You’ve seen them: the grown women in sequin ears full-body-sobbing at the sight of Goofy; the couple who honeymooned in Anaheim and return for their “castles and cocktails” anniversary every year. They own themed Loungefly backpacks, refer to the Haunted Mansion as their “spiritual home”, and line up for limited-edition popcorn buckets. They have preferred princesses. They watch “ride perspective” YouTube videos published by influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. They mouth the words to the pre-shows.
You think you know them, because you’ve heard about the worst ones. The ones who shoulder-barge toddlers out of the way to get to Mickey Mouse. The ones who weep theatrically outside Cinderella’s Castle. The ones who yell into ring lights and selfie sticks about the latest cupcake at Gaston’s Tavern and the ones who whisper, “Rope-drop to fireworks,” like it’s a sacred mantra. In mainstream discourse, they’re derided as infantilized and obsessive, an offputting cult of adults in arrested development.
If sports fans are the acceptable face of adult fandom, Disney Adults are its punchline.
Thirty-seven-year-old Anne Chester knows all this. She’s a Magic Key holder who plans her outfits before each trip. She coordinated her pregnancy announcement in front of Cinderella’s castle with a custom “Beauty and the Bump” shirt. Her husband proposed to her at Disneyland just before midnight, after a ride on Peter Pan. She took her daughter, Lily, for the first time at eight months old — “She won’t remember it, but I will” — and she’s gone back many times since, sometimes with her family, sometimes just with friends, sometimes for a late-night Star Wars-themed special event with her husband. By most cultural measures, she fits the stereotype.
“I do find that people can be a bit negative about it,” she says, when I ask her about the online conversation surrounding Disney Adults. She doesn’t know why people get so riled up about people who love the Disney brand: “Maybe they don’t like amusement parks. Maybe they don’t like fun. I don’t know. I do think it’s a little strange that someone would think so negatively of something just because they don’t enjoy it.”
The past few years have seen an explosion of Disney influencers — some of whom have well over a million followers — and an explosion of commentary surrounding them. A professor of religion has written about how Disney Adults now fit the bill: they have uniforms (the ears, the T-shirts, the princess dresses), take pilgrimages (to every park from Disneyland Paris to Tokyo’s Disneysea), partake in rituals surrounding pivotal life moments (proposals at the castle, multi-generational vacations, and even family trips to scatter the ashes of their loved ones, an increasingly common but definitely banned practice that keeps getting rides temporarily shut down), and have a shared language (it’s “Cast Members”, not “Disney employees”, and they deliver “pixie dust” rather than excellent customer service.) And as the community of Disney Adults grows larger and larger, the backlash does, too.
The particularly vocal hostility to Disney Adults is “striking,” says Lynn Zubernis, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at West Chester University who specializes in fandoms. In comparison, “there’s very, very little criticism both in the UK — in Europe in general — and in the US of people becoming passionate fans of sports teams,” despite the fact that following football or basketball or baseball with a passion “is completely analogous to any other kind of fandom, including Disney fandom. They get the same benefits, they do the same things. They are equally passionate and intense, but that is a more socially accepted type of fandom. So they also make fan pilgrimages — it’s just going to the meet that their favorite team is at, and people can go all over the world following a team that they like.”
They might bristle at the term, but sports fans also engage in “cosplay to show their fan-ish identity,” Zubernis adds; in the world of sports, that looks like “wearing your favorite term’s jersey instead of dressing up like Snow White.” At the heart of it, however, these actions are all motivated by exactly the same psychological impulses — “but one is very socially accepted worldwide and the other is often ridiculed.”
It’s unclear exactly why this is, but Zubernis has a couple of theories. For one, Disney tends to be more beloved by women, meaning that misogyny might play into it. However, Zubernis adds, almost all fandoms are criticized by wider society for openly enjoying something that is a distraction from work and family; a common refrain is, “Why don’t you grow up and be more serious?” It just so happens that Disney Adults make an even more “convenient target” for that criticism, because most Disney films were originally created for children.
