The big events at the San Diego Convention Center always take place in Hall H, which holds about 6,500 people. After the first year of Twilight movie panels, regular SDCC attendees basically demanded that the convention schedules the annual Twilight panel as the very first one each year. That way the screaming fans could leave the con to people who understand what goes on at a convention of this size, and that plan has worked out. Now Twilight fans just buy a Thursday pass, and most of them go home after they’ve squealed over the cast.
One of the side effects of having the Twilight panel in Hall H, and the first panel of the first day, is that people who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in a Twilight panel need to sit through it in order to secure prime seats for superior panels later in the day. That’s the situation I found myself in with two other friends for the first couple hours of today’s Hall H panel, but we made the most of it by joking about just how much of a steaming pile of shit this Twilight movie is.
We had to suffer through the first seven minutes of a movie that would look bad on the SyFy channel on a Saturday night. The horribly acted footage showed Bella running so fast through the forest, it reminded one of my friends of George of the Jungle. Naturally he started to sing, “Bella, Bella, Bella of the Jungle…watch out for that tree!” Laughter ensued and the tone was set to mock the entire panel until the pain ended. When Stephanie Meyer was introduced, we recalled Chud’s analysis of the book and had to yell “you magnificent idiot!”
At the end of the panel, some forty-something overweight Twitard sitting in front of us got all pissy and spun around in her chair. She asked us if we were staying for the other panels that day and when we said yes, she said:
“Fine, I’ll come back and sit in back of you and ruin those panels for you. You need to learn to respect that people like other things here. ”
My friend replied, “I have no problem respecting that people like a variety of things here, but that doesn’t mean that I have to respect or like those things.”
With that thrown in her face she got up and before walking completely away she spun around again and shoved her fat finger in our faces, “You guys need to grow up and learn to be more tolerant of what other people like.”
Again my friend shoved it in her face, “You can like whatever you want, but you can’t force us to not make fun of something that sucks.”
That Twitard is the poster child for something long-time Comic Con attendees will be happy to see go away after this year and the final Twilight movie. They have a problem being in a place where their scary love of a shitty book series isn’t shared by the 100,000 other people there and they get all defensive and hostile when confronted with that fact.
If you can’t stand the heat of differing opinions on the quality of what you invest your life in, Comic Con really isn’t for you.
