40 days until Anime Weekend Atlanta
For at least a certain percentage of college-educated millennials, college was itself a second childhood. It’s a sentiment I’ve seen online. My friends and I are not the only people in our demographic slice to have held the embers of well-loved childhood hobbies through the tough parts of adolescence and stumbled into college to discover like-minded peers who would embrace rather than mock those interests.
Doubtless, we weren’t the first, and we weren’t the last to have this experience. I’ve read enough web comics and Reddit threads, though, to understand it was a core part of the nerdy zeitgeist of the last decade.
So my friends and I spent the 2010s eating fast food and spending too much money on comics and action figures and video games. (Hell, some of us are still doing that. But our budgets and belts are tighter than they seemed to be then.) We discovered new hobbies together, treasured old ones, told horribly mean jokes, embarrassed ourselves a time or two hundred, did most of our sleeping during daylight hours, terrorized our university’s student center, occasionally went to class (and still made decent grades mostly), and we started going to conventions.
Others went a-conning before me, but my first convention was Kami-Con 2013 in Birmingham, Alabama. We stayed with a friend’s grandmother, I danced atrociously at the rave, and I believe I accidentally insulted Vic Mignogna when he was within earshot. (I have come to regret that last part less and less with every passing year.)
Like a lot of things from my teens and early twenties, I started going because there would be girls there, and then discovered there was other life-giving stuff afoot.. I’ve gotten better with age, I promise.
I loved my first convention. It was strange and awkward and sometimes uncomfortable. I bought a bunch of junk because it was junk I’d never seen before. My friendships with the people I went to the convention with grew and changed in unexpected ways. I felt like a part of a community that was, for me, defined by my tight-knit group of nerdy friends in the Deep South but expanded beyond them in ways that the Internet didn’t prepare me for. It was a brave, new world with such people in it.
I wasn’t sure it would be a must-do the next year, but then the main cast of Cowboy Bebop was set to attend in 2014. I couldn’t not be there.
So we loaded up. This time we stayed at the convention hotel. I went to more panels. I was a little shrewder with my money. It was even better. There were strange incidents. There is a story from this convention that I still tell 12 years later.
The hooks were in, and I needed more. One of my best friends was returning from a year-ish studying abroad in China. I had heard legends of this Anime Weekend Atlanta. We were in. There are also stories from this trip that we still tell years later.
This is where the convention began to become pilgrimage. Some group of us has been to every Anime Weekend Atlanta for over a decade. Of course, 2020 was online, but I still sat in on a panel to mark the occasion. Only two of us made it last year. It was the only year I’ve missed.
I graduated college in 2015. More then most of us were out in the real world, and AWA was shaping up to be our new home base, a vital anchor to the Way We Were.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first several years of our regular attendance, AWA fell toward the end of September. In the Deep South, that meant that we left our sleepy college town in a late summer evening, drove through the dark to what felt like an isolated village of nerds on the outer bubble of Atlanta, and then one Sunday afternoon stepped out into the first breath of autumn and traveled home to the shamelessly nerdy season of Halloween.
The changing of the seasons, the changing seasons of our lives, steady patterns giving meaning and continuity to those changes. That’s the stuff dreams are made of.
Through 2023, AWA was at the Cobb Galleria Centre and the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly Hotel. For the first few years of our attendance the Braves were either not yet in residence or, alas, not terribly relevant at the time of the con.
The convention complex sits just within the perimeter defined by 285, but for us (or at the very least for me) the feeling was that we were in a bubble. There was the hotel atrium, the cavernous convention halls, the strange, timeless, half empty Cobb Specialty Shoppes, the bridge to the Cumberland Mall with Cinnabon and Ted’s Montana Grill, and eventually our bubble expanded to include the Battery.
This was a walkable city populated primarily by people who shared our interests. It was raucous and sexy with showy cosplay and drunken dancing (not, usually, by us). It was strange and awkward with people living much different lives than our own elbow-to-elbow in the vendor hall and the lobby party. We ate too much, we spent too much, we stayed up too late. We deepened the bonds of friendship and sometimes were bold enough to make new ones.
There is something magical about seeing events like a convention come to life on Thursday, blaze with activity day and night for days, and then quietly pack up and vanish Sunday evening. Arriving in the calm before the storm of the nerd bacchanal and leaving on Monday as the Home Depot annual event classes up the joint is something. Perhaps a uniquely capitalist experience, but it leaves an impression.
Eventually, our trips became arriving late Wednesday night and getting in early for Thursday activities. Catch-as-catch-can dinner on Thursday night with whoever is already in town. Friday was the vendor hall and the mall food court. Friday night dinner happened somewhere in the midst, but there was also people watching and grown up panels to go to. Saturday was the main event. I’d get up early, do my rounds in the vendor hall, usually catch a panel, then hold court in the food court for much of the afternoon. Saturday night was a big dinner with as many of us as we could get together in one place then usually watching the ravers from a safe distance. Then Sunday was full of goodbyes and safe travels, and my traveling party would eat a quiet post-con dinner and watch the con go away before heading off to bed for a Monday on the road. Often the return leg of the journey featured dinner with friends who didn’t make the trip, and that was special, too.
This pattern developed over time, gained and lost form, but settled into a fine set of traditions that have been, to me at least, as important to my year as Christmas.
Suffice it to say, the psychic imprint of those first few years made AWA an anchor, a bastion in the midst of adulthood. I did some important growing up there, too. Had a few tough conversations. Learned to embrace the strangeness of the stranger and get over some dated notions of my own. I’m also much better at spending too much money. Haven’t regretted a con purchase since before COVID.
Now, AWA is at the World Congress Center, and it is certainly different. It is hard to feel like we are encapsulated in a city-within-a-city just for anime nerds when we are in downtown Atlanta, but at least in 2024, the magic wasn’t gone. My friends are still there. It is still our season of pilgrimage.
I don’t know if I have really made my case here. I think this is an only slightly structured ramble so I’ll say a bit more.
Since we first got the hint AWA would be moving, we’ve started making summer trips to the ol’ home place, in part to dip our toes in the water of memory. The Galleria and the Waverly are alive in my mind and full of faces, some I haven’t seen in years and some I will never see again in life. Even without those familiar corridors, the gathering and traditions we share at AWA bring those faces back to the fore.
I could tell stories. I could talk about how our friend Default is expressly forbidden from going to AWA with us but is a staple of our summer trips to Atlanta.
But I’ll say this instead. I love my friends and my hobbies and the celebration of both of those things I get to have once a year in whatever form it comes in. I love the way it has helped shape the last decade of my life and bring a steady rhythm to the tumultuous changing of the world’s season. I have spent too much and ate too much and slept too little and occasionally made some irresponsible choices just to be there, and I’d do them all again in a heartbeat.
Until next time.
