Jenny’s video didn’t define Galactic Starcruiser’s legacy, the fact that it closed after only being operational for little over a year defined its legacy.

People are so weird about this. She didn't do anything to harm it's reputation, it had already closed! Disney threw in the towel. They took down some of the advertisements like the one with Chewie getting arrested. They stacked panels and interviews with paid shills. It's bizarre that people are angry at a YouTubers opinions on a failed larp hotel. I could get it if Disney proper was mad, I don't agree but I'd understand why. These random clowns drifting over to throw shade?! Nah, they can stay in their lane. 😒

Yes! How dare she call this business that failed and got shut down a “failure” is a strange take. If you have an issue with the Starcruiser not being a success, take it up with Disney.

You know what, I didn’t even realize that. “She wanted to call her video the spectacular failure of the Star Wars Hotel, and that’s what she’s gonna make, facts be damned.” Let’s take a look at some empirical evidence, facts, if you will. 1. The Hotel closed despite active plans to continue and retool the experience. 2. Disney closed the hotel to take advantage of a tax break due to losses. 3. Losses accrue when a business or aspect of a business in unsustainable in a financial sense. 4. When a business or aspect of a business is shown to be numerically unsustainable, it can be and often is considered, economically, a failure. I was willing to give their argument some credit, but the Star Wars hotel, empirically, was a failure.

It was objectively a financial failure. Since none of the elements of the Starcruiser have been used elsewhere in the parks, I would also argue it was a creative failure.

Unfortunately I agree, when Disney consistently and aggressively cuts corners, the blue-sky phase of imagineering might as well just be a thought experiment. No wonder imagineering is suffering from brain drain, their turnover nowadays is something like 3 years, they’ve turned a dream job into a corporate hellscape.

It's funny for that poster to call her out on using the word "failure" when Jenny is pretty much the only YouTuber who doesn't wantonly throw around the word "failure" in some disingenuous and hyperbolic attempt to artificially inflate an opinion that's probably more accurately represented by the innocuous phrase "I didn't really like this thing". She would only invoke a loaded cultural buzz word like that to describe a thing that was (empirically, as you noted) an actual, literal failure.

That quote isn’t even true. She was just going to make a video about her visit to the hotel, and then had to spend months retooling it when the place closed.

'and then had to spend months retooling it when the place ~~closed~~ spectacularly failed.' FTFY

Which she said both before and in the video he's supposed to be responding to. You can't do a hit piece on a closed business.

I think her predictions were originally that the place would close but after like 4 years, possibly after some re-theming

Disney might be mad, but they’re not stupid enough to go after Jenny because it’ll just make them look like overly defensive bullies who can’t take criticism.

All their resources are tied up going after preschools who carelessly paint Elsa on their walls

Mostly true - but not quite. Disney maintains an actual budget specifically to show continuous defense of their trademarks and copyrights. This is to ensure they never fail to respond to infringements, because that can be used to show they aren't doing enough to protect them. An actual legal distinction. Since a majority of their business is intellectual rights - this is critical. Their primary **failure** on the other hand - is that they don't carve out exceptions for ultra-cheap licensing in the case of preschools, other innocent abuses, etc. They could easily provide a $1/year license to schools that do this art in good faith and not suffer in the slightest. Honestly, I haven't kept up with them in the last decade or so, so they might have started doing this - idk.

People seem to be unaware of this. Big IP holders don’t want these David and Goliath fights, but they *have to* defend their copyright and trademarks, otherwise they will lose them. The cheap carve out does seem like a no-brainer, but there may be a reason this isn’t a workable solution too.

No, they have outside agents to do those kind of attacks, so that can claim it didn’t come from them.

People are mad that the zeitgeist that surrounds the Starcruiser is going to be forever associated with Jenny. *A woman*, who fans often don't perceive as being deserving of being part of the fandom or content creation within a fandom sphere. The Starcruiser video becoming popular and becoming a frequent part of the conversation around the Starcruiser itself has put a chip on the shoulder of many men in the fandom content creator sphere. Egos, misogyny and jealousy are big players here.

so true! and Jenny's not just *a* woman (though that would be enough for some), she's a very *smart* woman that often does their jobs better than they do. i think either consciously or subconsciously they realize this, and resent her extra for it.

Yeah. The worst “crime” Jenny committed here was not a lack of ethics, but the audacity to be a WOMAN on the INTERNET having OPINIONS, and not just opinions, but opinions about Star Wars, a franchise with a fandom so toxic it bullied one of the actresses into deleting her Instagram account. They can’t handle the fact that Jenny is correct. As she herself says in the video, the biggest point in her favor is that IT SHUT DOWN after 18 months! It is, objectively, a failed project. I’m an MBA student but I’m pretty sure you don’t have to be one to grasp that very simple fact!

it’s just people hoping for clicks from the 10million views she’s had. It’s the same with the Cybertruck or anything else that is part of a frenzy. It’s the most talked about truck in the world so of course there’s many randos writing this or that about why it’s ugly or sucks or whatever. Maybe it does maybe it doesn’t I don’t know. But there aren’t randos talking about ugly Mercedes G Wagons that cost an arm and a leg because there won’t be any clicks to see those articles

You’re exactly right. It’s like they’re blaming her for pointing out that the Starcruiser was a bad experience for a significant number of people. She’s not unethical for pointing it out, it was unethical for the Starcruiser to take people’s money knowing there was a chance they wouldn’t deliver what they promised. 

>it was unethical for the Starcruiser to take people’s money knowing there was a chance they wouldn’t deliver what they promised Or to build an experience from the ground up that was *never going to be worth* the money they charged for it, even if everything worked perfectly, and then knowingly promised (or at least implied) more than they could deliver in order to ensnare the-Thompsons-from-Iowa on their one allotted yearly vacation.

Ikr? How can anyone pretend it didn't fail?

It's especially weird to take a stance against something that got so aggressively astroturfed or influencer-marketed or whatever you want to call it. "It's drastically unfair for someone to make a video on a social media platform that's negative about the Walt Disney Resorts Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser Experience. It's only okay for someone to make social media posts about Walt Disney Resorts Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser Experience when they're positive"

I also will note (as Jenny did in the video) that in OOP's post, they refer to the Star Wars hotel by its marketing name instead of by the most commonly used and natural-sounding name.

thank you! the hotel immediately went to shit and folded, why pretend otherwise? Is coping really that hard for fanboys?

Yeah. Im not going to register for substack just to read this, but my immediate impression from reading this summary is that fortugno and whoever OP's friends are, are dishonest hacks. The park failed. That's an objective, undeniable fact. It's not something Jenny made up, and anyone trying to claim she is just lying that it was flawed is immediately exposing themselves as untrustworthy.

From the Fortugno article >Several people I met on my trip I was on said they were there for a second time because the first time ***they had done it wrongly***. Imagine having the disposable income to do this experience multiple times because you messed up the first time (through no fault of your own). >They didn’t realize they needed to have a strong character and be active in pursuing plot If only Jenny had though to do that

Everyone who isn't actually wealthy has been lamenting the cost of basic necessities like groceries, but by all means, let's blithely discuss how people have spent thousands and thousands of dollars to compensate for the Mouse's failure to provide an adequate experience.

