The Best Made-Up Worlds Are Made Up of Real Parts

At Disneyland, though, most of the weird historical details are also made up. In Disney parlance, topic-delimited sections of theme parks are called “lands” (like Tomorrowland), and the new one is Avengers Campus, based not on a fairy tale but on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the movies and television shows derived from Marvel Comics that began in 2008 with Iron Man and continue, this week, with the Disney+ show Loki. Like the movies, this physical version of the decades-long comics story universe has all kinds of in-built pretend history. One of the attractions is built, in-story, inside an old flying-car factory owned by Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark, the man inside the Iron Man armor. It’s a not-implausible historical gesture for that part of Southern California, even though it’s not true—an imagineering gloss on the Philip K. Dick concept of “historicity,” of ginned-up history-like details that add a patina of authenticity. Fun!

Meanwhile, you can walk just about 20 minutes across the theme park to another land centered on a different Disney-owned shared story universe—Galaxy’s Edge, based on the Star Wars franchise of movies, TV shows, books, etc. Both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars Universe have prescribed timelines and geographies, even given the occasional timey-wimey shenanigans you’d expect in any science-fictional universe. They both have their own proprietary histories.

Except Avengers Campus is like other things to do and see at Disneyland in that it has a certain timelessness. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride isn’t situated on a timeline in the mrtoadiverse. But Galaxy’s Edge takes place not just on a specific planet in the Star Wars universe (“Batuu”) but at a specific time. On a specific day, even—repeating, resetting. It has what I described when it opened as chronotopic properties—a temporal narrative like books and movies, and also a spatial narrative like other immersive theme park environments. It’s ambitious, but it also means that, for example, any performers walking around dressed as stormtroopers have to be in the new, more angular white armor from the most recent movie trilogy—the old style seen in Star Wars or the clone armor from the prequel trilogy would be anachronistic.

Now, OK, I get it: A book is not a theme park. But let me just go over the three possibilities here: You’ve got historical fiction, science-fictional stuff set in the real world of the past, with the familiar physics of our universe and actual historical events as guide rails. For my purposes here, that’s The Hidden Palace. You’ve got spatial, immersive narrative set in a made-up time and place, but one with rigid (albeit fictional) events and guide rails. That’s Galaxy’s Edge, or any other fictional or future-set universe—the Expanse, maybe, or Middle-earth. And you’ve got Avengers Campus, set in a fictional universe with spatial guide rails but not temporal ones. The timey-wimey is wibbley-wobbley.

This is the digital ectoplasm of which Twitter fights are made. Do the details of the lands adhere to canon and timeline? And you can sort of see the point. Well, actually, let me revise that—no, you can’t, it’s preposterous. But it might be true that Galaxy’s Edge’s ruthless enforcement of chronotopic status builds loyalty—critically important to the transnational corporation that owns the intellectual property—while limiting narrative flexibility. Over at Avengers Campus, someone dressed as Iron Man can “coexist” with an actor in the Sam Wilson version of Captain America’s costume, even though in the story Sam didn’t become Captain America until after Iron Man’s death. You just go with it. But at Galaxy’s Edge, Darth Vader can’t just show up; he died a couple movies ago, and would disappear with a pop upon entry. (Even though Vader can participate in Jedi training in Tomorrowland, because it’s outside the timeline.)

When some aspect of a game’s mechanic, its rules and mode of play, contradicts the game’s story, that’s called “ludonarrative dissonance.” It’s when the pieces, cards, whatever can do something within the rules that violates the narrative superstructure. (If chess is a battle between two opposing armies, are the players the generals? And if so, why can they command the king? Maybe that’s ludonarrative dissonance; these are the kinds of things gamers have exciting fights about.) So Darth Vader in Galaxy’s Edge would be the theme-park equivalent—chronotopic dissonance, maybe. But Iron Man in a pretend-retrofitted Stark factory would not.

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Author: showrunner