I live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and recently started helping a good friend of mine and his wife who have a small side business selling vintage toys and comic books at small conventions. I had stopped going to most Conventions for a while. A couple of years back the guy who ran the major ones in this area sold to Fan Expo and it wasn't as fun as it once was. I am loving going to the small conventions because you get to interact with legit fans and talk about sci-fi/fantasy or comic books.
I used to have it on my bucket list to one day go to the San Diego con or the annual Star Trek convention in Vegas but they seem to (like so many others) have stopped catering to actual fans and are more interested in the woke garbage. Panels about more diversity/women in gaming or how evil nerd culture is doesn't cut it for me.
Kind of reminds me of my beloved Sci-Fi channel. It came out when I was 10 or 11 and I loved it because as a sci-fi nerd, it seemed to be a channel for people who liked sci-fi. Now like so many other nerd sites it has turned into the usual fake geek hangout. I stopped going on the syfy channel website when the lady reviewing Brightburn complained about white supremacy and the evil white male nonsense.
The last SDCC I went to was 2015. I just lost interest after that. I don't miss cons at all. I had 5 day tickets to go to 2020 SDCC and I was actually relieved that it got canceled and I was able to get a full refund.
When the movie industry started taking notice of SDCC it didn't take long for it to become shit. Same with Fan Expo.
Smaller and Independent conventions are the only ones worth going to. The hosts need to be actual fans (and not woke) instead of just being in it for profit. Having a strong independent creator section is also probably a good sign, where possible (not possible with vintage toys). These conventions also have much more fair pricing.
Even the major studios started to abandon SDCC right before 2020. Disney was going to stop doing panels entirely and instead focus on their own D23 Expo. Warner Bros was going to follow suit. The major studios were starting to realize that they were getting incorrect data points from SDCC. SDCC was telling them that Snakes on a Plane and Scott Pilgrim were going to be hits, but they were both flops. The comic book industry is just starting to realize that Twitter is the same - that pandering to the Twitter and Tumblr crowd is pointless because those communities are a very small but very vocal minority that does not even pay for content.
they are still marginally popular, though... so its not entirely a bad reading.
' ive had enough of these mother fuckin jannies on my mother fuckin subrddit'
Don’t blame you. If I wasn’t getting paid to help him I wouldn’t go. I can have as much fun at the used book store
You dont miss the holier than thou rapists that run most of these woke cons?