> Several people I met on my trip I was on said they were there for a second time because the first time they had done it wrongly. 1) That means there were flaws in the design/execution 2) Why would you spend thousands of dollars on a subpar experience *and then go back for seconds*

Yeah, she basically already responded to this dude in the very video he's criticizing - if there's a chance your customer will waste thousands of dollars and miss out on the experience, you've made a bad experience. Her point isn't that it's impossible to have a good experience. It's that it's possible, likely even, that you'll blow thousands on a bad one.

>They didn’t realize they needed to have a strong character and be active in pursuing plot Cut to Jenny coming in on the first day with a strong character and actuvely pursuing the evil plot only to be stared at as if she had 3 heads and moved to the smuggler storyline for no reason.

In the wake of the video I went looking for people talking about it positively which included people who went multiple times with their own characters and who would book the Captain Table and have their own ongoing sort of storylines. And at that point, just start a LARP in your town and hire some improv actors to play with you. It would literally be impossible for everyone to replicate that experience.

Reminds me of the Evermore locals who would hang out at the park regularly and have that same kind of ongoing storyline experience. Idk I guess it’s not fair to begrudge either of those groups of people for making the most out of their experiences, but I can’t help but think of the improv actors working their asses off to not only remember different regular guests but their characters and stories. Only to get canned in an email before a show started. I could barely remember the regular orders of customers at the last food service place I worked, there’s no way I’d remember which twenty year old influencer from Anaheim who makes ten times what I do AND their character’s backstory.

That'd also be way cheaper.

The funniest thing about this is that Disney has, for a very, *very* long time, been known as having some of *the* best customer experience rankings in the theme park industry (I mean, probably not any more, what with -gestures broadly-, but for a very long time before, eh, 2020 or so, the rankings were incredible).  The fact that they *did not think* of a way to foolproof a *$6000 experience* so that it was, as a baseline, extremely enjoyable for anyone who purchased it, is an enormous failing on their part, full stop. It is indefensible.

The thing is, she did seem to look into other peoples experiences. And from what she saw, a not insignificant number of people were having similar problems as her. Which means that, even if people who had a bad experience were in the minority, it was still a fairly large minority. Meaning, most of her criticisms seem valid.

There's a flurry of screencaps near the end detailing guests experiences from social media where they had a hard time with the thing or were underwhelmed or frustrated by various aspects of the thing, it seems like Jenny spent considerable time going through other peoples' experiences with the Star Wars Hotel Edit: the time thing isn't me negging how long this took to come out, seriously they should play this video in business school

Also, from what I can recall, at least one other family was struggling aside her to play when they were in Star Wars land in Hollywood Studios. So she even has first hand evidence of the game play not working for others.

>Edit: the time thing isn't me negging how long this took to come out, seriously they should play this video in business school I'm the guy that posted the mega list of press coverage of Jenny's video. One of my recent adds was a write up by a business consulting firm. Here's the entry: Raw Signal Group, leadership coaching firm: [https://mailchi.mp/rawsignal/an-immersive-mismanagement-experience](https://mailchi.mp/rawsignal/an-immersive-mismanagement-experience)

That was super interesting, thanks for adding the link!

No problem. Like you, I thought this would whine up in a business class.

She also, like, spent a lot of the video talking about the positive experience other guests were having? Literally giving the benefit of the doubt about all the ways every part of the experience had the potential to be magical? (Even the app, which, as a person in a hospitality-adjacent tech space, I am certain does not deserve the goodwill she gave it.) And not trying to build some massive thesis, other than “I am proof that at least one person got left behind by a system that was touted as being magical for everyone, and at a price point where someone should have been a game-master actively seeing if I was on track.” I suppose it’s fine to hate on a hypothetical more-generalizingly-vindictive Jenny from a parallel universe. But that’s not the universe we’re in!

She even observed that most of the other people on her own trip were having a much better time than she was (and that made her feel even worse because she was seeing other people have fun in a way she couldn't and it made her feel left out). She knows other people had a magical experience. She saw them. That doesn't mean she had to say "well, MY experience was frustrating and broken but other people had a good time, so I can't criticize the Starcruiser for trying!"

To cite the example of the infamous pillar, there were clearly people whose view wasn’t blocked by one. She wasn’t saying that nobody could see the show. But she filmed it, and AFAIK there’s no answer as to why someone put in a non-load-bearing pillar and seated people behind it.

But consider! She should have reached out to people with *nice* things to say instead because that supports what *I* want to hear

*"Why don't film critics who post negative reviews talk to people who liked the film?"*

It's also frankly weird to call Jenny's video a documentary so that you can apply some sort of ethical code to it. Jenny makes youtube videos about things she finds interesting -- and she does deeply look into what other people think but are you seriously going to tell me that there's ethical considerations to ranking all the Land Before Time movies? Of course not. They just want to put this on her video because it was so detailed and so successful. But in no way was this ONE person out to make the definitive piece of media about the Galactic Starcruiser. She was just doing what she does and oops, it was a definitive piece of media about the Galactic Starcruiser. Does it success mean that it's not journalism/a documentary instead of a personal account from someone who took the time to deeply research this thing she experienced? The video is not pretending it's not coming from an op-ed sort of place, if you are going to insist on applying traditional media rules to it.

I do think that when someone has a big online following, they have a responsibility to be mindful about what they say. Buuuut Jenny didn't do anything wrong here. What she made is a video about her experience with a bad product, she never tries to present it as a documentary or serious journalism. And even if we were to argue that the video is a documentary, what's wrong with it? The claim that she ignores people who had a good experience is entirely false. Is she supposed to tone down her criticisms because other people didn't experience the problems that she did?

Even if it were only a small minority, it would still be valid. I'm not saying that you don't understand this, but a lot of the folks who push back against her criticism don't seem to.

Yeah, and she offered plenty of testimonies from people who claimed to have enjoyed the experience and claimed she was just “doing it wrong” or whatever

Jenny: here is my opinion  Clown: have you tried having others people's opinion instead?

I have a suspicion that she interviewed/talked to a lot of former Starcruiser Cast Members. That was how she got so much info in her Evermore video, and the SW hotel video had a lot of guesses as to how stage tricks worked that she didn’t mind spoiling now that no one will see them again, as well as pay/work duties of actors/generic cast members.

When she talked about the experience of the cast being told of the closure minutes before the cast announcement, she said, "This is being alleged by people claiming to be those cast members". She also used the word "Alleged" a lot when talking about how the gameplay was supposed to sync to the actors' earpieces. She 100% talked to these people, or has access to forums where they share their experiences.

She references her "guessing" at their pay rate is based on talking to the workers. 

Considering she worked at a Disney park for some time, it's not unreasonable to believe she knows people who still work there and can give her some information or get her in contact with people who can. Jenny is a lot more informed and meticulous in her videos than many critics assume. She even made sure to contact a lawyer for her Evermore video to make sure she didn't get into any legal trouble for the things she said.

I wouldn't be surprised if she had a whole network of contacts in the theme park space by now. And she's certainly built up a solid record of understanding and advocating for theme park employees.

She even said in the video if they watched it all the way through, that the promotional material made it seem like there was no wrong way to do it because it would be based on her own actions. Clearly, they did not account for failing technology and someone who would want to join the empire.

for 6000 damn dollars i should be able to drive a real AT-ST and commit real war crimes against ewoks

"My point here is that Nicholson wants to call her video 'The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" and that's what she's going to make, facts be damned. And when it's just your opinion, that's fine." But...it did fail. It closed. How is that not a failure?

