Swancon 2018 panels: Unisfa is 40, Anime with adult protagonists, Disney from the POV of kids
Star Wars:
This was Cam's first ever panel and I...slept through it. But it apparently went very well and he has the panel bug now :D
Unisfa is how old??:
Unisfa is the science fiction club of my alma mater The University of Western Australia, and tends to be a (sometimes literal) breeding ground for Swancon attendees. It's also 40 years old!
The panel was fun, it was mostly people 10+ years older or younger than me but since I was at uni for about a decade I still connected with many of the anecdotes, and the rest were fun to hear about.
Emma told us some entertainingly horrifying stories about the UWA engineering club, whose history she once researched. They killed multiple people with initiation rites and once started a riot where buildings got burned down.
The current crop of unisfans seem like a decent lot. They also had a book stall and I had a nice conversation with a disconcertingly young woman about life after a pure maths major.
Anime with adult protagonists:
The presentation, which I have very slightly edited.
The panel I was on! This went very well despite me unknowingly being in the throes of med withdrawal.
We three panelists discussed it a little on twitter before hand. I took all the anime we'd mentioned and put them into categories with cast images from google and some half assed meta. I'm glad I did this, it made it easier to quickly get across what an anime is like and also makes for an interesting visual comparison in aggregate.
During the panel we just clicked through the slides and rambled about what was on screen. The other panelists didn't necessarily agree with what I said in the meta but that encouraged discussion!
The audience was the same 8 people who go to every anime panel at Swancon, plus Cam being supportive, so it was a very low key panel with a moderate amount of audience participation.
Having done the panel, I think the repeated trends are:
-mundane stories about work/university etc that would feel silly being about teenagers
-Gritty noir/cyberpunk/War Is Hell etc
-realism (this doesn't always overlap with the previous two)
-comparing reality and fiction, with unrealistic, youthful looking characters contrasted with more realistically drawn and characterised adults.
Also there's a moderate amount of romance. Obviously teen romance is also HUGE but sometimes people want stories about adults falling in love instead.
Disney from the perspective of a 12 year old and 11 year old:
The two panelists are daughters of con goers and decided they wanted to do their own panel. It was pretty good, and a different point of view than I usually hear about. There was also a special section up the front for kids in the audience, and they asked a lot of questions. One boy enjoyed asking very silly questions but wasn't allowed to derail things too much.
There was a long discussion, including multiple slides of tabulated data, about who does and does not count as a Real Princess. They both think Moana, Pocahontas and Merida are iffy since their fathers are chiefs not kings, when it was pointed out that this cuts out a lot of POC the said they're still important just not princesses. In general they think there's too many princesses, and there should be a focus on other kinds of female characters.
One suggestion was Disney Presidents, including Vanellope and Amidala.
They think Disney is money hungry, and also have gotten bad at making good movies, all "their" recent successes are from acquired companies like MCU.
Diagram: is Hux Prince Hans or Donald Trump?
It was agreed it could be cool to have a princess crossover, so they get to be in more than just the one movie/series. There will apparently be a bunch of princesses, voiced as much as possible by their original voice actors, in Wreck it Ralph 2.
They loved Star Wars but think Finn and Rose were underused. Leia was going to get crowned at Disneyland and become a princess but didn't, probably because you couldn't exactly have Carrie Fisher walking around even when she was alive.
Descendants is about the kids of various Disney heroes and villains and is cheesy live action tv with singing. Pokes at Good and Evil a little.
Not convinced Han is really dead. People get lightsabred and fall into shafts all the time and come back fine, if Darth Maul can do it so can Han.
Why so many giant shafts anyway??
Frozen musical: they start off in dresses then after Let it Go Elsa wears PANTS.
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