Fan Expo 2010 - A Journal-Esque Story Picture Book

[Azisien]

Fan Expo 2010 is Canada's largest nerd convention held in Toronto, Ontario. I was tempted to call it a gaming convention there, but really gaming is only a small part of it. The Expo features five main subsections: Comic Book, Sci-Fi, Anime, Gaming, and Horror.

Although I am probably eternally going to be a hapless gaming nerd, I never really saw myself going to conventions. I guess when I was younger, I still held prejudices against nerds and myself. I probably still do. Luckily, my own fanboyism of Bioware led me to Fan Expo and my first gaming convention in 2009. I was knee-deep in Mass Effect again after a bit of a break, and I had read the novels and eagerly awaiting both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. I was so psyched, in fact, that I decided to travel 450km to Toronto, just to talk to the Bioware Ground Team that had pledged to go to Fan Expo 2009 to promote Dragon Age.

I went, and it was great fun. But I won't go into much more detail because that was 2009, and THIS is 2010!

Friday

Much to the chagrin of my summer sleep cycle (wake, noon; sleep, 4AM), I woke at 8AM to catch a bus for Toronto. The ride was glorious and packed with the fantastic DS title, Dragon Quest IX. Okay I'm lying, the game kind of sucks, and the bus ride was average at best. I did have my new 3G cell phone to keep myself up to date on Twitter, Facebook, and even NPF lurking!

We arrived with good timing, and because my three companions and I were all cheap as fuck, we decided to walk the 3km from the bus station to the hotel carrying all of our luggage, instead of taking a single subway. We checked into the hotel, and I stood in line beside a furry dressed in biker clothes. Sadly, I did not have my camera at this point.

In fact, now is probably a precautionary note that I DON'T own a dedicated camera. It is probably my one regret of the whole trip. My new cell phone has a 5MP camera built-in and I thought that would be adequate, but it turns out the focus and shutter speed and pretty much everything EXCEPT the resolution sucks. I apologize.

We reached the Expo one hour before it opened, around 3PM. It was there we became acquainted with THE LINE. The first day turned out the worst, and most of the conventioneers had decided to come earlier than we did.



In fact, there's the convention center. That's the side on Front Street if I remember correctly, and at the very far end of the picture is the streets where they put the entrance. Our place in Friday's line extends far beyond the left side, to the nearest intersection, then down a long tunnel to the other, main side of the convention center. Probably three times as long as the full distance of this one picture, if you can abstract it.

In other words, this wasn't no pansy ass rollercoaster line at Wonderland/Disneyland. Luckily, unlike rides, entrance into the Expo was a bit quicker. Even so, the Expo opened at 4PM, and we didn't get in until 5PM, even with pre-purchased tickets. My companions had been replaced by mobile groaning mobiles, as we entered the convention center and found out there was an internal line. It was a snaking, looping line this time though, and that allowed me to enjoy some of the cosplays.



Finally, the entrance. Or at least, the entrance sign. This year they had changed the floor plan because the Expo underwent a significant expansion. In 2009, I don't recall them using the entire convention center, just parts of it. Now, they had expanded the main floor to its absolute maximum, and they were using two bottom floors for panels and cosplay.



I snapped another picture of the main floor of the Expo, still near the entrance. The crowds were already getting decent, and there were still massive lines behind me. We headed as a group around for one lap of the Expo. None of the celebrities had shown up yet, leaving the west side (area with those flags) of the center pretty clear.



I passed by some rather comprehensive Star Trek art work at one point and snapped a picture of my favourite. While I am by no means a Trekkie, I loved me my teenage TNG and Voyager. After doing a lap and a half of the convention, I found myself feeling a little dejected. The very reason I had gone to Fan Expo 2009, to troll the Bioware folks, was nowhere to be found. On top of a lot of reorganization on the part of the location of each Expo subset, the Gaming Expo seemed to get a decent downgrade. In 2009, Halo itself had its own central, gigantic area where people could get in line to challenge, and get pwnt, by Lil Poison. There was a huge LAN area, and an area for each of the Big Three consoles.

While I didn't snap a good picture, this year, the Halo area had been chopped down to a tiny Halo Reach booth where people could line up to try the demo. The big three had much smaller booths for Kinect and Move. They both sucked, in case you were wondering. The LAN area had been wiped completely.



Gaming is probably my top subculture, so with that part of the Expo much smaller in favour of more comic books, I was a little sad. And instead of Bioware, the developer of the day was Ubisoft. Great. One of my most hated developers. Don't get me wrong, they have some good franchises. I boycotted them six months ago because of the type of DRM they use on their PC titles. I cheered up a little after we had a nice long chat with the Ubisoft rep about that exact topic.

Content that I still wanted to be here and that I had already seen the main floor, I needed a bit of a break and headed downstairs to check out some of the cosplays. There were cosplays everywhere, of course, but in the teeming crowds of the main floor, it was difficult to do much aside from bump into people.



Oh, shit. Perfect part of her aggro to do a crown, too. Nothing got my mood up better than some gamer girls cosplaying Left 4 Dead.

I didn't take many more pictures on Friday after that, because today was mostly a survey day, because I still wasn't too comfortable with the phone camera, and because Saturday had the cosplay contest. I did, however, run into one interesting cosplay group...



Here is a great example of how stupid I can be sometimes: I walked up to these fine folks and asked for their picture. The entire time I was like "Cool! An original final fantasy cosplay!" It didn't occur to me for a full twenty minutes that, hey, wait, those cosplayers had sword-chucks and a giant hammer. Maybe I just don't know enough about the 8-bit FFs, but did I just pass by NPF cosplayers? I guess if I did, I might still find out!

Of course, I lost sight of them, and never saw them again for the whole weekend. We left an hour before the convention closed and walked our long walk to supper. We aren't cheap okay, we're thrifty! We all brought hundreds of dollars to this con, and we were determined to spend it only on bare necessities:

Roof over heads: Check.
Transportation: Fuck it, our legs work.
Expo swag: WOOOOOOOOOOO!!

Food:


You really can't beat Toronto prices on eating out, not compared to anywhere I've been. A $12 shawarma plate in Ottawa will cost $7 in Toronto. In this case, the above picture is from my favourite restaurant, the Korean Grill House on Yonge Street. The picture, of course, comes after we completely brutalized it with enough beef to choke, well, a cow. All we can eat meat barbequed meat for $13, sign me up!



That concluded my adventures on Day 1 of 3 of the Fan Expo. Stay tuned for the Saturday update! I would write it up now, but I have a lot of swag I still need to organize, and hug. Alone. In a basement.