“Oh, I want to learn how to shout orders in Dothraki!” Melissa Anelli, 35, is leaning over a small, round table, ripping a turquoise sticky note into tiny squares. She quickly writes something on one of the pieces and presses it onto a portable, platter-size whiteboard, which is already covered in neat, color-coded vertical rows. She’s trying to figure out where the panel about the Game of Thrones language might fit in the sprawling four-day schedule for GeekyCon, the annual fan convention that she co-founded (under the name "LeakyCon") in 2009, set to kick off in Orlando on July 30 this year.
“Should I go to that panel, too?” asks Sierra Fox, Anelli’s executive assistant, who is busy adding notes to a similarly mapped-out board on the other side of the table. Their laughter fills the small conference room of the shared workspace in the Midtown building that houses their tiny office. “I mean, if you’re going to start speaking Dothraki, I should be able to understand what you’re saying.”
If the fact that San Diego Comic-Con has 130,000 people in attendance during its four-day span and brings in over $135 million to the San Diego area is any indication, the business of fandom is thriving. The Harry Potter movie franchise has made more than $7 billion worldwide. Three of the top 10 highest-grossing films in history are Marvel superhero properties released in the last three years, and they have pulled in a combined total of more than $4 billion worldwide. Toy sales are expected to have a record-breaking year thanks to the pop cultural frenzy over Frozen, Minions, Jurassic Park, and the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can’t swing a properly licensed replica of Mjolnir without hitting a Tumblr dedicated to your favorite Sweet Valley High book covers, a fantasy baseball league, and a group of people on Twitter talking about their favorite theatrical cast of Les Misérables. There’s never been a better time to like things, or more ways to show how much you like them.
Geeks might be inheriting the Earth, but not necessarily in a way that feels diverse or inclusive — especially at fan conventions. Blackface is somehow still worn. During a 2011 Game of Thrones panel at San Diego Comic-Con, actor Jason Momoa joked that he gets to “rape beautiful women and make them fall in love with me” as a positive aspect of working on the show. Groping, catcalling, and sexual harassment are so prevalent at many fan conventions that harassers refer to it as a sort of event of its own — “creeping at a con.”
Melissa Anelli, co-owner of the event-planning group Mischief Management and co-creator of GeekyCon, LeakyCon, and BroadwayCon, could change that. The former journalist has not only turned a love of Harry Potter into her life’s work — she’s done it by creating positive spaces in a male-dominated field that incorporate her naturally inclusive, feminist principles, and by encouraging fandom as a shared experience. Anelli is part of a growing wave of people inventing careers out of the nerdy things they love — and when you invent your career, you get to make all the rules.
Left: Cheri Root; right: James Dechert / Orlando Weekly / Via photos.orlandoweekly.com
Anelli’s status in the world of Harry Potter took a little while to take hold. She started reading the series during her last semester at Georgetown when her older sister insisted she needed something light in addition to all of her schoolwork. When she graduated with an English degree in 2001, bored and out of work, she started reading the series again and went searching online for more information on when the next book would come out. It was then that she found The Leaky Cauldron, a Harry Potter fansite named for the wizards’ pub frequented by characters in the book.
Anelli used the blog as her main source of Potter news and frequently sent the editors links to Harry Potter articles she found all over the web. In the fall of 2001, she scored a major coup by sending the site pages from the October issue of Vanity Fair, which featured an exclusive first look at the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone actors in full costume, the day before it officially hit newsstands. Anelli was a managing editor at The Leaky Cauldron by 2002 and gained full editorial control of the site by 2004, the same year she became a reporter for the Staten Island Advance, a daily local newspaper in her hometown. During that time, she met J.K. Rowling for the first time at a Harry Potter reading in London. “I love The Leaky Cauldron!” Rowling squealed when Anelli introduced herself, and later declared it her favorite fansite. Anelli started the popular PotterCast podcast in 2005 and, later that year, established her own LLC, Leaky Net. When she released her New York Times best-seller Harry, A History — an extensive look into the explosion of Potter fandom — in 2008, Rowling wrote the foreword. That year, The Leaky Cauldron’s forum had 75,000 registered users, up from 30,000 the year before Anelli joined.
Yet, while the all-consuming world of Harry Potter gave Anelli a place to comfortably blend her journalistic background with her pop culture obsessions, her work within the fan community was entirely voluntary. Then she met Stephanie Dornhelm.
