My Life In Fandom: Shit Like This Is Why Fan Cons Die

If you aren't following Nick Rekieta on YouTube and Twitter, you should. This lawyer delivers, and last night was another livestream following the #KickVic stupidity.

Put simply, the folks running these fan conventions are not the professionals they think and say that they are. It's no different than the convention committees I've seen here in the Twin Cities fan con scene; it's a bunch of amateurs cargo-culting their way through it all, with a handful who have a goddamn clue keeping the edifice together as best they can. Nick, if you see this, you would be surprised just how commonplace the stupidity you're seeing with anime fan cons is throughout the con scene in North America.

It's no surprise to me that the SJWs who attacked Vic Mignogna feel confident, however delusional, that they can weather the reaction just fine. Nick's seeing the sort of influence that they have over the people who run these things, and the sorts of fuckups who run them. The same sorts of wankers, losers, and wanna-bees run fan cons across the country. It's been a thing for so long, intergenerational now, that we even have a phrase for them: "Secret Masters of Fandom", "SMOF" for short.

If actual professionals, competent and knowledgeable, ran these cons then this bullshit and all the other abuses and stupidities would stop. Why? Because you'd have someone on hand with the sense to say "Hold up, let's talk about this with a lawyer." before getting roped into this bullshit. Why? Because, like it or not, conventions are a business and need to be handled accordingly and that does include non-profit operations. Allowing unprofessional behavior to go unchecked is not good for business, yet it is too often the case because amateurs care more about the approval of those who they court over their primary responsibility to produce a smoothly-operating event.

With "talent" like this, I can see why most of those who could do this properly find it too bothersome to be worthwhile and instead go do something more rewarding. Considering that most fan cons are already rendered obsolete by the Internet, I can tell you now that not going HAM on these SJWs will only accelerate the collapse of fan cons as a thing, and that's before more scandalous things like abetting child abuse (and other open secrets in the SF fan con scene).

Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Livestreams and Internet sales do all that con appearances do, but cheaper and easier with superior security. Let the cons die in a fire.