying a few hundred dollars worth of figures and I got my hands on a model tank.

The people we met were nothing short of legendary. We had a couple of drinks with a man who glowed so bright, you could see him from space. I got to see Rob Mungle again, voice actor for Amanojaku in the English dub of Ghost Stories. Jerry and I found some like-minded individuals, and turned out Gruesome Twosome into a Four-Sum Goresum. I stayed up until 2 AM playing YuGiOh with people I had just met earlier that day. I got to dance with women so skimpily clad it would shimmer you blind; it was like walking into a gooner’s modded Skyrim game. Here in a few weeks, after people recover from the show, I plan to do my best to reach out to them and see if I can’t organize a game night or something.⁴

We rounded out our first night with Shinichi Watanabe, the famous director of the greatest comedy anime of all time, Excel Saga. I could write an entire article on this man; he is as close to an Anime Yogi or Guru as you can get, while also being a talented artist, comedian, and director. He is always a pleasure to interact with, and even if you haven’t seen his works, I would highly recommend attending any and all of his panels and presentations.

What happens now?

The con rocked, but as a wise man once said, “Even the worst of video games can be fun if there’s two of you playing.” To many, the future of Ohayocon is still in doubt. I didn’t stick around for the closing ceremonies, but I could see that attendance was much lower than last year. This very well could have been the last Ohayocon. We may not know for awhile. Ohayocon used to my home con, and now it’s my home con away from home. It still feels a little like home, but it might not be like that for much longer. Whether or not I attend next year, if there is still a con to attend, is still up in the air.

The purpose of a convention is to convene. That means coming together, watching, discussing, making friends, meeting new people. Attendees cannot convene if the owners and volunteers cannot convene. What happened to Ohayocon is what happens when that convening breaks down or doesn’t happen at all. Instead of one great con in a major city, we have two mediocre cons in two tiny towns, one of which doesn’t even have an airport. We may soon have two shitty cons, or no cons at all. Who wins in this scenario? Did the people responsible for this incident not understand that this would happen? At some point leaders have to step up, get their subordinates in line, and allow cooler heads to prevail. People lower on the totem pole need to understand when their leaders are doing something wrong, and if at all possible, inform them respectfully of what they are doing wrong. Sometimes the grunts have to take responsibility for their leaders and not pass the buck.⁵

Not gonna lie, this was very funny. btw stop reading here

If you’ve followed my writing, you knew this comparison was coming, prepare yourself: An Anime Convention is not unlike a System of Government.⁶ The officials in control must do their jobs and work with people that they don’t like, or may disagree with them. If they don’t work together and shirk their duties, nothing gets done, and the citizens of the country are the people that suffer for it. We are seeing the effects of a culture war manifest in a space almost exclusively created for the sake of escapism. If that is not a symptom of how deeply divided we are, I don’t know what is.

1. Be on the lookout for How to Make Friends as a Strange Adult Part 2 soon-ish.

2. The same could be said of the pinkos- I mean, people who organized Sekaicon.

3. He also looks a lot like a friend of mine in high school. The resemblance is almost uncanny.

4. That’s right. Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Local Town Hard Lads, The B-Tec Boys, might be back.

5. You can stop reading here, if you want.

6. I warned you.