FUN! FRIENDS! FAMOUS PEOPLE! Why Fans Attend Anime Conventions

In 2021 during the global Covid-19 lockdowns, Billy and Maria ran an IRB-exempted online survey, looking to hear from fans who attend anime conventions. Conventions had been shut down as non-essential services that drew large crowds, and we hoped to capture a screenshot of this moment, to better learn from it in the future. And the resulting data collection went quite well – we were able to partner with a major anime organization to share the survey, and our 1000+ respondents had a lot to say about the conventions they were missing during lockdowns. Ultimately, we found a significant emphasis on the need for physical community spaces, which were being recognized and remembered fondly in a moment when they had gone away. In this paper, we provide an overview of the work we did with the 2021 survey of anime convention attendees and consider four of the major themes that we’ve uncovered in our ongoing work with a rich, multi-layered dataset, which themselves suggest specific interests in accessible spaces of knowledge and expertise.