Anime Lockdown Once More, Weekend Two
Sep. 14th, 2025 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWatching morning, afternoon, and evening panels during the first day of this year’s “Anime Lockdown” streaming convention might have made the announcement the convention’s second day would be moved to the next weekend a bit more appealing. I still wound up watching a somewhat less extravagant selection of panels from that second day; the thought of sticking around until the end did fade when the convention’s host mentioned he wouldn’t hold a “closing ceremony” because he had to get to a screening of the latest Demon Slayer movie.
The first two panels I watched did have me thinking I’ve been around long enough to have begun to live through what’s now “fandom history.” Having partaken of the cheap manga paperbacks from Tokyopop that had managed to make a go of “reading backwards” (even if I’d already been thinking of manga as “poor man’s anime” to the extent that I still might not have really weighed “streaming site subscriptions” against “buying the multiple volumes of a series” these days) only to be confronted with all the controversy surrounding the company pivoting towards trying to sell “comics that looked like manga,” I was interested in a chronicle of “Princess Ai,” one of Tokyopop’s (and its corporate head’s) more involved efforts to turn three volumes of apparently still drawn-by-someone-from-Japan manga into a multimedia franchise. I suppose, though, that I was also thinking a bit of the earlier efforts to “continue Robotech,” and even of how ADV Films had paid for concept art of a “live-action Evangelion movie.” It’s easy enough to imagine “middlemen” coming to think they have their own ideas on how to make a successful story.
A presentation on “anime fandom at the turn of the millennium” turned out to begin the very year I joined the anime club at my university, although the presenter started younger than I did, skipping the years I took to sort out first where Robotech had really come from and then that more “animation like it” was within even my reach. From there, I watched a panel on “explosions in anime,” one that didn’t quite carry a weight of “once upon a time” for all that it got my own attention by leading off with an explosion in Flying Phantom Ship. The last and somewhat drier panel I watched covered the anime industry in Japan as distinct from the perhaps-easier coverage of the middlemen over here, offering at least a somewhat different perspective on that familiar worry that the people who do the actual work don’t get a lot of the money made.
As I said before there is a pleasant convenience to being able to watch so many different panels without having to wonder about eventually getting back. Whether this is the only way to watch such “panels,” and whether what’s in them can also be presented as “weblog posts,” is a question I’ve also wondered about before. That we got one more Anime Lockdown was an unexpected surprise; if there ever happens to be another such “streaming convention” that I learn about before it’s happened that’ll be fine with me. (Discotek has continued to make streaming presentations of new licenses even as they’ve got back to in-person presentations, anyway.)
The first two panels I watched did have me thinking I’ve been around long enough to have begun to live through what’s now “fandom history.” Having partaken of the cheap manga paperbacks from Tokyopop that had managed to make a go of “reading backwards” (even if I’d already been thinking of manga as “poor man’s anime” to the extent that I still might not have really weighed “streaming site subscriptions” against “buying the multiple volumes of a series” these days) only to be confronted with all the controversy surrounding the company pivoting towards trying to sell “comics that looked like manga,” I was interested in a chronicle of “Princess Ai,” one of Tokyopop’s (and its corporate head’s) more involved efforts to turn three volumes of apparently still drawn-by-someone-from-Japan manga into a multimedia franchise. I suppose, though, that I was also thinking a bit of the earlier efforts to “continue Robotech,” and even of how ADV Films had paid for concept art of a “live-action Evangelion movie.” It’s easy enough to imagine “middlemen” coming to think they have their own ideas on how to make a successful story.
A presentation on “anime fandom at the turn of the millennium” turned out to begin the very year I joined the anime club at my university, although the presenter started younger than I did, skipping the years I took to sort out first where Robotech had really come from and then that more “animation like it” was within even my reach. From there, I watched a panel on “explosions in anime,” one that didn’t quite carry a weight of “once upon a time” for all that it got my own attention by leading off with an explosion in Flying Phantom Ship. The last and somewhat drier panel I watched covered the anime industry in Japan as distinct from the perhaps-easier coverage of the middlemen over here, offering at least a somewhat different perspective on that familiar worry that the people who do the actual work don’t get a lot of the money made.
As I said before there is a pleasant convenience to being able to watch so many different panels without having to wonder about eventually getting back. Whether this is the only way to watch such “panels,” and whether what’s in them can also be presented as “weblog posts,” is a question I’ve also wondered about before. That we got one more Anime Lockdown was an unexpected surprise; if there ever happens to be another such “streaming convention” that I learn about before it’s happened that’ll be fine with me. (Discotek has continued to make streaming presentations of new licenses even as they’ve got back to in-person presentations, anyway.)