Abstract
It is well known that Disney as a brand has fans and that the Disney theme parks have fans, but there is also a specific community within the wider Disney theme park fan community that focuses on attractions with the parks that have since closed. Current academic research surrounding the Disney theme parks focuses on the implications of the parks’ design, namely the Disney brand’s selling of ideologies in the park, and the attempt to engender a positive view of the brand to visitors. However, current research on the Disney theme park fan community is lacking study on how fans discuss and mourn shutdown attractions in the parks. Using the fandom study theories surrounding emotional connection, and the creation of fan community narratives, I will be using online interactions between fans, such as forum posts and online comments, to show how fans talk about these rides, and how they interact with each other when discussing attractions that have closed. I aim to show how fans create community-wide narratives surrounding the Disney theme parks, what these narratives are, and how those narratives in turn affect how fans view closed attractions. I hope to show that fans create narratives within the fandom space in order to establish a stronger, more cohesive sense of community.