Afterwards, was our big sword form demonstration. But before we talk about it, I want to clear up a misconception. As those of you who attended know, we had to perform this in the Kennesaw room where the layout and ceiling height did not allow us to perform the full demonstration as rehearsed. Instead we had to put on a shortened version of the program. Many people mistaken believe that this is the result of “Dragon*Con screwing us over”. This is far from the case. Dragon*Con this year had several issues regarding scheduling, the biggest was the sudden cancellation of Joss Whedon after months of rumors that he wasn’t even invited to the convention. Joss WAS invited and confirmed by Universal.
However, when the rumors of his cancellation began to appear, the Programming Directors created two versions of the schedule. One that had Joss’s appearances on it and one that did not. When we made the request for a larger room for this event, our request was put on one version of the schedule, but not on the other. The mistake wasn’t realized until we were already at the convention. The room that I had been told was available for us was also booked to another group doing a light saber fight demo. When the mistake was realized, the senior Director we were working with offered to attempt to find us space elsewhere. We volunteered to take the sure thing and reworked the demo to make it fit into Kennesaw. The senior Directors at Dragon*Con have always been extremely supportive of the WoT track and sensitive to our needs. In five years, this is the first mix up like this we’ve experienced and they made every attempt to fix it onsite, before we asked them to stop.
So now that you know far more about organized nerdery than you ever wanted to know, what happened at the sword form demo? Well, instead of having a series of staged fights scripted from the descriptions in the books, my husband simply performed some of the moves based on a fan interpretation that’s been passed around the internet for years. He took requests from the audience, as well as performing a series that he had practiced. Because of the truncated program, we were able to run it twice, accommodating all the people who had lined up to see it. We also had a good discussion going of the inspirations of the forms and how they might change depending on the culture of the swordsman.
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