Asylum 15 Con Report
So, it’s taken me a while to write this, as I’ve been really busy since the con, but here goes:
Day One: Friday
I booked the day off work on Friday so that I would have all day to get to the con and register, though it turned out that registration didn’t actually start until 5 pm anyway. Rather than driving to Birmingham in the morning, I actually ended up meeting one of my best friends from high school (and her 7-month-old daughter) for coffee in the morning and then I set off for the con at about 2pm.
I had wanted to leave earlier but I was waiting for a delivery from Amazon (a lens hood for my camera) which had been promised to arrive that day. However, I discovered online that it potential might not be delivered until 9pm and so I ended up having to leave before it arrived (turns out it was finally delivered at about 6pm). I arrived at the con hotel at about 4pm… 40 minutes later than originally expected due to bad traffic on the motorway!
The good thing about the October Asylum cons is that they are much smaller than the May ones due to usually having less guests and also not having the big guests, because they are in Vancouver filming… so there were only around 500 people this time compared to about 2,100 at A14. As a result, the registration process are pretty painless and we were done in about 30 minutes or so.
They don’t put any of the extras up for sale until the day of the con, so after registering, I queued up to buy some Coffee Lounges (Meet and Greets - which is what I’m going to call them from now on to avoid confusion), since they are so cheap at Rogue cons. I had been planning to buy M&Gs with Kim Rhodes and with Briana Buckmaster, but the con schedule showed that they were doing a joint M&G on Sunday, so I was going to buy that instead.
Unfortunately, when I got to the ticket desk, I discovered that for some unknown reason, they were only selling the Saturday M&Gs at that time (no idea why), so I wouldn’t be able to buy the joint one until the next day. With no guarantee that I would get one, I decided just to buy the separate M&Gs with them anyway.
Once that was done, we headed out to the car park because we’d heard that a fan had brought their Impala with them. Now, I was at DallasCon where Stephanie brought Bela, the Impala that was used in Bloodlines and that J2 have actually sat in and driven, so I wasn’t sure whether this one would be as special, but it was a pretty cool car. The owner told us that it was a custom made replica, whereas some of the other fan-owned cars are just regular Impalas painted black. Unfortunately, he couldn’t carry weapons in the boot (trunk) due to UK weapons laws!
We spent the rest of the evening chatting and meeting various fans :).
Day Two - Saturday
It was nice to be at a small, laidback con for once, because we didn’t need to rush around or queue for ages to get good seats… instead we could be pretty casual about it all. We went to breakfast about 8 am and then at 8.30, headed to the panel room. I had been thinking of paying for a reserved seat near the front, but although the front-row seats were only £20, since there were only about 12 rows of seats and the lighting on the stage was pretty poor for photo-taking it didn’t seem worth it. We sat about 6 rows back, which was fine.
First up on stage was Mark Pellegrino, who I hadn’t seen at a con before. I have to admit though, that his panel wasn’t particularly stand-out. He gets each fan up on stage to ask their question… and there are a few jokes, but that’s about it. The running joke of this panel was that everything became ‘a big bag of dicks’ (as Gabriel called Lucifer in ‘Hammer of the Gods’).
Sadly my photos weren’t great on Saturday due to the bad lighting (lots of blurry ones):
After Mark, we had a bit of a break, then a joint panel with Adam Rose (Aaron Bass from the Golem episode), Tyler Johnston (Samandriel/Bugs) and Chad Lindberg (Ash). I had seen Adam last year, and Tyler at Dallas a month earlier, but hadn’t seen Chad before. It was a fun panel, though again I was annoyed by the lack of good photos - the only person I seemed to be able to get good pics of was Adam due to where he was sitting. Chad talked a bit about his ghost hunting, and Adam was asked about his YouTube videos and his experience of eating at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas and getting spanked when he couldn’t finish his Triple Bypass Burger!
After that panel, it was time for my M&G with Briana. At Rogue cons, the M&Gs are just set up as a circle of chairs, with the guest occupying one of them. There were only about 10 people in the M&G (they had 20 tickets available for it), and it was a really nice atmosphere. Briana is lovely and it was basically just like a chat between us all rather than us asking questions and her answering. There was a lot of talk over the weekend about female representation in TV, and the possibility of the Wayward Daughters spin-off (which will likely never happen anyway). Also, we discussed fandom and conventions and how Briana is finding being part of the SPN family :).
