Fatui Con 2023 Con Report

[endofthyme]

Hello there Dreamwidth! This is my first post on this site, since I just made this account recently to participate in a fandom exchange. This is also my first time writing a con report! I tried to get it all down while it was fresh in my mind, and I hope someone will find it interesting/entertaining.

A bit of background info first. Fatui Con 2023 was a virtual convention with a focus on the Fatui Harbingers from the game Genshin Impact, though there was also plenty of general Genshin content. The con was held on Discord the weekend of December 16-17, 2023, and the Discord had 950+ members when I checked during the weekend of the con, which might be a large or small number depending on how you look at it. I suspect there won't be very many con reports posted on Dreamwidth other than this one, is all I'll say! For my part, I haven't attended an in-person convention since the pandemic started, and this was also my first virtual convention, so it was a pretty novel experience for me all told.

Con Structure

Essentially the way this convention worked was that attendees could freely join this Discord server, where there were your usual fandom-Discord channels for announcements, roles, info, general chat topics, and places for people to post their fanworks, then also channels dedicated to the various events that were going on such as: the 'battle pass' stamp rally, the cosplay contest, the artist alley, swap meet vendors (I'm still not totally clear on what a swap meet is in this context), and a few voice/stream channels for the panel rooms.

There was a meta-competition structure to the con, where attendees would choose to join the team for one of the Eleven Fatui Harbingers, and were encouraged to participate in the con in various ways to earn points for their chosen Harbinger. Each Harbinger's team also got their own channel - for example, all the Scaramouche team members like me got a #shakkei_pavillion channel. I can only assume the other teams' channel names were similarly themed! The main way to earn points seemed to be the battle pass. There was a list of 10 stamps to earn - doing the necessary task for each one would net you 200 points and doing all 10 tasks would net you an additional 500 on top of that. The tasks were a mix of socializing in the Discord and participating in the various con events and even some in-game stuff - I've listed them out here:

1. Attempt the stamp rally. Get 200 just for trying.
2. Introduce yourselves to your fellow agents in your common room. Include your username, age, and small bio.
3. Coop with an agent from a different Harbinger than you.
4. Say something nice about 2 agents' work in #⁠fan_gallery from a different Harbinger than you.
5. Play TCG with 2 agents from a different Harbinger than you.
6. Participate in at least one event on Dec. 16.
7. Vote for your favorite entry in at least one contest (writing, art, cosplay, or amv/edit).
8. Take a picture of yourself in a different Harbinger than you's teapot.
9. Finish Chapter 3, Act V of the Archon Quest
10. Gain at least 25 stars in Spiral Abyss.

I didn't really have the spoons this weekend to attempt the stamp collecting thing, personally. I've had fun doing stamp rallies at in-person cons in the past, though, so it was interesting to see it attempted here in digital form! Congrats to all the, uh, Dottore people 😆 And Pantalone and Childe for their silver and bronze medals. Scaramouche came in a respectable 4th. My condolences to Pulcinella.

The Artist Alley

The artist alley setup for this virtual con was interesting. The artists were split up into 'Marketplace Street A' through 'G', with 5 in each group (and an additional 6th member in 'G'). I didn't see much commonality to the vendors in each street, so I think they were just organized into subgroups so people could navigate a little easier. Each street had a group of channels dedicated to it on Discord, with each vendor getting one channel of their own. Discord seems to have recently done another weird update, so some announcements had to be made about how to actually see the channels, alas... Anyway, the vendors would put pictures and links in their channel, particularly highlighting their Genshin merch, but it definitely wasn't exclusively Genshin merch in there. Some vendors set up threads in their channels for people to ask questions, and a few just chatted back and forth with people in the channel itself. Some vendors had special discount codes or bonuses for Fatui Con attendees, too, like a percentage discount or a bonus item or something like that.

