LAST EDITED ON Mar-07-25 AT 03:05 PM (EST)
 
I wonder if fandom is simply just changing...

I attended Arisia for 27 years and was a panelist/moderator for about a third of that.

At first, I pursued whatever interested me (I was a fixture at Steampunk panels for a while—one of them is even online!)

But one of the reasons I stopped attending was that the panels that were being proposed had less and less content that I could contribute to—a lot of cosplay stuff, a slight tilt towards political themes. So, after a while, I tended only to do anime panels.

(One of the reasons I stopped attending, other than age, was that I was getting tired of doing the same panels every year.)

They keep inviting me back, but things have shifted even further. This past January, there was ONE Anime panel—an introductory one. And the only fanfic panel was "Crossovers we'd like to see."

Meanwhile, there were 7 panels tagged "Cosplay", 4 on Maker stuff, and 14 on fan communities.

It's just a different crowd these days.