I attended my first Comic Con this year and came home wanting more. If I have one impression from the show, it was how incredibly diverse the offers are. From comic books (duh) to toys to LARPers to anime to costuming to movies, what holds the whole thing together nowadays. It’s about fantasy and an escape from the mundane.
Nothing encapsulated this better than a long conversation I had with this lady, a noblewomen from The Adrian Empire, which is “like SCA, but we fight with steel”. She was intelligent, passionate, and articulate. But what I most got from her was a sense of longing about how things might be in the world, as opposed to how they are. The community for her represents an opportunity to reshape the world. She told me how the Emperor of The Adrian Empire is a janitor “in the mundane world”. She started to tear up when we talked about how it was too bad that he wasn’t able to apply his obvious leadership talents in his day job. I heard the same sentiment in Darkon, an excellent documentary about The Darkon Wargaming Club, a LARPing group (they use magic so it’s not strictly a reenactment; she hadn’t heard of it).
Comicon is for people who, for one reason or another, find fault with mundane world and want to escape to a better one.
