PonyCon NYC-Brooklyn, New York, USA

Please put what year you are writing about as the first word of your review.

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Ponycon 2016
(Warning: giant followup with lots of pictures, )

Heyo all! My wife Mel and I went to Ponycon this past year (we hit up 2015 as well, and I was going to post that review along with this one, but a bunch of image links are broken and I'm too lazy to fix them, ). This year is our ten-year anniversary, so we had originally decided that this would be the year we'd finally treat ourselves and go to Bronycon in July (because the gift for ten years of marriage is totally ponies, right?) Unfortunately, the dates for Bronycon this year just happen to coincide with those of ConnectiCon, a big anime/sci-fi/videogame/you name it they got it convention in Hartford that we attend every year. Since we already had plans for this year's CTcon that involved a small group of our friends, we couldn't just cancel and go to Bronycon, so we decided Ponycon was the next best thing.

Like last time, and like pretty much every con we've attended for the past several years, we decided to go in cosplay. Since this was our anniversary, we decided to portray a long-time married couple from the show: Mr. and Mrs. Cake!

Anyway, the trip down was pretty straightforward: got up at 4:30am, piled everything into the car and booked it down to NYC. A few hours, a couple trips around the block the hotel was on to find the parking garage, and a short and easy subway ride later we arrived at this year's venue, the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn.

From the Grand View room on the fourth floor you even had a nice view of Lady Liberty out in NY harbor.

The event was as star-studded as most any pony convention has ever been, with guests ranging from Voice Director Terry Klassen and Director 'Big' Jim Miller to voice actors like Peter New and Ashleigh Ball to the very creators of MLP itself, Bonnie Zacherle and Lauren Faust. Broadway star Lena Hall, voice of Countess Coloratura, even made an appearance and lent her magnificent voice to a special concert.

Mel and I spent the first day making sure we met everyone we wanted to meet and took care of everything we brought to be signed. Possibly the highlight of the con for us was meeting with Bonnie and Lauren, whom we had only paid to receive autographs from, and for both of them to ask if they could take pictures with us in our cosplay.

Kids, you know you done good when the celebrities want you in their scrapbook.

We're still waiting to see if Bonnie or Lauren are going to post their selfies online, but in the meantime Mel made her own Twitter account pretty much so she could follow the two of them and the other MLP celebs we've come to know over the past couple of years.

After getting the autographs we came for and waving 'hi' to my man-crush Vincent Tong, we settled in for as many of the awesome panels as we could fit into our schedule. For the most part we managed to snag some really nice balcony seats that provided a perfect view of the main stage.

The Comic Reading panel was our hooves-down favorite part of the event. Each participant took copies of issues #9 and #10 of the IDW main series and read through them one speech bubble at a time, each person reading in whatever wacky, random voice they felt like using, and it was glorious. Poor Peter New; these issues are focused on Big Mac, and yet you know how many times he was the one who actually got to say 'Eeyup' or 'Nope'? None. Zero. Nada. It kept falling on Shannon or G. M. Berrow, to the point where they asked Peter if he wanted to switch seats. The crowd went nuts when Ashleigh actually got to read one of AJ's lines with AJ's voice, just like they did for Shannon when she got to read one of Silver Spoon's lines. In the end, they all celebrated by bursting out into a totally random, totally awesome beatbox session that brought down the house. Big Jim made Vinyl Scratch proud, drumming out a bass rhythm on his own head with his microphone, while Peter and Andrew did their best Rarity impressions. The clincher came when Shannon started singing the MLP theme song right in time with the rest of them. My God, I have not laughed so hard in months.

There were a ton of other great panels as well; two in particular that stand out are Vincent Tong's Prancing with the Stars, in which Vincent conducts a super-fast but amazingly fun dance class for everyone who wants to try. This year he chose Michael Jackson's Thriller as the song and had everyone doing the zombie all over the dance floor. Mel and I unfortunately had to leave partway through in order to make it to the Cosplay competition, but not before Vincent himself gave us a quick hug for luck (seriously, people loved these freaking costumes...).

