There’s something disorienting about walking into a fan convention in Washington, D.C. while the city is being taken over by federal overreach. You step off the Metro full of National Guard into a March morning that feels like it could go either way weather-wise, navigate the various gaggles of law enforcement walking through the streets, then you turn a corner and there they are: thousands of people in elaborate costumes, carrying props and handmade signs, streaming toward the Walter E. Washington Convention Center with the buzzing energy of people who have been waiting a very long time to be somewhere that feels like an escape.
The city around them is, at this particular moment, a pressure cooker. Policy decisions that will affect millions of people are being made in buildings a mile away. The news, when you check it, is always almost apocalyptically bad right now. And yet: here are 60,000 human beings, gathered in the nation’s capital to celebrate the things they love.
As someone who is haunted every waking hour by the horrors the country I live in is causing both domestically and abroad, I kept thinking about that dichotomy all weekend. Awesome Con bills itself as a deliberately apolitical space, a haven for fandom and community and joy. The convention itself does not take political positions or make statements. It is, in this way, the opposite of everything else happening in this city right now. I found myself wondering over the past three days whether that is a feature or a bug – or, given who actually shows up, how it might be something more complicated than one or the other.
The Lay of the Land
The Walter E. Washington Convention Center is a beast of a building – enormous and built somewhat like a maze, the kind of place that rewards prior navigation planning. My biggest advice to first-timers, especially neurodivergent attendees: look up the floor map before you arrive and locate your must-see events in advance. Some areas are easy to find; the main vendor hall and autograph tables are consolidated enough that you’re not constantly trekking across the building. Other events, like the Supernatural rave and trivia event held in a less-trafficked corridor, for example, require a bit more intentional seeking.
The vendor floor is overwhelming in the best sense: tables and booths stretching seemingly to infinity, stacked with comics and figures and prints and handmade goods and every piece of merchandise from every fandom you have ever loved or forgotten you loved. Hall B this year housed the Book Fair and the new Romancing DC section, which made its debut as a dedicated space for romantasy and romance fiction – an addition that gives us a nice glimpse at where book culture is right now.
Awesome Con Jr. occupies a corner of the floor where families with small children can actually enjoy themselves without constant anxiety about navigating adult crowd density. On Saturday, the Bluey Dance Party there was a chaotic and delightful reminder that fandom has no minimum age requirement and that watching a toddler attempt the Bluey theme while their parent gamely tries to keep up is pretty damn restorative for someone burdened by the state of the world.
The convention runs programming across multiple stages and rooms simultaneously, which means that on any given hour you are making choices and sacrifices. Main Stage panels – held in Ballroom AB – were where the weekend’s marquee events happened, and I’ll get to those a bit later. But what makes Awesome Con such a unique reflection of human nature, to me, is in the behavior of the attendees themselves: the demographics, the culture, the interactions with strangers, all of the particular social physics of a gathering like this.
The Fandom Crowd as a Mirror of Society
The demographics leaned white, of course, because whiteness is the default of most USA fan spaces, and pretending otherwise isn’t useful, but it was multiracial in a way that can be rare in convention spaces. The gender spread was roughly even, with slightly more women than men from my observation, and the age range was pretty broad: toddlers in matching family costumes, college students in handmade cosplay, a man, probably in his sixties, who I watched hold very still while presumably a stranger in her twenties carefully re-glued a piece of his armor.
What I appreciated most was the openness of it. Pride Alley – curated by Geeks OUT, a nonprofit celebrating queer fans and creators – was well-placed and well-attended, and queer identity was visible throughout the floor in a way that felt completely unremarkable in the right way. People wore pronoun pins and pride flags and accessories openly, without apparent self-consciousness, and the crowd around them responded in kind. I overheard a group of teenage girls spend minutes talking about their favorite queer characters with the same easy fluency that their parents’ generation might have discussed baseball. It felt like queer identity truly was normal within their walls – something not every convention manages to achieve.
Part of what makes Awesome Con’s demographic profile distinct from, say, a more fandom-specific convention is its accessibility. Admission passes are priced affordably, which is not a small thing – it opens the floor to a broader range of economic backgrounds than the cons that charge $200 for a single-day pass. The correlation between accessible pricing and racial and class diversity in fan spaces is a very well-documented issue, and Awesome Con’s comparative openness reflects a better policy than pricing out tax brackets.
It also probably works out better for them in the long run! Cheaper admission means more people in the door who are then likely to spend more on photo ops, autographs, and all the other extras once they are there. Banking on enough people being able to splurge for the act of attendance alone may not be a strategy that survives an economy that is in the beginning of a recession. The first thing that people cut in times like this are luxuries – aka events they can no longer afford. It’s much easier to justify a $30-$40 ticket for the day, knowing you will have time to save for any extras you may want, rather than to have to commit to spending $200+ just to get in the door.
