Midway through the convention’s middle afternoon, a panel discussion at this year’s 40-year edition of Archon was targeted at its middle-aged attendees. By most accounts of this session, it’s the middle-aged among Archon’s ranks that will need to take the convention’s wheel over the next decade, a time that panelist Walt Boyes said may determine whether fan-run science fiction and fantasy conventions will continue to exist. (His grim prediction: well, grim.) The founders, many of whom were on this particular panel, in this very conference room, have hit the point of volunteer retirement, while the Millennials haven’t fully engaged in active participation yet; or, some might argue, they’ve not been engaged.
Archon’s squarely been a fan-driven affair for all four decades of its life, even as it’s hopscotched through a variety of venues. This past weekend’s edition at Collinsville’s Gateway Center showed that the volunteer nature of the almost-everything-goes fest remains as key to its success as ever. And what those volunteers have created is a far different experience than you get at one of the bigger cons, e.g. the big-bucks Wizard World, which has been hitting St. Louis during summer months in recent years. At Wizard World, the guests are more mainstream; the vendors, more plentiful; the venue, more sizable; and the feel, more corporate. At Archon, the tradition exists because there are still folks who’ll sit at a table for big parts of the entire weekend, so that others might have enough fun for two.
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The panelists at this discussion, “The Aging of Fandom,” were but a tiny fraction of the con’s attendees, which one of them guessed at around 2,000. But the topics they were hitting upon were of the kind that anyone at the fest could’ve appreciated. Prominently among those: keeping subcultures alive, IRL, in an increasingly digital world. The members of this old school for sure remember the need for kinship earlier in their lives; different days, indeed.
One audience member spoke about her youth, when she was the only young person in her small town to read science fiction. The li’l village’s pharmacy doubled as the bookstore, and the clerks there held SF titles every time that book shipments came in, so before they went on the shelves, she got dibs. In time, a friend-of-a-family-member-type connection was established and she began going to a science fiction club’s meetings, which meant an hour drive each way. In time, nascent sci-fi conventions were the logical next step and, after attending her first, that was it: she was hooked.
Person after person riffed on similar themes, if the details were different. And, as many folks of certain generations will do, they held their phones aloft to make a key point.
“These,” they’d say, waving around those Apples. “These let you find a form of community. But it’s just not the same as meeting other fans in person.”
At Archon this year, this collision of new-and-now and old school was found, comfortingly, as usual. In the latter camp, you still had an assortment of Trekkies, of Dr. Who devotees, or original Star Wars fans. On the new tip, you saw the kids from Stranger Things, a dozen versions of Rey from A Force Awakens and, via one family of five, a variety of pack of characters from Game of Thrones, highlighted by the daughter’s dead-on Lady Mormont.
As in the recent past, the steampunks have been losing steam, the zombie hunters seem to be getting picked off, and last year’s breakthrough female cosplay character, Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa, went from omnipresent to endangered. Every fall offers these cultural wrinkles.
Such is fandom, though. What’s old is new again, and what’s too old is forgotten until remade, at which point it’s truly new again and, possibly, quite popular.
Proven this past weekend: Bikini Ewoks will always have a place at Archon.
Long may it thrive!
(And, lookee there! Archon 41’s been set for September 29, 2017. Sweet.)
