u/ConfettiBrownie

The guest in question was artist Gary Bedell, who designed monsters for the horror youtube channel crypt tv- specifically the he's the creator of the horror monster Miss Annity. If you're not familiar with modern horror i cannot stress how important Crypt TV was to horror on the youtube scene, like, every reaction youtuber and horror youtuber you could think of had at least one video relating to something they made at one point or another, and miss annity was a big part of the crypt tv connected universe, so Gary's a huge deal. I actually didn't even realize who he was the first day until i went home and checked back at the special guest list. I think most people didn't know he worked on things like that cause he blended in with many of the artist ally booths, but when i told my friend he worked from crypt tv we both lost our shit.

Our conversation started with he stopped me walking around the convention center and asked me if he could take a picture of my annie wilkes cosplay because he was a huge king fan and had never seen an annie cosplay before. We then started talking about stephen king books, and i mentioned that i really liked IT specifically, and that got us started on freaking out about IT together.

I told him my favorite character in IT was Henry Bowers and he asked why, and after I told him he actually listened and engaged with deep discussion about his character with me. I'm kind of used to people immediately being weirded out when i say that, or, worse, assuming I must agree with his actions in some way, but Gary just laughed and said that was awesome. I then mentioned that I also really like Mike Hanlon so we started to geek out about how cool of a character mike is and the comlexity of the hanlons and bowers fued, which was funny for 2 reasons. 1. It's just really novel to have anybody talk to me about these two together, so much so that i pointed that out and Gary said that was right, and 2. I'm a white person whose actually spent time in a psycheward before cause of mental health issues and Gary is a black nerd from smalltown red state missouri, so the fact we were totally fawning over how much we enjoy Henry Bowers and Mike Hanlon together was very serendipitous. I even started discussing how i felt women/mentally ill people were represented in stephen king stories and he suggested me some black horror movies to check out.

Then the funniest thing happened, when i mentioned i write IT fanfiction and started describing the plot of one of them and he was genuinely so interested. He even suggested i try to make it into a horror comic in the style of creepshow, and when i mentioned i was already planning to do that and whipped out my, admittedly, kind of shitty concept art he was delighted. He then said "I love how much you love IT" with such sincereity and kindness i could have died.

God, he was genuinely such a nice guy. I even bought his original horror anthology comic and got it signed to remember him buy. Talking to Gary just got me super inspired to like draw more and write more, and keep letting my passions grow. That's not even to mention all of the other things we talked about, cause we literally yapped to each other so much the convention organizers had to split us up when the day ended.

This is the kind of shit i go to cons for, 10/10 experience, would do it all over again.

It doesn't matter what the post is, it could be fanart, it could be a random scene, it could be a 5000 page analysis about Bill Denbrough's shiny bald head- inevitably someone will come along and make a reference to the sewer scene- and if it's not about the losers club and you're talking about henry, they'll make references to the junkyard scene. It is more than valid to have discussions about these scenes, or bring them up when they're relevant to the topic, but most of the time it's not even discussion, it's like marvel reference humor. There's a lot of weird stuff in IT that you can make fun of, I make shit posts about IT for a reason, but they have such little variety. Half the time the joke is just "well that sure did happen".

I'm not trying to control anyone or hate on anyone specific, but come on man, why is it when i post a drawing of beverly marsh on the internet some one always has to pop in to joke about her fucking all her friends, it's aggrivating. I don't wanna hear about beverly marsh's first time when i'm just trying to draw a picture of sophia lillis. People also use joking about the sewer scene as a way to be creepy to the real life actors who've played bev before. Multiple interviewers brought this up to her in interviews when she was 13 and she was so clearly uncomfortable with it. Someone sent her fanart in the mail of her in the sewer with all her castmates doing it right after the movie released. People ask her about it at q and a's at cons til this very day. It's weird man.

I brought up stephen king to him cause he told me his fav author is mo willems so i told him mine was stephen king, and when he asked who that was i pulled up a picture of him. It was a pretty normal photo of him, just him kinda staring off into space lookin old as fuck. He then proceeded to turn his whole body away from me and huddle into a ball and whine "i don't like himmmmm".

Honestly i get it. I always say the scariest part of any king book is the author portrait on the back.