Convention Highlights: What We Loved Most
We have an exciting lineup of articles coming out this week that go more into detail about specific panels and announcements, but here are some moments from the weekend that I feel are highlight-worthy:
The Drag Halftime Show, held Saturday night on the Main Stage, was amazing, and I am glad they did it. A mainstream pop-culture convention running a full drag performance for a packed house as something the audience was there to celebrate, rather than a spectacle to be mocked, is always nice to see in this current climate, and the crowd response was electric. Everything being done to restrict and stigmatize drag performance in various states puts the decision to continue celebrating drag in a more complicated light than usual, and too many businesses have chosen to distance themselves from drag and the queer community in general now that is has been made “socially acceptable” to stop pretending to care about our rights. It is great that Awesome Con has continued to celebrate both – which should be the norm, but unfortunately is not.
The Supernatural rave and trivia session was small but full of joy. The Supernatural fandom has been gathering like this for almost twenty years, through the run of the show and after it, and there’s a special feeling being in a room full of people who have loved the same thing for that long. They know each other. They know the dances, the references, the inside jokes that require years of fandom context to understand. The room felt like a family reunion – it truly doesn’t end in blood with this fandom.
I watched people fix each other’s costumes throughout the weekend – a woman carefully reattaching a wing to a woman she told me she’d never met with a smile on her face, two teenagers adjusting each other’s fairy makeup, a man in full Deadpool cosplay helping another man adjust his knight’s helmet. There’s a generosity that fan spaces create, a low-stakes but genuine human kindness that I find myself very moved by every time I encounter it.
Paul Giamatti’s first-ever fan convention appearance was also notable – he seemed quite charmed by the whole thing, so hopefully he’ll be back for more, for those of you who are fans of his. George Takei’s panel touched on LGBTQ+ advocacy with the ease of someone who has been doing this for decades and finds new urgency in it every year. It’s always lovely to hear from queer elders, and especially when they are discussing their partner of 40 years. It’s a nice reminder that a happy, unapologetically queer future is possible.
The Undercurrent of Politics: Can Military Recruitment Ever be Apolitical?
The one thing I did take note of that I feel is necessary to touch on given The Convergence Lens’ mission to navigate the crossover of politics and pop culture – there was a U.S. Air Force/Space Force recruiting booth on the convention floor.
A professionally designed booth staffed by uniformed personnel, targeting exactly the demographic – young and idealistic – that a military recruiter might want to talk to. I don’t want to overstate this as a condemnation of the convention, and I don’t know the full history of how military recruiting has or hasn’t been present at previous Awesome Cons. Regardless, it landed strangely with me, given the current political moment and what the military is being asked to do and be in the USA right now. A fan convention that emphasizes its apolitical nature has, in its commercial ecosystem, a booth run by the military.
There is no world in which military recruitment is an apolitical act. None. The United States military is the biggest polluter in the world, and the imperialist doctrine of the USA has caused our military to be directly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent human beings across the globe since its inception. However fond you may be of your family members who served, the material reality of what the United States military inflicts on other nations is undeniable – neo-colonial, imperialist violence. The booth does, simply by being there, violate the claim of being apolitical that Awesome Con is making.
Again, this is not condemnation, but it is a request to the organizers to reflect on whether the presence of military recruiters is necessary and conducive to the environment you are trying to cultivate.
The broader tension of attending a joyful event while the world feels like it is in the process of collapsing is not unique to Awesome Con, but it is particularly vivid at a convention held in Washington, D.C. in 2026. The people attending Awesome Con know what’s happening. They read the news. Many of them are actively fighting back in their daily lives – showing up to town halls, donating to causes, calling their representatives. They are also, just for a weekend, wearing a costume and celebrating something they love.
Continuing to build and maintain community – to show up, to gather, to celebrate the things that connect us – is not a retreat from politics, but rather, a precondition for it. You cannot fill from an empty cup, and finding moments of joy does not mean you are giving up the fight. However, you still have to commit to the fight itself. You have to pay attention. You have to show up to do the work, too.
What Conventions Offer Us
On Sunday evening, as the convention floor was winding down and attendees were making their final passes through the vendor hall, I stood in the main corridor and watched people leave. You could tell that most were tired in the good way – the way you’re tired after a wedding or a concert, full of something rather than depleted of it. I saw a lot of hugs.
What conventions offer that other spaces don’t is the experience of being visibly yourself in a crowd of people who understand, at least approximately, who that self is. The person who has been managing their love for a cancelled sci-fi show as a private interior thing for twenty years suddenly exists in a room full of other people who feel exactly the same way. That is, in fact, one of the fundamental human needs that political organizing tries to meet and often, in its urgency, forgets to.
In a city that is currently the site of enormous political crisis, 60,000 fans gathered and found each other. They were, in their own way, practicing a form of radical resistance against the current administration’s War on Culture. Fandom is not and will not ever be the impetus for revolution, nor is participating in fandom an act of revolution itself. But it can be, sometimes, the thing that gives people motivation to get involved in making the world a better place.
For that, I am grateful. I am also grateful to Awesome Con for giving us a chance – this is the first press event for our growing publication!
Stay tuned for more coverage from the convention releasing throughout this week.
