The Disney Essays, Two of Three

 

It’s me again, the weird creative writing professor here to chat about craft while sharing my super-specific Disney hyper-fixation. When we last left one another, we’d chatted about worldbuilding through the eyes of Imagineering. Today, we’re taking on second person perspective and how you can be the main character in your experience with the Disney parks, most specifically with Disney vloggers. But what is second person? What is a Disney vlogger? What does any of this have to do with your writing?

First, don’t worry.

 

You’re Going to Disney World!

Well, kind of.

Your legs have been acting up again, and you live on the other side of the country, and the price of eggs has hit us all very hard. So YouTube is going to have to suffice.

You click on the TV to watch ResortTV1’s livestream. Their Friday walk through EPCOT has already started. For the next three hours, you and three thousand other people from around the world will stroll through World Celebration, World Discovery, World Nature, and World Showcase, checking out the festivals, rides, and exhibits.

And if you don’t want to be in EPCOT, there’re also old recordings of Adam the Woo checking out the monorail resorts in detail, including time to pause and zoom in on the tiki torches to show you how they’re glowing tonight.

Or Tim Tracker, who is sitting in the Magic Kingdom and eating everything off the new seasonal foods list. Ordinary Adventures and Mammoth Club are also hard at work bringing information and walk-throughs.

You can recreate an entire Disney trip from your couch, because vloggers can take you on that adventure.

And here’s the cool thing: It’s not their adventure. It’s yours. Curated to you. You tell one of them something you want, something you wish to see, and they’ll mail it to your house or video it for you. Because ResortTV1 is live, Jenna or Josh can ride the rides you’d love to see, standing in line and showing you the views you miss or wish you could be there for. It’s your adventure. With you at the center as its protagonist.

If you’re a big Disney fan, you already know Disney vloggers and livestreams have become the bread and butter of the fandom. With Disney costing so much money and also being geographically in a red state far away from so many other destinations and countries, and not to mention the pull-back on Disability Access Services in the parks nationwide, one way for you to get your Disney in is to sit at home comfortably and watch it accessibly from your couch.

If you’re not a Disney fan, this is all probably further down the rabbit hole than you wanted to go, but really, it’s all just the concept of second person.

As a writer, second person has scared me, and it has scared most of my students. It can be gimmicky, it’s hard to sustain, and how the hell do you as an author create a world around an unknown reader?

 

Shared Human Truths

Last time, we chatted about how Imagineers’ worldbuilding puts you in the protagonist’s seat. No matter what the story, they can connect their general narrative to your personal heart through shared truths. This isn’t that weird of a concept: It’s been done masterfully in speculative short stories for years.

One really great example is “This Village” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Triantafyllou’s short story about a safe haven made of candy gladly shines as a beacon to anyone who needs a place to be happy and protected. Eugenia the writer doesn’t know why this would specifically appeal to you, the reader, but most of us have felt alone, scared, threatened, lost, or nostalgic at some point in our lives. Especially nowadays. So Triantafyllou says she doesn’t know why you’re here, but here are the reasons it may be, and welcome. The story ends with a promise to protect you.

This story would not be as strong in any other perspective or tense. Present second POV is the only way to make this village feel immediate and personal, to make sure we know we’re on the right side of the speaker when the fangs come out. They’re going to protect us. And the story succeeds in leaving us feeling loved and hopeful, while still tickling that part of our speculative reader brain that goes, “Oooh, the implications!”

Very much like the parks, the story is speaking to a broader human need for kindness and acceptance, and you bring the rest of your story to the table. We all cry at the fireworks show because the show is told in second person and walks us through our own heartbreaks, our own childhood, our own villains. There is a section for friendship, a section for romance, for courage, all things that the million people watching every night can relate to, even if in a million different ways.

One of my favorite examples of second person is A.T. Greenblatt’s “And Yet.” It’s a very personal story, with a very specific main character who is not you, unless you’re a quantum physicist on the brink of a multiverse discovery who lost her brother in a car accident and also knows what it feels like to be bullied because of your disability. But no matter what the reader may not have in common with the protagonist, there is more we do have in common. All of us miss someone we lost or know what it feels like to be wanted. You know exactly what sort of haunted house this is, because no matter how happy your childhood was, childhoods also come with fear and the unknown and all the things we have no control over (a lot of them living in our very own homes). This connects us, and Greenblatt snaps the rest of the threads into place to snugly buckle us into the ride of “And Yet.”