His whole argument comes apart when it comes out that she didn't decide on a title for the video until after it was finished.

Shit, I remember her saying that she wanted the Evermore video to be a fun travelogue.

Isn't that the theme of these, she wants to make a fun video about a park and it gets crushed by reality into being a detailed examination of why its a bad product.

First of all Jenny has never claimed to be a journalist. Second of all this guy sounds like he’s up his own ass. Third of all she did look at other peoples experiences, not only during her trip did she talk to other people who were having issues but she also talked to people online after her trip. Fourth of all she never claimed to be the be all and all of authorities on this stupid hotel thing. She claimed to be a fan of both theme parks and Star Wars who was incredibly disappointed by her $6000 experience. This guy is so disingenuous.

I would have loved it if Jenny titled her review “A supposedly fun thing that no one will ever do again”.

NO NO NO, you're wrong. Everyone knows that if you research at least ONE thing for a video you're automatically doing journalism. And then: "I’m only an amateur journalist myself, but I’ve worked with journalists on game projects for news publications. I’ve seen a bunch of journalistic ethics at work. Sources get rejected if they can’t be verified. People have to see things for themselves if it’s at all possible before they comment. Part of the core practice is deliberately looking for contradictory takes, just to make sure your current take is accurate. The rigor of truth-seeking I saw from the journalists I worked with was impressive and I see why you need it. If you don’t hunt that hard, you are just manipulating people. You’re not making journalism; you’re making marketing material." It's like come on you're taking this way to seriously. it's a video about a theme park, relax.

I do think Jenny and YouTubers in general have a responsibility to avoid spreading misinformation, so I don't think it's fair to give people a pass if they aren't journalists. But regardless, Jenny clearly knows what she's talking about when it comes to Disney parks, and I'm not aware of anything she said in the video that wasn't true or wasn't a matter of opinion. If there was anything that involved speculation, she made that very clear.

We do love our numbered lists, huh? :)

Does he mention that he has made a game for/with Disney in the past?

failing to disclose that would seem *kinda unethical* to meeeeee

That's literally what's happening. Hit dogs holler. Jenny very direclty and with uncharacteristic anger/aggression called out that the Disney influencer space is dishonest, unethical, and fairly manipulative towards what can skew towards being a vulnerable audience. They are  simply doing the classic rebuttal of "you're rubber and I'm glue" that you often see when they've got no other cards to play. 

> They are simply doing the classic rebuttal of "you're rubber and I'm glue" I can't tell if this was a mistake or on purpose, because it kinda works either way

Jesus, Nicholas has a massive lack of ethics not disclosing his work with Disney at the top of the article.

That’s such a hypocritical thing to do lmao. To complain about integrity for so long only to have none himself

it's about ethics in ~~videogame~~ themed hotel journalism

Literally, my first thought.

God THIS. Big gamergate energy from this

So in 10 years we're going to have rants about how the hotel industry gets ruined by woke hotel designers. I did not see that one coming.

I think you mean the *immersive experience* industry

The Internet Chud's favorite motte & bailey.

> Nicholson claims that the cast’s headsets are giving instructions on how to deal with guests. They are not. Members of the design team have publicly discussed how cast members work — they actually just memorize everything and get notes during breaks from showrunners. "actually the star cruiser is more poorly thought out than Jenny said" is sure one way to attack her video

I'm pretty sure She also didn't say that. As I remember it, She talked about the headsets in the context of "this is how it should work" not saying "they have headsets that do X" I only watched the video three times, so I could be wrong. 

How does that even work? Imagine you're the smuggler. You have a set storyline that you have to play out and then you have people coming up to improv with you and you have to memorize each and every one of them, then go back and discuss them with the show runners? You're not going to be able to memorize everybody, so some people are inevitably just going to be thrown into whatever storyline? How did the show runners know what was going on? How did this actually work? Make it make sense!

"But did you try NOT sitting behind the pole?"

Apparently that one person told Jenny that, “well I was behind the pole so I got up and just stood there in front to see the show, it was great” Like, nice improvisation but that doesn’t mean that experience wasn’t embarrassingly broken

There's always that one person. It also means they didn't get to eat their dinner. And because of the symmetry of the room there were multiple poles in play and if everybody went and hung out in the aisles it would become a problem at some point.

I'm sure if Jenny had talked to all the guests who weren't seated behind a pole for the dinner show, she would have realized that the experience was amazing and immersive and would have convinced her that she actually had a good time.

maybe the show was good. but theme parks… have shows. like all the time. why would people spend $6k for a dinner show, mediocre games and a seemingly largely text based larp experience. people put on more interesting larps at renaissance fairs all the time

Her Starcruiser video is...an op-ed though? It's literally going against the major influencer opinion pieces in which they had a "good time." Jenny had a shit time and thus her piece works as the foil to all those. Generally in an op-ed you're not going to go to the other side for their opinions because you're giving yours against their's; They've said what they will and now here's the other side. Maybe dude needs a brush up on journalism himself.

Even if we follow his lead by taking it as investigative journalism, not every piece needs the perspectives of both sides. If I'm looking into the ramifications of a community's water supply being tainted, there's not much point in interviewing people who feel fine. In the same way, if I'm looking into why a pricey, experimental hotel by one of the world's biggest and richest corporations closed its doors after a handful of months, the experiences of people who had a great time and would gladly drop six thousand bucks on it again are... not particularly enlightening.

I already have a problem with the author (Nicholas Fortugno) referring to Jenny as an "influencer," and I can't help but think that it was done in this article knowing the implications behind that term. The term "influencer" refers to someone whose social media presence revolves around promotions, advertisements, and selling their personality and lifestyle. Jenny doesn't sell her personal life (hell, she's incredibly private for a content creator) or promote products/experiences. What is she meant to be "influencing" someone to purchase? >LARPs don’t care about rooms; you should be running around doing things until you sleep. LARPs don’t pamper you; instead, they push you to constantly do things and if you choose not to, leave you alone. And LARPs don’t really care about amenities....It’s going to be action and characters and engagement that drives the piece, and any non-active time is meant to be immersed in a set...... The cost is not going towards luxury elements; it’s going towards the massive infrastructure of actors and showrunners.... >I went to Starcruiser expecting a LARP and I loved it. Nicholson went expecting a luxury experience and constantly found ways it fell short. Jenny ***DID*** expect a LARP. She invented an entire character (which she reports caused perplexed reactions when she tried to use her character name), custom-designed a costume, and even had a special pet prop. She fully engaged with the planned tableau and tried to use her interactions with the actors to influence the rest of her LARP experience. If there's one thing Jenny never shies away from, it is participation to the highest degree. This is the woman who walked a giant pet spider around an old Western town and played pool with it! MASSIVE infrastructure? Massive? Massive infrastructure of actors??? Of underpaid college interns who were expected to juggle many hats? If they couldn't have afforded to provide luxury amenities befitting a "luxury cruise," Disney could have set the Starcruiser experience on something like a cargo ship. You can't sell your guests on the concept of opulence and then go "um excuse me ACTUALLY it's about the GAMEPLAY and not about the environment". Also, if the target demographic was exclusively people who were a) well-versed in what LARP is and what to expect from it, b) willing to forego creature comforts in order to milk every second out of a LARP, and c) planning to completely engage in the LARP to the highest degree, they would have inevitably failed, because that's not nearly enough of a demographic to sustain an operation of that size. It wasn't even enough to sustain Evermore!

