BABSCon 2025 Blog (Patreon)

Hey, everyone! I know I posted part of this already, but I had written more back in May and wanted to finish my idea of this retrospective, to see if I like the format. It's fun! I included some little illustrations and I'd love to do this for future events.

I'm posting this soon to deviantArt(? insert blog site), but I wanted to post here first. I hope you like it!

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BABSCon 2025 Blog. "Babescon"

BABSCon is dead! The staff have slept (more or less). I wrote most of this in May, but it has taken this long to recuperate from the events of this year. Let’s talk about it!

As I worded it in the final team Leadership meeting, BABSCon 2025 was the most busy, crazy, stressful, & successful convention I’ve experienced to date. We had over 2,000 attendees, which is the largest pony con attendance in years (Covid really did a number on those numbers), and was double our attendance from 2024. Our team had its usual ambition for big events, new merchandise, and the swankiest guest list. The stress was surprisingly minimal until the final 3 months, which I will cover later. And I think the success was self-explanatory: I’ve never heard so many people calling a convention their favorite weekend EVER, or their best experience at ANY pony con yet. And many vendors said that they sold more this weekend than they had at the final 2019 BronyCon, which had an attendance of 12,215. Wow.

It’s something to be proud of. BABSCon has taken up several years of my life. I met many of my closest friends here, and now my husband as well. I’ve met thousands of people working at my vendor booth, and it is such a phenomenon to see the same people every year and slowly learn more and more of their own stories, their life successes, struggles and dreams, and to see how far they’ve come. My family is always fascinated to hear about the latest people I’ve met, the history professors or biophysicists or pilots or artists that all share these weekends together.

I also haven’t written out my thoughts in a long time, so this might be a long one. Hopefully it’s informative though; I always enjoy reading about the inner workings of events like this.

I’m going to be bragging about my team a LOT, so let me introduce some of the many indomitable cast members that worked their butts off to make this year a success. 

Stephen & Zemming, our Chair and Vice Chair of the past 3 years. BABSCon held a tradition of rotating con chair until 2023, with the intention (I think) being to keep the seat fresh and democratic. A nice gesture, but with the extreme downside of one con chair only having one year to make and learn from their newbie mistakes. BABS was known as the “forever first-year con” for a reason. Steph and Zemming changed the game, staying on for these final 3 years, forming a solid legacy team, re-formatting our leadership structure, and building up a trusted reputation. They weren’t perfect, but they’ve been the best con chair team I have ever worked with. And I’ve worked with a lot.

The Directors. For the past two years, the chairs added the Director level to BABSCon. A common problem among volunteer events like these is finding solid leadership while also being able to trust them, to prevent the con chair from being inundated with tasks. Six of us were chosen to be Directors who ran multiple departments, and we were given the trust and authority to make executive decisions amongst our teams as pseudo-chairs. To name a few: Diva, our Attendee & Sponsor Relations Director, oversaw those respective departments as well as Registration and Info Desk. Yoyo, our Con Operations Director, headed Ops (Security), Accessibility, Hospitality, Logistics, and more. Ike, our Events & Programming Director, ran seven departments including Concert. I was Publications Director, overseeing five departments, and Marketing Lead.

Leadership. These are the main department heads, tasked with staffing and leading their respective department. While Directors served as a department head for a few of their channels, most departments had a dedicated Lead, and ideally a Deputy as well. Harry with IT, which was overseen by Yoyo under Operations; Looney with Theatrics, and Pinkaboo with Concert, both under E&P’s umbrella; Jon with Con Store, under me; and WindSong with A/V, one of the few not specifically under a Director.

I’ve had great trials and triumphs with BABSCon over the past many years. I initially began as a Design Staff member in 2018, and since then I’ve worked with a rotating cast of staffers. Of note: these are volunteer events. Nobody makes money working for conventions, and anyone in a leadership role certainly puts in more hours than could ever be reasonably compensated. To see the levels of pure passion and commitment that I have had the joy to witness from people from all walks of life is truly special. I’ve laughed and cried with people in hotel hallways past midnight; I’ve stayed up all night on calls because we decided to host some ambitious, impossible project together like making custom chocolate confections, or assembling every single public BABSCon art asset into a single Trello board for posterity, or getting married so all of our closest friends can attend. And as of this year, I’ve officially had people wish me dead. It’s a mixed bag. The highest highs and the lowest lows. Would Little Me be proud? I’ve certainly learned more working conventions than I ever did in school, or in “the real world”. It’s funny, how addicting but stagnant but vibrant this lifestyle can be.