There was also an additional stamp rally event here in the artist alley, where if you got a stamp from each of ten participating vendors, you'd get some bonus items - (digital) emotes and (physical) stickers, sticker sheet, print, and button. Most of these vendors had a free stamp task option such as to follow them on social media, but some did require a purchase for a stamp (including the person who was responsible for, y'know, mailing the physical merch out, which makes sense :P). Anyway, I browsed through all the merch artist shops over the course of Saturday and only found a few things I really wanted, so I didn't bother with the merch stamp thing myself.

Panels

This was the main thing I was personally interested in doing during this con - attending the panels. I suspected this would have a lot in common with the con experience I was used to - I was always big on picking at least a few panels to sit in on at any con I attended back in the Before Times. I wasn't far wrong, I don't think, but it was also kind of wild attending panels exclusively hosted by Genshin fans, attended exclusively by Genshin fans? Felt kind of like being part of a community for once and not just a loose association of warring factions 😆 Though maybe that's because we were mostly Harbinger stans and us villainfuckers have to stick together.

I'll also note that it was only in the evening of the first day that I thought up the idea of doing a con report, so I wasn't taking notes before that time. Had to reconstruct what I could from the chat and my memory...

Morning/Noon Panels

I attended the opening ceremony at 10AM PST on Saturday, which ended up just being the admin Kit giving a brief (<15 min) overview reiterating the rules of the con and other important info, for example that the con is strictly 18+ - not a NSFW space in general, but some NSFW content is allowed, so.

I popped in briefly to the 11AM panel which was an artist called Bosie talking about their art journey, how they got into the Harbingers and Genshin after Lazzo dropped, some background and discussion on their more popular pieces, such as one of Pantalone buying the Harbingers (all dressed in pink) tickets to see the Barbie movie? I dipped after a bit since I was mostly attending because it was the very first actual panel, and I'm not actually familiar with the artist in question - this will be a recurring theme in this con. I love Genshin and find Genshin fandom fascinating (especially Genshin zine fandom, more on that later), but like, I don't use Twitter, so I don't know anyone's names and hopefully they don't know mine :P

Came back at noon for one Tofubuns doing a stream (notably, on Twitch instead of in the Discord) about using Live2D. Vod is here for the interested.

I love watching animatics and I also kind of want to be a Person That Makes Animatics someday (please don't look at the like 12 seconds of animation I tried to make recently that took me like 8 hours of work to do) so it was helpful to see the tools another program offers. I've tried like 5 or 6 so far, and they all have super different feature sets and quirks and price models. The presentation was largely focused on the idea of making vtuber-style animation, which isn't really the direction my interest lies (I'm kind of an old-fashioned let-me-see-every-frame kind of person 😆 ), but I still found the presentation itself and the demos of different features pretty engaging. Oh, and there was a line at the beginning I found kind of funny because Tofubuns was like 'probably everyone here is just a regular of mine' or something to that effect and I… Well, I'm not a regular on anyone's Twitch lol I just want to know more about Computer Program and also there's only 2 panels at any given time at this con… It's not weird that I'm here, I swear…!)

1PM/2PM Panels

After the Live2D stream wrapped up, I tuned into a panel on publishing fan novels, presented by Strange Diamond, who I only realized after the intro started that I actually had been familiar with! Though incredibly minorly familiar. I have a bit of a side project documenting Genshin zines on the Fanlore wiki, so I had perused the Rain Anthology twitter trying to figure out if it counted as a zine or not. I'm not sure it does, but I put it on the list anyway because 🤷 where else was I gonna put it? And it seemed worth documenting somewhere.

The panel itself was a no-audio one, Strange Diamond putting their slides and the contents of their talk into the chat in their designated panel room. It was only sometime after this panel that a channel dedicated to text-only panels got set up - there was a little bit of confusion from people thinking they weren't hearing audio for technical issue reasons.