Straight after Briana’s M&G was Kim’s (which unfortunately meant missing Jewel Staite’s panel) - there were a lot more people in this one… about 24… so it didn’t have the same intimate feeling, but Kim was hilarious as usual. She also talked about the Wayward Daughters spinoff possibilities (she’s not optimistic about it because she knows she’s too old to be a lead in CW show, due to their demographic), told some stories about working on the Suite Life and also talked about the new show, Colony, she’s just been filming.
After lunch, during which time, we finally managed to buy M&G tickets for Kim and Briana together, we had our first panel with Kim, Briana and Kathryn Newton - Kim and Briana were the main attractions of the con for me (I had been looking forward to also seeing Tahmoh and Ty again, but they had to cancel and were replaced by Tyler and Adam). I had seen Kim at Dallas last year, and Kathryn’s first con was Dallas this year, and I was looking forward to seeing Kim and Briana on stage together. It was a fun panel and they’re all hilarious together :P.
The final panel of the day was Osric… it was actually at only about 3 pm, because they scheduled the autographs for the last 3 hours of the day (which was good because normally you end up missing panels to get the autos).
For autographs, at Dallas I’d bought a SPN pillowcase to get signed by people who had already signed my canvas bag, so the auto lines saw me trying to switch between the two and remember who had signed which one! I spoke to Adam about how he was the only guest who had been at both A13 (my first Rogue con) and A15 :). Briana liked my bag and asked if I used it for school… I had to inform her that it had been at least 10 years since I was in school (I wasn’t sure if she meant high school or university though… it’s been 10 years since I graduated from undergrad and 14 years since I finished high school)!
I also congratulated Jewel on her baby (at the time, she was 33 weeks) and told Kathryn that I was at Dallas and thought she was great, considering it was her first ever con. When it got to Tyler’s autos, his girlfriend was sitting just behind him and I noticed she was really pretty… of course, it was only afterwards that I realised she’s also an actress and has actually been in 2 episodes of SPN (Emily Tennant… she was Kate the werewolf’s sister, Tasha in Paper Moon and also had a small part in S5’s Fallen Idols).
Saturday night, we decided not to go to the disco/rock concert, but instead grabbed some food and chatted in the bar.
Day Three: Sunday
Sunday was actually even more relaxed than Saturday and the lighting in the panel hall seemed to be a bit better, so I got some better photos.
We didn’t feel the need to rush, so leisurely headed downstairs for breakfast at 8.30 am and then into the panel room by 9 am. Turned out there was a mix-up with the schedule because Adam’s M&G had been scheduled for the same time that he was supposed to be on stage! So they switched his M&G with Kathryn’s which meant I could buy a ticket for Kathryn’s M&G as well (it previously clashed with the Kim/Briana one).
First panel was Osric (they just scheduled the panels in the opposite order to the day before), which was a mixture of fun and serious… fun because there were lots of jokes about him being tired and drinking peppermint tea because it was supposed to be ‘invigorating’ (and the audience berating him because peppermint isn’t ‘real’ tea!), but serious because it got a bit heavy when he started talking about doing stupid things and telling us some of what happened when he was a kid (he got a bit choked up himself). Can’t remember if it was in his Saturday or Sunday panel, but he talked about having to scale back on the cosplays a bit because his agent had a go at him for spending so much time on costumes that he was neglecting his auditions!
After Osric’s panel we had a massive gap of about 5 hours where they finished the autographs and had a lunch break. Luckily though, they decided to show some of the A14 panels to fill the time… which was great because I got to see the J3 and Jared panels from Hall 1, which I missed because I was in Hall 2 (they also showed the Jensen panel from Hall 2).
The afternoon brought the 3 girls again, Kim, Briana and Kathryn… it was another fun panel, with lots of laughter and joking around. Kathryn is still a little young compared with the other two (Kathryn is only 18 while Kim is 46 and I don’t know how old Briana is but I’d put her maybe early/mid-30s?), which could have been awkward, but luckily it wasn’t.
Next up was Jewel Staite’s second panel - it was a bit quiet at first as not many people had questions and she was onstage on her own, but she had good, interesting answers and there was a fair amount of joking about how uncomfortable her pregnancy is :P.
The last two panels of the con were the boys again (Adam, Chad and Tyler) and then Mark P., but I missed both of them because of the Kathryn and Kim/Briana M&Gs. There was a bit of confusing before Kathryn’s because apparently no one had told the M&G staff that they’d switched Adam and Kathryn’s around! So two of the girls with Adam’s M&G tickets stopped one of the volunteers who was walking Chad out of the room to ask her… so Chad was basically just standing next to me, witnessing the whole conversation :P.
