Time To Get Our Nerd On!

We have officially done the nerdiest thing we have ever done, and it was a blast! How I haven’t come across this in years past is a surprise, but I saw an ad for Phoenix Fan Fusion and thought why not!?

Fan Fusion is basically Comic Con but I assume a different company sponsoring it. It still has all the nerdy awesomeness including cosplay everywhere. With the panels and events scheduled all weekend, we opted to get the weekend pass so we could go Friday and Saturday, but we skipped Sunday which was a bummer in the end.

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Table of Contents

• Friday Overview
• Simu Liu
• Adam Savage
• Saturday Overview
• Gina Torres
• Micheal Rooker
• Vendor Hall
• Small Sessions

Friday Overview

Now before you ask, we did not dress up 😂.

It was a ton of fun to see everyone else dress up, but also made for an interesting check-in process. There was a badge pickup, props check, and then the metal detectors we all had to go through.

While busy, Friday was easier to get through check-in than Saturday. We were able to quickly get our badges which were of good quality and meant to last the whole weekend and beyond.

The event was surprisingly big, covering two of the three convention center buildings. There was the massive panel room for the major names, tons of meeting rooms with smaller events, the main convention space covered in vendors, as well as arcade games, and a big room set up with dozens of tables for tabletop games. Truly anything you wanted to see was there!

The super cool part is that you can bring a previous mug and pay a small price or buy one at the event and then you get free refills all day/event long!

Since we didn’t know they would be there, we didn’t have our mugs so we bought new awesome ones and we happily loaded up on our soda for the day! Now spoiler, drinking 100+oz of soda with real sugar will give you a REAL big sugar high. Especially for someone who doesn’t drink anything with sugar right now. 🤣

Now that we had a drink, we made our way to the main stage for the panels scheduled throughout the weekend. This was the biggest draw for me to come to Fan Fusion. I wanted to see the person behind the characters and I don’t care about paying for a picture or signature with them.

Simu Liu

First up was Simu Liu which ended up being our favorite panel of the entire event!

For those who may not recognize him, he is known for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Barbie, and Kim’s Convenience.

Side Note: Barbie was surprisingly popular at the event! There were a few people dressed up for it and tons of questions for Simu Liu about the movie, which was unexpected. I would have thought all questions would be around Marvel since we were among nerds.

We learned that he was born in China and Sky Harbor was the first airport his dad arrived at when coming from China. He received a scholarship to ASU and did a semester of school in Tempe. Then he relocated to Canada to finish out school which is where Simu ended up moving and grew up after childhood.

Other interesting facts, Simu has multiple songs published which are pretty good! (What I would consider “soft” music.) Plus he used to be a public accountant, which he hated. 🤣

He was a fantastic panelist, he cared about his fans, he was passionate about his work and making the world a better place, and all in all a fantastic human being!

Adam Savage

After we grabbed some food and refills on Wild Bill’s soda, we went to our second panel with Adam Savage!

Known for Mythbusters, Adam Savage has a unique position where he didn’t play a character. He was himself on the show and what you see is what you get. Now in person, there isn’t the benefit of editing and directing, so he was somehow even more chaotic in person than on TV but it entertaining to see.

While I appreciate Mythbusters for the fun, I don’t understand the technical components, so I think Nathan enjoyed Adam Savage a bit more than I did simply because he could follow along with the technical explanation or details of whatever story.

The funniest comment he made was that cursing is the gift of adulthood to make up for bills and shit. 🤣

Saturday Overview

After a relaxing evening to recoup from walking around the convention center, we are back at it for Day 2! Even better, we had our friends Keslie and Brad join us!!

We started the day by introducing our friends to the joys of Wild Bills and got our morning soda. Then we were off to our first panel!

Gina Torres

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed with her. We realized this is the catch of falling in love with a character on TV, the actor is acting and they might not have the personality that you expect.

