Monday, January 18, 2010

It Must Be Said

The official Leverage convention has the best name of any convention ever.

It's ConCon.

I'm not going, because I don't have the time or the money, but I like to just bask in the sheer, unmitigated joy of that name from time to time.

(Really, the Transformers people dropped the ball. Come on, "BotCon"? How do you do an official Transformers convention and not call it "DeceptiCon"? Oh, the lost opportunities.)

6 comments:

E. Wilson said...

There really is a serious, semi-legitimate reasons for the Botcon thing, though it might make your head explode if I told you. Do you really want to know?

John Seavey said...

Absolutely!

E. Wilson said...

Well, there are two general problems: first, Decepticon is a term owned by Hasbro, and even though Botcon currently operates with Hasbro approval and participation, this wasn't always the case.

Okay, that's the rational answer. Here's the head-exploding one.

In the mid-late 90's when the event was first being formed, the fledgling online community was beset with heated debates brought about by a group that could roughly be called "Decepticon Apologists", who believed the Decepticons were the good guys.

If I recall correctly, the apologists' logic was that because (in the cartoon universe) the Decepticons were "decedents" of military hardware, conquest and battle was literally hard-wired into them, and by opposing them, the Autobots were quite literally being racist and genocidal.

You can do a search if you'd like, but from what I've seen, these debates got really heated, and generally really weird. (And this is from someone with a Decepticon insignia on his car's bumper.)

One of these apologists was heavily and publicly involved in organizing the early conventions, and calling the convention "Decepti-Con" would have alienated potential guests.

We Transformer fans are crazy.

Greg Manuel said...

"(Really, the Transformers people dropped the ball. Come on, "BotCon"? How do you do an official Transformers convention and not call it "DeceptiCon"? Oh, the lost opportunities.)"

Whenever I think of the chance Marvel had to let Karl Kesel write the Fantastic Four, and then call it "The Kesel Run," I ask myself the same question.

RichardAK said...

The difference is you can call Karl Kesel's run on any title "the Kesel run," so it's not like that opportunity is gone forever. Also, that joke should really be saved for if Kesel ever writes Star Wars comics for Dark Horse.

On another note, Seavey, when are we going to get more story engine essays? DC recently released Showcase Presents: Eclipso, and I'm sure you could come up with something interesting to say about that.

John Seavey said...

Well, I feel sheepish; I was about to say, "I already did 'Eclipso'," but then I actually went back and looked, and found out I hadn't. :) Did the reading, never wrote the essay. So that should be coming down the pike shortly.

Thanks for pointing that out!