NOV.24.2025 1:39 AM: San Diego Anime Con
Attended San Diego Anime Con for one day, Sunday, to see what it was about. Almost kinda missed going to smaller conventions after only having gone to large-scale ones in the past few years.
I've previously gone to Anime Conji that was held in the San Diego Marriott in Mission Valley back in 2019 or so. Super small convention. Maybe only the size of one side room with a few extra rooms nearby to browse then dip. I suppose with con culture growing along side "nerd" culture, it would be a good idea to keep up with it. Events like these always remind me how vast of a community San Diego has, but is also very small. I've begun to see a lot of familiar people and faces when I find out about new anime-related events. Being part of a maid cafe group for a little bit but only as an artist, I saw a fraction of what the anime community held often in the county.
San Diego Anime Con has been around for 3 years apparently, but only found out about it this year because of the VTuber Research Club. Their origin is primarily from SoCal. They're the group that has the vtubers head around on screens with speakers to interact with con-goers. They make sure the machines don't get damaged, get walked around properly, and help with interacting with others. They also recently attended TwitchCon which I attended for the first time this year but am unsure I will be attending again considering it was expensive and didn't actually have much to do for someone with my lack of outgoing personality and only being affiliate on the platform. I digress.
The VTuber Research Club posted about attending the convention as a group. I didn't even know the convention existed! I talked with my boyfriend and we agreed with another friend to head there only for a day. Smaller conventions can be seen completely in one day and there weren't any other days we could attend anyways. Small little hotel convention filled through a lot of the hallways and little extra branched off rooms. This seemed like the perfect environment for me to try tabling with my art sometime.
Easy to get in, paid for entry there. Walked around a bit and it turned out our other buddy was volunteering for the event so we talked to him for a little while and saw 3 or 4 different vendor/artist areas. I bought a couple of little blind bag keychains from an artist that I will try to take a photo of later. My boyfriend found some Advanced Wars fanart stickers made by one of the people in the artist area. Some other things were bought by our friend. I spent a really big chunk of time looking through artbooks at a vendor. Most of the books I thought about getting were $50+ and I couldn't justify it, thinking I'd only look at them maybe once or twice a year at most. Wandered around some more, then our buddy wanted to check out something with a local maid group I had seen with my boyfriend previously. (I think I talked about it at the end of my AX2025 blog, actually...)
Turned out they were doing a J-Pop focused RPD. RPD standing for "Random Dance Play". I had never seen it in person but, unfortunately, had seen it often in bad etiquette videos. Our buddy with us wanted to be served food and the other cute maid cafe things but was disappointed to see the RPD. We dipped hoping to hang out with our volunteer friend but couldn't find him or his other friends at all. Played some Smash Bros. Melee and 2XKO with some crunchy and overly-used controllers as part of the San Diego Lan group that had a room there instead. Forgot when we ate food inbetween all these things we did but it happened.
Overall, very positive experience. Will more than likely be attending again in the future considering the ticket for entry was only 25$ and I would be considering trying to table next year as well. One day is definitely enough to experience it all even if they upgrade to a bigger venue. Excited to see what they decided to do for it.