Kathryn’s M&G was really small - only 6 or 7 of us, and I felt a little awkward at first because she was like, ‘so do you all love Claire, then?’ and to be honest, I’m not a massive fan of what the writers have done with the character, but I just think Kathryn is so sweet (and the M&G ticket was really cheap) and I love the intimate atmosphere of the M&Gs. She said how nervous she had been at her first con (I told her I was there and that she did well), and she told us stories about playing golf with Jensen (and how he’d told the execs from the CW how good she was after they came back from playing and found them on the lot waiting to meet her), and stories of the boys mucking around on set (she totally fangirled over J2 :P). She also spoke about how, being a kid, on normal sets she wouldn’t dare talk to the main actors or presume to eat lunch with them, but on the SPN set, it’s different. There’s no one getting water for you or fawning over you asking if you want anything all the time… everyone just gets it themselves, because everyone on the set is considered equal :).
After Kathryn, we ended on a perfect note with Kim and Briana together. They are both hilarious :P. One of the fans gave them some cookies and things, which they immediately dug into. There was a lot of discussion during the M&G about the spin-off ideas, how to get ratings up and our voices heard (emphasis on that article that called female viewers of SPN ‘casual’!), and there was also a question about fandom/fanfiction… one of the fans had done her masters thesis on the demographics of fandom/fanfic and was talking about how the smutty/slash fic was just a tiny proportion of all fanfic, but it gets the most attention and therefore creates an unfair stereotype of fanfiction readers and authors. Kim spoke about how she’d just been at Geekycon which is more about fandom itself than the source material, and also mentioned that cringeworthy moment when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman had to read that fanfiction on stage as just being an awful representation of fandom/fanfic.
After the M&Gs, we headed back to the panel hall for the closing ceremony and then it was time to say goodbye and drive home!
Overall, A15 was the smallest and most laidback con I’ve been to so far. It was nice that we didn’t have to rush around all the time or queue for hours for anything, but at the same time, it didn’t have that same special atmosphere as the larger cons with the bigger guests.
However, it was enjoyable all the same and I love how cheap the con is compared to others. I managed to get all 4 of the M&Gs with Kim, Briana and Kathryn for only £90… that’s about the same as the starting price of the cheapest M&G at a Creation con, and is about the same price as the cheapest M&Gs at JIB!
Day One: Friday
I booked the day off work on Friday so that I would have all day to get to the con and register, though it turned out that registration didn’t actually start until 5 pm anyway. Rather than driving to Birmingham in the morning, I actually ended up meeting one of my best friends from high school (and her 7-month-old daughter) for coffee in the morning and then I set off for the con at about 2pm.
I had wanted to leave earlier but I was waiting for a delivery from Amazon (a lens hood for my camera) which had been promised to arrive that day. However, I discovered online that it potential might not be delivered until 9pm and so I ended up having to leave before it arrived (turns out it was finally delivered at about 6pm). I arrived at the con hotel at about 4pm… 40 minutes later than originally expected due to bad traffic on the motorway!
The good thing about the October Asylum cons is that they are much smaller than the May ones due to usually having less guests and also not having the big guests, because they are in Vancouver filming… so there were only around 500 people this time compared to about 2,100 at A14. As a result, the registration process are pretty painless and we were done in about 30 minutes or so.
They don’t put any of the extras up for sale until the day of the con, so after registering, I queued up to buy some Coffee Lounges (Meet and Greets - which is what I’m going to call them from now on to avoid confusion), since they are so cheap at Rogue cons. I had been planning to buy M&Gs with Kim Rhodes and with Briana Buckmaster, but the con schedule showed that they were doing a joint M&G on Sunday, so I was going to buy that instead.
Unfortunately, when I got to the ticket desk, I discovered that for some unknown reason, they were only selling the Saturday M&Gs at that time (no idea why), so I wouldn’t be able to buy the joint one until the next day. With no guarantee that I would get one, I decided just to buy the separate M&Gs with them anyway.
Once that was done, we headed out to the car park because we’d heard that a fan had brought their Impala with them. Now, I was at DallasCon where Stephanie brought Bela, the Impala that was used in Bloodlines and that J2 have actually sat in and driven, so I wasn’t sure whether this one would be as special, but it was a pretty cool car. The owner told us that it was a custom made replica, whereas some of the other fan-owned cars are just regular Impalas painted black. Unfortunately, he couldn’t carry weapons in the boot (trunk) due to UK weapons laws!
We spent the rest of the evening chatting and meeting various fans :).
