Disorganization XIII Interview

So, I've finally got around to releasing my Disorganization XIII interview. For those who don't know, Disorganization XIII’s is a group that produces and preforms panels for conventions, most famously their Spoiler panels. Some of the latest Spoiler can be seen below, the rest is at this Youtube playlist.

I think the interview provides a look into the process that goes into creating panels, and traveling the convention circuit.

Me: Disorganization XIII is very popular at conventions. Every panel I've seen you at has been crammed full, especially the Spoiler panels.

Disorganization XIII (Angelo): Thank you.

Me: Would you say that this fame carries over outside of conventions, or to put it another way, to what extent does Disorganization XIII exist outside the convention hall?

Angelo: There a good story about that. In my actual workplace (Angelo is employed at 30ninjas.com), at one point I'm wearing my Disorganization XIII tee-shirt, and this girl comes up to me and says “You're that guy from Disorganization XIII!” so she recognized me, but she probably wouldn't be able to peg who I was without the shirt and rosy velvet headband. So does the fame extend past conventions? Not in a huge way, but I have been recognized once or twice in shops and at the mall, but nobody is jumping to give me free limo service or blowjobs or anything...Is this supposed to be PG?

Me: Nah, you can say what you please.

Angelo: Ok, so it's not like anyone's all over me, some people here and there recognize me, but I kind of wish more did because I'm a glorywhore. What about you Rob?

Disorganization XIII (Rob): My day job is that I'm a teacher and a private tutor, and I would like to have one of my students recognize me, I'm perhaps glad that none of my bosses ever recognize me (From the panels). Getting on stage and swearing and ranting about anime for an hour, four weekends a year is maybe not the best advertisement for a sound pillar of learning.

Angelo: I'm actually lucky that I work for 30ninjas.com, check the site out. No, but in all seriousness I'm very glad that I work for really awesome people who dig my comedy and dig my sense of humor and that stuff, because I have the freedom of coming to a convention and saying what I want, when I want, and in the end there's not a whole lot of political or bureaucratic snafu there because I can just say 'I was at a convention, I was preforming'. But there are members of Disorganization XIII who specifically will never reference themselves by their real names because they are afraid that it might adversely affect them in the future. We understand that and we're very supportive of these members as much as we may mock them for it. I think it's a shame though, that it's even a factor, that you have to be afraid of what you do when you come to a convention and have a good time and preform, because someone out there in a suit might say 'We really disapprove of the fact that you made people laugh for five hours'.

Me: Five hours? That's quite the panel.

Angelo: Well, did you hear what happened this convention?

Me: Are you talking about what just happened? (Manga Entertainment kicked DOXIII out of the presentation room before their panel was over, so they could set up their displays and equipment. The matter was later resolved with a long apology from the NYAF staff).

Rob: No no, yesterday we had a panel on RPG video games, and the panel before that was called 'Why Anime' and the panelist didn't show up. So when we arrived early, just to check out the room, we realized that the panel wasn't going on, so we stepped up and did it. Then right after that there was our panel, and then after that was something called, uh...

Both: 'Hip-hop Hearts Anime'.

Rob: And those panelists didn't show up either. So the six of us, the six pasty white of us, got up there and did the panel.

Angelo: We did it because there should never be an empty slot at a convention. We've done this before at AUSA and other conventions. I think it's kind of despicable that people would sign up to do a panel, and then just bail and collect the free tickets. And you see these really sad faces in the panel room, going 'Oh my god, I really wanted to see an interesting panel here, but no one's showing up.'

Rob: It's a huge let down, and it's a betrayal of trust. My attitude is that the show must go on. And while panels are information most of the time, basically it's a performance. And everyone is there to watch you preform, so if you just don't show, if you say that it doesn't matter, that goes against what live theater is. That personal engagement with the audience is just stepped on.

Angelo: The only reason that conventions even run is because of both fans and professionals who step up and say 'We're going to do this programming for you.' Very successful cons like NYAF run on the volunteers and unpaid or low paid panelists. If you're not willing to preform, then the con can't happen.

Me: How does Disorganization XIII work, online or offline?