The presenter had some interesting things to say about, in particular, publishing fan novels for profit. For example, they called out that the Genshin devs' very permissive fan merch policy means that publishing Genshin fan novels for profit is a lot less risky than in other fandoms, where fanfic and fanart get treated very differently from each other by the IP holders (e.g. fanart being considered free advertising and not subject to copyright threats). They also said that even if a writer has racked up a number of zine rejections (like they themselves had), that doesn't necessarily mean they won't be able to sell their work. The number of zine mods in the fandom is a small and non-representative fraction of the fandom of a whole, and they might not be your target audience. They also had some things to say about the current zine-publishing environment and mods running off with money, which... uhh... yeah. 😆

Logistical parts of zine publishing also came up. Mixam is their printer of choice, and they cautioned about choosing printers outside your country due to shipping costs, shipping time, and potential import taxes. Then there was some stuff on layout/formatting, cover art commissions vs. DIYing (warned against AI for that), and the likelihood that printing errors will happen even if you do everything right.

In their final slides, they highlighted a few other writers who also sell their fan novels, including Bgtea (whose panel I also attended later that day), and then they opened up for questions. The only question I found particularly notable was someone asking how many people would have to be interested for it to be worth printing a fic. Strange Diamond recommended conducting an interest check and doing careful budgeting if the number is low (in the 20 copies range). Which seems pretty reasonable. People do interest checks for all kinds of fan merch nowadays, fan novels are probably no different.

Right after that panel, at 1PM, was a 'Scara Brainrot' panel, and I have Scara Brainrot so I stuck around for a bit as the presenter was responding to chat and intermittently doing lineart on a Scaramouche drawing, but honestly I felt like I didn't really need to attend a stream where everyone is just gushing over Scaramouche in mostly the same way I do in my head so I left 😆 I guess I prefer attending events on topics I don't already know inside and out. I don't need my opinions reinforced, I'm here to learn and be challenged!

5PM Bgtea Panel

This panel I genuinely felt comically out of my depth in, best illustrated by the fact that the presenter again made a remark about how everyone is probably familiar with them already and I seriously was not!! The chat seemed to be incredibly familiar with them though, so not at all an off-base assumption to make, it seemed. Apparently they've written a few very popular Chili fics, which I haven't read. I have read some Chili, and it's a perfectly serviceable pairing, but it's not really where my interest lies... Especially because I'm very picky about Zhongli characterization and dialogue... Maybe I'll dip my toe into this person's fics sometime but like right now I'm almost exclusively reading Scum Villain (mostly Moshang) fic, so it might be a while 😂

Anyway, the gimmick of the panel was that Bgtea was brewing a troubling 'Russian mulled wine' concoction involving vodka and a $10 Merlot while talking about their writing process and answering questions relayed by their cohost from chat. In particular, the focus was on the process of writing longfic and also on publishing physical copies of fics for sale. They seem very successful at selling printed copies of their work - they have some more upcoming volumes, and have done a number of reprint cycles on previously published ones, though they did express that at a certain point reprints become a lot more risky with regard to breaking even since so many people have already purchased - the potential buyer pool shrinks each cycle. That was in response to someone asking if they'd reprint... Autumn Winds(?) again. They discussed commissioning artists for covers, and apparently their first run of one of their books even had a merch bundle, so that also had some logistics involved. They also mentioned how they're always careful to make it clear that this is for a commercial product so the artists in question know to inform them about commercial upcharges.

As for the mulled wine? Apparently it was rank. I believe the phrase "burning all the way down" was used. Bgtea insisted they would finish it despite their cohost saying they should definitely dump it out lmao.

I think this panel was the most trafficked and active one I attended. Not least of all because the chat kept being asked how much of each ingredient Bgtea should add and people started spamming high numbers lol. No slow mode in this chat. But there were also plenty of questions being asked, often very specific to Bgtea's works, so I was only half-listening by the end and doing something else in another tab. But I did stick around until the end. The admin Kit (who was coming into every panel at the :55 mark to give a 5 minute warning) actually ended up moving the next panel on the schedule over to the other room to give more time - people were very interested in hearing more from Bgtea, it seemed, haha. But, in the end, they and their cohost did have to dip after 20 minutes or so past the scheduled end time, so they could head to a D&D session.