Day Two - Saturday
It was nice to be at a small, laidback con for once, because we didn’t need to rush around or queue for ages to get good seats… instead we could be pretty casual about it all. We went to breakfast about 8 am and then at 8.30, headed to the panel room. I had been thinking of paying for a reserved seat near the front, but although the front-row seats were only £20, since there were only about 12 rows of seats and the lighting on the stage was pretty poor for photo-taking it didn’t seem worth it. We sat about 6 rows back, which was fine.
First up on stage was Mark Pellegrino, who I hadn’t seen at a con before. I have to admit though, that his panel wasn’t particularly stand-out. He gets each fan up on stage to ask their question… and there are a few jokes, but that’s about it. The running joke of this panel was that everything became ‘a big bag of dicks’ (as Gabriel called Lucifer in ‘Hammer of the Gods’).
Sadly my photos weren’t great on Saturday due to the bad lighting (lots of blurry ones):
After Mark, we had a bit of a break, then a joint panel with Adam Rose (Aaron Bass from the Golem episode), Tyler Johnston (Samandriel/Bugs) and Chad Lindberg (Ash). I had seen Adam last year, and Tyler at Dallas a month earlier, but hadn’t seen Chad before. It was a fun panel, though again I was annoyed by the lack of good photos - the only person I seemed to be able to get good pics of was Adam due to where he was sitting. Chad talked a bit about his ghost hunting, and Adam was asked about his YouTube videos and his experience of eating at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas and getting spanked when he couldn’t finish his Triple Bypass Burger!
After that panel, it was time for my M&G with Briana. At Rogue cons, the M&Gs are just set up as a circle of chairs, with the guest occupying one of them. There were only about 10 people in the M&G (they had 20 tickets available for it), and it was a really nice atmosphere. Briana is lovely and it was basically just like a chat between us all rather than us asking questions and her answering. There was a lot of talk over the weekend about female representation in TV, and the possibility of the Wayward Daughters spin-off (which will likely never happen anyway). Also, we discussed fandom and conventions and how Briana is finding being part of the SPN family :).
Straight after Briana’s M&G was Kim’s (which unfortunately meant missing Jewel Staite’s panel) - there were a lot more people in this one… about 24… so it didn’t have the same intimate feeling, but Kim was hilarious as usual. She also talked about the Wayward Daughters spinoff possibilities (she’s not optimistic about it because she knows she’s too old to be a lead in CW show, due to their demographic), told some stories about working on the Suite Life and also talked about the new show, Colony, she’s just been filming.
After lunch, during which time, we finally managed to buy M&G tickets for Kim and Briana together, we had our first panel with Kim, Briana and Kathryn Newton - Kim and Briana were the main attractions of the con for me (I had been looking forward to also seeing Tahmoh and Ty again, but they had to cancel and were replaced by Tyler and Adam). I had seen Kim at Dallas last year, and Kathryn’s first con was Dallas this year, and I was looking forward to seeing Kim and Briana on stage together. It was a fun panel and they’re all hilarious together :P.
The final panel of the day was Osric… it was actually at only about 3 pm, because they scheduled the autographs for the last 3 hours of the day (which was good because normally you end up missing panels to get the autos).
For autographs, at Dallas I’d bought a SPN pillowcase to get signed by people who had already signed my canvas bag, so the auto lines saw me trying to switch between the two and remember who had signed which one! I spoke to Adam about how he was the only guest who had been at both A13 (my first Rogue con) and A15 :). Briana liked my bag and asked if I used it for school… I had to inform her that it had been at least 10 years since I was in school (I wasn’t sure if she meant high school or university though… it’s been 10 years since I graduated from undergrad and 14 years since I finished high school)!
I also congratulated Jewel on her baby (at the time, she was 33 weeks) and told Kathryn that I was at Dallas and thought she was great, considering it was her first ever con. When it got to Tyler’s autos, his girlfriend was sitting just behind him and I noticed she was really pretty… of course, it was only afterwards that I realised she’s also an actress and has actually been in 2 episodes of SPN (Emily Tennant… she was Kate the werewolf’s sister, Tasha in Paper Moon and also had a small part in S5’s Fallen Idols).
Saturday night, we decided not to go to the disco/rock concert, but instead grabbed some food and chatted in the bar.
Day Three: Sunday
Sunday was actually even more relaxed than Saturday and the lighting in the panel hall seemed to be a bit better, so I got some better photos.
