Ponyville Ciderfest 2017 Convention Summary · 8:42pm Oct 24th, 2017

To put it bluntly, my first MLP convention was a blast. I sadly had to leave halfway through the charity auction, but I would have stayed until the end if I could. Over the course of the con, I was mistaken for Anon five times, met someone erroneously placed on a terrorist watch list, and turned somepony into a raging manticore. Details after the break.

So, I’m just gonna go in chronological order for the most part. Things started off in the most suitable manner possible: a round of d’awws, as panelist Alto Scribe proposed to his girlfriend Pastel Bubblegum on stage at the opening ceremonies. Also the con chair was wearing a silly Oktoberfest outfit with suspenders. After that I beelined for the vendor hall, where I snagged some sweet enamel pins for my collection, a Turnabout Storm print, and a kickass playmat featuring artwork of Twilight’s battle with Tirek.

There were a ton of voice actors from the show in attendance, and all were funny in person. The first big panel was a Q&A session, while the second was a live reading of an original script, complete with a song courtesy of Britt McKillip and some stand-up comedy by Nicole Oliver as Celestia! After location mix-up, I made it to the author hangout, where I met Calm Wind, Zyrian, and Vivid Syntax, all of whom are very nice people. Vivid and Coffeeminion later hosted a writer’s workshop which I attended to help out some budding authors. Meanwhile, ChocolatePony’s panel on transformative art was quite interesting. I recommended that the next line of tarot cards he draws should be Jojo themed, for obvious reasons, but he had never heard of the show, somehow, and probably won’t do that.

Whenever I had time between panels, I was usually in either the tabletop gaming room playing Magic or the video gaming room playing Smash. Apparently, my usual playgroups are very competitive when it comes to commander, as I ended up crushing everyone in all three games I played. There was exactly one other person I could find who had brought their 3DS with them for Pokémon battles.
At the end of the day, I got to play Tails of Equestria for the first time. My character was a unicorn biomancer named Dr. Splice. During the climactic final battle with a vestige of Sombra, I polymorphed the party’s earth pony fighter into a manticore, which proved quite effective. Also I made this great hero quip you really had to be there to get before being knocked out by our Pinkie Pie stand-in’s improvised boompile.

On Saturday, I participated in costume, going as everyone’s favorite one-off character: the Smooze. I wore a green morphsuit, red bow tie, and blue top hat. (For some reason my phone won’t let me send emails anymore, so you’ll just have to settle for a description.) I probably should have also included the goofy smile, because people kept confusing me for Anon, especially before they saw the tie. Still, it was literally no effort to make. Sadly one of the zippers broke during a bathroom break and I had to take the thing off.
Probably the best decision I made was to go to an 18+ panel about bad relationship stories. There, I was shocked to find a brony with a more absurd life than Aragon, which I didn’t even think was possible, in the form of Fiaura the Tank Girl. She was the aforementioned person on the terrorist watch list. Her other stories were not kid friendly, but I can assure you they were super crazy. Like, the cops were called.

The highlight of Sunday was the charity auction. At first, I thought I might be able to afford one of the smaller items, but then Nicole Oliver started running around and cuddling with whoever had the highest bid at the time. Needless to say everything started selling for hundreds at that point.

Oh, and the hotel food was great.

To reiterate, it was one of the best weekends of my life. 10/10, would con again.

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