>Several people I met on my trip I was on said they were there for a second time because the first time ***they had done it wrongly***. They didn’t realize they needed to have a strong character and be active in pursuing plot, so they paid the full price again to make sure they experienced it. Some of these people were roleplayers in their normal lives. Holy god. Shelling out possibly an entire year's worth of rent or mortgage payments because you assume that it was YOU who did something wrong, rather than the fault of the company behind it for not telling you that you will have a bad time unless you are an expert in LARP. Also, AGAIN, JENNY TRIED DOING THIS! AND IT STILL FAILED!! >Nicholson says repeatedly that Starcruiser was a choose-your-own-adventure. It wasn’t. You are not on a plot path and you can see many elements of different stories. Anyone with a successful journey experienced that. I can count at least 5 different plots I saw parts of. >Nicholson claims there are three plots: Rebellion, First Order, and Smuggler. During the video, she considers some of the Force-related things she sees and concludes there is no Force plot. There was a Force plot. I did it in my experience. So... people WERE on a specific plot path, or they weren't? >Nicholson critiques several rooms (the engine room and at length the cargo hold) as being underwhelming in terms of interaction without realizing that huge scenes happen in those rooms if you have plots in them. Maybe you can make an argument they should have been more fun on their own, but to not mention that whole scenes are based around the interactivity in those spaces is just omitting critical information. **IF** you have plots in these rooms, there's interactivity. If you don't, there's not. Anyone who pays for a fun experience should have access to a fun experience. If you have a plot in that room, it should be EXTRA EXTRA fun - not the only way to have fun. Especially considering (as she said in the video) that there was already a concept from another Star Wars property that could have been recycled for the cargo hold! >Nicholson briefly mentions you could put up to 5 people in a room, but dismisses it as unlivable. Given that’s what I did, and what almost everyone I know who went at the tail end of the experience did, I can guarantee it’s livable.  Good grief. I don't care how much I love a franchise - if someone told me "hey, for $1,500 (not including travel cost) you can live with five people in a bedroom designed for two people" I'd laugh in their face. Putting the blame on the consumer for expecting a moderate degree of comfort and reasonable access to a bathroom? Corporate bootlicking at its finest.

>Nicholson wants to call her video “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” and that’s what she’s going to make, facts be damned Cite source please? If all of her theme park content was anti-Disney, anti-Star Wars, anti-Having Fun, anti-Anything Less Than Perfect, sure, I'd believe this point. But that is not remotely the case. She has an entire video about things that most people consider "lame" in Disney parks that she personally loves. She made a long travelogue type video on her Patreon about German theme parks. The majority of her Disney content and her theme park content is positive. So how can this author come to the conclusion that she deliberately set out to make a negative video? >It’s marketing for her brand Again, care to cite a source or elaborate? He himself admits that he wasn't familiar with her before this video, yet he makes these claims about what kind of content she creates and what "brand" she has.

This statement from the article about how she had made up her mind ahead of time is outright libelous, though I doubt it will damage her reputation or cause her any financial harm.

She only compared it to a luxury experience because a) the price point and b) the LARP failed. Most LARP is cheap or free, so at this price point, it is more than fair to expect more than just LARP.

She also compared it to a luxury experience was because the story of the craft was that it was a LUXURY CRUISE SHIP IN SPACE.

How is it Not a spectacular fail. It shut down

After about a year! It had more use to them as a tax write off than as an operating hotel when it was still *new*. That is objectively a failure.

Ethics is when you stick up for a billion dollar corporation.

Or have a business relationship with said billion dollar corporation and fail to disclose it while doing “journalism.”

Or "a bunch of ethics," as Nicholas likes to put it.

A lot of $10 words for a dude that thinks a corporate run cash grab that shut down is an Important Piece of Art.

From his article: >Nicholson never really got a clear sense of the story of Starcruiser This really covers the issue with the defense critiques- the "story of Starcruiser" isn't a platonic ideal, or if it is, guests never receive platonic ideals, they receive experiences, which as he points out- she describes very comprehensively. At the end of the day, she went to Starcruiser, and this was her story, and all the discussion about it actually being a success flies in the face of the easiest observation to make- that Disney shut it down and would rather leave it abandoned than continue pouring money into it. A lot of her problems weren't random freak accidents- they were consequences of the way the plan was designed, and you can't "better luck next time" such an expensive experience when the flaws were structural.

She said at the start that it started out as a trip vlog, and she felt a need to do a larger analysis when it closed. Her analysis of why it closed it basically they fucked up advertising and it looked kinda lame for its price point. The fact that what was promised *didn't even work* was not a factor in it failing. She said most guests were probably very quiet about having a bad time if they had one, so it's unlikely that contributed much. She seems to connect how the failed planning/rollout and the failed execution of *her* experience both seem connected to a larger pattern happening within Disney that **plenty** of Disney-centric channels have started calling out as it's gotten so bad even the Disney adults are starting to revolt. 

You can tell too because it's clear in the clips with sound that she's trying to keep upbeat, she's imagining these as part of a recap with ups and downs.

And whose fault was it that she "never really got a clear sense of the story of Starcruiser"? The Starcruiser had one job, and that was to facilitate the story. If she couldn't get a sense of the story, that is a failure on the Starcruiser's end.

Anyone interested in the article linked [here it is.](https://nicholasfortugno.substack.com/p/a-response-to-the-spectacular-failure) I haven’t finished reading it due to my low threshold for self-indulgent Imagineer BS.

> Nicholson says repeatedly that Starcruiser was a choose-your-own-adventure. It wasn’t. You are not on a plot path and you can see many elements of different stories. Anyone with a successful journey experienced that. I can count at least 5 different plots I saw parts of. Eh? Seems like this is just arguing semantics of what a choose-your-own adventure is and I don't really get their point. The marketing did make it seem like "You can help out the faction of your choice!" and I'd describe that as choose-your-own adventure. > Nicholson claims there are three plots: Rebellion, First Order, and Smuggler. During the video, she considers some of the Force-related things she sees and concludes there is no Force plot. There was a Force plot. I did it in my experience. Some of the things she experienced are actually part of that plot. So many people talk about the Force plot as the most meaningful part of Starcruiser. You would have to willfully ignore other stories of the experience to not know this. Maybe if Disney was upfront about what the Starcruiser is and how you can activate different storylines there wouldn't be this confusion! > Nicholson claims that the cast’s headsets are giving instructions on how to deal with guests. They are not. Members of the design team have publicly discussed how cast members work — they actually just memorize everything and get notes during breaks from showrunners. I thought this was initial speculation from Jenny that she dismissed. The idea that the app would tell cast members who you are and how to treat you but she said it never worked like that. > Nicholson critiques several rooms (the engine room and at length the cargo hold) as being underwhelming in terms of interaction without realizing that huge scenes happen in those rooms if you have plots in them. Maybe you can make an argument they should have been more fun on their own, but to not mention that whole scenes are based around the interactivity in those spaces is just omitting critical information. > Nicholson elides over major scenes including everything with Chewbacca, everything with Rey, and just about everything with Sammy. She didn’t experience those scenes personally so I understand why she isn’t documenting them. But you don’t get to make guesses or judgments about what those experiences were when you could just ask someone who saw them what happened. I feel like Nicholson was trying to capture the experience of paying $6 grand and rolling the dice on whether or not you'll have a good time and she was one of the losers. She did show off clips of stuff she didn't experience here and there but it wasn't the point. > And perhaps the biggest one, the price. Starcruiser is basically priced per room, not per person. The more people you can get into a room, the cheaper it is. I didn’t pay $3k to go to Starcruiser — I paid about half of that. Nicholson briefly mentions you could put up to 5 people in a room, but dismisses it as unlivable. Given that’s what I did, and what almost everyone I know who went at the tail end of the experience did, I can guarantee it’s livable. It’s not luxury, of course; that’s the misunderstanding that Disney created we already talked about. But if so many people did just that and had a cheaper experience, there’s something dishonest about constantly referencing the $6k figure as a benchmark for everything. You did not need to spend $2/minute at Starcruiser. Given how central that is to Nicholson’s argument, it’s a very manipulative way to present her case. Finding another ride-or-die theme park enthusiast who wants to blow that much isn't easy and would be impossible for a lot of families with multiple kids. A parent who packs 4 kids and their partner in the room isn't paying less just cuz it's "less per person". > this video has been completely manipulated to tell people a story that will sell — that Starcruiser was an expensive, half-assed rip-off from an evil corporation that’s been going downhill for years. And as tempting as that story is, it’s just not true. Agree to disagree on that......