We didn’t feel the need to rush, so leisurely headed downstairs for breakfast at 8.30 am and then into the panel room by 9 am. Turned out there was a mix-up with the schedule because Adam’s M&G had been scheduled for the same time that he was supposed to be on stage! So they switched his M&G with Kathryn’s which meant I could buy a ticket for Kathryn’s M&G as well (it previously clashed with the Kim/Briana one).
First panel was Osric (they just scheduled the panels in the opposite order to the day before), which was a mixture of fun and serious… fun because there were lots of jokes about him being tired and drinking peppermint tea because it was supposed to be ‘invigorating’ (and the audience berating him because peppermint isn’t ‘real’ tea!), but serious because it got a bit heavy when he started talking about doing stupid things and telling us some of what happened when he was a kid (he got a bit choked up himself). Can’t remember if it was in his Saturday or Sunday panel, but he talked about having to scale back on the cosplays a bit because his agent had a go at him for spending so much time on costumes that he was neglecting his auditions!
After Osric’s panel we had a massive gap of about 5 hours where they finished the autographs and had a lunch break. Luckily though, they decided to show some of the A14 panels to fill the time… which was great because I got to see the J3 and Jared panels from Hall 1, which I missed because I was in Hall 2 (they also showed the Jensen panel from Hall 2).
The afternoon brought the 3 girls again, Kim, Briana and Kathryn… it was another fun panel, with lots of laughter and joking around. Kathryn is still a little young compared with the other two (Kathryn is only 18 while Kim is 46 and I don’t know how old Briana is but I’d put her maybe early/mid-30s?), which could have been awkward, but luckily it wasn’t.
Next up was Jewel Staite’s second panel - it was a bit quiet at first as not many people had questions and she was onstage on her own, but she had good, interesting answers and there was a fair amount of joking about how uncomfortable her pregnancy is :P.
The last two panels of the con were the boys again (Adam, Chad and Tyler) and then Mark P., but I missed both of them because of the Kathryn and Kim/Briana M&Gs. There was a bit of confusing before Kathryn’s because apparently no one had told the M&G staff that they’d switched Adam and Kathryn’s around! So two of the girls with Adam’s M&G tickets stopped one of the volunteers who was walking Chad out of the room to ask her… so Chad was basically just standing next to me, witnessing the whole conversation :P.
Kathryn’s M&G was really small - only 6 or 7 of us, and I felt a little awkward at first because she was like, ‘so do you all love Claire, then?’ and to be honest, I’m not a massive fan of what the writers have done with the character, but I just think Kathryn is so sweet (and the M&G ticket was really cheap) and I love the intimate atmosphere of the M&Gs. She said how nervous she had been at her first con (I told her I was there and that she did well), and she told us stories about playing golf with Jensen (and how he’d told the execs from the CW how good she was after they came back from playing and found them on the lot waiting to meet her), and stories of the boys mucking around on set (she totally fangirled over J2 :P). She also spoke about how, being a kid, on normal sets she wouldn’t dare talk to the main actors or presume to eat lunch with them, but on the SPN set, it’s different. There’s no one getting water for you or fawning over you asking if you want anything all the time… everyone just gets it themselves, because everyone on the set is considered equal :).
After Kathryn, we ended on a perfect note with Kim and Briana together. They are both hilarious :P. One of the fans gave them some cookies and things, which they immediately dug into. There was a lot of discussion during the M&G about the spin-off ideas, how to get ratings up and our voices heard (emphasis on that article that called female viewers of SPN ‘casual’!), and there was also a question about fandom/fanfiction… one of the fans had done her masters thesis on the demographics of fandom/fanfic and was talking about how the smutty/slash fic was just a tiny proportion of all fanfic, but it gets the most attention and therefore creates an unfair stereotype of fanfiction readers and authors. Kim spoke about how she’d just been at Geekycon which is more about fandom itself than the source material, and also mentioned that cringeworthy moment when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman had to read that fanfiction on stage as just being an awful representation of fandom/fanfic.
After the M&Gs, we headed back to the panel hall for the closing ceremony and then it was time to say goodbye and drive home!
Overall, A15 was the smallest and most laidback con I’ve been to so far. It was nice that we didn’t have to rush around all the time or queue for hours for anything, but at the same time, it didn’t have that same special atmosphere as the larger cons with the bigger guests.
However, it was enjoyable all the same and I love how cheap the con is compared to others. I managed to get all 4 of the M&Gs with Kim, Briana and Kathryn for only £90… that’s about the same as the starting price of the cheapest M&G at a Creation con, and is about the same price as the cheapest M&Gs at JIB!