F.A.C.T.S. 2015
Winter is coming. This mean conventions are nearing to an end, at least for this year. While many other organisations are planning their next convention, some of us were still waiting for the weekend to arrive as the biggest and most popular fantasy and sci-fi convention of the Benelux, namely F.A.C.T.S. 2015, was closing in on us.
Much like last year the convention was hyped a lot due to commercials popping up everywhere, and this truly showed in the packed halls. This also caused for the qeue-time to run up to two hours for some, quite a long time especially for those with a ticket. Once inside, all was forgiven quite easily.
The main hall was huge once again and housed a large part of the vendors as well as the artist gallery, signing sessions area and the photo booth zone. An additional but smaller hall housed some vendors as well but they were accompanied with some game developers and a retro gaming zone. Three other small halls were opened up for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Extravaganza, the fan village, a chill zone and the cosplay podium. The arrangement of halls seemed to work much better than it did last year and it shows that this convention continues to grow in size – even if it is already the largest fantasy and sci-fi convention in the Benelux.
The shops were filled with anime, sci-fi, comic books and many other collectibles ranging from Japanese import to Hot Toys to Marvel. Notable were the amount of shops that sold Star Wars mechandise but than again, it is a fantasy and sci-fi convention.
Cosplayers were a rare sight at the previous edition of F.A.C.T.S and it was rare to spot them at Antwerp Con too. This year the amount of cosplayers present was certainly much more than both conventions earlier mentioned combined. To top it off, many of the cosplays were of excellent quality and some were simply original. We’ve seen an amazing cosplay of Jafar, the main antagonist of Aladdin but also some Lara Crofts and detailed assassins from the Assassins Creed franchies. While opinions will vary, I found the most original cosplay to be Morticia and Gomez from The Addams Family – mostly because the series is a classic but enough about cosplays.
Shuffling through the a packed crowd at conventions can be tiring and there were limited possibilities to sit down and take a breather. The first one being the chill zone, where you could simply chill, but a secondary – and much larger – zone were the several food zones as each zone had picnic tables. This year, the organisation had opted to have several food zones, both indoors and outdoors, each with different kinds of munchies ranging from burgers to pizza to onigiri to pasta salads to barbecue. There had to be something you liked because the possibilities were almost endless. This type of diversity was great to witness as it also lessened the queue-times.
A lot of the visitors wanted to catch a glimse of famous actors who were autographing anything you wanted them to, and later in the day you could get your picture taken with them. There were a couple of great actors such as Summer Glau and Christopher Lloyd so it was yet another brilliant line-up and many were lining up although some fees were quite high this year.
All-in-all, this year was a great year to visit F.A.C.T.S. 2015 and the infrastructure has certainly been changed for the better. However, there is a continuous problem with trash cans as they were filled up quite fast and people ended up literring the tables. Irregardless, F.A.C.T.S. is certainly a convention that you should put on you to-visit-list for next year.
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