In the bathroom stall adjacent to you, a woman is attempting to give birth while a minimum-wage Disney employee in a 47-pound Goofy suit attempts to usher her out. She refuses to leave. A short distance away, a man discreetly chucks the ashes of a loved one off the Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance ride, amid a gaggle of screaming 10-year-olds. It will be vacuumed up by another worn-out janitor. This is an average day I envision being spent in the unsettling presence of Disney adults, and their arsenal of shenanigans they should have long outgrown. Despite this already saturated market of tomfoolery, I was bewildered to see that TikTok armchair analysts have turned on a new, less strange, creator to rip apart in the latest instalment of their bizarre witch hunts.
Toni Kulusich, or @babytoni99 online, has been the latest casualty in the internet’s increasing quest to find Lolcows, modern-day jesters who can be bullied endlessly for the audience’s viewing entertainment, all for committing the crime of being moderately weird. Toni, who has documented her Disney-related content on her page since 2015, has come under recent scrutiny for her alleged ‘stalker-esque’ interactions with the character of Peter Pan and the Disney actors portraying him.
In the now infamous crochet duck clip posted in May of this year, Toni hands Peter the miniature duck and holds a 5-minute-long awkward conversation with him. Peter is visibly weary and mildly dismissive, eventually strolling off and picking random leaves from the tourist-trampled ground to hand to her as ‘compensation’ for the duck. Did I find this clip dreadfully awkward? Yes. Was it 100% optional, and did I have the autonomy to scroll past it at any given moment? Also yes, which is a conclusion many others should have reached before absolutely eviscerating everything about Toni in the comments.
The comments inform Toni that there is a “hidden Mickey in the therapist’s office,” suggest that Peter’s actor “wishes he could fly” in order to leave the situation and even claim that they would have to be “addicted to every substance on earth to survive working as a Disney actor.” In summary, there is no shortage of vilification this woman faces, all for maybe stretching out a painful interaction a minute or two longer than it should be. In fact, people conveniently ignore that Peter Pan is intended to be an irritating and conceited boy, and therefore the actor does not, in fact, break character by being slightly snippy with her.
Despite exhibiting no obsessive tendencies towards the actors, people on the internet treat Toni as if she has personally leaked the location of every single Disney actor alive and simultaneously is holding their families for ransom. Yes, Toni should probably lighten her hyperfixation, but at no point has she displayed behaviour that warrants this performative moral outrage. She has not ever targeted the actors specifically, followed them around or spread information about them online. In fact, out of 30 visits to the park, Toni has met Peter Pan seven times, dispelling conspiracies about this so-called ‘decade-long obsession.’
Moreover, a previous Peter Pan actor has stated that although Toni may have caused him to be a bit “uncomfortable,” at no point did she “cross any boundaries of what a character interaction should look like at Disneyland.” Even with this, people have started a Change.org petition to get her banned from the parks entirely. Ironically, they have morphed into even bigger stalkers than Toni, launching investigations into her spouse and leaking her workplace address. In an interview, she states that this has “taken a toll” on her mental health, which implies that the most heinous offence you can commit on the internet is being slightly odd.
I do also believe that Toni, although not the worst person to ever set foot in a theme park, can be slightly parasocial at times, especially since the actors have to stay in character for as long as possible, letting her stretch out as many uncomfortable conversations as she pleases. In fact, there is an online precedent for this, with the horrifying ‘Peter Pan’ subculture on Tumblr in the 2010s, dedicated to leaking as much information about each actor as possible. The situation plummets into something more sinister when you consider that the subject of these middle-aged individuals’ fantasies is a young child who can quite literally never grow up. However, I do feel that Toni is set apart from them given that she has never once indicated interest in the actors as people.
People online have also argued that if the roles were reversed and if a man was stalking an actor of an underage girl around a 107-acre park, the outrage would be warranted. I would point out that the roles have been reversed several times, with men approaching women portraying Disney princesses in horrible ways, and yet the public thirst for collective online shaming has been nowhere near as severe.
Ultimately, Toni is a woman with an immature dream, with too much money and time on her hands, and that is not a crime. As a Magic Key holder, she reserves the right to bore Disney actors to death (within a reasonable time frame) and post all the confusingly awkward meet and greets she desires. There is a special place in hell for TikTok armchair analysts who challenge her right to do so, and ignore the lunatics who bound their child to a pole so they could go ride Splash Mountain.
Sanjita Paspulati is a sophomore in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. She can be reached at sp2579@cornell.edu.
Hater Friday runs on Fridays and centers around critiquing media or culture.