2024’s BABSCon year was a resounding success, all around. We had built up enough trust under the new leadership that people were returning to the convention, and most importantly, having a great time. It was our “Sweet Tooth” year, coincidentally timed with the release of the new “Wonka” movie and the disastrous viral “Willy’s Chocolate Adventure” that took place in Glasgow, Scotland only months before. So many people showed up to BABSCon in cosplay, the atmosphere was lively, and the confections were delightful! It was a difficult decision made on the part of our chair team to end on this high note and declare 2025 to be the final year: after a long and storied history with previous leadership, scandals, and skeletons, it made sense that the new team needed to write their own story rather than forever compensate for mistakes of past staff members. There are only a handful of staff members who were there since the beginning, and I’ve only heard secondhand stories of previous mismanagement, politics, and so on.

But we looked forward to 2025. With my involvement in Design & Merchandise, I’d been given priority as far as theming goes. 2023 had been “Memory Lane”; 2024 “Sweet Tooth”; and 2025 became our “Slumber Party”. I follow the “EME” of theme: Events, Merchandise, and Environment. People need stuff to do, to buy, and the right vibes to do it in. Maybe that’d be a fun blog post on its own.

It’s hard to recall any actual issues over the course of the year. Everything seems so small now. And really, it was a satisfyingly smooth year.

Some moments:

-Diva, the sponsor liaison, is one of my favorite people to work with. She and I are both entirely stubborn, determined, and committed to our roles, and I am so grateful to know her and to have been able to come up with so many ambitious projects over the past few years for our sponsors. She has declared herself my “shadow mom”, which I consider to be legally binding. I’ll see you at the next family reunion, Diva.

-Opening merchandise boxes the Wednesday and Thursday before the convention feels more like Christmas than Christmas. Nothing beats the rush of arriving to a freshly cleaned hotel, sleep-deprived and sweaty, and sorting boxes of assorted merchandise with staff members you might just be meeting for the first time. What’s in this box? Who knows! I ordered this at 3am on a weekday and I have no memory of drawing this artwork.

-Con Store had extra help this year! Last year, I was so focused on the events-side of things that I neglected this department, and I’d ended up working there for the majority of the weekend, with little time to check on my other obligations. I delegated better this year, and thank goodness for our epic Con Store team, who handled an endless line all weekend long.

- Seriously. I adore them. Every time I walked in, the “Tem Store” theme was playing, someone was in a maid outfit, and something new was being organized or tweaked for the next day. I could not have asked for a better team.

-NANA. <3 My favorite person in the entire world, my grandmother, came to BABSCon. She grabbed a hooded blanket and began trooping around the convention, harvesting life stories from every brony who dared cross her path.

-I got married!! Ike proposed to me last year and we decided to have our wedding here at BABSCon, the convention we’d met at, the passion project we’d helped run for several years. And we’d have all of our friends here already; why ask my starving artist friends to book an extra flight to come see us when we could just host the event where everyone would be?

Art by OofyColorful <3333

Without my friends though, this would never have happened. How was I to know that little girls are supposed to have planned out every moment of their wedding instead of daydreaming about being the next Karate Kid attending wizard school? I missed the memo, and on the toilet I was furiously researching how many bridesmaids a woman can reasonably have, or what the heck a Maid of Honor is meant to do. And then February came, and my schedule was halted during the stress of fending off a lot of sudden accusations (I’ll get back to this). All of my deadlines went out the window.

I can never thank my second cousin, Wing, enough, for writing out a schedule of events, a speech, and for being the best officiant I could have ever dreamed of. I had only asked him to officiate, and when he messaged me out of the blue one day with a full tentative schedule and a "what do you think of this?", I cried behind my computer screen.

