The Jenny Nicholson Experience

Jenny Nicholson has gained notoriety among many random algorithms for her recent four-hour video about the the Star Wars Hotel. Sorry, the Star Wars: Galactic Experience. The exhaustive 20-part documentary discusses every individual aspect of the doomed Disney venture, from marketing to food to Jenny’s own personal experience, in as full detail as we’re ever likely to get, since the Star Wars: Galactic Experience no longer exists. Most people probably don’t know anything about the Star Wars: Galactic Experience except for its price tag, and probably never even wanted to, because who would be willing to pay so much money for something like that?

Well, apparently, Jenny Nicholson did, although she’s fairly vague about whether she would have wanted to do the Star Wars: Galactic Experience if she hadn’t planned on monetizing it via her video. There’s no denying she’s in the target audience though. Jenny Nicholson films her videos from her extremely nerdy bedroom surrounded by stuffed animals, dressed in whatever cosplay seems most relevant for the section she’s doing at the moment. She also genuinely seems to love Star Wars, having named the stuffed animal that she brought as a prop as a part of her character after a fairly obscure Star Wars critter. She nerds out when one of the actors actually recognized the critter’s name without her having to mention it.

 Oh, right. Her character. So part of the reason why Jenny Nicholson has to do such a laborious set-up regarding the marketing is to note that, for years before the Star Wars: Galactic Experience opened, Disney was explicitly promising customers that they could be their own character and go on their own adventure. Nerds like Jenny Nicholson interpreted this at face value as meaning that the Star Wars: Galactic Experience, despite fans colloquially calling it Star Wars Hotel, was basically going to be a form of Live Action Role Playing, commonly abbreviated as LARP, which is an elaborate, if highly niche subculture. This long Kotatku article on the subject probably won’t take you four hours to read if you want to familiarize yourself with the fan community Jenny Nicholson is talking about.

Not that Jenny Nicholson herself does LARP. I think. She’s kind of vague about that, not that it matters, as her main speculation points for how the Star Wars: Galactic Experience might have worked analogize the activity to being more like an escape room or a dinner murder mystery, except you can pretend to be the protagonist. Jenny Nicholson makes up her own character, an aristocrat from Coruscant, but quickly abandons using her fake name when it becomes obvious that the actors are relying on real world information from reservations to keep track of people.

This, incidentally, is the main information about the Star Wars: Galactic Experience that Disney kept hidden from the public, and for good reason- a ridiculous amount of the content involves an app that doesn’t work very well. In one noteworthy stretch, Jenny Nicholson even goes into theme park history to discuss a similar, much more functional aughts-era flip phone scavenger hunt app that Disney deployed for Kim Possible and other reskinned shows at the Epcot Theme Park. Supposedly, this older app ssd actually a lot of fun because it involved reaction and interaction with park employees and the environment. The Star Wars: Galactic Experience app, by contrast, is mostly just scanning QR codes and keeping track of text messages from robots pretending to be the actors on the Galactic Cruise.

Jenny Nicholson’s her Star Wars: Galactic Experience video is intriguingly consumerist in design, despite her repeatedly acknowledging that framing her visit this way is quite silly given that the Star Wars: Galactic Experience no longer exists. Much of this is important in the larger perspective. Jenny Nicholson is quite harsh in regard to other influencers, particularly those invited to media week, who were way too rosy and positive about the flaws of this supposedly all-inclusive resort. Partially this was because their abbreviated version of the experience wasn’t representative although there’s also the sense of desperation they feel about needing to keep their place on the Disney media list.

Consumerist discourse is more distinct, and frankly more honest, than the anti-capitalist discourse that tends to pervade our culture because it centers these stories in terms of practical experience. Jenny Nicholson notes that the baffling economic decisions made by Disney in regard to the Star Wars: Galactic Experience don’t even really make much business sense. Disney’s reasoning assumed that literally anything they could do with the Star Wars brand would make guarantee money, so the quality of the individual elements wasn’t really that important.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Disney’s entire corporate strategy for the last decade at this point has been to double down on seemingly indestructible brands, a strategy that’s been slowly destroying the company even as it still inexplicably claims $300-million write-offs for very incompetently building and managing a hotel. Weirdly enough, Jenny Nicholson’s apolitical explanation of the park’s flaws as a consumer are convincing precisely because they don’t involve political elements. It’s easy enough to say that Disney is going broke because they went woke, but that doesn’t really get across why they went woke in the first place–as an act of nakedly opportunistic marketing cynicism, not any genuine belief in the ideas they claimed to be promoting.

Star Wars: Galactic Experience is a more purely business oriented expression of the same corporate philosophy, that if you can pressure the bigger media players into not criticizing you, no one will think your product is bad. This attitude simultaneously weaponizes the idea of the TikTok influencer class, while counterintuitively not really understanding that the whole reason this has become such core marketing is because people are increasingly paranoid about corporate plants. Jenny Nicholson is credible, not just because of her nerdy room, but because her squeaky voice isn’t exactly obvious viral marketing material. Indeed, Jenny Nicholson is so obviously not obviously an influencer that Disney didn’t take her customer service complaints about her droid not being delivered seriously until she finally gave up and just complained to her followers on social media.

Indeed, there’s a certain sort of credibility to Jenny Nicholson’s weirdly specific brand of kitsch. Her videos regularly count their total views in the millions, and break beyond her usual subscriber base because the topics are so specific, and spaced far enough apart, that the YouTube algorithm smiles upon them. Additionally, they’re easy to recommend person to person for that same reason. I first heard of Jenny Nicholson because of her video about crucifixion musicals, which to maybe phrase that in a less clickbaity way, discusses the rather elaborate stage show parodies this one church puts on that reframes the Easter story with some pop culture icon, like Iron Man, as Jesus. Iron Man isn’t really that far off from being a messianic character already, frankly speaking, but I digress.

Noam Chomsky once argued that, despite the idea of Americans being helplessly ignorant spectators to the political world, you can turn on the radio, listen to sports chat, and find long, intricate discussions involving a great deal of thought and analysis. Americans clearly can have such nuanced thoughts. We just tend to dedicate it to petty topics because our political system operates in such a way that nearly anything we even could discuss is just a petty topic. Perhaps the greatest contemporary expression of this farcical idea is Jenny Nicholson making a weirdly compelling argument that Disney should consider making products that people actually want to buy.