Day: May 20, 2019

Anime Central is a convention that takes place every spring outside of Chicago, IL (USA). It’s been an annual event for over 20 years at the time of this writing, and it’s also one of the first anime conventions I ever attended as an itty-bitty otaku (after I wet my heels at the much smaller, more intimate Anime Iowa around 2002). This year was the first time I’d been back to the con after a 5 year hiatus; I have a tumultuous relationship with “big” (over 10K attendee) cons, and so I took a break after my last venture to regroup and figure out just what I was looking for in terms of convention experiences.

I’ll write more about the convention in general in a separate post. What’s relevant to this post is the fact that I wasn’t planning to attend this year’s Anime Central either until I saw some news about the guest list – members of animation studio Kinema Citrus, including staff members who performed key production roles on two of my recent favorite series (Made in Abyss and Revue Starlight) were slated to attend and speak. Because my local medium-sized convention rarely gets Japanese guests in the first place, and because both of those anime series affected me deeply, the con suddenly went from being a distant “maybe” to an absolute must-do event.