written by Axe Binondo, paid for by the Deep Hell Patreon

Heartbeats. The echoes of wooden paddles from a bygone era, bruising the ass of anyone cosplaying an anime twink. The anguished guitar tone of a Japanese band playing their first US show at an American anime convention. Can you hear it? It’s all here at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Hub City. The Healthcare City. No Funswick. New Brunswick, New Jersey.

It’s also a 20 fucking minute drive away at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center in Edison, NJ. New Jersey’s largest anime convention AnimeNEXT is back after a long COVID induced absence and some public squabbling with the prior venue’s new management. Over 400 booths of artist alley and vendors flooded the convention center while thirty-three hours of back-to-back panels, performances, contests, and game shows went off across both venues. On paper, it was a five Yaois out of five, but it felt more like a phantom of a convention; three years of massively trending franchises with no physical release crashing into each other resulting in shit like multiple people slapping Chainsaw Man chainsaws on various recently popularized characters.

What’s the point of anime conventions anymore?. At an earlier stage of culture, before anime conventions took off, there were only a few hundred anime series in existence and you could only watch whatever your local bootlegger or the national anime fan clubs let loose into the ecosystem. Only a small number of freaks caught a select few releases that made it to television proper before VHS rings blew up. And in either case, you either needed to be middle-class yourself or know enough middle-class folks who had the time and income to blow on getting the necessary goods with a VHS player and a television running you more than a PS5 considering inflation. Given the fact that there are magnitudes more anime series and an increasing amount of platforms to view them legally and illegally now, this need is pretty moot.

Another raison d’etre could be delayed adolescence sexual awakenings. So many speak fondly about conventions past as if they were some kind of college sex comedy playground. These people, usually graduates of their twenty-somethings, probably still come back to the convention hotels like a swingers club. It’s really difficult to envision young people having even a PG rated meet-cute at this year’s AnimeNEXT. Fucking like animals has left the culture while a maddening sense of surveillance, starting with confusing anti-photography signage and ending with reports of a staff member manhandling whoever at the main event hall, has invaded. No one here is getting laid, despite my mating call of playing Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari in the retro gaming room. If you reach out your hand to try and touch the spirit of fellow freaks selling CharMuro prints, you’re going to get a fistful of recent Jump hits and Toonami-core classics instead.

For various social obligations and general indignation against the conditions of the event, I found myself coming and going from the con multiple times despite having paid for the weekend nearly a year ago. With the event being in a somewhat small city and one which I am intimately and eternally entrenched in, it felt like a simple right of mine to come and go. Friday night, I left the AMV contest screening after the “Dramatic/Serious” category concluded. I went about a mile and a half outside downtown New Brunswick to a house show where my friends’ band was playing their last show after about five years of activity. I walked up to the house and was immediately greeted by close friends, new friends and old friends. It was a lovely, sentimental, cinematic, dingy and extraordinarily normal event. Everyone talked about their day or music they’re listening to. I spoke highly about the AMV screening amidst the nightmarish time I and other attendees have already reported about the con on the first day.  Kissies played their set. Right before, they told us that it’d be twenty minutes and my friend and partner of the guitarist said “damn that’s long.”

The following morning I was scheduled to attend a friend’s belated wedding party. The couple had a small ceremony a year ago and not much of a gathering given the conditions of the pandemic. I had to plan an outfit that could easily melt into the con and the party where I assumed a number of white middle class folk would be. I don’t think I did a very good job, but I brought the amazon cat girl cat ears headband I keep around the house for fun along with a fake bamboo shinai I had made for a class in undergrad to toss on before I returned to the con. It was a delight to meet my friend’s wife and to see him, his sister, and other friends I had not seen for years. But Japanime calls me for bittersweet goodbyes.

Pictures taken at a homemade photobooth at the party

Directly from kind-of-out-there western New Jersey with budding heat poisoning and a 2 day dehydration combo, I returned to the Hyatt in New Brunswick and followed the first crowd I could find into a panel. The talk was an attempt to inform attendees about what they were referring to as clip shows and comedy shows generally about young women misbehaving. “Clip show” here is a misused expression referring to slice of life or sketch based comedy when it is generally codified as recap shows or shows or episodes made with reused footage. Its usage promptly flung me back into the trenches of late 2000s /a/ and gaia forums. Shellshocked and mostly ignoring this silly distinction, I could not withstand the damage done to me when they began citing Azumanga Daioh (2002) as the first show about clown women when Urusai Yatsura (1981) or even just Sailor Moon (1992) punch at my soul daily. I wonder what kind of indifferent and uncaring panel approval board nodded through this proposal to this as I quietly excuse myself.