Angleo: We've been trying to get a successful website up forever. We have been failing at getting a successful website up forever. This totally goes against our happy-go-luck cute geeks image, but we are not the best with computers. I mean, we know some stuff, but when it comes to website management we just don't know a whole lot. We've been through a lot of website revisions, a lot of retooling and smooshing together different ideas to try and get a website up. We have a new one up (http://disorganization-xiii.com) and we think it's working...

Rob: But we've thought our site was working before.

Angelo: We've been ready to dropkick each other over some of this stuff before. As far as how do we work, we take it very seriously. We treat what we do like a theater production. We premier all of our stuff at NYAF, just because it's the closest one, and it's pretty big. The way our schedule is set up, NYAF is the beginning of the con year. So we go to NYAF, we show our stuff, then we actually cycle our stuff when we go to Otakon the next year, which is the last con of the year for us, so the two form a nice couple of bookends. Pretty much the two biggest cons on the east coast. In order to be ready for these cons, we start planning in March. We get together and throw around ideas. Granted, we're throwing the ideas around in our living rooms, where half of us are drunk and the other half are playing some video game or are lounging on the gay cuddle bed. (Noticing my reaction) No, it's just that Kirk and Casey, the two who's apartment we use, don't have a couch but they do have a bed in their living room, so we call it the gay cuddle bed. It's our favorite piece of furniture. But anyway we start in March and admittedly most of our preparation is for Spoilers, our hour-long comedy presentation, which requires a lot of attention. It's basically an hour long scripted comedy show with visuals and powerpoint. Rule of thumb, it's usually about one slide per second, however we also have fast bits, like in this years Excel Saga section, Casey has 150 slides in 60 seconds. So we start by thinking of things that are funny, jokes about popular animes...

Rob: What are we going to spoil and make fun of.

Angelo: Right, we then split up the work and say 'Have some beta scripts ready in a couple months.' Then for the next few months we yell at each other and finally the beta scripts come in.

Rob: Eventually we've got the scripts and we go through those and figure out how long they are and how much time we have and we pick which ones are going to be in the show.

Angelo: And from there we have to make the Powerpoints. Which take a looong time.

Rob: Then in another couple months we go through these and put the best of the best into the show. And then from that point on it's all rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal.

Angelo: Until we're sick of it, and each other. While we're doing this, we are also planning one or two other panels. Many of us are actually Alumni of Rutger's University and we came from a dorm called Demarest Dormitory where you had to do this thing called 'Sections', where you had to lead an hour long discussion just to live in this dormitory and that was perfect training for this, because we had to come up with something that would get people interested and talking on a variety of subjects and we had to do this often many times a month. We then graduated and got into the con scene...

Rob: Not necessarily in that order.

Angelo: Right, but one of our first panels was a panel on Kingdom Hearts and it was all just a scam to get Rob to go to a convention.

Rob: I was a Sci-Fi fan and was going to Sci-Fi, literature, and gaming cons. And this friend of ours wanted to get me to go to an anime con. Since I was a cheap, poor college student, he figured that the best way to get me to do this would be for me to apply to get a free badge, so he said let's do a panel. I had been playing the Kingdom Hearts series, and...

Angelo: Had?

Rob: Well, there's no games out right now. At least not till the 29th. But anyway, I was speculating about it, because the creator of that game loves to inspire fan speculation. So my friend said 'Let's do a panel about it.' and I agreed. So Angelo, this friend, and I got together and we did the Kingdom Hearts panel. To our complete surprise, despite being total unknowns, the line to the panel was all the way out of the room. The line of people who didn't get in was bigger than the group of people who could get in. I mean, they even tried to stop us at the door for fire code. We had to tell them 'No no no, we are the panel.'

Angelo: So this took us by surprise and we were like 'We need to do something about this.' So we got together, and we were thinking up names for ourselves and since our first panel was Kingdom Hearts, we're like 'Ok, we need something so people will remember as the guys from the Kingdom Hearts panel' and it took us a while but we came up with Disorganization XIII from the antagonists from Kingdom Hearts, Organization XIII. However, due to copyrights and all of that crap, we can't actually have anything to do with it, so we can't use any SquareSoft images, we don't reference any SquareSoft games...

Rob: Outside the panels that is.

Angelo: Our icon is original, we don't use the same fonts. It's all about being original and separate from SquareSoft. That's cool and everything, and it's not like we're making any money, other than free entrance to cons. We were sort of grandfathered in to the idea of discussion panels. And ever since then we've continued our discussion panels. We continued Kingdom Hearts until last year when there wasn't new info. We went into fan fiction after a couple people did a fan fiction panel that was so abysmally horrible...

