Dragon Con is the only national convention that actually mattered this week. I mean, check out these insane costumes.
Dragon Con is huge.
Dragon Con bills itself as the "the largest multi-media and popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, pop art, designer toys, literature, art, music, film, and fun in the universe." This year, Dragon Con staff members told me that attendance was over 50,000 people, who took over five hotels in downtown Atlanta. (The San Diego Comic-Con brought in 126,000 people this year.) Amazingly, practically the entire Dragon Con staff is composed of unpaid volunteers: workers told me there were around 1,000 volunteers — Atlanta Magazine puts the number at 2,000 — and that only three people get paid. It is, in a word, huge. And almost everybody's in costume.
And Star Wars is still the single biggest cultural force at Dragon Con.
It's Star Wars costumes as far as the eye can see.
At least if you're using the annual Dragon Con costume parade as the measuring stick. The most massive section of the 3500-person parade, by far, was the Star Wars contingent, which dwarfed any other single franchise. This is perhaps the most fascinating thing about Dragon Con — while nerd culture has increasingly become intertwined and conflated with internet culture (think Reddit, ROFLcon, E3, etc. etc.), what's on display at Dragon Con is mostly offline nerd culture. It's movies, comics, genre fiction, fantasy and sci-fi, and it's largely top-down culture: While cosplayers at Dragon Con frequently remix genre tropes and well-known franchises — zombie Stormtroopers and steampunk Batmans ran amok — what attendees performed and discussed and mimicked, more often than not, were products of larger cultural machines, like Hollywood or the comic book industry. Not wholly original creations generated by and for Dragon Con, the way the internet often generates and spreads its own cultural memes.
At the same time, nearly everybody I talked to insisted that what made Dragon Con special was that it was "by and for the fans," as Jane, dressed up as Lady Loki, expressed to me while we stood in the middle of the Marriott hotel, which felt very much like the center of a bee's nest with thousands of attendees buzzing by us, zipping between the three levels of the hotel. "All of the other [cons] are very commercialized, but this is the fan version of it. This is for us," explained a girl dressed up as Twili from one of the most recent Legend of Zelda games for the Wii. One of a couple of Links in her group added, "This is a completely different feeling [than other cons]. It's got all of it in one giant mix." There are 42 tracks at Dragon Con.
