There’s a version of twelve-year-old me who would have loved this exact kind of day, if he’d ever had the chance to find out. My dad never took me to an anime expo or a nerd convention, and I want to be clear up front that I don’t hold that against him for one second - this was the late eighties and early nineties, there was no internet to tell us such a thing existed, and the city we grew up in, a real city, not a small one, leaned hard enough to the right at the time that something like a nerd convention probably wouldn’t have found much oxygen there even if anyone had thought to organize one. The nearest real con was almost certainly Toronto, which for a family like ours at the time may as well have been the moon. The opportunity simply wasn’t there to take. What was there were airshows. His company volunteered him every year, and he always said yes - he’d spend the day working a table, selling airshow posters, and the second his shift wrapped, that was our time. We’d wander the grounds together and look at planes. I genuinely loved those afternoons. Still do, looking back on them.
What’s different now is that I know what’s out there, and my kids know what’s out there, and I’ve made a conscious decision to be proactive about their interests in a way nobody quite managed to be for mine - not out of any failure on my dad’s part, just a gap in knowing where the door was. I can’t go back and hand twelve-year-old me a convention ticket. I can do the next best thing.
The apple, for what it’s worth, hasn’t fallen far from the tree - it’s just rolled into a different country. A couple years back I dragged the family to Dayton, Ohio, specifically to stand in front of certain airplanes in person, and an international border did not slow me down for one second. That’s its own story for another day.
Me, my daughter, and her friend made the drive down on Saturday morning - between the two of them they could probably out-trivia any panel in that building, which I found both impressive and slightly humbling. I’d done my homework. YouTube, vlogs from previous years, the full research package. I knew it was big. I knew there’d be walking. I came prepared.
I was not prepared.
We Could See It From Here #
The Toronto Congress Centre was visible from the car for the better part of an hour before we actually got to it, which is its own special kind of torture. We inched forward in traffic, the venue stubbornly in sight and completely out of reach, questioning every decision that had brought us to this particular Saturday morning. At some point, bored and stationary, I started narrating the whole ordeal to my wife by text, using speech-to-text because typing felt like too much effort for a car that wasn’t moving. Mid-sentence, I turned my head to the left and saw, no exaggeration, the biggest sword I have ever seen in my life - and Siri, faithfully and without judgment, transcribed every word of my reaction in real time and sent it exactly as spoken.
Her entire reply was “Damnit,” which feels like the only reasonable response to a man narrating his own traffic jam in real time and then abruptly, mid-sentence, switching topics to report a sword of biblical proportions walking past the car. For the record: the sword was real. The crossguard alone looked to be a solid six feet across, carried by someone who’d clearly committed to the bit days before any of us had even left the house. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know what he was cosplaying. I know that I’ll randomly think about that sword in the future and start laughing to myself.
We eventually found a pop-up parking lot about a five-minute walk from the venue for forty dollars, which at that point felt like finding water in a desert - I handed over the cash without hesitation and considered it a bargain. Word to the wise: if you haven’t parked before the doors open, you are not parking near the venue. The surrounding streets were operating as an impromptu municipal ticketing event for anyone who tried.
Next year: passes mailed in advance, hotel room nearby, leave the car at home.
Toronto Had Feelings That Day #
It rained. Not politely - torrentially, with wind, the full meteorological production. The silver lining, and it was genuinely silver, was that we spent our parking hour watching an uninterrupted parade of cosplayers making their way to the convention from the nearby hotels - soaking wet, fully committed, completely unbothered by any of it. It set the tone for the day in the best possible way.
I felt genuinely bad for the people who’d spent weeks on their costumes and had them drenched before they even made it inside. The dedication on display was something else entirely.
I found out afterward that a colleague from work had been running AV at one of the Anime North breakout sessions - turns out he operates on the con circuit at a considerably higher level than I do, Burning Man being among his regulars. We may occasionally find ourselves at the same events, but we are not playing the same game. When he found out I’d gone to Anime North he seemed genuinely relieved, like he’d been waiting for someone at work to admit they also do this. I think he’d assumed the IT-to-con pipeline was more commonly acknowledged than it apparently is.
My work colleague also let me know that the organizers at Anime North weren’t planned for the rain - even though the forecasts had called for it, nobody anticipated the sheer volume of water that descended on Toronto that day. Everyone was doing the best they could in the moment. He was also thankful that his job involved AV in a breakout room, and not dealing with parking logistics.