Rob: Just terrible. It was basically everything that's ever been wrong with fan fiction panels.

Angelo: The panelists promoted their own work, which was very very bad.

Rob: They basically said that it's ok for fan fiction not to be good because it's fan fiction. And we were talking both during the panel and afterwards about how much we disagreed with everything that they were saying. And it's so happens that the management of NYAF agreed that it was perhaps not the best panel in the world, and they asked us to do it instead., and we said 'Great.' So yeah, we started with Kingdom Hearts, and the Spoiler was born basically in a bull session right after a panel we went to at AUSA and someone gave away the ending to some game.

Angelo: I gave away the ending. And they said we don't really want spoilers, and I'm like 'I'll try my hardest, but they don't let you use you main character at the end of this game, and it's really annoying.' And they said 'No Spoilers', and I'm like 'Well, I didn't tell you how... She dies in the end.' So everyone laughs and whatever. So we go out of this panel, and start this bull session, and we're like 'Really? How do they expect for there not to be spoilers? This just in, Aeris dies.' and we started saying 'Well, maybe we should do Spoilers: The Panel, a panel with nothing but spoilers.' and we started talking about having stuff like huge lists of what characters are dead, what characters are actually god, what characters are actually girls, so on and so forth. And it sort of evolved from there into this sort of self-styled mocking humor. Every year now we have our discussion panels, the ones that work like Fan Fiction, we try a new panel, this year we tried The Disorganization XIII RPG Panel: Now With Chairs, and we have Spoiler. Spoiler takes up most of the time, and we try to have one to three or four heavy discussion sessions about the panel.

Rob: Prior experience has shown that if we try to do a panel where all the panelists haven't gotten together and talked about it at least one time, that it will go poorly. Actually, in our first Spoiler one of our cast members who was in Maryland at the time wasn't able to come to our rehearsals and he sort of rehearsed on his own but it turned out that being separate, he didn't get enough rehearsal in, and he choked hard.

Angelo: Very very hard. In front of the whole New York Anime Festival. We had to fast forward through his bits, which was a shame, but hilarious. So it's really all about practice. You gotta practice, practice, practice, and there are some people out there who we even know who wait until the last few weeks before their panel, and like we said we start in March. It dominates our lives to the extent that we are crying in little heaps in the corner.

Rob: To get back to your original question, because you did actually ask a question at some point, we generally do our creative work in person. There's been talk of Skype and so on, but we definitely wouldn't want to move away from the group discussions. If we did prepare on the internet, we would definitely use some kind of medium where we would all be talking to each other, as opposed to two at a time instant message conversations or e-mail or anything like that. Those methods have worked out poorly before.

Angelo: Every member has to be a part of it, and the best way to do that is face-to-face.

Me: Have you ever tried to express a message through your panels?

Angelo: Stop writing bad fan fiction.

Rob: The main panel for that would be Fan Fiction. The Fan Fiction panel is almost fan activism. We have a real goal with this panel of improving fan fiction, so there's a lot of messages and one of them is 'Have pride in your creative work and put effort into it, and always try to improve.' But there's always rougher issues that come up, every time we do the fan fiction panel, slash and yaoi come up.

Me: Or male pregnancy.

Angelo: Oh, so you were there this year?

Me: I was not actually.

Angelo: Well, it came up. Yeah, fan fiction is where we mainly try to put across this message that it's not ok to suck at writing. You have to try to get better, you have to break this convention of 'It's ok, it's just fan fiction.' and really try to do something different and new and good with your writing.

Rob: And actually, fan fiction crosses over into some bigger ideas. Like the slash and shonen-ai communities, they are actually a resource and a very liberating thing for their fandoms. It's very good and powerful that there is this resource that they have and that there's this place that they can go. But there's so many people who are writing slash badly and for bad reasons, the stereotypical reason being because they are fourteen year old girls who think it's hot, that is not helping the community. In fact what that does is it associates gay characters with this really terrible over-sexualized, cliché, self-serving writing and that hurts us. It makes people attack the slash community and try to damage this thing that originally was very good thing and a resource. I try to get across 'Write slash, write gay love stories, write gay characters, but please do it for the right reasons.'