“We are generally as humans are uncomfortable with people expressing very strong passion for something,” Zubernis adds. “There’s something about that display of emotional reactivity and not regulated emotions that makes us anxious and uncomfortable when we see it in other people. So when fans are really passionate about something, especially something that makes you uneasy in the first place, that doesn’t seem quite appropriate.”
We are, in other words, evolutionarily hardwired to get the ick from people being too openly enthusiastic, because “we tend to feel like when people’s emotions get out of control, that maybe they are going to be out of control and that might in some way be dangerous.” Zubernis brings up one example of how the public collectively experienced that repulsion to over-enthusiasm: the moment when Tom Cruise leapt up on Oprah’s couch and started jumping up and down with excitement. “He was a movie star and he was a guy, but even he didn’t get a pass for showing that much strong emotion,” she says. “People are very anxious and uncomfortable about that.”
Protection from a cruel world
When Anne Chester goes to Disneyland, she experiences something that’s rare for a lot of women: she feels completely safe. “I’ve never felt unsafe in Disneyland,” she says. “I feel comfortable just going with my daughter and I into the parks. And there’s always someone around if you need anything.” The Disney parks are well-oiled machines, with thousands of Cast Members — including both uniformed guards and plain-clothes security throughout — working to make sure that rowdiness is tamped down, bad actors are swiftly ejected, and visitors are protected from crime and inconvenience.
“I mean, they bill it as the happiest place on earth,” says Zubernis. “It literally has a tagline that sets it apart from the rest of the world, and you are protected. There is a higher level of security. Everybody who works there is very well-trained.”
Zubernis personally knows a number of former Cast Members, and she knows “they take it seriously,” and that Disney as an organization “makes sure the norms that are set there are very different to the outside world.” Cleaners and custodians have extra training on how to make Mickey heads out of water with their mops for passing guests. Hotel pool lifeguards are given extended training and are regularly subject to random tests where managers will slip child-shaped mats into the water during busy times and time how long they take to react.
Chester also knows that when she walks into the park, she’s walking into a space where like-minded fans will appreciate her efforts. She “will always dress Disney at Disney,” either in the Star Wars Spirit Jersey she got during a May the 4th drop, or in something themed around her favorite princess, Sleeping Beauty. Some fans will go so far as to dress according to the rides they plan to go on. Chester says she doesn’t do that as much, but “if I know I’m going to be in California Adventure all day, I might do some kind of Avengers outfit or something.” Enjoying that combination of perceived safety and camaraderie is common among fandoms, says Zubernis. From message boards to Comic-Con, spaces of fan-gathering feel this way because “they tend to have different norms for interaction”.
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Nowhere is this more obvious than the r/WaltDisneyWorld subreddit, which is replete with defensive responses to people who have insulted or judged Disney Adults. The space is half enthusiastic grownups planning their hundredth pilgrimage to the Land of Mouse, half harried parents looking for tips on how to navigate the complicated Disney infrastructure during their once-in-a-lifetime trip, and those two groups don’t always play nice.
“I’m 30 and went to Disney World last October,” one recent contributor wrote. “…And the one thing I really wanted to do was to meet the princesses. People would say to me, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ or ‘That’s for kids’ or ‘You know they’re just actors in costumes. Guess what? I don’t care. I didn’t get to meet the princesses as a kid. And so what if I want to meet the characters… Yes, I know that they are actors in costumes. But still, it was an awesome experience. And when I go back, I will do it again.”
