Monday, July 14, 2014

Vampire Diaries Convention NJ 2014 Review


As you know from reading this website I very much enjoy the show Vampire Diaires. I was surprised that during the season that there is convention that is held in New Jersey and has been in the past. I decided this year to go and asked my dear friend Ruth to attend with me. We planned to attend on Saturday as Sunday was sold out since it was featuring Ian Somerhalder (Damon) and Paul Wesley (Stefan). 


We arrived bright and early Saturday morning and just missed the panel with Todd Stashwick (Kieren - The Originals) and Callard Harris (Thierry - The Originals).


There was a great costume contest in which many people apparently only wanted to dress as Katherine. Of the 30 something females on stage only 3 were not dressed as Katherine. There also were ongoing presentations of fan made music videos during any downtime between panels. They were surprisingly good. 


The first panel that we actually had a chance to watch had Michael Trevino (Tyler) and Zach Roerig (Matt). They had it set up that fans would ask continuous questions for about an hour as all panels were set up. Trevino remained professionally and remember to keep his answers on the level of the audience. In other words he recognized that the majority of the people in the room were minor females. However, Roerig continued to be inappropriate and left me with a creepy feeling as well as the people sitting around me. He constantly would get up and walk around and appeared to be jittery. He was dropping F bombs and made a very inappropriate joke of being a father and having sex with his daughter. Overall the panel left me with a feeling of "ick".  The one thing that Roerig did mention that the only honest love for Caroline would be Stefan. 


The second panel I had a chance to watch was of Daniel Gillies (Elijah - Vampire Diaries and Originals). He was very personable and handled all the questions quite well. Gillies stated that he has to work extra hard to have the diction of Elijah. However while listening to him talk he held himself well and started to sound like Elijah. I very much enjoyed his panel. 

 
The last panel of the day was a pleasant surprise. Turns out Somerhalder changed from Sunday to Saturday so we got to sit in on his panel. I feel bad for the fans that had tickets for Sunday but felt lucky that we planned to come on Saturday. I must admit the Somerhalder truly surprised me. He is very intelligent and a huge humanitarian. He often would be asked a simple light hearted question and then would provide a deep profound answer and often not actually answer the fan's question. He even found a way to bring up the BP oil spill, the killing of animals for sport in Africa, the Obama Administration, and even dog fighting/killing of pitbulls. So wow! Again he needed to recognize his audience. He began the panel saying that most people in there were 14 year old girls and he was old enough to be their father. Then he would turn around and talk about all the boobies in the room. So while it was awesome to see Damon I found that I enjoyed the Elijah panel the best.

  
The night was coming to an end it was time to get our Michael Trevino autographs. He was nice did a quick signature, found the spelling of my name as being odd but made eye contact. He was very nice to his fans. Overall the convention was fun and I might come back next year. I just hope there will be more female characters. I understand the fans are there for the eye candy but I would love to meet the female characters.

Post by Vikki
Twitter: ProfessorWhite

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