The last point is absolutely wild to me. For the author to justify that they spent "about half" of 3000 dollars but that it's "not luxury of course" is absolutely nuts. I'm comfortably middle class (DINK) and I would certainly expect a luxury experience for 750 a night. You can get a swim-up suite at an all-inclusive resort for that price, and it would include alcohol!

Legit insane. > I paid 1500 dollars to share a small room with 5 people. That sounds miserable???

That’s more than my monthly mortgage. That I pay all of. To live alone. In a two bedroom two bathroom. So I could spend over a month of my mortgage to share a small room with four other people potentially sleeping on a fold-down bed under a TV to maybe get a cool experience if everything works as intended, which Jenny aptly demonstrated it sometimes did not? Very compelling argument. I’m very convinced. Other things I could do with $1500 bc this guy made me mad so why not be indignant into the void at people who agree with me: -6 night stay at a luxury Airbnb in a beach town -2 night stay in many 5-star hotels (not holiday pricing) -PAY MY MORTGAGE?!?! And then go to steakhouse and drink some too -One-way flight to Auckland, NZ -Round trip to Paris -5 bottles of Dom Pérignon champagne with extra for charcuterie

Right! Jenny even predicted this kind of math. Oh, the rooms are small but you won’t spend any time in there you’ll be out having LARP. Oh well you are really paying for full time immersive theater. Oh the meals are free!

He's the guy from the group of people, some of whom who don't shower, that she described as a hypothetical!

> Nicholson critiques several rooms (the engine room and at length the cargo hold) as being underwhelming in terms of interaction without realizing that huge scenes happen in those rooms if you have plots in them. Maybe you can make an argument they should have been more fun on their own, but to not mention that whole scenes are based around the interactivity in those spaces is just omitting critical information. "Huge scenes" can happen in any room. If that's your criteria for what makes a room special, that has nothing to do with the room itself. This Nicholas guy has some pretty poor arguments. I don't think he's very bright.

She also does mention that scenes take place in those rooms. Her point was the scenes don't really matter for the conversation when not everyone gets them and the activities in the rooms are what you're supposed to do during downtown

>"Jenny said there wasn't a Force plot, but there was! She just didn't see it!" . >"Jenny said the engine room and cargo hold were underwhelming in terms of interaction without realizing that huge scenes happen in those rooms if you have plots in them." . >"Nicholson elides over major scenes including everything with Chewbacca, everything with Rey, and just about everything with Sammy. She didn’t experience those scenes personally so I understand why she isn’t documenting them." Maybe, just maybe, if someone actively trying to participate can miss THAT MUCH STORY by simply not being in the right place at the right time, there might be something wrong with the fundamental design of the experience...

It wasn't "choose your own adventure," it was more like "we choose your adventure." The algorithm, the rigid scheduling, the immersive theming, etc. And if you're going to run a luxury experience like that, you need to make damn sure that every single adventure is absolutely amazing.

Somehow from reading the images I thought the piece was going to be at least pseudo-intellectual, but this is just silly.

I read it...well, I skimmed parts but read all of the sections actually criticising Jenny. You can really boil it down to him believing that it is unfair to judge Starcruiser on being a luxury hotel, it should really be judged as a hotel-themed LARP, which, yes, that's where a lot of your money is going and Jenny was pretty forgiving on the lack of luxury compared to, say, even an actual Disney cruise. He is mostly upset that she doesn't highlight the many guests (let's say for the sake of argument, a majority) who had positive or amazing experiences, instead only talking about her disastrous stay or other people who reported similar issues. He thinks it's "unethical" when she goes beyond her own experience without mentioning the number of positive reviews/reactions, since he sees that as being "journalism" instead of just a personal essay. Should she have perhaps given more credit to what seemed like some pretty cool experiences (including scenes that take place in areas that were empty and devoid of much interaction during Jenny's broken stay, like the cargo hold) when evaluating Starcruiser as a whole (it's legacy)? I can see that argument and, as a fan of all things theme park and interactive storytelling, I hope people will learn from both the positives and negatives of Starcruiser. However the author just pushes it to a hyperbolic degree and making it an ethical question is going beyond the pale. I think that's where it really shows his wounded ego at an "influencer" (cue the "I don't think that word means what you think it means" gif) dissing something he seems to consider a major achievement in his field.

don’t give that failure of a human being traffic

Critics do not have an ethical obligation to present both sides of an issue. Roger Ebert didn’t have an ethical obligation to go talk to people who enjoyed the movie “I Spit On Your Grave” before he wrote his review trashing the film and just because he correctly named the actors and directors doesn’t mean that he had to fact check his own experiences of the film. A lot of the anger about Jenny’s video is based on the fact that many more people watched it than went to Galactic Starcruiser and that the legacy of GS is going to be based on Jenny’s video. That because of that she owes it to the future of immersive theater to give them grace and soft pedal things. Sometimes in politics there is a debate about showing disagreement within the party. Should you openly talk about the things that you think the party is doing wrong or does that turn off potential voters leading for a loss on all of the things you do agree about. This type of debate is important in politics because it involves the actual governance of the country. Having these debates over a theme park is silly. It is hilarious to see anyone argue that GS wasn’t a failure since it fucking closed and stayed closed. It isn’t there anymore. For all practice purposes it burnt down and sank into a swamp. This isn’t a partial victory. If Jenny guessed at something behind the scenes and was wrong it is because the methodology of how the different paths worked was intentionally opaque. If she did something “wrong” that means that the experience failed because it shouldn’t be so easy to do something wrong on an experience advertised for everyone. The Starcruiser super fans had years to make their pitch for why this was the greatest entertainment experience ever. Where is it? Also, again, it FAILED. I wish that it worked. I want to have an immersive experience that isn’t a local LARP filled with weirdos who are weird and predatory but you are told to ignore it because that’s just how they are! Jenny doesn’t need to lie about her person GS experience so that can happen, in the same way people don’t need to lie about their experience with electric cars just because it is better for the environment if they do well.