One of my family’s favorite movies is Pride and Prejudice (the newer one with Kiera Knightley). I’d mentioned to my sister about wearing my hair up in those immaculate curls Kiera has up, laced with pearls. What a dream that would be!... if we weren’t impossibly busy greeting customers,,, or setting up staff members,,, or stealing away to the storage rooms to grab boxes full of unlaced drawstring bags. And I was on a panel one hour before my wedding! But my sister came prepared.

“Grab your hair straightener on your way to the panel,” she said, grinning. “I’ll bring the pearls.” And so my little sister fixed up my hair behind me as ChocoPony and I discussed the history of BABSCon’s Design Team. She followed me behind the projector screen of our wedding's panel room as I hastily wrote my vows on a scratch piece of paper and pulled open a few songs to use for the procession.

“Nobody is going to show,” I was muttering, as a friend came through to take candid Polaroid photos. “I only handed out paper invites today. Who did I even invite?” I was panicking, but we were out of time. So imagine my surprise as I walked out from behind that stage projector to see a room full of my beloved friends.

Thank you to everyone who came. To anyone who missed it, I’ll be hosting a horse divorce so Ike and I can get re-married at the next con. /s

-The Pink stuff. This did significantly impact my final few months before con, and it did impact quite a few things that people probably didn’t notice at-con. The TL;DR of it is this: a staff member was fired for repeatedly lying and damaging trust between staff which caused many significant delays and a lot of stress. There’s no smoking gun, no conspiracy and no age-old feud. She lied a lot to and about staff, GoH, and so on; she was fired; and she evidently lied to her friends about what happened. It sucked. There had never been any issues before February, and then everything happened all at once. Her friends began an online hate campaign about how she’d been abused for months. People joined the BABS Discord en masse and posted slurs, allegations and panic, every hate comment you can imagine. They dogpiled random attendees for asking them to stop, they sent death threats to our new musician lineup, and some threatened to make sure that the BABS staff were never welcome to another convention again. But I saw my team pull together, and I’ve never been prouder of a group for dealing with the kinds of unnecessary stress they were put through. This went from feeling like an insurmountable heartbreak to a real testament to friendship and love for the community that we’ve been a part of for so long.

@ any of those musicians, I hope you had a good time. If you ever have any questions, please always feel free to ask any of us rather than assume the worst. I think we all just want to be here, at these weird horse events, with our beloved friends. I hope it was evident at BABSCon this year.

-Mystery Skulls and the entire Burning Mare concert were incredible. Anyone who has pulled an unreasonable amount of all-nighters for a convention can probably still feel the stress of making it through that convention weekend, still pulling shifts and making sure that the guests, the friends, the attendees have the best possible experience. This concert was such a beautiful level of catharsis for me, to see so many different styles of musicians performing together, to run circles around a burning Princess Cadance, to boogie down as Mister Skulls himself yelled “Hooves up!” to the audience. To dance with my sweetest friends, and with my sister! We did it. We did it!!!

obnoxious watermarks so the bots dont get me

2024’s Sweet Tooth year was extraordinarily memorable for me, as I’d had the time and success working on so many strange and goofy projects, such as working with a confectioner to make custom chocolate (and painstakingly hand-wrapping all of them in thin gold foil and custom wrappers!). With all of the stress of the last few months of 2025, we didn’t have the time or energy to produce anything near as crazy (we really wanted to make a massive pillow fort room!), but gosh. I don’t know how 2025 managed to be the smoothest weekend yet, especially dealing with the insane attendance. But it was good. It was a good weekend.

To steal Ike’s words: “through hype and through drama, in con crud and crunch, for meat fountain and struggle meal, for being so back or so over,” I hope you all had a fantastic time at BABSCon this year. And if you were there, tell me about it in the comments! I’ve never used Fimfiction lol. (I never published those awful fics from high school >>;;) Tell me how your vendor, panel, attendee etc experiences went, what you loved to see and what felt unique about the con. I’ll certainly never forget that wonderful venue.

Okay, that’s it for me. I hope you enjoyed the read :)