The lead-up to a convention, especially one you’ve been looking forward to for a long time, can be just as taxing as anything else that goes into preparing for it. You’re excited for any number of reasons; it’s nearby, it’s in a location that you enjoy going to, you have a lot of good memories of the place, you name it. Each new year, you’re hoping the con can make the same level of memories that past cons have made, if not surpass them. Which is part of what puts us on high alert when this specific convention comes up on the docket.
Zenkaikon 2026 comes to us once again from the Lancaster Convention Center in Lancaster, PA, in the heart of Amish country. And it’s not just another Zenkaikon this year; they are celebrating their 20th anniversary, which is an incredible achievement for an anime convention. The con was decked out top to bottom in sakura motifs, parasols, and paper lanterns, which I found especially beautiful and pleasing to be around, especially on the ground floor outside of the Dealers’ Room.
The hotel connected to the convention center hasn’t changed all too much…at first, is what we all thought. As it turns out, the building had undergone a significant series of renovations on its lowest level. What was once the main Registration section with mostly open space has been converted into three brand new conference rooms in progressively larger sizes, all of which were very clean and had the building equivalent of the “new car” smell to them. The renovations were projected to be finished around the first quarter of 2026 according to the people in charge of the building, and wouldn’t you know it, they were available just in time for the convention. While it was nice having new venues for panels et al for the convention (aside from having to shuttle over to the Holiday Inn), the only complaint I had about them was that a lot of panels were held in this new space. A lot. Good on Zenkaikon for making the most of their new convention space, but 70% of my time at the con was spent either going to or leaving those three new panel rooms.
Good news about the hotel: the pool was open. As was the hot tub. And both were being used by attendees and non-attendees alike. AJS is back, baby!
Our party was split into two rooms this year, as the days of packing ridiculous amounts of otaku into a single hotel room just to save a few bucks are long behind us. Especially when some of us have…unique needs when it comes to sleeping arrangements, as they’re difficult to address when every bit of potential sleep space turns into a free-for-all. That, and since we all have jobs with comfortable salaries, we can splurge on the “extra” space. And thankfully, the hotel made sure to put the two rooms together instead of, say, on opposite ends of the building; that made it much easier to just talk to one another, much less coordinate plans for who wants to go see this panel, go eat dinner at that place, what have you. I only say this because I wouldn’t put it past any of these hotels to pull a stunt exactly like that; hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if some other attendees went through a similar situation.
Friday was off to a pleasant start, mostly because there was no mad dash to get down to the con at the very crack of dawn (maple bacon donuts at the farmers’ market notwithstanding). I made my way down to the new panel rooms to check out “The Most Iconic Anime Opening” panel. It was a bracket-style audience participation game where, in each round, of the two openings presented, the audience voted on which one resonated with them better. The openings were mostly the Japanese versions, apart from one or two that didn’t change for international versions, as well as the godawful DiC opening of Sailor Moon, which made it much farther in the tournament than it had any right to. Ultimately, the winner ended up being the Cowboy BeBop opening, getting a narrow victory over the Neon Genesis Evangelion opening. So, all in all, a very fun way to start the con.
What wasn’t nearly as fun was the “Anime Jeopardy!” panel that followed soon after. It was a rather low-rent Jeopardy! audience game, though a far cry from what I’m typically used to seeing from game shows adapted for an anime con. Or maybe Big Bucks Entertainment has spoiled me on what I expect out of an anime themed game show.
The next panel, and the first panel I visited at the Holiday Inn, was “Dumb Ways to Die in an RPG: A Group Tabletop Experience.” Two panelists portrayed D&D characters, and while there was a cohesive story, the fun came from players stepping up to take actions for either character. This inevitably led to audience members making the player characters do outlandish or completely out-of-pocket things just because they thought it was funny. So, it was a typical D&D session, but with audience participation.
In between panels, there were periodic visits to the game rooms, of which there were two. The video games were hosted in the convention center proper, while the tabletop gaming—board games, TCGs, etc.—was held in the Holiday Inn. They also held various M:TG tournaments throughout the weekend, but I didn’t partake in any of them, since the trek back and forth between the two venues was tiring, and I didn’t want to spend too much money. It’s also why I didn’t set foot in the Dealers’ Room, since it would be highly unlikely that I would want to buy anything. Besides, I already was given a belated Christmas and a belated birthday gift later that Friday, so nothing in there would be even remotely as valuable to me.
The last panel I attended on Friday was “American Anime: The Ultimate Oxymoron.” It talked about not just anime influences in Western animation, but also how other anime were adapted by the west for contemporary audiences…and how these were not always the best of ideas. Warriors of the Wind, the version of Nausicaa that was heavily edited, was especially reviled.