8PM Genshin Tarot Panel

Finally, a panelist that my out-of-touch self really did know already 😂 I preordered Genshin Tarot way back when, and have played it with a friend a number of times now. It's a great, low-lift cooperative game (I much prefer cooperative games to competitive ones), built around a tarot theme. This panel was about the creation process of the game, and was hosted by the game designer, Brother Ming, and his co-host rice who was the graphic designer for the project.

The panel opened with the 9 min Genshin Tarot instructional video to make sure everyone was on the same page. I tuned out a bit while it was playing since I'd watched it before and also played the game myself. After that, the two hosts talked about the history of the project, how it started as a standard tarot deck project intended as a simpler project to tackle after the previous board game they'd done (Anna's Roundtable), how the project evolved into an actual board game (in part because there weren't enough characters to fill a full tarot deck, so that's why the idea of monsters being the minor arcana came about), how different people got on board, that kind of thing. We also got a look at the design bible/style guide that rice put together to ensure all the graphic design stuff was consistent on this large project - design bibles are so fascinating to me, though I'm mostly only familiar with them in the context of video game design. And there was a bit of a sidebar about timelines where the two presenters compared the project to zine projects (board game, higher complexity and inherently longer timeline) and also expressed some sotto voce opinions about zine project mismanagement. Plus there was a brief anecdote about how apparently someone tried to copy the game assets and set up a copycat kickstarter...? Some people found it and reported it and it got shut down, but wow the brazenness.

They opened up for questions near the end - one person asked about how they handled game balance (answer: game balance was a lot less important than it might have otherwise been because it's a cooperative game), another asked about how they decided which characters to include (answer: artists got to pick what characters they were interested in doing), and I got in a final question myself to ask about how they decided to keep vs. discard different aspects of Genshin's combat system when making this board game. An example I gave was how, in Genshin Tarot, elemental reactions will happen with any pair of two distinct elements with the effect determined exclusively by the second one applied, rather than having only certain pairs of elements able to react and having an effect determined by both elements together. In my experience, this made playing the board game a lot more frictionless than if its element handling had been closer to the video game's system.

Brother Ming explained that they'd iterated on the systems a lot, which is kind of what I expected! They'd previously had a different system for distributing enemies to players (kind of circularly around the table?), and apparently they were considering involving artifacts even at some point, which definitely didn't make it into the final game. For the elemental reactions, they were considering having both elements each have an effect, but a smaller effect each than they ended up with. The driving consideration for everything though was that they wanted to make sure a player could internalize the rules in one session, so the simpler the better - thus, just one element to determine reaction effect it was.

9PM Bleeding Hearts Zine Panel

This was right after the Genshin Tarot event, and I was pretty tired at this point, but I stuck around for this final panel from two mods, Eli and Flora, for a currently-in-creation charity Arlebina zine called Bleeding Hearts. This was probably the smallest panel I attended, a single-digit attendee count for most of it, rather than the couple dozen plus that were at most of the others I went to earlier that day. They had a slideshow which went over what zines are, the types and responsibilities of mod positions, and the zine application process. It also included a collection of WIP art from the first check-in for Bleeding Hearts, which was neat. And there was a bit of a nice present at the end for Fatui Con attendees~ :P

After the presentation finished, they opened up for questions. Pretty active chat for this one, even if it was small! A few highlights: Like Strange Diamond, they mentioned Mixam as their printer of choice. For promoting projects during interest checks and apps, they recommended @'ing zine-promoting Twitter accounts, reaching out to character-specific Twitters that might be happy to share your promo posts, and also mentioned the possibility of setting up more social media accounts on other platforms - though they cautioned that this comes with increased work for the social media mod. Comparing the difficulty of running different types of zines, they said digital zines are easier to run than physical ones, and charity zines comes with a lot less finance work needed than for-profit ones (while free zines come with none at all!), so running a free digital zine is a good way to ease into the process of running zines in general. They also linked to this zine creation kit.

Since the two mods doing the presentation had done a number of non-Genshin zines in the past, I also asked if they felt the Genshin zine scene is different than other fandoms. They replied that in some other fandoms you won't get the same attention Genshin projects will the fandom's larger, more active audience, which can be intimidating. It's also a more competitive scene, with so many more zines happening at once and vying for that attention.

