For their fifth edition Heroes made in Asia (HMIA) is moving their convention from Gorinchem Evenementenhal, the venue they have used for the last four years to Jaarbeurs Utrecht, a popular venue for larger scale conventions like Heroes dutch comic con and Gameforce.

 They claim to be moving to a bigger venue to get the experience and atmosphere of HMIA to a wider audience. While this is a nice sentiment, one of the key factors to this loved convention is the hall it has resided in for all its previous editions, and moving this convention to a different hall would pose a multitude of issues for its visitors

  With the larger venue would come a larger body of con-goers which might cause the convention to oversell tickets and surpass capacity. This tends to be a repeating issue with conventions in Jaarbeurs which causes large crowds in market halls, long queues in food markets and safety concerns regarding the accessibility of medical aid in times of emergency.

One of the reasons HMIA is so well loved in the community is because of its internal accessibility for disabled and neurodivergent folk, thanks to its many resting places, overseeable layout and open space. The Jaarbeurs is an overwhelming and unpleasant building which has none of these benefits and overstimulates at almost every front. Many people who finally had an accessible con would not be able to go anymore because of it.

 Jaarbeurs Utrecht is indeed a larger venue but it's devoid of any real atmosphere or cozy vibe with its concrete floors and walls, lack of natural light and bad sound isolation. 

 These things all cause an underwhelming base for a convention that heavily relies on a certain atmosphere to sell its unique and wonderful vision to its visitors. 

 Another problem that comes with the large visitor body is a build up of crowds around popular spots which causes people to be careless about those around them, accidentally breaking props or parts of people's costumes in the process. 

 A big part of the convention is its cosplayers. A large scale of visitors comes in some form of costume or outfit that they'd like to show off. A way of doing that is through making photographs and videos to later post online. Gorinchem Evenementenhal has a beautiful courtyard which is perfect for taking such content with various trees, stones and a large pond in the middle. For its large size, Jaarbeurs is a very industrial venue which makes it quite bland and uninspiring for you to be able to create a nice environment for your content. Its concrete floor is quick to be riddled with dirt and spilled food items or liquids that quickly dirty long gowns or dragging parts ruining the image of a nice and organized costume that people worked weeks if not months perfecting. 

 An issue that the Evenementenhal has is that it's not easy to reach with public transport, HMIA offers shuttle busses that go from Gorinchem centrum right to the Venue every half hour from 9:30 - 18:30, At closing time (18:00) a mass amount of people need to leave causing the busses to be overcrowded and even having to deny people from leaving on them (making them have to walk about 800 meters to the nearest bus stop) an easy fix for this would be to send out shuttle busses every 15 minutes for the last hour at closing time so that there's a smaller waiting period and more people would be able to leave without the crowd being a problem. 

 We as a community hope that with this petition our voice will be heard and the organization will take the opinion of the people they make their con for into account while making their decisions.