Replies to such posts are almost universally supportive. There are the people who visit the parks in order to heal their inner child — “I have spent my entire adult life now traveling twice a year to my happy place. The cost of Disney is less than therapy and I rarely think about my childhood anymore” — and people whose lives are a struggle outside Disney, where they find a temporary reprieve from hardship (“My favorite thing I ever spotted was in AK [Animal Kingdom], by the Harambe Market, there’s graffiti on an old decaying concrete pillar that says ‘Broken Hearts Healed Here’ and it stopped me in my tracks. That, to me, the 33 year old man standing in the dusk of a fake African marketplace staring at that graffiti, is Disney World to me. I had a moment.”) There are former Cast Members who worked as the princesses as meet-and-greets (“We love every face, 0-100 years old. Hand on heart, we do not judge anyone coming in line to meet and hug”), teenagers and middle-aged women. There are people who grew up in poverty (“I was trapped in poverty in rural Arkansas until well into adulthood,” one commenter says, adding, “We need what little escapism we can find.”) There’s a 40-year-old single straight man who travels solo to DisneyWorld Florida every year and tries to be respectful while indulging his love of meeting characters — “The costume characters I have no problem. But the face character princesses, it can be tricky because I’m sure they get their fair share of creeps and I don’t want to be THAT guy that gives the actor the ick,” he says. “So I try to follow a few important rules. Never initiate physical contact (if they go in for a hug, or take my arm, that’s fine though), and I always try to bring at least two questions to ask them that they could answer in character without having to make awkward small talk.”
And then, inevitably, there are the haters. “Disney Adults were the worst part of taking my five-year-old last week,” came one reply to that post about princesses. The response to that claim became heated, with some complaining about parents and strollers and bad attitudes, and others agreeing (“I’m trying to make this an amazing experience for my kids, and the line is two times as long because of way too many adults trying to get a picture with someone in a costume.”)
Not enough to go round
The problem with loving the Disney parks is that so much of what makes the experience great is a finite resource. Lines stretch beyond two hours at times; Lightning Lanes are costly, with the top-tier Premier Pass sometimes costing $400 per person, per day, on top of the costs of tickets and food and transportation, just to skip the queues in one park at DisneyWorld; characters can only meet and greet a certain amount of people. All of this creates obvious conflict between parents with small children and adults who are engaging in nostalgic joy.
That’s “an interesting sort of tension that doesn’t happen in very many fandoms, that really is kind of unique to fandoms like Disney or My Little Pony or Barney — things that were targeted at children that now adults sometimes continue to like,” says Zubernis.
It’s tempting to tell adults in this space that they should simply move out the way and let kids have their turn. But it’s important to remember that when Disney Adults are engaging in nostalgia, they’re also solidifying their identity. And humans are neurologically set up to seek these moments: “When we indulge in what they call nostalgic reflection, which people would be doing when they’re indulging their Disney fandom, you actually mentally transport yourself into the past. You kind of leave the present, you access all that autobiographical memory, it feels really good. It actually lights up the reward centers of the brain when we’re engaging in nostalgia. It brings all kinds of psychological benefits, including that feeling of belongingness and more optimism, more life satisfaction — there’s even research that after people engage in nostalgic reflection, they have higher levels of empathy for other people. So it instinctively connects us to our own past and brings a feeling of connection to other people. So it helps us feel more authentic, more like we’re aligned with our true selves, because there’s that sense of continuity between your past self and your present self.”
Perhaps you went to Disney as a child and it was your happy place. Perhaps you simply dreamed about going, and that’s what kept you positive while you were living through trauma. Perhaps, like Anne Chester, you got engaged at Disneyland and imagined bringing your own children to the scene, then spent a long time trying to get pregnant, with a lot of emotional ups and downs along the way. Why, then, wouldn’t you announce your baby with a Disney onesie and a picture in front of Cinderella’s castle? What exactly is the problem if you do?
When Disney Adult turns against Disney Adult
It’s not all rainbows and pixie dust in the Disney Adult community, however. Sometimes, the fandom can be vicious.