I don’t think this story would hit as close to home if it wasn’t “you” and it was instead “she” or “me.” These are your fears, your ambitions, your haunting. The best kind of haunted house.

Very much like Haunted Mansion, which has stayed the same for over fifty years, but still promises that you’re not getting out alive and you specifically can be the 1000th Happy Haunt. There’s no way that the imagineers knew me back in the ’60s when they wrote the script and designed the track, but I still feel very threatened when Paul Frees reminds me how dire this situation is. The ghosts look right at me, they speak to me: “I am your host, your ghost host. Kindly step all the way in please, and make room for everyone. There’s no turning back now.”

This is how most of the original rides and new dark rides work: The characters speak to you and place you physically as the protagonist. The Jungle Cruise skipper cracks a joke with you, Tiana needs your help finding musicians for the celebration. It is a story for you, that you are experiencing, instead of witnessing.

 

Using the Senses

We chatted last time about how Disney parks create just enough freedom while still guiding you. Everyone must enter through Main Street USA, and the sightlines draw your eyeballs to the castle and pull you forward. The ground is on an incline to make it easier to leave after a long day where your feet are hurting. The compass layout works as a choose-your-own adventure but also a way to corral big crowds, along with the Cast Members methodically placed along the route to make sure they’re herding you.

And even when you’re not there in the flesh, vloggers can immerse you as well as they can from a television or phone screen. Vloggers usually stay behind the camera, and if they’re in the foreground, they’re chatting to you about what you’re going to see today, like they’re your own personal tour guide. There’s also Tim Tracker, who will eat the food for you, show close-ups of the dishes, and then explain the texture, taste, and rating of each one. While they are controlling the POV, creating the path you’ll take, it’s all for your benefit and your experience. They utilize the senses, much like how Emlyn Dornemann explains the tactile experience of different kinds of love in “Cold, Unmoving Stone.”

By using brightness, temperature, texture, shape, Dornemann brings the very ethereal feeling of belonging into a physical form for the effervescent main character of your night terror. Disney also packages the feeling of home, pumping the smells of sugar and rain and campfires into different parts of their parks. Even the sidewalk is covered in horseshoe prints, popcorn pieces, or cobblestones. The most recent example is the Journey of Water at EPCOT, where the audience is navigated through the water cycle. You literally can reach out and feel the movement of water, walk through fog and mist, smell the flowers around you.

Dornemann’s work also introduces an interesting use of second person POV: direct address. We also see it in stories such as Jordan Kurella’s “I Think About You, Only Louder” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s murderer speaks to you specifically, trying to tell you exactly what happened, and it reads like a conversation you may have with a passing (and unsettling) stranger. This reins you in as he tries to convince you that he is not mad (he is) and this wasn’t his fault (it was). But him trying to convince you, and his close vicinity, adds to your unsettling involvement. This reminds me of character interactions throughout the parks when you swap stories and improv together or even the Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor or Turtle Talk where the performance is a conversation.

But Kurella does something really interesting, that I’m not sure can be done in the parks. Because yes, the whole point of this essay series is to learn from Imagineers about storytelling and how to hone our craft. But form and content are different in two different mediums.

Kurella puts you in the position of an absent person (although how absent are they in the end?). He is positioning you on the other side of the words, in another dimension where you cannot truly interact with the character who is yearning to find you.

And I wonder how this would translate into the parks or a ride. How would you use the physical space to show the disconnect and inability to touch one another? The only thing I can think of is this one particular moment on the Frozen Ever After ride, when Elsa literally pushes you out of her ice palace and backwards down a waterfall. But you’re still on the ride, you’re still participating.

Maybe, it’s the feeling I get when I’m watching the vloggers go through the EPCOT Festival of the Arts and I can’t touch the artwork, I can’t smell the flowers, I can’t turn my head to look around. Even with all the immersion a camera and a narrator bring, I’m still not there.

 

Why Do We Need Second Person?

This space between writer and reader is this liminal gap where new worlds are created using only written language and brain synapses. We need these worlds, to escape and to hope and to dream and to learn. And we can close or examine this gap with the use of “you.”

So many of us are unable to go to the Disney parks for a multitude of reasons. And most of us will never fly through space or befriend a dragon. But with the idea of the consumer being the hero of the story, it seems that much closer. Or that much further away. A relationship is made between you and the story, when second person is done well.

In the meantime, tune into ResortTV1. Send them five bucks, ask them politely to ride Living with the Land, and they’ll fade into the background so you can enjoy your visit. The magic is yours.

See ya real soon.

© 2025 J.R. Dawson