Day 2

I think I maybe attended a bit too many panels the first day, but it was a good experience anyway! The second day had fewer panels overall and the day ended earlier. A handful of panels also got cancelled kind of last minute, including the 3PM one on zines from zine mod & really prolific writing contributor Cavalierious (another person I'd heard of previously! - from my Genshin zine documentation efforts). Then the closing ceremony got moved up from 6PM due to the 5PM cancelling, so I missed it :( So, in the end, on the second day, I only ended up attending one panel at 10AM on Sunday and none of the others.

The 10AM panel started a little late, and the audio quality wasn't the best since the presenter was tabling at an in-person con while they gave the talk. 😆 I assume someone else was manning the table or something, though I'm not actually sure. Anyway, the panel was about tabling at cons, so it was fitting! The presenter, Cy, who was also a mod for Fatui Con, started tabling in 2021, and has tabled at 30+ cons. They started off with a slideshow of pictures of the progression of their table setups and what they did with the different size & solo/shared spaces they'd gotten assigned for various conventions. They used the pictures to give advice about setting up tables, such as to try taking up as much space as possible to increase your chances of catching people's eye as they pass by, and to put bigger things up top so people will see them from further away. They pointed out the places that different grids and walls on their table displays were attached to each other with zip ties etc, and how side walls were important for keeping the structure stable for high-up displays.

After the slideshow, the chat got to asking questions, which where largely asking for advice. Cy mentioned that making group orders with other artists can make things easier re: acquiring product, and there's Facebook groups and Discords for that. Stickers/acrylic charms are a good thing to start with before branching out into more complex items. Only make stuff you yourself like - that's a good indicator other people will like it, too. Don't make too many designs at once - you'll end up with 'dead stock'. Start with 5-10 prints/5-10 stickers, go to a local event, and give yourself some experience before moving on to bigger conventions. You can even make stickers by hand and not have to deal with manufacturing issues. And travelling out-of-state or out-of-country is a huge commitment, not least due to having to move inventory.

Cy also repeatedly emphasized the importance of checking on the rules that apply to the specific cons you're attending. Cons sometimes have rules on table height or whether or not NSFW products are allowed. Some cons even disallow stickers (due to vandalism issues?) or require that at least 50% of your merch must be original non-fanwork stuff. There's also licenses that you need to sell things that are different on a state-by-state basis - Cy has only done California cons, but cons will usually provide links on how to get those licenses. And cons also have different ways they conduct applications: first-come-first-served, a lottery system, or a juried portfolio submission system.

There was also some discussion of keeping your merch secure. Cy advised saying hi to people when they come up to your table, and paying attention as they browse, both to reduce the likelihood someone tries to make off with something and also just in general to know what things people are interested in. Also, a lot of people leave unsold product under the table overnight, but taking it back to your hotel room is more secure - apparently some people just walked into an artist alley at a con and took a bunch of stuff a year or so ago!

And then naturally there were some other horror stories shared, like of course the likelihood of getting hit on as a fem-presenting person, the more comical experience of someone sitting on and breaking one's table, vehement complaints about price expectations set by aliexpress and people who just table reselling stuff from aliexpress, and a truly WTF anecdote about a white guy saying "I hate China" in response to being being asked if he's played Genshin Impact O__O Ay me.

Final Thoughts

Whew this was a lot to write out! I hope some of this will be interesting to someone now or in the future. The idea of a virtual convention certainly seemed wild to me when I first heard about this one, but I'm glad I attended! Too bad about missing the closing ceremony, though :( I would've liked a nice concluding moment for the con - kind of felt like it just petered out. Especially since the main panel I was interested in on Sunday got canceled… Still, I hope the event runners will set this up again next year - I'd definitely attend!

Comments

[taevachi]

Sounds like a very cool project! Thank you for writing this report :]

[endofthyme]

My pleasure! Thanks so much for reading! :D