In the past decade, conventions for popular culture have started popping up everywhere, for everything. While Comicon may be more widely know, here in Minn., Anime Detour is the bigger hit.

Anime Detour is an annual event held in the Twin Cities over March and April. This is the second year the annual anime/manga convention has been held at the Doubletree by Hilton Bloomington in Minneapolis. The conventions popularity has been growing exponentially since it was created in 2004, and this year a few students from Stillwater were lucky enough to attend.

With the growing popularity of the convention, tickets were sold out by the middle of January of the 2014 event. The hotel where the convention was hosted at was not nearly big enough to accommodate all of the attendees of the event, so many people had to stay in nearby hotels and take busses or walk to and from the convention.

“This year was amazing when it came to Detour, although we had to stay in satellite hotel, but it didn’t end up to be that big of a deal because we had a shuttle that we just ride back and forth from the satellite hotel to the hotel that the convention was at,” explained senior Preston Potthast.

There are also a variety of charity opportunities at Anime Detour Fundraisers for guest voice actors or other causes close to the heart of a beloved conventioneer often get a lot of attention from these events.

“There is always a cause we focus on.  Like last year we helped a voice actress named Carrie Savage with a medical problem, and a year or so before that it was towards tsunami relief,” added junior Emma Bliven.

The convention itself consists of a variety of events, including gaming tournaments, a StarCraft competition, premieres of anime music videos and of course FanFiction contests. Another common and celebrated tradition of Anime Detour is cosplay. Cosplayer Competitions are arguably the biggest event of the convention, second only, and barely, the the masquerade ball.

“This was my second time attending Anime Detour and I really suggest to anyone who hasn’t done anything like that to try to make it to Anime Detour,” Junior Ben Reeves explained.  “There is plenty to do there from the amazing panels to the just general hanging out of the people at the con. The first day I went as a the boulder from Avatar, and the second day I went as Equius from Homestuck.”