Theme Park Fandom

It's Not 'Weird' to Be an Adult Woman Who Loves Disney
https://www.glamour.com/story/its-not-weird-to-be-an-adult-woman-who-loves-disney

The trio say they don't go to the parks to relive their youth, though. Smith, Puga, and Walker all have successful careers in creative industries and approach Disneyland like a city’s downtown rather than a family-friendly vacation resort. They're not alone: With a rotating offering of seasonal Instagram-ready treats, celebrity chef partnerships, and a record for being the single largest employer of sommeliers, Disney’s Parks & Resorts have a lot to entice adults with money to spend. To Internet savvy, culturally involved guests like these three, Disneyland provides the same experiences they’d have elsewhere, only better.

When asked about the stigma attached to adult women visiting the parks, they shut it down. As these three see it, everyone’s a fan of something—why should enjoying a roller coaster through space in an intergalactic Tomorrowland be so different? “People are always going to judge no matter what,” says Walker. “You just have to sort of own what you love and be proud of that. Maybe they’ll never understand, but they’re missing out on something pretty special, and that’s okay. More for us in the long run.”

I’ve been slowly making my way through Rebecca Williams’s monograph Theme Park Fandom, and it’s one of the best academic books I’ve read in years. In the Introduction, Williams opens the discussion by referencing a cringe-inducing opinion piece written by a gross older man saying that adult fans of Disney are creepy, which was picked up by College Humor and adapted into an even more cringe-inducing video.

I won’t deny that some adult Disney fans are creepy. In fact, I can think of a specific acquaintance right off the top of my head who collects Disney enamel pins and is creepy as fuck about their aquisition habits, as well as a certain Tumblr account that posts bizarrely sexual photomanips of the characters from Frozen. I don’t think this level of creepiness has anything to do with Disney fandom, however.

I’m not personally a fan of Disney (or Marvel, or Star Wars), and I have no real desire to go to a theme park. (Maybe when Universal opens its Super Nintendo World attraction? But probably not, honestly.) Still, I don’t get why people think fans who go to theme parks are weird, aside from the obvious misogyny and homophobia. It sounds like the people who are into this sort of thing have a lot of fun, and they’re not hurting anyone. I mean, sure, Disney is a giant evil corporation, but we’re not going to get meaningful anti-trust legislation by harassing people on Instagram.

So I’m not planning on visiting Florida or California, but it’s been interesting to learn about the different subcultures surrounding the Disney and Universal theme parks, as well as how the fans participating in these subcultures have made use of social media to connect with each other while actually influencing the objects of their fandom at a surprisingly high corporate level.

I know “serious scholars” like to mock Fan Studies as an illegitimate subdiscipline of Media Studies, but I’m getting tired of “serious scholarship” about How Disney Is Anti-Feminist And Poisoning Our Children™. To me, it’s much more meaningful to learn about how this culture is created, who is creating it, and how it’s not just Rich White Men producing media that’s consumed passively. If nothing else, I feel that good scholarship should be like a documentary that shows you a part of the world you only vaguely knew existed and then explains how it influences its broader cultural context. Theme Park Fandom is really enjoyable to read, and it’s been helping me make sense of all sorts of aspects of contemporary American culture that I’ve always found a bit mystifying.

I’ve also been reading Carlye Wisel’s various bits of theme park journalism, and I’m a fan. I wonder, how does someone get a job like this?

Re: Theme Park Fandom

I guess, to me, theme parks seem a little overwhelming.

I can totally imagine flipping your shit at a theme park if you're a kid, and some of the rides seem interesting. I've been reading about Tokyo DisneySea, and the level of detail put into theming the rides (and the waiting areas for their lines) looks downright incredible.

I really enjoyed spending two hours with a friend in Namjatown one rainy afternoon while they were doing a promotion for Neko Atsume, but we basically got lunch, had a few drinks, got desert, chatted with some of the staff running the stamp rally, and left. We walked right in without waiting, and we were definitely ready to leave at the end. I can't imagine spending an entire day at a theme park filled with loud music and screaming children and endless crowds and relentless sunshine.

I think people who visit theme parks regularly probably have a strategy (or a routine) worked out in advance, though. Sometimes the Game Grumps talk about Disneyland, and it seems like they always have a good time when they go. It's also really wholesome to hear about people enjoying their fandom in a way that doesn't involve, like, sending death threats over social media.

I admit that I'm a little intrigued, but for me, for the time being, all the theme park I need is the state of New Jersey. When I was in grad school, I would sometimes book a carshare and drive across the Ben Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia to Cherry Hill to go to the giant Target, which was a solid hour and a half of hardcore Americana. I'm thinking that, when (or if?? oh god let's not dwell on it) a vaccine comes out and it's safe to go places without compromising the health of service workers, I might like to eat at the Rainforest Cafe in the Menlo Park Mall. I probably can't handle an actual theme park, but it would be cool to see what "theming" looks like up close in person.

Revisiting Old Friends, Part Four

Setzer is very gay in this one, just a big walking bisexual disaster.

It’s hard to find a voice for Setzer that isn’t inspired by someone else’s fanfic, so I’m writing him as a version of Balthier, if Balthier were a few years older and not still an insecure child at heart. This is not to hate on Balthier, because I love Balthier and appreciate the subtleties of how he’s written. Rather, I’m trying to be sensitive to the difference between someone in his early twenties and someone in his late twenties.

As a side note, this is exactly how I’d like to write the character Melchior in The Demon King – as someone who’s not super into adventure but sticks around anyway for the drama. He may not be the leading man, but he’s a strong support character and not-so-secretly everyone’s favorite.

For the record, Locke doesn’t appear in this fic. He’s not even mentioned. I’m afraid that, along with Tidus, Locke is one of the very few fictional characters who actually annoys me. I genuinely respect and enjoy the fan versions of the character (both characters, in fact) that people have created, but this is my story and I do what I want.

Meanwhile, I'm writing Terra as being very strange, sort of like a combination between Luna Lovegood and Bjork.

It’s my headcanon that, until she becomes human, Terra is most definitely not human. Not only does she have an uncanny appearance, but there are also significant differences in the way she perceives the world. Like, she can see colors outside the visible spectrum, sure, and then she can also see time. No one would ever know about any of this unless she says something completely bizarre and out of place, which she manages to do infrequently enough that everyone is surprised when it happens.

I wrote earlier that I couldn't say why FFVI in particular has been able to inspire such a large and active fandom community; but, if I had to guess, I would say that it probably has something to do with the richness and diversity of the characters. Every combination is a lot of fun.