One Million Square Feet #
The Toronto Congress Centre advertises one million square feet of space and they are not kidding - it is enormous, and there is a lot to see in it. Vendors, artists, panels, cosplayers, and a general sense that you could come back three days in a row and still find things you missed. The bad news is that signage appears to be optional. We had no idea which doors were exit-only - several, it turned out - spent considerable time locating the washrooms, and were yelled at for not displaying our passes correctly approximately forty-five seconds after entering the building. The staff seemed to be deployed primarily at key chokepoints to redirect traffic rather than actually help anyone navigate, which is a choice. The map we were handed at registration was immediately destroyed by rain, because immediately after registration they sent us back outside to walk to the entrance on the other side of a million square feet. In the rain. With a paper map.
Bring Cash. Full Stop. #
By mid-afternoon the debit infrastructure had effectively collapsed under the crowd, leaving what I spotted as one ATM to serve the entire event. My daughter and her friend had been eyeballing that ATM with growing interest by the time we decided enough was enough, which tells you where their finances had ended up by that point in the day. I felt genuinely bad for the artists - people who had paid for a table, made their work, shown up in the rain, and then watched sales walk away because the payment system gave up. Sort it out, Anime North.
The Good Stuff - And There’s a Lot of It #
Here’s the thing though: none of that is actually what the day was.
The day was my daughter and her friend completely losing their minds over cosplayers they recognized, getting photos with people dressed as characters they love - people who were genuinely warm and happy about it, which says something nice about con culture. It was watching them spend hours in the artist alley making purchasing decisions with the gravity usually reserved for much larger life choices. They found, and I’m quoting directly here, “extremely rare stuffies and figures” in the vendor hall. The specifics were explained to me at considerable length. I nodded along with what I hope was convincing enthusiasm. The joy was extremely real and entirely genuine.
One of the things that surprised me most about a con this size is how effectively it finds your people for you. My daughter and her friend are big Bungo Stray Dogs fans, which is not exactly mainstream territory, and they were genuinely delighted to discover that other people loved it just as much. A big enough concentration of nerds in one building makes the niche stuff suddenly feel mainstream, which I think is the whole point.
The cosplay was legitimately impressive - not impressive-for-a-con impressive, just impressive full stop. The effort, the craft, the commitment to the bit in the middle of a rainstorm. My personal favourite, and the only time all day I asked a stranger if I could take their photo, was someone dressed as a six foot tall potted plant. When stationary, the illusion was genuinely convincing - they looked completely like part of the scenery. Then, every so often, feet would appear at the bottom of the pot and they’d scurry off to a new location. I have enormous respect for that choice.
I spent most of the day functioning as personal butler and concierge to two teenagers - carrying cosplay accessories, bags of accumulated merch, and whatever else needed carrying. I’d had the foresight to bring one of those nylon shopping bags that folds into its own pocket, and I had dramatically underestimated how much work that bag was going to do.
My Kindred Spirits Had Somewhere Else to Be #
Here’s the thing about Macross - I’m an adult with a credit card and a working internet connection, which means that if I want Macross badly enough, I can find Macross. What’s genuinely fun is stumbling across something in the wild - a vendor who’s quietly brought over a Japan-exclusive, something you weren’t expecting to find in a place you didn’t think to look. The thrill of discovery is half the point, and I was quietly hoping that somewhere in a million square feet of anime convention, at least one of my kindred spirits might have shown up with something interesting tucked away in their inventory.
They had somewhere else to be that day, apparently. I saw Ultraman, Astro Boy, and what appeared to be an entire Godzilla economy. Gundam was very well represented, which I appreciate on its own merits, but Gundam doesn’t scratch the same itch. I came home instead with a set of Godhand nippers, which I’m unreasonably excited about - assuming I can stop being terrified of accidentally snapping them long enough to actually put them to use.
The Macross hunt continues. Next year, maybe.
Editorial note, added after this post originally went up: I have since found the answer to the Macross problem. I’m not telling you here. That’s its own post, and it’s coming.
Already Talking About It #
We’re already planning next year - passes mailed in advance, hotel room nearby, probably both. Looking back, the things that didn’t go perfectly were mostly inconveniences that barely registered in the moment. The traffic gave us a front row seat to the cosplayer parade. I brought cash - not enough, but enough. The debit situation never actually burned us.
And the rain - the rain became part of the experience in a way that a perfectly sunny day never could have. You can eat poutine from a food truck in a parking lot any time. That’s a perfectly ordinary thing that happens all the time. Eating poutine from a food truck in a parking lot while wearing an elaborate costume in a torrential downpour, surrounded by hundreds of other people doing exactly the same thing with complete commitment and zero complaints - that’s something else entirely. That’s the kind of shared absurdity that turns a day into a story.
The things we were actually there for went perfectly. The kids left with the merch they wanted, having spent hours in the company of people who recognized their niche cosplay choices and were genuinely excited about it. My daughter and her friend found their people, which was the whole point. The cosplay was extraordinary. The vendors were lovely. Nobody had a bad time.
Twelve-year-old me would have thought this was the greatest day of his life. He wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.