Longtime readers who’ve read my previous coverage of this festival are already well aware of the personal history I have with it. Each consecutive year I have less of a definitive idea of how to open my writeup on it and whether it’s worth going over the exact same details every time just for the sake of new readers. Well, I’ll do it again, so old readers feel free to skip until the next paragraph. ArtMania is the first festival I ever attended, other than some nondescript local ones, all the way back in 2013. I was going through a symphonic metal phase at the time, a genre that me and my father both got to enjoy (he doesn’t usually like newer music or spending money on music), and I convinced him to go to one of the days of the festival, the one that had Within Temptation, Haggard, and Amaranthe. That started a tradition where I would make it to at least one day of the festival each year it took place. My dad would join us in 2014 too, this time for the entire festival, and starting in 2015 I’d go with other friends, 2017 was the last time where I only attended for one day, 2018 served as a meetup with members of a prog shitposting group on Facebook, and most importantly for this website, 2019 was the first time I ever received media and photo creds for an event. My attendance only stopped as the pandemic led to the discontinuation of the festival for two consecutive years, but once it reemerged in 2022, I attended and covered every edition, including the one that just happened.
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