There is nothing quite like the experience of a convention. This year I got to go to ConnectiCon 2016 in Hartford, CT, the first convention I've ever been to. I had a lot of fun, and though I was so overwhelmed that I did not get to see many panels (only 1), I had a great time.
The Con (for short) began July 7th, mainly for pre-registration, and ran thru the 10th, at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. I had to work so I missed pre-registration and the first half of the day on the 8th, but my fiancee(which I only just learned how to spell) and I arrived around 4 pm. After waiting in line and getting my badge, I ascended the escalator to the Con floor, and I was immediately in awe. While not nearly as extravagant as San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) or New York Comic Con (NYCC), CTCon was a sight to see for a Con newb like me. Since CTCon focused on all pop culture, as opposed to a focus on comics, like SDCC and NYCC, or electronic entertainment, like E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), I saw people cosplaying from Pokemon to Game of Thrones to HALO and more. Many anime characters that I did not recognize. I did not dress up for the first day of Con, as I wanted to just see what was up.
The first part of Con that I got to see was a gaming floor, where people had space to play test various board, card, and video games. I wandered around the mostly empty (at the time) game floor, where the majority of people were playing League of Legends, Gears of War, HALO: Reach, and Overwatch on both consoles and computers. There was also some fighting games I did not recognize, though I think one was a newer Tekken.
Then there was the Tokyo Attack area. This area is a section of the gaming floor that featured arcade-style games from Japan. There were Dance Dance Revolution games, on-rail shooters, all different kinds of musical rhythm games, and this one little game that reminded me of a mobile game I have on my phone.
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| Puzzles and Dragons Arcade Game?! |
It was a
Puzzles and Dragons arcade game! If you are unfamiliar with the mobile App, it is a matching game, like Candy Crush, where you move colored orbs together to make groups of three or more in order to attack monsters with a team of your own. One of the unique gameplay aspects is that you can move one piece anywhere on the map, instead of just along the horizontal or vertical axes. That said, I greatly enjoyed the brief time I had to play it. My fiancee wanted to see the rest of the convention, so we moved on after I played one game.
We then moved to the vendor floor, where all of the booths are located. It was also where the celebrity guests had booths set up to meet fans and sign autographs. I was instantly was distracted and overwhelmed by the fact that four actors who had played some of my favorite characters on tv and the silver screen where in the same room as me. John Rhys Davies (who played such characters as Sallah in Indiana Jones and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings), Sean Astin (who played Samwise in The Lord of the Rings), Michael Dorn (who played Worf in several Star Trek tv series and movies), and Nana Visitor (who played Kira Nerys in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), and Walter Koenig (the original Chekov from the original Star Trek), were all at there, as were some others I was not familiar with (although whoever does the voice of Spongebob Squarepants was there). I immediately wanted to say hello and ask them questions, but my fiancee urged me to try and finish seeing the things on the show floor. So after some standing around like an awkward con-goer fanboying over celebrities, we checked out the vendors.
How many different ways do you think one can make something Pokémon related, two days after the release of Pokémon GO? Let me tell you... had I had the foresight to take pictures, I would have had one of almost every other vendor booth that wasn't selling niché products like kigurumi (think giant fleece onesies designed to look like an animal or character) or poseable models (Gundams, mostly). From Pokéballs made of chain-mail, to knit and crocheted Pokéballs and Pokémon, to shirts, toys, buttons, stickers, pixel art made of Perler beads. Pokémon was everywhere, and with Pokémon GO having come out just days earlier one Cosplayer we met, dressed as a semi-anthropomorphized Lugia, complained of people trying to "catch" her (another wasted photo op. There were so many good cosplays...)
Apart from the clear Pokémon cash in going on, there were several vendors we talked to. One, whose business is called
Snow's Creations, which sells awesome applique pillows with all sorts of pop culture logos on it from games, shows, anime, and more. She was dressed up as a Vault-Dweller, and at the end of the day, I actually remembered to ask her for a photo!
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Yay Photo Op! She made the Laser Rifle and it's well done! She also has the Collector's Edition
Pip-Boy 3000 that you can put your phone inside and use the Pip Boy App to interact with Fallout 4. |
The rest of that day involved lots of walking around and checking out the rest of the vendors, of which we only managed to see about half, since we spent so much time talking with vendors about their wares that we ran out of time! We did, however, run into a friend of my fiancee's, whose fiancee had a booth! They sold chain-mail goods, including jewelry (and Pokéballs!).