Angelo: I myself try to use our other panels to say 'It's ok to be a geek.' We were interviewed last year by Channel 8 news and they asked 'Why are you doing this, how does this all tie together' and for me it's trying to say 'It's ok to like this stuff.' Obviously, all of us here like this stuff, but when you leave there's all these stereotypes of the anime geek, and here we are taking many months out of our lives doing this very professionally, working our butts off to do panels, to do performances. So we've gotten offers from other conventions, we've been paid at conventions before, we call ourselves professional fans, because we love what we're doing because we are defending the fandom, we're making sure the fandom continues. And part of that is getting these people to know that you can be a grown-up professional geek. You can chase your dreams and actually make a difference by being a geek. That's a very powerful message when it comes down to it, because a lot of these people separate themselves from the fandom, like they say 'I like this stuff but I will distance myself as far as possible if I am confronted with this by anyone who isn't also part of the fandom.' and we're trying to say 'No, it's actually ok.' Everybody is making a big deal over something that's actually quite small.

Rob: And in our informational discussion panels, we introduce ourselves and talk about our geeky jobs. I am, among other jobs, a game writer and game designer. And Angelo is a writer and a reviewer for 30ninjas.com...

Angelo: Check that site out!

Rob: Which reviews anime and action movies and video games and all that stuff. So part of the message that we're trying to get across is that it's not just for kids. You can be an adult and still have this be a huge part of your life if that's what you wanna do. As kids or as 'Weekend Fans', it's ok to be a consumer, but if you want to be a grown-up and part of the fandom, there's all this producing, creative fandom that you have to take part in. And there is money in it, not massive money, but there is money in it. And we really love doing that kind of thing. And we don't make a big deal out of it usually, but part of what we want to say is that this is out here, you don't have to stop being a fan in order to grow up.

Angelo: When it comes to money, none of us are any of the big professional cosplayers, none of us are in bands or do concerts, but when we go to Mokucon, they'll pitch us thirty to fifty bucks, some conventions will give us discounts on rooms, some have talked about giving us free rooms, most if not all will give us free entrance, and most if not all will give us LOTS of free entrance. We have a lot of members, most of those members are doing panels, and this sometimes amounts up to twelve, fifteen, twenty or more free passes to a convention, and a lot of convention staff have a siren that goes off in their heads saying 'Hey, maybe these guys are trying to swindle us.' but then we show up and we do the panels that other people don't do, and we really dedicate ourselves to it, and they see it's worth every single free pass. Basically, we haven't found a way to make this our whole lives, we all have day jobs, except for those of us who are unemployed right now which is unfortunate. We all do our best to make ends meet, but this is a passion we have, and when you have a passion you're serious about, you get perks, and perks are awesome.

Rob: This year we got free shoes.

Angelo: Yeah, we got free shoes, I'm actually wearing mine right now. Onmyodo Shoes gave us some free shoes. They were like 'Hey, you guys are from DOXIII, you're awesome, have some shoes.' And we've gotten a lot of other free things, and we'd like to say that you can make a full time living off of this, but we haven't yet found a way. We have sort of a fun and decent rivalry with Uncle Yo. He premiered the same year we premiered, so he's our favorite person to make fun of because he tells dirty limericks and has really corny bits. We like to say that we're like Uncle Yo, but we have talent. Now I'm sure he's an awesome guy, and we would love to comedy battle him sometime, but Uncle Yo is one guy. He's very successful and we commend him about that, like he goes out and plays actual gigs...

Rob: Actual gig.

Angelo: Well yeah, but he gets actual money and he's very widely known. We are not one person, we are about thirty people, we are a group that is specifically made of reliable people who have done panels, gone to conventions, but aren't well recognized. So I don't think we're going to be seeing, at least not anytime soon, maybe someday, the level of success that you see of Uncle Yo or some other people.

Rob: I think we could match Uncle Yo.

Angelo: I'm trying to be polite here, but you really want to say that we are funnier than Uncle Yo...

Rob: Aside from other things, he's not actually doing that much better than us. He's doing pretty well, and congratulations to him, but...

Angelo: You're just looking to start a fight, aren't you?

Rob: I just wouldn't say that he's that far ahead.

