MomoCon: A teen’s take on this all-age anime, manga and video games con

Our children have been going to Momocon since they were four and six. They were rabid about Pokémon for a year or two and gravitated towards board games, one of them has fallen in love with wrestling and both of them have always loved the cosplay that they see. Eight years on they were both very eager to go to MomoCon, but I wasn’t sure what would interest them the most when we got there.

The well started being primed in March, almost three months before MomoCon, when I got a message from an acquaintance. They remembered me talking about MomoCon and how much my children enjoyed it when they were in early elementary school. Our children are approximately the same age, and they reached out to ask two questions. Did they enjoy themselves and was the con appropriate for children?

Appropriate is always an interesting question when referring to a con because my appropriate may not be your definition of appropriate. I assured them that MomoCon is an all-ages con during the daytime. The costumes are cosplay awesome and don’t go to the violent or sexy/trampish side that some cosplay can venture towards with other cons. If anything, the innuendo that the anime, their statues or posters the vendors sell is more suggestive than the cosplay you’ll see at MomoCon. That’s important because those things need to be sought out and aren’t overtly in your face.

I told them what to expect and they said that their child was really into manga. Now that I knew their tolerance, I explained to them that, outside of Japan, this would be the largest collection of manga that their child would see, read and have the chance to purchase. This year at MomoCon I met a representative from The Carolina Manga Library who was a great example of that. If you go to a con on the East Coast of the United States, especially in the Southeast, you might see this traveling library.

The Carolina Manga Library has thousands of manga and exists to share their love of manga. The reading room is free, they travel around the Southeast and visit schools, libraries, and cons. When I saw them at MomoCon they had a table of collected manga available for sale, otherwise, it was every manga you can imagine or discover. There were also a couple of shelves of graphic novels and webcomics that blended into the reading scene. Much like the all-age vibe at MomoCon, all of the available manga were fine for middle school ages and up. Their operation is fascinating and fills a literary void, check out their website to see how you can help them or where they’ll be next.

As there were more than 43,000 people at MomoCon this year I did not see that acquaitance. Our children were locked into video games this year. They normally like to play them, but this year that’s pretty much all they wanted to do, but they branched out and tried all of them. These are the big console games that I grew up with, the drum-pounding, state-of-the-art new video games from Japan and the claw machines that defy gravity and never pay out until they do.

We’ve always played the classics. This time it was their desire to attempt the machines that usually had the longer lines. They didn’t have instructions in English and usually required the assistance of someone in line familiar with establishing their player settings to speed up the games. This was especially important for the racing games that could accommodate four players. Those machines have evolved like the T-1 000 since I used to play them in Fukuoka. Back then it was a luxury to have four different perspectives to choose from as the driver, now it’s multiple skins for the driver, car, track, or the time of day. It took as long to put in your settings as it did to play the game, but our 12-year-old, who normally has no relationship to cause and effect, was loving every minute of the wait.

Claw machines are the bane of the arcade. Some claw machines are hypnotic and impossible to look away from. The latter is what I learned this year at MomoCon. There was a machine that had a plushie with a plastic loop attached to it. The loop was then precariously balanced on the end of a rod. The goal was to manipulate the hook to where it would push the loop-addled plushy into the escape opening. The drama that this machine created and the crowd that it attracted was worthy of a k-drama that I’ll never see.

The people at MomoCon, at least the vast majority of the attendees who we encountered were great representatives of an all-age con. There was only one person who was rude and surly, but that was due to their lack of manners and protocol in hogging one of the video games. However, that figure bodes well for people just figuring out if should enter the con world or if MomoCon is OK for them.  It is. We told our 14-year-old that when he’s in college he’s welcome to attend any of the evening parties or to meander about the exhibition floor just like any one of the thousands of college-age attendees that were there.  

MomoCon happens every Memorial Day Weekend in Atlanta, Georgia.