Arduinna

After the Denpa/Kuma licensing panel at Anime NYC 2025, I wave goodbye to the acquaintance I’d first met at the manga freelancer mixer the day before and walk back to Penn Station alone.
Walking back to Penn Station alone is not in itself a novel experience for me: When I come up to NYC, it’s often to meet up with people who live in the city already. But still, something felt odd about this particular walk. As if I’d left a parenthesis open on my convention experience, and the weekend was still unfinished.
I thought back to my first convention at the Javits: New York Comic Con, 2012. My mother dropped me off by car because, at fourteen, I was still too scared to take the train up by myself. It was my second convention ever, the first being an anime convention at a local community college the previous year. I stepped out of the car next to the badge pick-up line to hear someone yelling “MASHA” at maximum volume— a friend I’d made at summer camp a few months prior, who I hadn’t realized was going to be at the show. (And was cosplaying God Tier Tavros. We’d bonded over Homestuck.) I spent most of my NYCC, and the three that followed, hanging out with my friends from summer camp and a bunch of other Homestuck cosplayers. I looked around the Artist Alley, I went to some silly fun panels like in-character Homestuck discussion panels or “Dos and Don’ts of Lolita Fashion”, and I spent my entire show surrounded by friends I’d made over our similar interests in...mostly Homestuck, but also 2012 Nerd Culture in general. I got to experience the warmth of belonging I mostly didn’t feel in my day-to-day life.
Since my school days, I’ve stopped going to conventions (or shows, as people “in the industry” call them) for pure fun, and started going to them for work, with a Press badge as part of the comics journalism websites I write for now. Or for the potential of future work: when Anime NYC started, I was two days out of my editorial internship with a manga publisher and was cheerfully telling everyone who asked how much I’d love to keep working in the manga industry. Which is 100% true: I loved every moment of my internship and spent a lot of it thinking “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this." I want to keep doing it so badly it aches.
It really is so much fun, to be on the inside of a convention instead of just a fan. Getting to skip the long line for badge pick-up, getting to sit in the Press Lounge (slightly more exciting than the staff break room at my day job), going to panels and not just knowing the people on the panel but knowing what they’re going to announce that day before they make their announcements (and not saying anything about it because I am soooo good at keeping secrets I promise.) I love seeing bits and pieces of the big machine that keeps fandom going, and knowing how everything falls into place to entertain hundreds and thousands of people for one overpriced weekend.
But going to the show For Work also made the show exhausting in a way shows weren’t when I was a student: the feeling of being constantly on the clock, frantically scribbling notes at panels I’d need to write up later, having my business cards at the ready for when I met someone I’d like to stay in touch with after the show. I spent almost all of my Friday in panels and running around from place to place, not getting any opportunity to check out the Artist Alley until the next day. I managed to miss seeing several of my online friends at the event entirely, and the friends I did see I could only overlap with for a few hours at most before we had to go to different panels or events, splitting up with an awkward, “hopefully see you later?” So I never really got to say goodbye properly to anybody because it was hard to be sure if we’d run into each other again later. 
And so, when I walked off to Penn Station alone, it was without having anyone to say goodbye to first. I wasn’t sure where my friends were: I think some had left already, and some were at the Seinen Manga panel at the Japan Society on the other side of Manhattan. The cell reception at the Javits is notoriously terrible, so there was no point in messaging people to ask if they were around. I stepped out of that giant glass fidget-spinner-shaped structure into the darkening night sky feeling that quintessential New York City anonymity. Just another nerd with an anime con badge, heading back to real life. 
I ended up getting dinner at Penn Station because every place I passed on the way was completely packed, and the timing of the trains worked out so I was scarfing down my fettucine alfredo on the train as it pulled out of the station. I kind of wished I’d been able to eat dinner with someone. And not inside Penn Station. That and the complete internet dead zone that happens between going down to the train platform and the train bursting out onto the surface again really accentuated the isolation.
Would I rather be going to shows like Anime NYC with my friends from school, to hang out in cosplay? Or do I like being an industry person, alone in the crowd of thousands, but with knowledge and access the masses lack? Or would I rather be even more than that: an invited guest, holding court at panels and signings for my scores of adoring fans? ...Well, it might be fun to try that last one someday.