Now granted I didn’t expect her to be a hard-ass lawyer or anything, but I expected a passion from acting and she reiterated multiple times that it’s a job. She likes what she does, and she is good at it but she does it because she is paid.

It was a little heartbreaking when you have fans from shows like Firefly with people who LOVE it, and want the actor to have some significance behind their choice to play that character or how they played it, and Gina didn’t have that.

The one fun note I had from her panel, was that the outfits on Suits were truly as tight, and restricting, and the heels were just as high as you would expect 🤣. She said they were terrible and she really couldn’t sit down in most of them which is why she is always leaning on couches instead of sitting.

It made it feel a little better that these women weren’t comfortable walking around in that, and it was really for show, not function.

Michael Rooker

The last big panel that we attended was for Michael Rooker, which you probably know from The Walking Dead (Merle Dixon) or Guardians of the Galaxy (Yondu).

He. Was. Insane.

I don’t think I have ever met a more chaotic person in my life. Granted we are about 99% sure he was intoxicated but he was all over the place and like Gina Torres didn’t seem to have a passion for his roles and was just glad to be making a lot of money.

He started off the panel talking about random things like buying pills online to “grow stuff” and then cutting his hair.

That was a common theme. He would be talking to someone and just walk away, either didn’t want to respond to their question like “Was the transition between theatre to acting hard?” or he would give a one-word response like “Money.” and he was done talking after that.

Like I said chaotic and 99% sure he was intoxicated.

Sadly, I lost a lot of respect for him as an actor seeing him act like this. As I mentioned with Gina Torres, it is the downside of meeting an actor, they are not their characters. Some are even better and some are a lot worse.

Vendor Hall

In between and after the panels we explored the Vendor Hall and other general areas.

We found a new card game, Game of Ham, that we immediately had to purchase. It helps that we don’t have Cards Against Humanity, so a darker version was just too funny to pass up.

They even had a special expansion pack that was even darker, where you had to sign a waiver before you could purchase! We couldn’t resist and I will attest that the expansion is absolutely worse, but quite funny if you like that sort of thing.

WARNING – We do not recommend this for everyone. If you don’t think the examples on the sign are funny, you will NOT like this game.

Other purchases during the festival included a road trip game, and Nathan got a mystery comic book box with 25 different comics which turned out to be pretty cool for a decently cheap price!

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We spent the large majority of the day wandering around the vendors, and there was so much to see that it was impossible to take pictures of everything. So I highly recommend going at least once if you have any amount of nerd tendencies because it was a ton of fun to see the vendors and what there was to offer.

We did see multiple booths for blood drive signups that I thought were cool. You have a mass of people with lots of time, it is a great opportunity to get some volunteers.

However, because Fan Fusion is full of creative and awesome people, the blood drive entry was decked out! If the thought of giving blood didn’t make me nauseous I would have wanted to go just for the decoration!

Small Sessions

One of the other things will did throughout the day was attend a few small sessions. These were in meeting rooms with less than 100 or so people, unlike the panels with thousands.

Some were not as exciting as we thought they would be, and they were a little cheesy but still entertaining.

The best one, and the only one I got pictures of was a Star Trek vs Star Wars debate.

For those that don’t know I am 100% Star Trek, as is Nathan. However, Nathan being the genius he is knows plenty about Star Wars to have a very good debate. If I didn’t know he would hate it, I would have suggested he go up there because all of his arguments were amazing!

To make it fun, they had the obvious fans debate for the opposite team. So the three on the left, who were obviously in Star Trek uniforms, had to defend the Star Wars response. I kinda wish they would have let them defend their own because the arguments would have been more intelligent but it was still fun!

Some of the prompts:

• Hyperspace vs Warp Drive
• Millenium Falcon vs USS Enterprise
• Empire vs Klingons
• Light Saber vs Phaser

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Fan Fusion was a fantastic experience and we will be coming back! Especially for any big-name panels that catch our interest. Plus it was something fun to do over the weekend, and we are always looking out for fun new activities.

Thanks for reading about our adventures!