AJ Wolfe is the founder of Disney Food Blog, a phenomenally successful brand that was started as a couples project with her husband in 2009 and now employs 50 full-time staff. DFB — as it’s now more commonly known, since it’s long branched out from just reviewing food and puts out video and written content about everything from vacation planning to ride rumors these days — has people in the parks on every single day of the year. Its readership leans Disney Adult, so much so that Wolfe wrote a book — Disney Adults: Exploring (and Falling in Love with) a Magical Subculture, out in August this year — about the much-maligned community. While interviewing Disney Adults for the book, she found out something strange.
“When I would talk to Disney Adults and I’d say: ‘Do you find that you get a lot of pushback online or from your family or from people at work? That they’re just like, Why do you like Disney so much? Why are you going to Disney again?’, their answer consistently was: ‘Yeah, a little bit. But actually, the worst part about being a Disney Adult is other Disney Adults.’”
Wolfe hadn’t seen that one coming. “I was shocked,” she says. She asked people to expand on what they meant, and their reasoning was “mostly because there has become this very significant hierarchy within the Disney Adult community. I compare it to a church community, honestly.” She laughs and clarifies that she means that in the negative sense. “People are trying to one-up each other… They’re trying to get higher and the higher you are, the more you can look down on everybody else. So, do you have an annual pass? Have you been on this brand new ride? Have you gone to this brand new park? You know, what are your wins in the space? And I think that a lot of Disney Adults are just tired of that, tired of being looked down on by other Disney Adults or being thought to be less than, or even trying to fight that battle of: Well, if I don’t get this new Loungefly, then I’m not going to fit in with my Disney Adult group, or people aren’t going to give me those envious looks, you know?”
That brutally competitive side of Disneydom happens among the influencers, too, Wolfe says: she’s been subject to it herself. People will say “Oh, Disney invited me to their media event. Well, Disney didn’t invite me to their media event and it’s — oh, my word. It’s just a lot. And I think that that kind of infighting has started to get to people.”
In some ways, Wolfe adds, she was upset to hear people telling her that the Disney Adult fandom isn’t quite as kind and supportive with one another as it claims to be. After all, isn’t this supposed to be the happiest place on earth? While she was listening to interviewees wax lyrical about how awful Disney Adults can be to each other, “I’m like: OK, well that doesn’t really prove my theory for this book, so I need you to not say that, but all right,” she says. “But I heard it over and over and over.”
This “happens in every single fandom,” says Zubernis. “I’ve watched it, and again, this just goes back to human psychology. It was an evolutionary imperative back in the day to belong to a group. If you didn’t belong to a group, you were literally going to be eaten by a saber tooth tiger. So we are evolutionarily wired to prioritize belongingness and to form ourselves into groups.” Once a large fandom, like the Disney Adults subculture, becomes too big, it naturally begins to fracture into in-groups and out-groups. “There are always going to be subgroups that define themselves as ‘we are the ones doing fandom right, this is who should be shipped together [in a TV show] or this is the most important character, or this is how you should cosplay, whatever it is. Each little subgroup is going to define themselves as an in-group. And in-groups develop their cohesion by pathologizing out-groups. So sometimes those outgroups are other subgroups in the same fandom, and the accusation is often, ‘well, they’re doing it wrong,’ or, ‘they’re not good fans,’ or, ‘we are the good fans and they’re the bad fans.’”
Even Anne Chester hits her limit with some Disney Adults. After the Disney parks briefly shut down during the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020, she was among the first to attend the reopening. People were still socially distanced, with many in masks, but the reappearance of the characters was a big moment for a lot of people in line.
“These Disney Adults were crying when they saw Mickey — crying, like hysterically sobbing. And I just was really embarrassed,” she says. “It’s just — it’s a person in a costume. And they’re aware of that.”
