Once again, I hate to say I told you so, but... I told you so.
See, I remember a year or so back when that post on Tumblr was going around saying "Hey wouldn't a Tumblr Con be great?" and someone else echoed "No, it would be like 90% scary Superwholockians" (their exact words, and in their defense, SWL fans are pretty damn terrifying). I remember that post because I was there to read it. Little did I know that the planning for such a Con (called DashCon, with a name like that I was suspecting an MLP con, not this) was already underway, and that the aforementioned post would ring very, very true in a very, very scary manner.
For those of you who are still under a rock, a few idealistic Tumblr users read that same post I did, and apparently thought (as idealistic teens are wont to do) that a Tumblr con would be a fantastic idea. Oh how little they understood. The Con was planned (I use that word very roughly here) and occurred the second weekend of July in Illinois. According to all the reports I spent several hours researching last night (I was seriously up until 7AM researching this disaster), a number of issues arose with it:
- The Con was indealized, decided on, and brought about by teenagers and a couple of college students, none of whom had any background in organizing Cons. Need I remind you that teens are not the best judge of business sense, and most college students (including myself) do not good Con runners make. The staff didn't have any information given to them and were expected to know things they didn't. This resulted in people being in charge of things no teenager should be expected to handle, fandoms being underrepresented, and a messy crew that would translate into three days of garbage. You can read more about what it was like for someone who was on the crew before the con right here: Part 1 Part 2
- The Con proported to be for all fandoms, but true to the Tumblr post I mentioned earlier, only about three were adequately represented - Teen Wolf (which I've never even heard of), Superwholock, and Homestuck. Some WtNV (Welcome to Night Vale) fans were there as well, I understand, but otherwise nobody else.
- Around 3,000-4,000 people were estimated to attend - only about 500-1,000 actually did.
- This is directly due to the fact that VIP badges for both days of the event were $65 a person, a price that not even the San Diego ComiCon would think of using for their VIP badges.
- There were very few vendors and very few "All Ages" panels, despite the fact that Tumblr's userbase is generally teens and young adults. Many of the panels were such wonderful, sexist, 'informative' things as "British Men... With Cheekbones" and "Can U Knot: Exploring the Omegaverse". For those unaware of this "Omegaverse", it's basically M-Preg, but worse, applying all the same sexist and gender-normative tripe normally used on women to men with wolf dicks. It goes without saying that you absolutely should not Google this. Trust me, it's horrifying and very NSFW, and literally just another excuse to fetishize slash pairings without any regards to how it makes gay men actually feel.
- There may or may not have been an incident involving an informative 18+ BDSM panel and underage children sneaking or being allowed into it.
- There was a games room with only a single console and TV in it, an inflatable bouncy castle, and a children's inflatable ball pit that had an hour time limit and reportedly was only big enough to hold maybe five people at most, if even that. Apparently Congoers did not treat the inflatable items correctly (wearing jewelry and other sharp objects on them, throwing the balls outside of the pit, playing too rough, etc.) and both deflated by the end of the Con, resulting in the ballpit being thrown out because a hole was put in it. Oh, and here's the ballpit, in case you were wondering.
- There was supposed to be a Steam Powered Giraffe concert, however it was cancelled months in advance due to them never being booked properly to start with. The tickets went on sale anyway, but when SPG never showed up the congoers were not reimbursed for their monitary loss.
- Speaking of, there was supposed to be a WtNV panel with the voice actors of the podcast, however when the voice actors arrived, they discovered that they could not be adequately paid to do the panel. These people drove all the way to Illinois, taking time out of their European tour to talk to fans, only to discover that the con organizers didn't have the respect, money, or time to even pay the people they asked to drop everything and come talk to a bunch of whiny white fangirls for an hour. The WtNV crew walked out on Dashcon due to this, disappointed that they had to disappoint their fans like that.