Another panel I wanted to attend was dangerously overlapping with the Blue Encount set, so I headed back to my car. Due to an electrical issue, I’ve been disconnecting my negative battery terminal every time I park my car to prevent battery drain. I drive a 2006 Volvo XC90, so I have to first climb over my front seat to my middle seat to unlock the next door before climbing into the trunk from the newly unlocked middle seat to access the battery stored in my trunk. This ordeal gave me a bit of time to discover that the arcade area at the convention center proper closed already, an hour before the Blue Encount set time, and that my friend who I was going to meet up with had left early, a little too day drunk from lack of much else going on at the convention center. So I instead took my car over to the longest continually operated independent arcade in America where I frequently play mostly the same games that would have been at the con. Poking at the convention’s Discord, the start times with Blue Encount were fucked and the DJs that followed them cleared out a significant head count in under ten minutes. I scarfed down a cheap cheese steak from the arcade counter after a few credits and took my leave for the night.

Sunday morning, I finally headed to the convention center proper. That morning I tried to toss together a mid-2000s comical otaku cosplay but settled on one of my Gundam x UT tees as I don’t own a single plaid button up let alone two.

How to be an otaku

How to be an otaku.s (Alt text: An individual with lines to labels drawn to itemize their outfit like an anatomical chart. The top of the image reads “I AM OTAKU”)

I tried my hand at the actual paved convention lot where I drove past someone selling limited edition Master Grade and non-standard scale gunpla out of their trunk before I settled on the dirt lot a quarter mile up the road. The lot resembled the kind of quarry they often use for tokusatsu shows. Cosplayers were not as excited about this coincidence as I was. I personally thought it and the rest of the venue was a pretty workable outdoor locale for photos, so maybe any New Jersey cosplayers on a budget should hit me up for a shoot next year. The Grind Never Ends.

inside, the border between artist alley, the section housing independent artists selling original art, and the dealers room, people or whole businesses selling whatever, is blurred in ways that are probably not great for the artists. The voice actors’ booths sit right along this line where people mull past them awkwardly without eye contact. I do the same as I, respectfully, have zero business with English dub actors. Some people are lined up to speak with Ray Hurd who’s biggest role I can ID is Kizaru in One Piece, but a later muffled announcement about signing events doesn’t seem to get anyone around me excited about any of the other guests. I do laps holding my breath for prints of Amuro Ray and Char Aznable making out or otherwise fucking before grabbing a HG Re-GZ and AGE-1 Full Glasna as consolation prizes. Strolling past the cosplay chess where an emcee is making fun of Travis Touchdown’s beam katana by calling it a lightsaber, I finally reach the arcade.

Con cabs are usually in dubious condition, often designated as dedicated cabs for traveling to different events, and rare finds for American arcades like Maimai DX or Ongeki are absent from the spread provided by Save Point. For some reason I am happy to queue for the games I can play whenever the hell I want while sharing a line with people who probably are playing for the first time ever or only get to play these games at other conventions. I am better than the average player at rhythm games but I am not exceptional, so I am maybe here for the thrill of playing in front of a different crowd more so than showing off. I queue twice for Pop’n Music, a game I’ve been playing on-and-off for almost six years now, absolutely eat shit with a B grade on a 45 and doubly so on a 46 (the game’s difficulty terminates at 50). A line exceeding an hour hangs over the Taiko cab throughout each of my laps around the venue and I have one last panel to catch at the other venue so I get the fuck out of the convention center before the Victory Gundam Blu-rays I spotted earlier chew a hole in my pocket.

My penultimate drive for the weekend and a budding case of sun poisoning carry me back to the brain of the country, the seat of American culture, Hub City, for a panel almost hilariously called “Older Than VHS: Gen-X Recollection of the Early Days of American Anime Fandom”. I weasel in thirty minutes late and if you couldn’t see the fading trails of conventions past before, you could certainly see it here. This panel, hosted by Brian Price, Walter Amos, and Rob Fenelon, needs to be required to enter anime conventions. The three discuss the trajectory of organized anime communities and the birth of the anime convention. With fewer shows available in circulation in far fewer places, the community was more focused on shared subjects but far more disparate. Cons, fanworks, or simply meeting people interested required monumental and intentional organizational work to get the word out to the right people. Fanzines were born and they would actually meet their audience unlike the Gatchaman Crowds fanzine I’m trying to cook up in my head.

A big idea trying to push through the panelists constant reminders that Star Blazers was really important to early anime fan community, was that early conventions had very explicit and specific purposes. They served a community that had, generally, shared interests and principles instead of trying to appeal to the most general possible community member. This is a concern that I have for all of the communities I’m in which have had their continuity threatened since Covid first struck in 2020. The panel never really congeals into a thesis about this, instead ending on the trio showing old photos from historically significant early anime cons. And that’s okay, because new problems need new minds to solve the problem. I depart alone, not quite brought into the fold of what anyone could call the New Jersey anime but much more hopeful something could exist.