The politics of envy
It was 2020 when Disney Adults “really came to the forefront” of the cultural conversation, says AJ Wolfe. “Although the concept had been there, and the name had been used sparingly prior to that, it’s really 2020 when everything came out, when everybody was stuck at home online and angry.” Wolfe has noticed in her interviews that the perception of Disney Adults is that they’re mainly “childless millennials,” the kind who have also been castigated for supposedly spending their downpayment money on avocado toast and for lacking the grit of their parents. In reality, of course, she adds, it’s the economy and “generational issues” that have worked against millennials, creating global housing crises and employment recessions with cycles of layoffs. But Disney feels like an easy thing to point to: See, look at these lazy, good-for-nothing wannabe kids! They should be procreating and instead they’re lining up for an autograph from a cartoon dog!
In a politically divisive and geographically unstable environment, Disney Adults may simply represent a bunch of people trying to find joy where it is no longer abundant. They’re also sometimes seeking predictability, Wolfe says, who adds that it’s important to note there’s a sizeable community of neurodivergent Disney Adults, particularly those who identify as autistic. For those people, they may state that when they travel to Disney: “I know what to expect. So it’s not something that I have to go into blind. I know what it’s going to be. I’ve done it before.”
If your psychological load is higher — if you have a very stressful life working multiple jobs, or if you’re autistic and spend all day masking — that will be particularly important. “For example,” says Wolfe, “I was taking my 82-year-old mom to Florence for the first time… and there’s a lot of research and there’s a lot of information you have to learn, and you’re going into a completely different culture. You’re going into a completely different transportation space and money space and food space, and you have to learn this mini culture to go there. And if you’ve been to Disney before, you’ve already done that work, so you’ll keep going back because well, I know what to expect, but also there’s so much there that I have a lot more that I can do. I haven’t done all of it. So there’s so much more, but I’ve already done the legwork.”
For members of the LGBT community, particularly in Florida, that’s particularly pertinent. “DisneyWorld is safe for them, and they know they can go there and be safe and comfortable, and they don’t have to worry about someone maybe physically attacking them or accusing them or whatever,” Wolfe adds. “…So a lot of people will go because it’s like: I just want to relax. I don’t want to think. And you also know it’s going to be relatively clean.” Wolfe’s own self-described addiction to Disney started when she lived in New York City, she says, and that’s because “it’s the opposite of New York City. It’s predictable, it’s safe, it’s clean. I know everywhere that I go there is probably going to have relatively decent food and not a lot of roaches. So yes, I think that’s a huge piece of why people keep going back.” Such repeat visitors might be easily stereotyped as unadventurous and babyish — but perhaps critics should consider that those people might simply have hard lives, and might save up their money every year to visit Disney because it provides such a big psychological payoff.
We should remember, says Lynn Zubernis, that being part of a fandom isn’t inherently pathological. In fact, nine times out of ten, it’s a force for good. Fandom “ brings all kinds of psychological benefits: higher self-esteem, and more optimism and more positive emotions, and that sense of belonging,” she says. There will always be people who take it too far — who drain their accounts to visit the parks too often, or who neglect their real family relationships in order to feed their addiction. But those people are rare, she adds. And because Disney is so successful at marketing — and being a Disney influencer is so uniquely lucrative — we should be prepared for the Disney Adult community to only get bigger in the future. “When we find something that gives us that sense of wellbeing, we instinctively want more, more, more, more of it,” she adds.
“I think that one of the things that people hate about Disney Adults is that they think it’s weird and they don’t understand why they like something for kids. That doesn’t make any sense to them,” says AJ Wolfe. But there’s another component to the Disney Adult hate that she thinks people haven’t considered: “I think there is a little bit of jealousy there.” A lot of people have been drawn in by the demand to be relentlessly serious, to always involve themselves in conflict, and to lose themselves in divisive discourse online. The existence of the high-octane, technicolor Disney Adult challenges everything they thought they had to leave behind. What does it mean if they didn’t actually have to sacrifice that fun and whimsy at all? How should they feel about the people who didn’t?
Wolfe smiles and shrugs her shoulders. The jealousy is definitely subconscious, she says, but, in her opinion, it’s definitely there. “There’s a little bit of: How come those people are allowed to have fun and I am not?”
