I adore Disneyland like little else in my life, but I have to admit
that the fandom can be...difficult. For me, at least. It's a thing
apart from every other fandom I have ever gotten involved with,
probably because it's based on a fixed location rather than a piece
of easily reproducible media, but my area of concern today is the way
the discussions tend to go.
I'm
only “active” on one Disneyland discussion forum, that being the
one on Micechat, and the scare quotes are because I rarely find it in
me to join the conversations there. They're just...so...repetitive.
Trip reports (not much to add there), news items, requests for advice
from people about to make their first visit (others have usually
gotten there long before I see the thread), and the ever-popular
debates about the sorts of attractions Disney should
add to their parks vs. the sorts they do
add.
That last category of conversations are the really frustrating ones,
because they have possibly the highest potential for fruitful
discussion, but the lowest actualization of that potential. Most of
what I see is factions of people arguing past each other. As is
usually the case when people are more interested in waving their
opinions about like magic talismans than actually communicating with
each other, there are certain stock phrases that appear over and
over. Today I've chosen to highlight four that I think are especially
poisonous and would be discarded by a wiser fandom. I've been guilty
of using some of them myself.
Some
of these clichés and axioms, I would like to banish from the overall
conversation because I disagree with them, others because I feel they
convey my own positions badly. But we would be better off without all
of them, as a general rule, because they are less thoughts than
substitutes for
thought.