The next day (the 9th), after failing to get up early to be at Con when it opened for the day, my fiancee and I went in costume. I went dressed as Jaehaerys Targaryen, or as everyone else knows him, Jon Snow. "But Shane, who named him-" His mother! I know the books haven't confirmed things, but the show more or less did, so there. Anyway, my fiancee tried her own Daenerys cosplay, wearing a red dress and braiding her hair and doing her best with what we had (dragon earrings!), but I think she ended up looking more like Melisandre, the Red Woman of Volantis. Regardless, we went, and we had a good time. As soon as we got there, we went right up to one of the panels where Nana Visitor and Michael Dorn were going to be fielding questions about Deep Space Nine.
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Nana (left) and Michael (right) answering questions at ConnectiCon 2016
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They had roughly an hour with a large group of fans. I found Nana very gracious about answering questions and sharing her memories and stories about her time on Star Trek, and Michael was witty and teased the fans as they looked for questions to answer. I wondered if Michael, having been portraying Worf for 15 years, plus the near 15 years since, gets tired of talking about the same thing for so long, where as it's only been about 17 years since DS9 ended for Nana. Regardless, I got to ask them both about the relationships their characters had on the show. Nana's character, Kira, has a relationship with an alien shapeshifter called a Changeling named Odo on DS9, and I had heard from reading about the show that she had not liked how the writers developed that relationship in the late seasons of the show, while Michael's character Worf marries a character near the end of the penultimate season, only to ***SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*** have her killed at the end of said season. ***To be fair you've had 16 years to catch up...*** Nana replied that she felt that it would have been better to leave the two characters as close friends, but due to the culture on TV of the 90s, she said any characters that have friction 'have to becomes involved.' She compared it to her rea life relationship with co-star Alexander Siddig (whom she has a son with and is even pregnant with on the show). Her and Siddig were married for a few years, but discovered how different they are and seperated amiably. She would have liked the on screen relationship to have simply left as a friendship. Michael Dorn expressed a sort of regret that they were unable to keep Worf's wife Jadzia Dax's actress, Terry Farrell, on the show for the final year and season, and even said that 'they should have done everything to keep her."
Later that day I got to talk to both of them at their booths on the Con floor, and I got to ask Michael about the airplanes he owns. He was very polite, and when I said I did not want to talk his ear off, he quipped, "But you will." So during the Q&A panel (and from my own research before Con), I learned he liked to fly planes, specifically ex-military jets. So I asked him, what was his favorite, and he said he liked an F-104 Starfighter. That I thought was interesting, considering what he's best known for, but I did not want to mention that. I felt that gushing about Star Trek was the obvious reaction to meeting him, so I thanked him for his time and got to talk to Nana, next. She greeted me with a big smile and a voice I could not imagine was addressing me. You see, compared to Michael, who purposely used a deeper voice when playing Worf than his talking voice, Nana sounded exactly the same. She's also a sweetheart, where Kira was often gruff. That said, she was happy to talk with me, and I asked her about her time on DS9 (because that's why she was there, right?) I asked her about the notion of actors who are very kind in their behavior often playing villains, and how they seem to be able to turn on something and act in ways that make us hate them, using the young man who plays Joffrey in Game of Thrones as an example.
I then got to let my geek flag fly a little higher, as I got to meet John Rhys Davies and get his autograph. He's been in many shows and movies and games that I've enjoyed growing up, so I was thrilled to get to talk to him. Of the three celebrities I got to speak to, I got to speak to him the shortest, but I learned that he would love to work with Mark Hamill, whom he costarred with several times in the Wing Commander series and again recently for Squadron 42, again and again. On a side note, I heard that he personally visited the show floor at the end of the first day of the Con and wished every vendor a good Con. He is quite the guy.
The remainder of my Con experience involved revisiting vendors we wanted to buy something from, submitting a few commissions, and taking pictures with a bunch of other cosplayers. At different points during Con there were semi-organized events for people cosplaying characters from specific genres or intellectual properties (IPs) to come together and take photos. So, dressed as my GoT character, I joined in happily. There was over a dozen Daenerys cosplayers (not including my fiancee who changed out of her costume before the photoshoot), a few Robb Starks, a few Jon Snows, and a pair of Oberyn Martells. When asked who I was, I just said I was a Targaryen soldier, since explaining my head-canon behind why I was dressed as I was took too long. Here are a few of the photos:
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| That's me with the red surcoat. |
All in all, I had a great time at Con. "But Shane, what about the 10th?" Yeah, I didn't go back on Sunday. I was tired and still a bit overwhelmed by the Con, and having spent all of my free time the previous two days there, I took Sunday for myself. Next year I'm planning to do a much more in depth cover of the convention by attending more panels and either recording them for review or taking detailed notes so I can do more than just vaguely mention what I did two weeks later. I'd also want to publish the posts while the Con is still going, and maybe even try to get some viewers by mentioning it to people at the convention. But going to have to wait until next year! For now, I rest. Thanks for reading!
