Post in English because it's meant for all audiences, international as well as German speakers. This is just my personal opinion, and some matter-of-fact information on behalf of the project.
So, now it's official: there won't be a PlushieCon at GalaCon 2023. Why? It's because of the space of the venue, nothing else - or should I say: the lack of space.
Please don't get me wrong, anypony. I do not blame the GalaCon orga crew; quite the opposite: I admire them for the awesome job they're doing to make GalaCon possible, even under the difficult circumstances that GalaCon had to leave Ludwigsburg; I really don't envy them on this exhausting work! If y'all want to blame someone for having no PlushieCon at GalaCon 2023: please, blame the bureaucrats of the local authorities in Ludwigsburg who refused to negotiate a better deal for Pony Events Federation than their initial "offer", which would've made GalaCon insanely expensive - and I'm sure no one would want to pay a whopping 200 € for a basic ticket and even more for the higher tier tickets, but that would've been the price (approximately) if GalaCon had stayed in Ludwigsburg and agreed on the price called by the local authorities to rent the Forum am Schlosspark yet again.
So, now GalaCon will be at the new venue in Waiblingen. At the Discord channel, I read that someone wondered how small this new venue might be to not enable us. Legit question, I think, so here's what we need when it comes to space, and what the Bürgerzentrum Waiblingen simply can't offer:
It starts with the registration and the plushie hand-in. Where to put that? The orga team checked and thought about this, but there's just no space. You know, space is so limited that initially a lot of vendors had to be refused, now they'll share tables to bring you the variety and range of merch that everyone is expecting at GalaCon. If there's not even enough space for the vendors, where should we put registration and hand-in...?
Space behind the scenes. Until know, on Saturday, after you handed in your plushie(s) at our hand-in desk, the plushies were brought to the main stage of the Forum where our set-up artist Meganium would start to plan and prepare how to build the "stage picture", the scene, right behind the "Iron Curtain". Basically, we used the real main stage of the Forum for years as sort of a big storage and preparation room; you as the visitors, from the audience, only got to see the "pre-stage" because the real stage of the Forum is too big for GalaCon to usefully fill it with content (besides, if used, it would've gotten even more expensive, and we would have had to have the fire fighters in the house - legal requirements). Very well, but nothing like that exists in Waiblingen - so, where to put your plushies until the real PlushieCon, where to prepare the scene...? Yet again: lack of space
Event rooms. You know it from the Forum: the Main Theater Room was unused for the GalaCon Saturday evening events, the Gala itself was outside the MTR in the foyer, and the party was raving in the Bürgersaal, so the MTR wasn't needed, and we could have it for PlushieCon. Now, in Waiblingen, there are considerably less rooms, but the traditional evening events (Gala and disco party) should still be offered. So, where to set up PlushieCon...? Maybe in some sort of small room? No, you surely wouldn't want that. Imagine, say, just 500 plushies crammed in some room that would basically just be some kind of office. That's not a nice picture, you can't take nice photos there, and there wouldn't be any kind of presentation because it's no stage. Would that still qualify as the GalaCon edition of PlushieCon you're used to and are expecting...? No, right?
Worst of all: sorting all the plushies on Sunday morning. If you had your plushie(s) with us during the last times at GalaCon and picked it up on Sunday, you know our huge "storage room", the Bürgersaal, where all the plushies were brought on Sunday morning. Before we opened our doors for you, we all spent hours to sort hundreds of plushies by their numbers, we need to do that to give you back your very own plushie(s). And, you guess it: there's no such room in Waiblingen... well, maybe there actually IS such a room, BUT it's needed for the Sunday panels of GalaCon! Just imagine the Forum Ludwigsburg without the MTR: everything that's intended for a larger audience would've taken place at the Bürgersaal, yes, the very same Bürgersaal that we got as Sunday storage / sorting / hand-out room. So, where would we be...? Or should GalaCon cancel all Sunday panels...? No, right...?
You see: it always has been "GalaCon with PlushieCon", not "PlushieCon with GalaCon". We were the "event at the event", but not a standalone event on ourselves.
And there we go. Now you know why the new location is too small to have a GalaCon with a PlushieCon, at least a PlushieCon with the standards y'all know and come to expect of us. - I'll be there, most likely as a volunteer (application is sent in to our Volunteer-Bunny-Overlord 404), and will make myself a detailed impression of this new venue. We all will learn a lot of how the building is shaped, the rooms are aligned and shaped, how everything is looking, how the house staff's mindset is, at the GalaCon weekend, but for this year, it will be like a first-time event - and in fact, it is a first-time event: for all of us in this venue.
To close this WoT, I once again want to thank the GalaCon orga team for all the hard work they put in the project for all those years, and for having us and giving us the preconditions to make PlushieCon happen at the scale it has been over all these years. None of us knows what the future holds, but even if there should never be a PlushieCon again with the size of 2019 (800 plushies plus one robot), please don't forget that there is no natural law saying we MUST be at GalaCon no matter what - but instead let's remember the good times we had at the Forum Ludwigsburg in the past.
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![[Bild: sig-tatras-01-04-2018-3.png]](http://admiralmic.at99.at/Bilder/sig-tatras-01-04-2018-3.png)
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