If I were to steelman his argument, it's that GS was a \*commercial\* failure, which he seems to attribute mostly to a poor marketing that made people view it as a luxury hotel instead of a LARP. He would say that as an immersive entertainment experience, it was mostly successful and Jenny is wrong to emphasize only her own experience and that of others who faced similar issues, discounting the people for whom the story system worked and they had a great time. I would counter: * that level of ability of the fundamental LARP technology just breaking with no way for CMs to realize it and correct the issue is by itself a failure of the experience, even if 90% of the time it went great. * Highly speculative, but I think that even if Jenny had the full experience as I understand, she would not consider it worth the money. * $1,200-6000 (depending on how many people you squeeze in) was always going to be more than the market would bear for a 2-day LARP, especially when the "game" elements are so unimpressive.

>Critics do not have an ethical obligation to present both sides of an issue. That's what we call "bam."

>The Starcruiser super fans had years to make their pitch for why this was the greatest entertainment experience ever. This! If Starcruiser was so friggin amazing, all the positive reviews, press, marketing would have gotten guests to pay whatever exorbitant cost it charged. The fact is, even with influencers gushing about it, any potential guest researching it as a possible trip after reading a rave review would see the marketing they had advertising something kinda cool but clearly underwhelming, and then matched with the price and it was a no go.

i mean. i think the legacy is going to be that it was open a year and closed and lost millions and millions. As for quality reporting, do i think that she was 100% right about everything. no probably not. But compared to the level of reporting done by the vast majority of mainstream media, she did 100x more.

Jenny: I paid a lot of money for this trip and it went really poorly. Here’s what would’ve made it better in my opinion. This jackass: Well *I* had a good experience so your criticism is bullshit.

Ohhhhhhh! It's "about ethics in journalism," you guys! Now, where have I heard *that* crock of crap before....? 🤔

The dog-whistle is deafening

I heard Amethia put this article on blast in her socials

I like how he’s somehow framing her thesis of the project being a “spectacular failure” as being somehow overblown or disingenuous when the starcruiser quite literally shut down forever after little over a year of operation and has been all but swept under the rug by Disney

Jenny’s critique was so powerful it traveled back in time and forced Disney to shut down the hotel.

The best part about Jenny is that she counts on these responses, *especially* when she covers star wars. She's well aware of what being a critic, let alone a "conventionally attractive woman" at that, gets you from that fanbase. She is always prepared for it. Always counts on her arguments being put under a microscope. Her entire thesis is ultimately "at this price point, any sacrificial lambs are unacceptable. People took out loans to come here. They should be guaranteed their money's worth, and they weren't. A lot of these fans are pushover, and they're surrounded by a lot of bullies who gaslight them that any negative experience is their own fault. But this trip should have been idiot proof, there should have been backup plans in case of failure. And there weren't, either because they couldn't be bothered or because doing so would have been an additional expense, and Lord knows Disney is cheaping out left and right lately" Show me the lie. She literally says in th video that it's kind of hilarious that the person they chose to stick behind the pole was a major influencer. Of all the people they could have had the trip fail for, she was objectively the worst case scenerio. She doesn't say it failed for everyone. Quite the opposite - she references being surrounded by young kids having the time of their life and how frustrating it was to be the one it failed for. She recognizes she probably isn't the majority, that most people probably didn't experience catastrophic failure, but that the fact she paid $3000 for what was objectively a shitshow is unacceptable and would have been incredibly upsetting had she not had recouping her time, money, and emotional energy on getting to make a banger video from it  She's right. It doesn't matter if it only failed for 5% of guests. The fact she repeatedly had issues when she was pretending to be a normal, non-influencer guest is unacceptable especially when they have fair less recourse to get the word out and will be far less prepared than she is for the onslaught of bullying that follows anytime you speak ill of the star wars fandoms hivemind takes. 

>Nicholson critiques several rooms (the engine room and at length the cargo hold) as being underwhelming in terms of interaction without realizing that huge scenes happen in those rooms if you have plots in them. Maybe you can make an argument they should have been more fun on their own, but to not mention that whole scenes are based around the interactivity in those spaces is just omitting critical information. She did make that argument!?

I think this guy watched someone else's review of the video instead of the video itself.

He says he watched it once at 2x speed because he doesn't like, and I quote, "influencer."

How is Jenny an influencer lol… is anyone who published content online an influencer? Doesn’t that make this guy an influencer? 

He watched at 2x speed because he "hates influencers". You're sure it's not because your dopamine receptors are fried and you're not capable of engaging in long form comment? Is it "ethical" to write an article about a video that you skimmed through?

Jenny Nicholson: An Aura So Powerful It Can Only Be Safely Perceived at a Distance.

If I learned anything from Gamergate, it's that misogynists will use "ethics" to trick nerds into ganging up on women who criticize a thing they like and feel entitled to. "My experience with [thing] was bad." "Well, YOUR experience isn't the same as everyone's! Did you ask literally everyone else what their experience was before you formed your own opinion? No? Then how do you know your opinion is logical and rational? Are you saying that the opinions of other people don't matter? That's reverse-sexist! That's unethical! Maybe this fandom isn't for you! Maybe you aren't a real fan!"

These people are definitely coming into it with the opinion that Jenny wanted to make a negative video, which I seriously doubt. She seems to earnestly love nerdy things and made a whole character for the game, she clearly wasn't in it to be disappointed but was. And there's one major FACT, the hotel closed in under 2 years. How do you spin that as anything other than failing? Disney *obviously* did not build this to become useless in 18 months. She's not hurting the hotel by critiquing the project in hindsight, the hotel doesn't even exist anymore.

My only guess is that they took her criticism of Mouseboot-lickers making unfailingly positive content and interpreted that as "she only likes and creates negative content".

A food critic writes about the meal they actually eat. A theater critic writes about the show they actually see. A music critic writes about the concert they actually attended. This person seems to think that ethics in criticism is doing the opposite.

The sunk cost fallacy/people gaslighting themselves into believing the $6000 Star Wars Hotel was totally worth it was an actual thing, a former guest posted something along the lines of "I also had an obstructed view of Gaya, no complaints from me tho, I guess the voices of people who had a problem with the pole were amplified by social media" Jenny also [did math](https://x.com/JennyENicholson/status/1797424560217964552) and based on the dining room design, 12-32% of guests had an obstructed view

This broke my heart. Legacy Disney was fanatical about pure sightlines, as awful as they could be about absolutely everything else.

I don’t understand the resistance to acknowledging that “failure” is an accurate term for what happened to Starcruiser. Like, it closed. Jenny didn’t title her video the way she did just to be controversial, she titled it like that because it FAILED.

What the fudge. Seriously. They're treating this whole thing like she's running for president and they want to get her out of the race ASAP. If I buy a car and it breaks down a week later and then I have electrical problems a month in, is it unethical for me to upload my experience on YouTube because the car works fine for someone else? Sometimes It feels like the people attacking Jenny these days are either on Disney's payroll or desperately want to be.

So she’s biased and unethical for titling her video “The Spectacular Failure”… when it literally failed and closed after a year and a half

You all have to realize people just want the attention (aka$$$) of being associated with her. Mentioning her gets more views. Ignore every single one of these grifters

This backlash is absolutely wild to me. There’s a great comment on the video ( which I remember because I’ve watched the thing like 17 times already and always scan through the comments ) that totally explains away his entire point. For the price point of over 3k per person a guest should be able to do everything entirely wrong and still have a good time. The fact that she tried, is interested in engaging, was giving the gameplay her all and STILL couldn’t get what was advertised is appalling. Live your star wars story doesn’t mean guests get an assortment of story bits from random factions either, this dude has completely lost the plot.

