Birmingham Anime and Videogame Convention
On the 8th this month I was at Birmingham’s Anime and videogame convention with a friend. I’d only been in Birmingham once before this and not in the Edgbaston area, which is where the convention was held. Before I get into the the convention itself, there’s a lovely park just across the road from the cricket ground which has a nice teahouse which serves very generous portions of cake and is near to the Midlands Art Centre, both of which I’d recommend.
On to the convention itself, I saw a good deal more than I did at the Edinburgh or Bristol conventions. Black tsubaki, Jero11, Segadeath and the Q and A with Brent Mukai were the main activities that we attended. All of the musical performances were great, though I think the audio balancing could have used some work with Segadeath. Jero11 in particular was great to see, just a very passionate artist who I saw cheering on the other artists when he wasn’t on stage himself.
Unlike the Bristol convention, I was able to restrain myself from making any unnecessary purchases, though I nearly bought some crocheted pikmin which were very nice looking, but ultimately it’s just one more possession that I would quickly forget about I’m sure. Also unlike Bristol, the venue was much more suitable for hosting a convention, with plenty of room to move around between halls and a reasonably sized stairwell with accessible lifts for those that needed it.
We also caught the first half or so of the cosplay parade. Lots of Genshin impact cosplayers, which I am not really familiar with. Whilst we saw a lot of Demonslayer cosplays going around the convention, I don’t think any of them entered the competition. Notable entrants (to me) included an excellent Blue exorcist Yukio and male Hatsune Miku.
There were several activities there that we didn’t try but I would be interested to try in the future. There were a number of stations set up for people to play games, mostly a selection of fighting games (The most recent Tekken, King of Fighters and Mortal Kombat). Otherwise, the game selection was not to my taste (which is fine), Minecraft, Roblox, Genshin and Smite, with some others that I didn’t recognize. There was also a single table dedicated to a one-shot roleplaying session of what looked like DnD 5th edition. I’d quite like to try roleplaying again, but I’m not that interested in DnD/ pathfinder.
For most of the day I was too busy watching performers to take any photographs for the blog, so as an apology here is an extra crunchy picture of a squirel from the park.