- The ticketholders of the above event were not reimbursed with money from the Dashcon crew. Instead, horrified Dashcon staff told Congoers that anyone who had held tickets to the cancelled Night Vale event could be reimbursed with "1 extra hour with (sic) the ballpit". Once again, this, for reference, is the ballpit (On a side note, the caption on this photo is pretty funny - you can't say Tumblr doesn't have a sense of humor).
- There may or may not have been incidents involving urination and/or sex being had in the ballpit. Additionally, there also may or may not have been "An incident involving Homestucks and a bucket of spit" amongst other cases of fans behaving badly.
- Apparently people were so upset by the events at the con that there were people literally having panic attacks in the bathrooms, but this is Tumblr we're talking about, so I don't know how much of that is people actually having panic attacks and how much of it was people who have never had a panic attack thinking they had one when they were actually just disappointed and upset. Several congoers helped these people out, which is nice, but need I remind you all that Cons should not be so bad they cause people to go into panic attacks.
- In the middle of the con, the people involved started to run out of money. The hotel they were using was demanding $17,000 by 10 PM because they apparently still had not been reimbursed. An urgent message (which has since been scrubbed from the user's Tumblr) was posted on the Con Head's Tumblr page asking people to donate to the failing Con to keep it afloat. And of course, this being Tumblr, when the Congoers were told about the issue, the management told them that it was because they were being discriminated against, and that the hotel was doing this because "the hotel management [...] doesn't like the people at the con". First of all, you are a bunch of middle-class white girls (seriously, I did not see one cis dude or person of color in any of the con pics I saw - way to be accepting, Tumblr). Nobody is kicking you out of a con because you have a vagina, and you are not being discriminated against because your Con is failing. You are the most privilaged people in the fucking world outside of white middle-class men, don't you even tell me you have no fucking privilage, especually at a Con made by you, for you. Second of all, the hotel has a right to do whatever they want, it's their property and they don't owe your entitled little flower-crown-wearing asses a damn thing. And third, shame on the management of Dashcon for using typical Tumblr emotion-before-logic bullshit to guilt people into loading money onto a sinking ship. You knew Tumblr would listen to your appeal to emotion, you knew Tumblr would try to save a lost cause because that is what they do. Shame on you for taking advantage of people.
- Apparently the money was raised, but nobody knows where the $17,000 went, not even the hotel. According to the hotel, they never asked for such an exorbitant sum of money, and wouldn't have had need to because normally, Con costs are paid for 5 days before the Con starts. Dashcon's team would have had to pony up the money first before the hotel would even consider letting them use their facilities. The Dashcon team apparently shared a letter on Tumblr (with most of the content whited out) as proof of the hotel asking them to fork over money, which, as several Tumblr users pointed out, could easily have been faked and probably was.
tl;dr: Dashcon 2014 was a real life example of what Tumblr is - a slap-dash, hypocritical, sexist, unorganized mess of childish white girls in flower crowns who all like the same three or four fandoms. I don't know what else anyone was expecting. I do feel bad for the people who spent money on this waste of time Con, and I absolutely do not blame them for what happened. Dashcon was just too ambitious, too new, and staffed by teens and college students who got too big for their own britches about what was and was not possible for them to accomplish. You were victimized by people who didn't know what they were doing, and had Dashcon not tried to be so damn ambitious it may have succeeded. But as we've all seen time and again with Tumblr, they have a pattern - too many people getting too excited over something until a meltdown results - and this causes everyone to get burned. On behalf of my fellow fandom people, and on behalf of anyone who has ever gone to a con ever, I am truely, deeply sorry that this had to be some people's first Con experience ever. You deserved better than what you were given. In retrospect, I hope this was a learning experience for everyone on how not to run a con, because at the very least something good should be made out of this monstrosity. And for those of you still brainwashed into thinking this con was "the best con ever", can u not drink the kool-aid next time, please? Tumblr has an issue with that as it is, and you aren't helping.
Yours,
Sugary Snicket
PS: Tumblr, even if the stars and moon collide, I'll never want you back into my life. You can take your words and all your lies - I really don't care.