Animazement”¦People flock to Raleigh from literally all walks of life and from all over the country every year to celebrate Anime and Japanese culture in all different forms.
Anime, manga, video games, movies; no matter where your passion lies, you are sure to find others who share in it here. As you can see, this is definitely a no judgment zone.
The range of topics covered in the panels was even more wide-spread. You will find everything from Con Survival to Japanese music videos to live drawings. (I actually had the pleasure of sneaking away from the Stack-up booth and into a Live Drawing by Sword Art Online’s character designer, Shingo Adachi and Aniplex producer, Shinichiro Kashiwada. I must admit that it was absolutely fascinating to see Adachi in action and get some insight into the upcoming Sword Art Online move: Ordinal Scale. Yes, my inner fangirl is showing a little right now.)
However; most of my time was spent running the booth with my other lovely Stack-Up.org people. We were actually one of Animazement’s featured charities, which I was both proud and excited to be a part of, so my time honestly could not have been better spent. This mostly consisted of us sweet-talking people into trading their blood and sweat (not really, just doing a few push-ups) in return for free steam codes and basically just raising awareness about who Stack-Up is and what we do. I was genuinely impressed with the number of questions and the amount of interest that we received.
Along with the push-up challenge, was a leaderboard contest that we reset each day. For this, we added a third category; fluid, which was for the gender-fluid or any that didn’t necessarily identify with any specific gender. We wanted to make sure that everyone could feel included and all of the hugs and tearful thank you’s made that little bit of extra effort more than worth it for all of us.
The crowd at Animazement seemed to be more interactive than what I have been used to at some of the previous events that I’ve attended, but this could partially be because so many of us already live in Raleigh and friends tend to draw in more friends and it becomes a glorious spiral of friendship. I would also like to take this moment to thank all of the friends that did stop by, either just to speak and show support and those that participated in the push-up challenge just because we asked them to. (Even those of you that tried to glare at me the whole time, but I guess the whole trying to glare while you were doing push-ups thing didn’t work out so well because we all ended up laughing in the end.) The fact that we were supported by so many people, those that we did know and those that we didn’t, certainly makes a difference to morale in a very positive way.
As always, thank you Kevin Wallace and Stephen Machuga for the opportunity and I look forward to the future and more events to come with you guys.