By Tara Isabella Burton

Everybody hates Disney adults. At least that's the premise of A.J. Wolfe's counterargument.

By Disney adults Ms. Wolfe doesn't mean the grown-ups who were once young Disney fans or the beleaguered parents of current young Disney fans. She's referring to the internet-fueled subculture of (largely) childless aficionados of Disney properties, princesses and, particularly, theme parks; people who spend scores of vacation days and thousands of dollars returning to Never-Never Land, America's most sacred temple to saccharine capitalism. They are, in the words of some of the online haters Ms. Wolfe quotes, "the most hated group on the internet," "overgrown children" who should be "in divorce proceedings with their self-esteem," commandeering spaces and properties intended for children so they can satisfy their own nostalgic longings for a "safe space."

Ms. Wolfe is one of them. The founder of "Disney Food Blog," Ms. Wolfe is a professional Disney influencer whose reviews of meals and experiences offered by Disney properties have garnered her legendary status in the Disney-adult community. She has an intimate knowledge of Disney properties, parks and personalities. All the better, one might hope, to elucidate their appeal -- or intelligently critique the influencer-driven ecosystem of park reviews, recaps and fan-baiting immersive experiences that compel seemingly ordinary people to drop everything in their lives and move to Orlando for little more than the pleasure of watching Disney's fairground fireworks from their home windows. If anyone is well-placed to understand, let alone defend, the Disney adult, it should be someone who has spent the better part of her life as one.

But Ms. Wolfe's book, "Disney Adults: Exploring (and Falling in Love With) a Magical Subculture," doesn't contain much insight. The author insists that Disney adults are more than overgrown children, but her writing betrays a jejune reluctance to treat them with the critical seriousness they deserve. She constantly interrupts her own narrative with forcedly informal asides that come across as apologies for "adulting" in print. In one passage, she pauses while introducing a quotation from the founder of the Disney, Culture and Society Research Network to parenthetically marvel alongside the reader: "Can I just note how rad it is that something like that exists?"

The history of Disney itself -- including a potentially fascinating account of the company's early adoption of merchandising as a revenue stream and brand-building exercise -- is condensed into a few cursory pages. We get curiously little, too, about Disney's shifting role in the popular imagination, or its intimate relationship with nostalgic Americana as a whole. In an era where the mimetic and merchandising power of Make America Great Again rivals that of Mickey Mouse, what might an exploration of Disney fandom have to say about the role of aestheticized American optimism in our national subconscious?

Instead, the bulk of Ms. Wolfe's book consists of fawning interviews with Disney-adult influencers. We learn, for example, that "Gabby is one of the sweetest people I've ever met in the Disney community . . . sweet and kind and utterly not what you may imagine when you think of a super-successful, full-time TikTokker. And I know this as a fact, because I've been lucky enough to collaborate with her in the past."

Ms. Wolfe's fondness for her subjects often prevents her from making "Disney Adults" anything more than a lackluster defense of simply letting people enjoy things. And there is a sweetness, certainly, in Ms. Wolfe's conviction that any passionate hobby, fairy-dust-gilded or not, can tell us something meaningful about the person who practices it. But she is rarely willing to grant that our cultural enjoyment of things might be subject to wider commercial and political forces; or that her conclusion -- that we should be less judgmental about the things people take pleasure in -- seems to arise out of the same anodyne moral miasma that the haters of Disney adults want to reject. Does it say something about our wider cultural relationship to adulthood that Disney adults feel compelled by the promise of a childlike safe space?

Ms. Wolfe's soft touch ultimately comes across less as sympathy for Disney adults and more as a lack of conviction that their experiences can withstand a more aggressive approach. She may convince us that Disney adults don't deserve the mockery they get online -- nobody does -- but she fails to convince us why they matter, even as the book's most tantalizing asides suggest that they have far more to tell us than Ms. Wolfe reports.

In an era where nearly a third of the American population now identifies as religiously unaffiliated, what does it mean to consciously enter into a ritualistic, liminal space of culturally potent images alongside an equally frenetic community? What does it mean for our culture that nostalgia -- whether for our own past or for the nation's -- is among the most potent drivers of our artistic consumption and our brand loyalty? What does it mean to love Disney so intensely that, as one fan wonders, "you think we'll go to hell because we're worshiping Walt Disney instead of God?"

Ms. Wolfe acknowledges the connection between religious zealotry and her passion for the House of Mouse. In some of the book's most compelling missed opportunities, she mentions her own religious past -- as a student at an "intensely religious" private college and, later, as a missionary. Yet here, too, she is curiously reluctant to dig deeper, resorting instead to self-deprecation: "Now, I'm not here to make a judgment call about Disney's suitability as someone's literal religion -- I have a hard time even defining the word 'religion.'" About herself, likewise, Ms. Wolfe resorts to vague platitudes: "While I'm a very private person most of the time, I think being honest with where you're facing struggle or obstacles in your life is one of the best ways to find support -- even when it comes from where you'd least expect."

If Ms. Wolfe can't trust herself as an authority on the very topic of her book, let alone her life, why should we trust her? Disney adults , in the end, deserve a grown-up treatment.

--Ms. Burton is the author of the novel "Here in Avalon" and writes the Lost Word on Substack.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 17, 2025 14:50 ET (18:50 GMT)

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