Beyond Blue Sky: Disneyland Alignment Chart

Please bear with me; I've gotten into a weird mood and I'm short on ideas again.

In your online travels, dear reader, you may occasionally come across a peculiar graphic: a three-by-three grid, each square containing a picture of a person or character or something, and each labeled with a two-adjective phrase, the phrases arranged such that each square in a given row or column has one word in common. At least nine times out of ten, the words so mixed and matched will be: Lawful, Chaotic, Good, Evil, and Neutral. The other ten percent of the time, a different pattern will be followed…but Neutral will always be included. Run into enough of these, even if you never see one using characters you recognize and have no idea what is up with this funky Punnett square, and you will likely come to the conclusion that, okay, this is a thing. A meme of some kind. Okay, whatever, the internet is weird.

At the risk of outing myself as an even bigger nerd than you probably already thought I was, I would like to inform you that this is what’s known as an alignment chart, and has its origins in…get ready…

…Dungeons & Dragons.

Oh, come on. It’s not as bad as you’ve been led to believe.

Anyway, the idea was that you could summarize a fantasy character’s personality by measuring two facets of their outlook and behavior: how much they respected the rules (whether those rules were imposed internally or externally), and how well they treated others. Hence lawful vs. chaotic and good vs. evil. It’s like that two-axis political chart, but for people who swing swords and/or cast spells.

Simplistic? You bet. Even people who play D&D* poke fun at the idea that people, even fictional ones, can be so neatly pigeonholed. However, it’s also a fun mental challenge to say “Here are nine things, and nine categories. Assign accordingly!” and see if you can do it in a way that satisfies you. It can also be fun to take the basic premise and devise different labels, applicable to something quite different from the D&D paradigm.

What about the themed lands of Disneyland?

Heh. I can apply anything to that place.

So for this exercise, I’m going to using the axes of Realism vs. Fantasy and Fluff vs. Grit. Obviously, everything in Disneyland is fanciful and fluffy to some extent, so these are relative judgments—i.e., where the lands stand compared to each other and not to some hypothetical Platonic ideal.

Realistic Fluffy

Main Street, USA gets this square on the grounds of being, well, basically grounded in reality, but focusing on its more wholesome and idyllic aspects. This is of course by design, since Walt Disney and the Imagineers wanted to give guests something comforting before throwing them into the thick of the wild adventures.

Neutral Fluffy

Critter Country gets this spot. It's nearly as wholesome as Main Street (especially with all the Pooh Bear stuff), but sits somewhere between extremes on the fantasy vs. reality spectrum. Anthropomorphic animals and living toys are the stuff of dreams, but there's no overt magic per se.

Fanciful Fluffy

The intersection of whimsy and harmlessness can be found in Mickey's Toontown, where even a ten-ton anvil can't do any lasting damage. Not much more to say about that.

Realistic Neutral

Frontierland is pretty high on the realism scale, but it's got more of an edge to it than Main Street. The Western genre itself is pretty wide-ranging in that regard; over the years this place has featured both feel-good dance hall shows and horrific Indian attacks, and plenty of Western tropes inbetween.

True Neutral

This spot goes to Tomorrowland—poor, confused Tomorrowland. Caught between sober science fact and wild science-fantasy (among other things), not sure whether it wants to charm guests with cute talking fish and ride-through video games or freak them out with galactic conflicts and cosmic phantoms, this land gets hit with the alignment also sometimes called “Undecided” no matter how the axes are labeled.

Fanciful Neutral

This is Fantasyland's alignment. The first part is right there in the name. As for the second part, while most people associate this area with Princesses and twinkly fairies and kiddie rides, consider also things like the Evil Queen's dungeon and the Matterhorn's ferocious Yeti. There's quite a lot of darkness in Disney's classic animated features, actually, and it balances out the cutesiness.

Realistic Gritty

Remembering that these are relative judgments, not absolute ones, I place New Orleans Square in this...square. After all, what part of its content is fanciful? Ghost stories...and many people believe in ghosts and don't consider them unrealistic at all. Between the Haunted Mansion's fixation on death and Pirates of the Caribbean's unabashed portrayal of looting and pillaging, it's certainly gritty...by Disneyland standards.

Neutral Gritty

The Square's neighbor Adventureland is if anything even more gritty—possibly the grittiest land in the park if you think of it in terms of the survivability of its real-life counterpart—but introduces more genuine fantasy elements, such as the talking birds and singing flowers of the Enchanted Tiki Room or the quasi-demonic Mara in the Temple of the Forbidden Eye.

By now you might be thinking...well, that's it. There are only eight themed areas in Disneyland and they've all been covered. But let's not forget about the ninth land currently in development, which as it happens slots neatly into our final alignment:

Fanciful Gritty

The upcoming Star Wars area, if it's anything like the source material, will be plenty fanciful what with all the outlandish alien creatures and psychic powers. (What? That's what using the Force is.) I think we can also expect quite a lot of grit as these things go—the Star Wars franchise is hardly a happy ball of sunshine, and the grim stuff is often what makes for the best adventures. The sort that people would enjoy in a theme park setting.

And now...to put it all together into the traditional chart! You may notice my use of the standard map color coding, plus my proposed color for the Star Wars area:

I welcome your feedback...and if you can think of a way to work the themed lands of Disneyland into the traditional law/chaos/good/evil scheme, I welcome that too!

* Or rather played, considering the newer editions use a different alignment system.