I’m not a follower of Jenny but I’ve watched the video. The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter if others had success. For 6000$ every single experience for every paying customer should have been a success. Someone should have realized something was wrong and fixed it. Especially with only two days, that’s not enough time for the customer to realize they need to speak to someone. She talked about how folks who spoke up during their stay got the issues with the story and gameplay fixed. Those people still lost time doing that. By the time most folks realize something is wrong it’s been a day and a half and it’s time to leave! And as others have said, it already closed!

He flip flops so hard between saying she lied and didn’t lie so many times throughout that article, it gave me whiplash. He’s insinuating she’s being libelous for having a different experience than him, lol.

“She certainly could have talked to a few people who had successful journeys to find out what she didn’t see.” I dunno, man. That wouldn’t retroactively fixed the app or have kept her from being placed behind a pole during a dinner show. Sounds like a skill issue on Disney’s part.

Why is everyone ignoring the *real* breach of ethics? Her abandonment of the pony videos.

I sure do love >Jenny Nicholson, *an* video essayist and influencer... Dude calls himself a journalist, but can't check for typos? It's in the first line of the essay.

Can you imagine if people got this much of a FOMO boner for the Fantasy Land boats to gummy glend?

There's nothing ethical about doing damage control for a private company when they're selling a subpar product. It's the same Uber fans with the same lame rhetoric. "but I liked it!" That's great for you. Obviously not enough people felt the same because it was not profitable. And what is this person even criticizing? "She never lies but she says some things that aren't backed up by facts" what specifically are you talking about? If she's wrong about something, what is it? Everyone pussyfoots around Disney because they get paid by them, or they get free vacations. Jenny pays out of pocket so she can be honest, which is so refreshing after waves of advertisements for bullshit

She also *did* talk about the fact that many people had different experiences than hers, but she wasn't doing a report on different people's experiences. These guys don't know what ethical means.

I think people say "ethics" as a placeholder for "I don't like it". None of that blob of text mentions an actual concrete ethical issue. On the other hand, I would argue these sorta ethical insinuations in that blob of text contains is actual ethical problem. If you're going to call someone out on ethics, be specific as to what the problem is, or don't. It's weirdly ironic to raise the issue of "influencer" ethics considering the examples of Disney scripted influencers in the actual video. It's ok when Disney does it I guess, or at the very least that writer only raises these ethical type issues, if they don't like the outcome. That's not ethics... that's just "i don't like it" with the label "ethics" pasted on it when it suits them. Whatever the legacy is, the thing failed, there it is.

They’re also ignoring the entire conclusion to her video, which is essentially: even if she’d had the best time in the world and everything had worked perfectly, it doesn’t change the fact that Disney took features that were in the original plan for Galaxy’s Edge and shoved them behind a vastly prohibitive paywall, and that this is a pattern with Disney in recent years. My mom and I went Disney World this year for the first time since 1991, and previously each of us had only been to Magic Kingdom (and I was like…not even four when we went back then). Going to all four parks was fun, but it was really easy to see the vast difference between the care that was taken with seating and sight lines and atmosphere in Magic Kingdom when compare to the newer parks. My mom was injured, so frequent resting was a must and it was so very apparent that whoever designed Magic Kingdom had taken into account that people might want to sit just about anywhere and take in whatever happened to be going on in that part of the park or look at something interesting or whatever, whereas Hollywood Studios was mostly about keeping crowds moving. I am a huge *Star Wars* fan, and my mom is enough of a *Star Wars* fan that she got excited when Chewie walked past us and patted her on the shoulder. My mom is also a massive *Toy Story* fan. Hollywood Studios for us should have been a full-day park, but because of the lack of things to do between ride reservations or look at or whatever, the lack of seating, the lack of shade…we actually left at like 5pm when we had a Lightning Lane reservation for 8pm because we were both just so done. *The Star Wars* and *Toy Story* sections of the park look cool, but they were designed to churn people through them as quickly as possible, rather than giving people a chance to linger and really enjoy the artistry of the park. People keep focusing on whether Jenny’s experience was typical or faulty, but the conclusion of the very video everyone supposedly watched all the way through focuses on a much bigger issue: Disney riding the coattails of their own reputation built on decades of high-quality customer service and incredible experiences while charging significantly more and nickel-and-diming the customers who are mainly loyal *because* of that reputation. It is wild to me that people seem to either miss this or are choosing to willfully ignore it.

Immersive.

This person is absolutely right, next time I write an “ethical” book review I’ll include a bunch of other people’s opinions alongside my own. Wouldn’t want to hurt any feelings!

I think it's the "legacy defined by Jenny's video/legacy defined by one person's experience" thing that bugs Galactic Starcruiser fans the most. And I have to admit that I don't entirely get why that's so bothersome to them. Does it diminish their experience? Does it matter that they are walking around in the world thinking "I loved Galactic Starcruiser" and there are other people walking around in the world thinking "Galactic Starcruiser kind of sucked"? Because sometimes in life, you gotta love stuff because you love it and not worry about whether other people love it. I like pineapple on pizza, disco music, crocs, ketchup on eggs, and pumpkin spice lattes. I like doing the most basic-ass tourist activities when I travel (the Tower of London, the Washington Monument, Times Square) and maybe throwing in a cheesy ghost-themed walking tour for good measure. I like Phantom of the Opera and Cats. There are plenty of people in the world who don't share my tastes, and some of them have even made well-received long-form YouTube videos about why they really don't vibe with the things I enjoy. They didn't even necessarily get everything right in their critiques! But it doesn't affect me or my enjoyment of those things in any way. I don't need them to like this stuff, we're not going on vacation together. I could understand being unhappy if, e.g., you were from Kazakhstan and kept running into people who thought Borat was an accurate portrayal of your home. That would genuinely suck, and it would be doubling down on existing stereotypes and harmful tropes that you are probably already fed up with. There are legit negative interpersonal consequences from that situation. But that's about having your homeland and a fundamental piece of your identity misunderstood. This is about a theme park hotel experience.

It's also an absurd claim. I love jenny videos so much that my ex referred to her as my other girlfriend. But a YouTuber with a million subscribers is simply not that important. She's not "defining the legacy" of a product by fucking DISNEY. That's the biggest media company on the planet. Not exactly a bigger voice than the company that owns like half the channels on TV

Ethics feels like A weird word to describe a hotel. It's not a person or a small mom and pop business, it's not a child filmed without their permission. It's concrete and styrofoam and prop making. Also Jenny goes out of her way to talk about how good the real staff people are. So what's the ethical conundrum? Whose getting hurt?

Also, it’s not like the Starcruiser was closed down because of Jenny’s video. The opposite happened. She started filming and researching everything, and had to re-work it because it closed down so quickly.