Angelo: Either way, Uncle Yo is probably a great guy, and we've seen some of his stuff before, and I'm totally covering for my partner here who's putting his foot in his mouth, but we have a lot of people we need to look out for. We have a whole society that's filled with mostly old veterans like us, and the newbies, the people that have really good panel ideas but who need to get noticed, and we're there to help. First and foremost, we are dedicated to making sure that they can be seen, they can be heard, and that we find a way to get their voice across. Small story, we were invited to DROM to do a presentation on the Eureka 7 premier, but a lot of stuff got messed up in the middle, and they wanted us to do things in ways that we weren't cool with.

Rob: There was a lot of miscommunication.

Angelo: Lot of miscommunication. Once again, they're awesome people, but it didn't work out for us. In the end though, we were happier for it because we don't want to rush something, we don't want to present something that isn't our very best.

Me: May I ask specifically what was wrong?

Angelo: Timing things, we would all have to take days off from our day jobs that we couldn't afford, they wanted us to prerecord our bit, which is more work and less funny.

Rob: They also told us to keep it PG-13, and we really were ok with that, but it's also a little difficult. We were dubious about that, but we were willing to do it.

Angelo: We only want the best for our fans, and we won't accept a gig or opportunity if we cannot give it our very best. It was coming up right before NYAF, and it was very short notice, and it was just something we couldn't do. So in the end, you will find us where ever there is anime to be had, there is geekery to be had. We will bring the funny, we will bring the intelligence, but we will never do anything half-assed.

Me: Do you ever think that there will be a point where DOXIII will be too unwieldy or it will just be impossible to get everyone together, and you'll be unable to attend conventions?

Angelo: I have done a lot of thinking about this, being the president and being the guy who is elected to worry. There are points, and I'm just being real with all of our fans out there, where the work gets difficult, and a lot of us consider quitting.

Rob: And there have been people who's involvement had to come way down due to other parts of their lives intervening.

Angelo: I don't think anything is sustainable forever.

Rob: All good things do come to an end. It's just a fact of life.

Angelo: Professional actors fall out of popularity, professional comedians fall out of popularity, everything dies out eventually. Long story short, yes, at some point either all of us won't have the time or even if we have the time, maybe we'll have moved on, maybe have moved away from the area, maybe ownership will have to trade hands. If at all possible, I'd like to see this go on for a good long time, constantly cycling in new talent, especially when the old talent has to move on with their own lives. So in that aspect, I think Disorganization XIII is going to be here for a very long time, and I'm hoping in ten or twenty years you'll still be seeing us coming to conventions.

Rob: Just speaking for myself, I just love doing this.

Angelo: Me too.

Rob: My personal plan is to keep doing Disorganization XIII until it's either physically impossible, or we start getting booed off the stage.

Angelo: I feel the exact same way. I will continue doing this until someone yanks me down with that hook you see in Vaudeville shows and says 'It's over.' We will continue doing this for as long as we possibly can. We'll always be bringing new people in, and one day it might die, but let's hope that that day is far off.

Me: Finally, has DOXIII considered expanding into other mediums?

Angelo: We actually are expanding into other media. I don't know if you know this, but New York Comic Con and New York Anime Festival are running at the same time next year, so one get's you into the other. That means that when we're playing the NYAF, we are also playing the NYCC. For some of our stuff like Spoilers, that's easy. I mean, we already make fun of movies and comic books. Fan Fiction, also easy. Some of our other panels, maybe not so much. RPGs is really going to be kept more towards gaming and anime conventions.

Rob: That panel would only work at a con that has a strong video game component. There are quite a lot of Sci-Fi cons like that, and I have contacts in Sci-Fi fandom, so I'm starting to talk to them about breaking in to that, and again, Spoiler carries over very well, Fan Fiction carries over very well. Producing more than one Spoiler a year would be very rough, but producing a couple extra discussion panels? We could do that, we would love to do that. But to answer your question of what media do we produce, rather than what media do we talk about, we are rebooting our website right now, and the plan is to have more written and video content.

Angelo: And there are people coming up to us, at conventions saying 'We want you to be on our podcast.' So we are expanding, we're going into other mediums, we're going into other conventions, and we just try to make this a geek thing. It's going to be a little slow expanding, because we started in anime, but you can't get rid of us, because if it's geeky, we will be there, and we will bring the chaos with us.