Also an event that can't not be mentioned, the Singing Voices of MLP Concert was a spectacular show. No one in the audience was allowed to record or even photograph during the event, but the show staff was doing some recording and they claimed that parts of it would be up online for viewing later (still haven't seen any pop up yet, ). There was a great mix of different songs (some MLP and some not) and talents, from Kazumi Evans singing Becoming Popular to unique and powerful performances from Vincent Tong, Shannon Chan-Kent and Ingrid Nilson. Peter New sang a version of Katy Perry's California Girls that will not soon be forgotten, and of course, Lena Hall closed out the event by singing The Magic Inside and was met with a standing ovation.

Outside of panels, we met up with quite a few fandom celebrities amid the vendor halls, game rooms, and cosplay greenroom. Mel likes to have her art and prints signed by the artist, so we found ourselves talking to the likes of JadedJynx, DennyButt, Tsitra360, and more. We also got to very briefly meet Sethisto of EQD fame via our mutual friend Cups, and Mel had a conversation about pony fabric with a person wearing a very stylish vest, whom we later learned was The Illustrious Q (also from EQD).

It'd be impossible to talk about Ponycon without talking about this year's cosplay lineup! Mel and I entered the competition under the 'Duo or Group' category, and we managed to impress the judges and take home first place ()! There was some mixup with the prizes apparently, so they were supposed to be mailing them to us sometime in the next couple of weeks (been four months now; not holding out much hope, ) There were a ton of great outfits this year, only a portion of which we managed to get decent pictures of.

It's always great to see so many people cosplaying; it's a great conversation starter, you immediately have something in common with at least a third of the people in attendance, and with a little planning everyone will recognize you on sight, sometimes even from previous years if you like to hit up the same cons.

Now, onto all that wonderful #swag we picked up!

We picked up some Nightmare Moon promos and 'Celestia and Luna' (it's totally them; can't you tell?) foil cards courtesy of the ever-awesome folks at Enterplay. We also got some sweet DJ Pon-3 and Derpy Mailmare pins from them, but for some reason I can't find the picture. The Mr. and Mrs. Cake stickers were freebies from Dennybutt (I think it was Dennybutt? Mel would remember).

We brought mostly CCG cards for signatures from the stars to add to our collection. We got Octavia signed by Kazumi Evans, Dr. Whooves by Peter New, and a total of four cards--three Applejacks and one Lyra--signed by Ashleigh Ball. Originally we couldn't decide which one we wanted her to sign, so we figured we'd bring our top favorites and let her choose. She chose the 'Lasso Champion' card, but before we headed off she said 'gimmie those other ones', and proceeded to throw ink at all of them just for the hell of it. Now we're right back where we started trying to decide which of these gets framed and put up on the wall (this is a problem I am more than happy to have, mind you).

Mel continues her quest to Pinkie-fy her craft room, with a slew of new Partyhorse artwork. The top-middle and top-right pieces are commissions from Agnes Garbowska and Andy Price, respectively, and the other three are prints picked up from various vendors.

The centerpiece of our trip souvenirs, a print by JadedJynx signed by both Bonnie Zacherle and Lauren Faust, as well as the artist herself. We also snagged some of the other prints available by Dennybutt and PixelKitties (OMG, look at Adagio's face!!! )

As part of a charity drive, we snagged a couple of copies of this neat calendar that features extremely famous works of art throughout history, re-envisioned and ponified by some of the fandom's greatest artistic minds.

Last, but absolutely not least, my swag-purchase for the trip was a nicely-made Sunset Shimmer jersey from a vendor that offered practically limitless options for customization. You could get your name (or any character's name) printed on a shirt, or your own OC's cutie mark, or pretty much anything that you could provide them with a digital template for. I decided that since I was getting a shirt with Sunset's cutie mark on it, I should get something on the back that had to do with her as well:

Anyway, once all was said and done, we had a fantastic time at Ponycon. On the way out we heard that they'd announced that it would be the last Ponycon, and that's a pretty sad thing, especially for us Northeastern/New England bronies for whom Bronycon is a just a scootch too far to be reasonable every year, but I suppose if you're going to go out you might as well go out big, and the Ponycon staff certainly managed to pull that much off,