The rest of the night was spent up in the room, recuperating from the day’s activities, and watching either TV or YouTube stuff on the TV. Our usual end of the day stuff.
Saturday also got off to a smooth start, as, again, my first panel wasn’t until well into the morning. This was “Politics and Propaganda: The Complexity of Conflicts in Ghibli Films.” Anyone who knows of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s films knows that the messages in his films are not at all subtle, same with the allegories for all the worst kinds of things humans can do to one another, and this panel goes into depth about how messages such as his are more important than ever. Bonus points go to the panelists for showing the Porco Rosso clip of Rosso in the theater watching overt propaganda, and while discussing his past with Fierrain and recalling Porco’s defection, he drops the immortal line, “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” Such a sentiment seems to resonate a lot more profoundly in the world today.
The next panel that grabbed my attention from the second I saw it on the schedule was “The Shakespearian Anime Universe.” And what followed was a dissertation about how a lot of the tropes, plot lines, and character archetypes that modern and recent anime are known for were first pioneered by Shakespeare himself. Granted, the man did come up with numerous words and phrases because the language at the time didn’t have them, but this notion was amplified by a pair of plot summaries that objectively matched both “Hamlet” and Death Note, as well as “As You Like It” and Ouran High School Host Club. This isn’t a variant of the “explain a plot badly” shtick; the fact that the descriptions technically matched both the plays and the anime was mind blowing to me. The panelists also drew parallels between Shakespeare and anime regarding other character archetypes such as the tragic hero, the comic relief side characters, and the guys who simp incessantly for women that are far out of their league. It was easily the most informative panel I attended all weekend.
Another panel I really wanted to attend was “[Insert Thing] is WOKE (Now?)!” which was an hour-long castigation of conservatoid handwringing and pearl-clutching over storytelling in nerdy pursuits such as video games, anime, comics, et al. Manly Battleships were in peak form this weekend, busting on the continued usage of “woke” as shorthand for not liking something because it’s not completely about me, a cishet white male (overlapping with the presence of non-white, non-male characters in any major or minor capacity, or female who are dressed and proportioned modestly and not like humanoid Barbie dolls). The best parts of the discussion were pointing out how geek media has been “woke” for decades—mocking people for hating on modern X-Men when Prof. Xavier and Magneto were stand-ins for Martin Luther King and Malcom X, respectively; how the original Star Wars trilogy was “Space Vietnam” and how folks couldn’t piece together which country The Empire was supposed to represent; and how Superman was denouncing T.R.A.S.H. as un-American as early as 1949. Mocking these kinds of chuds never ceases to be funny, especially since they fall straight into the “Always have been” meme. Good times were had by all.
The last panel I wanted to attend that day was “Who’s That Pokémon? Bingo!” which was, as one could assume, playing Bingo with Pokémon silhouettes. I got to the panel room about 20 minutes before start time, only to find out that the line for said panel was well towards the escalators just outside the new panel rooms. So that wasn’t happening. The rest of the night was split between eating dinner, roaming the game room, and hanging out in our rooms watching stuff on YouTube again.
Sunday morning brought about the usual last day things we’ve come to expect from conventions—the solemn feeling of not seeing our friends again in person for a long time, getting ourselves packed up and squared away for leaving, and the absolute bedlam of trying to get room in the elevators to actually leave. It should also be noted that of the three elevators leading to the lobby (as well as the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors for con functions), one of them was out of service for the entire weekend. This inevitably led to the most aggravating of convention rituals for departing a con—going up to go down. And guess who had to go all the way up to the top floor before getting off at the lobby! Those two working elevators were a bad place to be if you couldn’t handle enclosed spaces, other people, or the con funk radiating off them. Occasionally throughout the weekend, a hotel employee would allow a few guests—usually with copious amounts of luggage—to use a service elevator that was out of the way of the main elevators. That is, until around Saturday afternoon, when this practice just stopped dead. Nevertheless, I didn’t have any specific panels I wanted to check out on Sunday; I simply made one last trip through the arcade room, said goodbye to my friends, and headed back home to recuperate from the weekend.
Zenkaikon is always a fun time going to, and this year was no different. While the new panel rooms and revised layout took some work to get used to, I ultimately enjoyed my experience and it’s inevitable that we will be back there again. There are entire sections of Lancaster that are also being renovated, not just the convention center, and ideally the renovations will be finished by next year. In between the end of the con and the publishing of this report, Zenkaikon announced the theme for 2027; in this case, video games. And already the wheels are turning for us…we’re putting the band back together.