Anticipation: Day One in the Media

CTV Montreal’s two-minute news feature of Anticipation’s opening day is preoccupied with visuals of plush dragons, hand-puppet-aliens and other dealer’s room cliches. The broadcast is available on the station’s website beside an atrocious article, “Alien-loving humans invade Montreal”:

Thousands of science fiction fans from around the world are in Montreal for the 67th annual World Science Fiction Convention.

Over the next five days, the ultimate fans are at the Palais des Congres doing things that are slightly incomprehensible to mere mundanes, like getting their picture taken with plush brain-sucking monsters sitting on their heads.

By comparison, pop culture oriented Hour used an interview with Neil Gaiman as the crux of its convention preview (as have several other publications) – and Gaiman deftly led the reporter to see the culture through his eyes:

“I’m always open to meeting fans,” says Gaiman. “I started out as a fan, so it was always straightforward to me – even though there’s some kind of difference of degree, whether you’re signing or are the person getting the signature, fundamentally it’s all the same: people who love books, films, getting together and celebrating that love and celebrating that delight in storytelling and the imagination. Fandom comes from love – people who are passionate about anything. I would much rather meet and interact and delight in those people than I would with people who are blasé about things.”