Dornhelm, a California-based attorney, and Anelli first crossed paths in 2007 at Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter convention in New Orleans. “There was this whole contingent of people [at Phoenix Rising] who were somehow affiliated with The Leaky Cauldron and many of us had never met before, so this was somewhat of a coming together of the group,” Dornhelm explains. Her father raised her on Star Trek and Star Wars, but Harry Potter was the first fandom she sought out on her own, gravitating to The Leaky Cauldron the same way Anelli had. At the Prophecy Convention, another Harry Potter–themed gathering that took place later that year, Dornhelm overheard that The Leaky Cauldron was planning a Harry Potter convention of its very own, and she jumped at the chance to help bring it to fruition.
Both women worked nonstop — and as unpaid volunteers — to pull off the first LeakyCon in Boston in May 2009. The recession had just started, and Anelli had to use $7,500 of her own money to get the convention off the ground; she says she’s still feeling the financial effects of it six years later, but it was worth it. Over the course of the three-day event, 750 Harry Potter fans lived out their favorite fantasy book series, attending events like “The Hufflepuff in All of Us,” “Wand Making and Lighting,” and “Snape Rehabilitation With Dr. Cynthia Cynical." Traditions were also born that year — like the Circle of Awesome.
“Basically there was this song ‘Dumbledore,’ by Harry and the Potters,” says Anelli, referencing the group widely known to be the pioneers of “wizard rock,” a genre of Harry Potter–themed music. “It goes slow and then it picks up into this great crescendo. Out of nowhere, someone actually grabbed me and said, ‘Melissa, look what’s happening!' There was just this giant circle on the dance floor [and] when the music picked up, everybody just rushed to the center, jumping up and down and singing about books. People were talking about that circle for weeks.”
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News
Anelli and Dornhelm made things official and founded Mischief Management, an event-planning company that would eventually house all their conventions, after the second LeakyCon in 2011.“Melissa and I are like Kirk and Spock,” says Dornhelm. “She provides the inspiration and drives us all to shoot for the stars, and I am the one who brings us back down to Earth and helps implement her vision in a realistic way.”
However, they decided to make the new business their full-time jobs only after a remarkable thing happened during the August 2012 convention in Chicago. Actress Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood in the Potter films) got onstage to play bass with Harry and the Potters; the excited crowd of 4,000 completely flipped out, and didn’t stop screaming when Anelli and Dornhelm came out to say good night at the end of the show. “I started crying,” Anelli remembers. “I just looked at Stephanie and said, ‘Something is happening here, and we have to make it real.’”
Cheri Root
When I walked out of the bright, muggy morning and into the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando last July, it felt empty. As a lifelong reader of comics, I had attended conventions before; I stood in the hour-long maze to get into New York Comic Con in 2009, and got creeped out by strip mall sci-fi signing events in the '80s. I was ready for the immediate frenzy of bustling bodies and the long, snaking lines that greet you as soon as you walk through the door. Instead, a handful of young women stood smiling behind a small line of skirted tables, handing out LeakyCon badges to fully costumed attendees. A teenage white girl dressed as a Tom Baker–era Doctor Who, the long, multicolored scarf grazing the ground, complimented a young black girl on her gauzy, bright Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time costume as they picked up their badges. These strangers had the ease of two friends exchanging a quick bit of gossip between classes in a high school hallway; both smiled as they left and walked in opposite directions.
Rather than the marketing maze that bolsters most conventions — basketball-court-size banners hanging from the ceiling and bookmarks emblazoned with an author’s photo and next publication date — at LeakyCon, you’re immediately thrust into the best part of every convention: the vibrant audience making fandom their own via thoughtful, funny costumes and a shared interest in nerding out over pop cultural touchstones. Everyone was full of compliments for cosplaying; some even shouted quotes from their favorite TV show/movie/book across escalators at each other. A group of Hermione Grangers passed along hair-frizzing techniques to one another in the bathroom between panels; a Whomping Willow posed for pictures with a Gandalf. The scheduled meetups, broken down by fandom (Gryffindor, Sherlock, Teen Wolf, and so on), all had a friendly, welcoming vibe; you got a sticky ribbon for attending and people layered them on their badges like bright, rainbow-colored tails. It felt like camp.
And, more than any other con I’d ever attended, most of the attendees at LeakyCon were girls and women.
Cheri Root
Even though Mischief Management doesn’t keep track of the demographic information of its attendees, when I tell Anelli LeakyCon felt like the most feminist convention I’d ever attended, she agrees. “Convention space is a very male-dominated space,” she explains. “We didn’t realize that going in; we were just like, ‘We’re doing a thing!’ We came in like scrappy upstarts. Then we noticed that, hey, there are a lot of girls here finally finding a space to enjoy themselves.”
