Surprisingly a fair number of attendees came to that panel despite not really liking yaoi and walked away still laughing. Crossing that barrier says something I think.

Drawing panels at convention needs a major overhaul. It’s up to the programming staff to make that happen. I think any artist that wants to do a how to workshop should at least submit a short portfolio and talk to the people before hand. As someone learning to create better manga inspired art it is disheartening when the panels is nothing but bad jokes and worse skill. I got burned by a how to draw yuri panel once. Maybe it was the same people?

Anyway thanks again for the feedback. Look out for The Yaoi-ing Game 2: Pen Fifteen. I’m planning on changing it every year to keep freshness and present it at conventions throughout that year. I hope Katsucon will accept it again. Then it will premiere there.

First off, thanks for taking the time to address the various matters at hand in a straightforward and adult-like manner. Not going to lie; after what I saw and heard at the NYAF, I initially felt compelled to contact your organization for perhaps an explanation, but in the end, didn’t believe it to be worth the effort. Why? Because based upon the conduct and antics of either you or other members of your group that I witnessed, not just at your KIngdom Hearts but at least one other game related panel, I simply felt that anything I had to say would fall on deaf ears. As silly as it sounds… at least to most others out there, but perhaps not to someone such as yourself, given what you guys regularly do at conventions… I easily envisioned a scenario in which I would become dragged into some kind of crazy online war of egos, my site against yours, mostly because similar incidents do go down for other people.

I myself, as you may or may not already know, also speak at conventions, giving presentations that are designed to get a reaction from the audience by pushing buttons, and sometimes people will take things the wrong way. Basically, I took you or your fellow member’s “shtick” too seriously. I too will act in a certain manner when on stage, to enhance the desired effect of the presentation, and which is not necessarily reflective of how I normally behave in regular discourse. So shame on me for that.

Now, someone recently posted a comment in my NYAF report, regarding “the incident” and my supposedly misguided take on it, plus this individual also made mention of the fact that you are bisexual. Unfortunately, because it came at a really bad time, not only did I never get the chance to properly address his points, but I never got around to actually approving the comment (anything said by anyone new automatically has to be green-lit by myself), so I really hope that person didn’t think I was avoiding a debate. Anyhow, my first reaction to this, to be completely honest, was basically “so?” It sounded to me like the “well, I have black friends, so I can say this about black people” defense. I myself am Korean, so how would it sound if I told a room full of people “all Koreans should be lynched”? Even if I made it loud and clear to everyone beforehand that I was a Korean myself and was just joking around? Don’t get me wrong… I often poke fun at my own ethnicity all the damn time, but there’s a time and a place.

The truth of the matter is, my memory of the incident has become rather hazy since it was quite a few months ago, and even when it actually happened, I still had no idea how the chant got started in the first place. I gather from your heartfelt apology that you and your group would never advocate a message that embodies so much hatred. Still, and not to lay another guilt trip, but the one thing I do remember with crystal clarity was the look on not just my friend’s face (who herself is bi btw) but others around us, as those words were being echoed in the room. But that’s in the past, and hopefully a lesson was learned. Unfortunately, as comfortable as you might be with addressing characters with assumed homosexual traits, it’s territory that’s quite tricky to explore, even in an ultra progressive city like New York and at an anime convention, where numerous comics and cartoons that specifically cater to those with gay tastes are openly bought and sold. That’s just the way it is, totally sucks I know, but that’s just the way it is.

Now regarding my comments about your group’s most recent appearance, from this past weekend, all I can say is that I simply repeated what I had heard. Despite my rather negative attitude thus far, it’s not in my best interest to make stuff up. If I was told that you guys had the best video game panel of the entire weekend, as difficult as it would have been to personally believe, I would have stated as such. And again, I’m not the only one who rolled my eyes when I heard you guys were at Otakon, that same friend from before felt the same way.

But then again, you guys clearly have a routine that works. It’s hard to say if I would have enjoyed your most recently panel. I’m willing to bet that I probably would not, mostly because it’s become quite clear, perhaps from my comments about some of the other panels from the same show, that my philosophy regarding what makes a good panel is quite different from many others. Anyhow, I wish you and your group the best of luck and thanks again for taking the time to talk.

My name is Angelo, president of Disorganization XIII. I have read your comments regarding our panels at NYAF, and feel that I must respond to them. First of all, I myself am Bi-sexual. My co-president Robert Bauer is gay, and several members of Disorganization XIII identify as queer. That being said we have been doing our Kingdom Hearts panel for 4 years now, and the last performance at NYAF was our last Kingdom Hearts panel we will ever do. The reason? We make it a point to give the audience what they want, and when the audience responded with joke after joke about sexuality, we realized that NYAF was not the correct audience for a Kingdom Hearts speculation panel. That, and there simply hasn’t been enough new information to fill an hour’s worth of time. Now, I would like to point out that when a point was risen to talk about some serious speculation, we switched gears as soon as it was requested to serious speculation, however once again we were only giving the audience what it asked for.

You are free to dislike our panels, and you are free to call us unprofessional, however, I take serious offense to being called anti-gay. At no point did we start an “anti-gay” chant, and the very notion of us spreading such bigotry is disgusting. As I said before many of our members are gay, and we actually look at kingdom hearts as one of the first and few games to provide actual gay role models for the young queer community. We feel the same way about Persona 4, and other games who have ambiguous to completely outed homosexual characters. We make jokes about the character’s sexual orientation, because they are funny, but at no point did we put down characters because they were gay. We made fun of Kairi’s lack of characterization as evidence of a homosexual relationship, we made fun of the way the game was written, and we made fun of Nomura’s intentional allusion to the homosexual relationships in his games. At no point was homosexuality brought up in a negative light.

Now as I said before, Kingdom Hearts was pulled from our panel roster due to it simply not having enough content. Spoiler, our panel at Otakon, is a shock comedy panel in which we spoil the endings to peoples favorite animes and videogames. I would not ask you to like or even come to see this panel, or any of our other panels, but I do ask that you stop spreading such hateful messages about us. If you do have a problem with us, I would feel happy to speak with you about it at NYAF, Otakon, or any other convention we perform at to clear up any and all misunderstandings. We at Disorganization XIII are proud of what we do, and would never EVER wish our message to be misconstrued as anti-gay or prejudiced in any way. We greatly apologize that our Kingdom Hearts panel was taken in such a fashion, and we are truly and deeply sorry that anything we have done could be taken that way. We are however adults, and professionals, and as such we would like to address any concerns you have in a grown up fashion. We do not wish to slander you, and we ask that you cease slandering us in order to reach a civilized conclusion.

Once again we apologize the intent of our panel was misconstrued, but frankly we are not bigots, far from it. Much of our lives are spent fighting for equal rights for all people regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexuality. The fact that we ran one panel which happened to have a profundity of Kingdom Hearts jokes of the queer variety does not change that.

Feel free to contact me at DisorganizationXIII@gmail.com, or as I said before, simply approach me at a panel. I will gladly discuss our policies with you either in private, or in front of our panel audience. This is a very serious issue, and I sympathize with you and how you feel about it. That only means we at Disorganization XIII must work that much harder to clear up our misunderstandings with our fans.

Thank you and I hope to hear from you soon.
Angelo M. D’Argenio
President of Disorganization XIII