Three years ago I made a post to my blog called “Is Dragon*Con Broken?” and it elicited a TON of reactions from people, which meant that me and my friends weren’t the only people who felt that way. To their credit the people who run the convention had that same realization and have made some great strides in making the convention fun again.
This year a few of our old cardboard troopers plan to be marching in the parade again along with some fun new friends from the convention I founded called Cardboard*Con, and in a fun new wrinkle I’ll be an actual guest of Dragon Con, officially speaking on several of Dragon Con’s Filmmaking panels (unlike last year when I strolled into an empty room with Timmy O’Brien (the assistant art director from the feature “Zombieland”) and proceeded to conduct an impromptu panel on the art department.
But the thing that has me most excited about the convention this year is something that I overheard in a comic book store the other day.
A young man wearing a Darth Vader Lives T-shirt remarked offhandedly to the dungeonmaster working the register: “I feel better about going this year since that asshole is finally gone from DragonCon!”
That was the first I’d heard about this!!
This situation has been the silent shame of the convention for years now and nobody has done a single gosh-darned thing about it, and anytime someone spoke up they were pilloried by people who were afraid of change. As if getting rid of one asshole is going to alter their own lives forever. Even one of my friends told me point blank from the point of view of “someone who knows” that it was essentially impossible to get rid of the asshole.
“Look, I hate the asshole too,” he said.
But he wasn’t willing to refuse going to con over such an issue and I was frankly unwilling to take a great stand against it lest I find myself blackballed by the crazed fanatics that I call friends. And truth be told, I had already pre-registered earlier in the year and it’s doubtful that I’d have had the moral fortitude to leave my badge sitting at registration on a matter of typographic principal.
But now I don’t have to worry because they’ve finally seen the light of a new age and removed that gosh-darned asshole asterisk from the middle of the “Dragon*Con” logo and have replaced it with a space.
That asterisk looked just like a cartoon a-hole and I’m glad that I won’t have to type it ever again!
Man I hope somebody gets this.
*snickersnort*