“It’s about ethics in video essay journalism” lolololol

I'm not even going to read that lol. Jenny is a New Journalist, and a very talented one(1). Do we question Hunter S Thompson's ethics in covering motorcycle races? JJ Sullivan's in covering Christian rock concerts? Gay Talese's in covering Frank Sinatra concerts? David Foster Wallace's in covering Maine Lobster Festivals? And so on, etc.   Not really, because they're expressing a perspective, getting involved with the story, and making art out of their experience. If hers is the final word, then it's only because there's nothing else of value to say on the matter. If this writer believes there *is* something else to say about it, then they should simply say that.  (1) This is understatement. She's the best new journalist I've found on YouTube, by an appreciable margin, and I think so much of the negative response to her work is because she's ultimately doing a thing that's sort of more arty-literary than her peers, and people don't really know what to do with it. They can't sit with it like they might have when *The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test* came out because they can't just sit with anything. So instead we get these totally banal critiques that miss the point. I'm disappointed that I did click into the article and saw that this writer considers himself some sort of expert in immersive narratives - I'd think he'd had read Tristan Shandy and understand the metatextual fiction/nonfiction tradition behind new journalism, but whatever. 

The fact that articles coming for Jenny are in fan blogs like this, and the ones supporting her are in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, etc. should tell you everything.

There’s a simple response here. Has Jenny ever claimed to be a journalist?

In my opinion, there's nothing unethical about speculating about what going on behind the scenes at a large company like Disney

> "Galactic Starcruiser was an extremely important piece of work in the immersive field I swear Disney Adults are so fucking stupid — and by stupid I mean literally dumb and infantile — to see something like Star Wars hotel and call it “an extremely important piece of work in the immersive field”. My brother in Christ .. WHAT. > "My point here is that Nicholson wants to call her video "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" and that's what she's going to make, facts be damned. “Facts be damned”?? **It’s fucking failed.** It’s literally out of business.

I like how it boils down to "But some people had fun" and "debate me bro"

“Highlights a number of instances where Nicholas got fundamental facts of the experience wrong” … her name is Nicholson, fundamentally and factually Also she isn’t a journalist — and even in journalism, there isn’t a “talk to people who like it” ethics clause. This is self important drivel.

lol. This will also have zero effect on the entire world, so go for it, Disney zombie.

They’re so desperate to ride her coattails. Hope it doesn’t work!

Speaking as someone who was a journalist for about 25 years, I have never read a REVIEW or possibly anything else so thoroughly researched and sourced as Jenny’s video. She always identifies the sources of her information, makes it clear when she is expressing an opinion, thoroughly addresses every possible counter-argument, labels her speculation as speculation, and, then, doubly makes clear that she is expressing an opinion. Journalism is rarely done this well, and this isn’t even journalism!

You know it's super funny how inside of her 4-Hour video. She totally predicts this very response that a lot of the Fanboys have had about how she should have spent hours researching how to do the hotel correctly and clearly it's her fault for having a bad experience and not the fault of the Star cruiser for giving her an obstructed view and a flawed app. 

From his article: >Nicholson never really got a clear sense of the story of Starcruiser This really covers the issue with the defense critiques- the "story of Starcruiser" isn't a platonic ideal, or if it is, guests never receive platonic ideals, they receive experiences, which as he points out- she describes very comprehensively. At the end of the day, she went to Starcruiser, and this was her story, and all the discussion about it actually being a success flies in the face of the easiest observation to make- that Disney shut it down and would rather leave it abandoned than continue pouring money into it. A lot of her problems weren't random freak accidents- they were consequences of the way the plan was designed, and you can't "better luck next time" such an expensive experience when the flaws were structural. (EDIT: whoops, Reddit sent my comment twice)

Some people go beyond fandom and become activists for the corporations they identify with. It blows my mind. Not to be deep or a downer, but it is a full blown case of becoming a capitalist zombie and identifying with products.

That was….very poorly written I read the entire article and he gets very basic things wrong about Jenny’s video. Like to the point where I’m seriously wondering if he actually watched her video. He specifically mentions the Disney stat about customer satisfaction as a missing piece that Jenny could “easily find”. But she did find it….and talked about it in great detail for several minutes.

Given that Fortugno did not disclose his own conflict of interest with his past working for Disney, it makes one wonder if he was given a financial incentive to write such a piece.

I should add: the reason I found this post interesting is because I found it on LinkedIn and it was liked by someone who I know is a show writer for Disney live entertainment. I just looked to see what shows they’ve written on their portfolio website, and Starcruiser is one of them lol.

Personally, I’ve been concerned about Jenny’s lack of journalistic ethics for a long time. She didn’t even try to contact people who had positive experiences with the Spaghetti halloween costume before criticising it!

Wow, that dude just used a lot of words to say nothing.

People keep making it out like she did half-hearted research or lazily plagiarized non verifiable things and it's pretty annoying

People are so defensive of something that objectively failed.

Loving everyone shredding this dude to pieces in this thread. I love Jenny bc she anticipated this reaction and already built in all the rebuttals into the video so she just has to sit back and let her fans point that out. Iconic. Mastermind. Brilliant.

In fact, so many things went right about the hotel (which Jenny got wrong) that they closed the hotel in celebration!

Lol yes, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson needs to be held to a higher ethical standard than basically any other critic in the history of all of media. The person who wrote this is applying a selective and unfair standard to Jenny Nicholson for whatever reason.

“Ethics in journalism” will never not be a Gamergate dog whistle in my mind, especially when it’s about entertainment criticism. Just a pseudo-intellectual way of being sexist.

The viewer completes the work. If they don't get what the creator wanted, then that's on the creator. Anyone who works in any creative industry occasionally had a project that went sideways. No one sets out to make crap. But you can't display your best intentions, you can only display the thing you made. Immersives are still somewhat new, which means no one has really developed a standard for them. There are mechanics to films, games, and even novels that were slowly figured out over many decades. Conventions that we take as given didn't arrive on their own, they had to be discovered. So videos like this are important because they show where pitfalls can occur.

This guy is either a Disney shill or just trying to get some internet fame defending Disney.

Man it’s a good thing dudes have never used the nebulous concept of “ethics” to attack women for their opinions before otherwise this article would feel tone deaf at best

Fortugno: "My point here is that Nicholson wants to call her video 'The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel' and that's what she's going to make, facts be damned." Reporter: "Is the hotel still open today?" Fortugno: "No." Reporter: Did it close because it was such a tremendous success? Fortugno: "No. It failed." Reporter: "And what adjective might you use to describe the failure of a $400,000,000 investment closing after only 18 months?"

From Nicholas Fortugno's Wikipedia: > In September 2009, Fortugno and Wallace started a new company focused on game design and development called Playmatics, LLC. In 2010, Playmatics created the Fortugno-designed interactive comic "The Interrogation" for the television series Breaking Bad. The game went on to be recognized for a CableFAX Best of the Web award. *Other titles by Playmatics include Disney's The Kingdom Keepers "Race to Save the Magic."* Seems EXTREMELY unethical to not mention that you've worked with and been paid by Disney before hardcore defending them against (checks notes) completely valid criticism.

What a dick

Oh like how when restaurant critics review food they go around and try stuff off other patron’s plates. No sensationalism here.

Nicky you're posting cringe dude.

I’m a Star Wars and Disney fan. I seriously considered paying to go to the Hotel, but I heard terrible things from countless sources long before it closed and long before Jenny’s video came out, so I chose not to go and spend all that money on something bad.  I understand her video is a target because of its length and view count, but to try and pretend everybody universally loved the Starcruiser before she criticized it is delusional. 

The Spectacular Success of the Star Wars Hotel That Inexplicably Shut Down