Botcon 2021 announced

[Trent]

Pete Sinclair has been (arguably deservedly) copping a flogging on Twitter because it has come out that he’s still heavily involved behind the scenes and given his apparently history with how he and his crew treated certain members of the fandom at BotCons. A Twitter search of his name made for very interesting reading.

[griffin]

I think if the fandom, and more importantly the Hartmans, was able to get over what Glen Hallit did back in 2003 (according to a meet up at a recent Robocon), the fandom should just try to put the last chapter behind us, and look towards the future... particularly if Pete isn't the primary person involved in the next chapter. Besides, he's the one who has the most on-hand experience at the moment of the current people, with time on the bigger FunPub events and keeping up his experience with Robocon since BotCon ended. We need some element of reliability to the hosting of a new event to risk spending a lot of money to attend it.

I've seen how Pete had turned on fans in the later years of FunPub, but I saw a lot of it being a result of online targeting of FunPub, and he was the main fan contact and promoter to fansites... some of it was deserved (directed at the main FunPub guys who weren't Transformers fans), but Pete would be the one who had to defend a lot of what the main FunPub guys were doing (oblivious of what Transformers fans wanted), so you can only take so much hate and criticism (meant for someone else who doesn't interact with the fandom) before you start taking it personally and fight back... and end up in a downward spiral of escalating issues.

I'm not justifying what he may or may not have done in recent years, but as a long time member of the BotCon community, I remember how he was in the early years of his involvement with BotCon... he was a really nice guy, and I would have missed out on several things
thanks to his personal involvement or intervention.

[griffin]

Still no word on if there and when there will be a 2022 event (that I can see), but at the end of November they announced more BotCon labelled merchandise, for fans of the BotCon Brand.
It includes a couple of us$180 jackets... which seems like an expensive extravagant item for a fairly niche audience.
Probably of note is an exclusive (unlicensed) bonus item for some items, of Vok floating heads from Beast Wars, done in cloudy translucent plastic.
(looking on their news page, it was something from the 2021 Robocon event)