Okay i grant you this...YES Orycon is for writers as a matter of fact they have Writers' Workshop where you can get helpful critiques to make original writing better. But even though it has a certain measure of intellectual standing.,...even the greatest of intellectual types know that all work and no play lead toa nervous breakdown. That's why I bel;ieve Orycobn needs something of a youth movement in it. to help keep it alive. That's why I'm all for Kumoricon goers going to Orycon.
About 15 years ago Orycon USED to have a rather vibrant set of costume activities including competitions, skits, and hall costume awards. IIRC they also used to have a scavenger hunt of sorts. Then some of the people who ended up getting elected to upper management ranks wanted to focus Orycon to be mostly about writing and writers, (including script writers) with a smattering of teachers and industry scientists ("What are NASA's latest missions up to?")
This was cool in that entertainers (writers) got to mingle with real-world professionals (the teachers & scientists) to make their creative works sound more believable and detailed. The teachers, whose job it is to hold the attention of a class, learn from the writers about how to present matter in an entertaining or intriguing way, so there's lot's if productive synergy going on. (How about some
syzygy, too? Google it!)
But, like it or not, the world is gravitiating towards 140 characters - which means graphic novels with maybe 10 sentences per page, and even these paragraphs I wrote here may look too large and blocky for some forum readers who will just tl;dr and skip this post.
Orycon will have to simply age (increasing its mean member age by nearly 1 year as each year passes,) or shrink ( they ranged within 1200 and 1800 members for the past decade, iirc; I don't recall Orycon ever breaking 2500 ppl,) or add recognition to a vibrant, media- and multimedia-based fandom beyond the written word ( Here ye be dragons and resistance and reluctance to admit of a changing world...) in parallel with the 'lit-trah-chuh' tracks.
Years ago, Boskone (a Boston-based SF con) tried to kick out all media, and the fans revolted and started up 'Arisia' (another Boston-based con) which was ALL media. It kicked the doors off Boskone within its second or third year. Irony: Arisians were 'the good guys' and Boskone were 'the bad guys' in E.E. Doc Smith's
Lensman series of the 1930s - and BTW they made a
Lensman anime OVA in the 1980s too!
So, just as otaku elite heirarchy goes from the dub to the sub to watching 'em raw; at SF cons and especially Orycon you will find the hoity-toity types who insist that 'real' SF fans buy the
hardcover - paperback fiction consumers
aren't really into it...(No, rly, heard it myself...)
Fandom to me is all about enjoying our differences from mundania in whatever mode the con is about, SF, steampunk, anime, the SCA, re-enacting - whatever, and sharing support that we can all have our own fun and be 'real' with our hobbies, interests, and unusual, off-the-beaten-path dreams, seldomly encountered outside of these cons. So we all come together and share the rare things that intrigue us or make us happy, or get us thinking thoughts we enjoy grappling with, or imagining the impossible, or the 'what might have been' if only something had gone differently than in the timeline we call 'reality.'