Pockets of various fandoms still struggle to accept that women constitute a huge percentage of pop cultural consumption, forcing an antagonistic point of view where there doesn’t need to be one. As was made loud and clear by last year’s GamerGate scandal, many girls and women are still being forced to prove their legitimacy in industries built around particular obsessions where misogyny is the standard.
Though Anelli luckily has been spared sexism from fellow fans, she laughed when I asked her to give me an example of misogyny she’s faced while putting together a conference. “I wish it was a joke!” she says. “But I just have so many.”
One time, at LeakyCon 2013 in Portland, Oregon, she and Dornhelm were paying a company to set up the hundreds of chairs needed for a panel, and Anelli thought they were being fleeced by the vendor. “I said, ‘I can do it faster than that! You’re overcharging us.’” When the man in charge smirked and said, “Go ahead,” Anelli started moving, setting up chairs as fast as she could. “We were arguing in between, and then he said, ‘Listen, hon.’ I said, ‘Hey, my name is Melissa. If you don’t like that, you can call me Miss Anelli, or ma’am.’” Her eyes are wide with disbelief. “That attitude of ‘sit down, little woman’ is everywhere.”
When I ask Anelli how she created the conference’s fun, feminist vibe, she insists it's unintentional. “It’s not something we set out to do,” she says. “We just set out to create something for all fans.” As she explains it, her desire for inclusion felt like a natural — and necessary — aspect of planning an event where everyone could enjoy themselves. She encourages trans-inclusive language, reads sites like Cosplaying While Black to follow the concerns of people of color in the geekosphere, and has hosted panels about race, class, and gender since the very first LeakyCon in 2009.
James Dechert / Orlando Weekly / Via photos.orlandoweekly.com
Anelli’s favorite LeakyCon moment happened last year on the dance floor. When the DJ started playing “Blurred Lines,” everyone stopped dancing and started booing. “I was so proud of my people,” Anelli says, smiling broadly. “That is the community we’re trying to create — people who hear a song about rape culture and go, ‘No, we’re not having that!’”
Suddenly, there is a small buzz in the conference room. Anelli pulls her phone out of her pocket and frowns. It’s the first time she’s stopped smiling since I arrived. “I don’t answer unknown phone calls. It’s an artifact of being stalked.”
Until recently, only the people closest to her knew that she had been mercilessly cyberstalked for the last seven years. But last February, she candidly opened up about her experience to NPR’s Weekend Edition. The stalker first visited The Leaky Cauldron forums and harassed other people; when Anelli asked her to stop, the stalker set her sights on Anelli. She sent graphic rape and death threats via email and Twitter, and even mailed a package addressed to Anelli’s newborn nephew saying “Enjoy your family while you can.”
The police offered to help her get a restraining order, but since the stalker was based in New Zealand, she was told it wouldn’t do much good. The FBI eventually issued a warrant for the stalker’s arrest should she ever come to the United States, but the fact that this woman is still out there takes a mental toll on Anelli. She told me that she wakes up in the middle of the night, afraid she forgot to lock her front door. Though she actively interacts with her 28,000 Twitter followers and regularly answers questions on Tumblr, she can also sometimes be cautious about people who reach out on social media. She isn’t living her life in fear, but she’s fully aware that she’s in a dangerous situation.
True to form, however, Anelli has turned this jarring experience into a teaching opportunity. She’s now working with the Harry Potter Alliance, a fan-based activist group for which she also serves as president, to develop "positive fandom" guidelines, an effort to keep fandom a “safe, constructive, positive space” by pledging to ideas like “I will respect and celebrate diversity” and “I will practice self-care.” “It’s just the idea that we can be fans and be passionate and be amazing and also not be bad to each other," Anelli says.
The GeekyCon code of conduct is brief, but reminds you that the private event reserves the right to kick you out for any form of mistreatment or harassment. You don’t have to ask her to stand by her claim — Anelli will prove it. She kicked a talent agent out of the convention last year for aggressively blocking a doorway when she tried to end their conversation. When I asked her how it felt to kick someone out, she shrugged her shoulders a little. “Being a woman in this industry is hard.”
Left: James Dechert / Orlando Weekly; right: Cheri Root / Via photos.orlandoweekly.com
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Can GeekyCon’s Founder Change Fandom For The Better?