Jenny’s latest video, “Evermore: The Theme Park That Wasn’t,” goes above and beyond the high watermark set by her previous creations, transforming a typical vlog-style video into a travel diary gone wrong. The result is the funniest documentary of the year, a painstakingly well-executed and fascinating look at a theme park called Evermore that squandered its vast potential through mismanagement, bizarre decision-making, and alleged mistreatment of employees.
What Is the Evermore Theme Park?
Unlike some snarkier or more mean-spirited YouTubers, it is immediately clear from both Jenny’s tone and herMidsommar-esque elven attire that she has a pure, heartfelt enthusiasm for the goals and lofty aspirations of the Evermore Park creative team. In interviews,Ken Bretschneider, Evermore’s creator,presented the park as a cutting-edge alternativeto the wonders ofWalt Disney World. Rather than focusing on thrill rides like roller coasters or dark rides themed to existing intellectual property, Evermore’s goal was to create a world unstuck in time, where various fantasy creatures could interact with guests while weaving an intricate and ever-evolving story.
The draw for repeat guests would be to check in on characters and see how their stories evolved. But unlike traditional parks that relegate such tales to stage shows, these various stories and character interactions would happen organically in every corner of the park, resulting in an experience that feels more like an expensive and immersive LARP (live-action role play) event than a typical meet-and-greet with one of theDisney princesses. The “blue sky” or idealized vision of the park would be the equivalent of seeing Jasmine and Belle having a heated debate on the street, with guests being able to intervene and perhaps help them resolve the dispute.
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What Went Wrong With Evermore?
Of course, Evermore Park does not have the benefit of Disney’s extensive library of characters, and so its creative team chose to invent their own characters and give paid performers the opportunity to improvise, some creating their own character lore on the fly while interacting with guests. While this might be an improviser’s dream job (finally an opportunity to break even after all those UCB classes), the end result of this creative freedom is often unsafe parasocial interactions or guest confusion, as explained by Jenny Nicholson’s video. Wanting to incorporate game-like elements to make Evermore appeal toWorld of WarcraftandDungeons & Dragonsfans, the park’s performers are tasked with providing quests for guests, ones that could eventually result in a guest joining a “guild” and receiving whatever prizes or acclaim that entailed.
As Jenny notes in her video, many of the quest parameters, means of tracking quest progress, and manners in which rewards are distributed, were extremely convoluted, nebulous, or downright unfinished when the park opened. This resulted in some attendants taking performers' improvised remarks at face value, with some following instructions to scour a specific location for clues only to later discover that it all had been an elaborate jape. This kind of thing might be funny over the course of a few minutes, but any regular theme park-goer will know that the prospect of wasting hours of time searching for a non-existent McGuffin as part of one’s paid experience would be more than a tad frustrating.
Despite the fact that Jenny Nicholson researched Evermore relentlessly and found middling reviews of many of its attractions and systems, she was also enticed by the claim from many of the parkgoers that the place clearly had potential, so long as it worked out its hiccups. This is part of the reason that Jenny’s video is so endearing and compelling: it is not solely a takedown of a place she reviles but an exploration of a park that she genuinely wants to love. No matter how many clues might lead the average person to believe that Evermore might not be worth the cost of a flight, hotel stay, and admission tickets, Jenny holds out hope that Evermore’s potential will eventually provide a glimmer of fantasy magic worth experiencing. Though her optimism seems undefeatable, the reality of Evermore is so unendingly disappointing that eventually Jenny’s hopes are thoroughly dashed.
The Tragic Kingdom
Jenny’s video consistently uses vlog-style presentation as its backbone, but things become a bit more like a traditional documentary once Jenny and her friends set foot in Evermore themselves- or at least, attempt to. The first of many concerns, a moment of foreshadowing suggesting the depth of the park’s mismanagement, is that the ticket booth operators have no way of correctly reading or processing the tickets that Jenny purchased online. There is a mild dispute about whether she purchased train tickets, park admission tickets for multiple days, or if she will have to pay for everything a second time. This would be enough to break a normal family on vacation, but Jenny remains steadfast in her hope for a magical time.
Once inside the park, the group of optimistic pals is shocked by the sheer number of unfinished attractions, closed shops, and pockets of exposed wiring on display. Earlier vloggers had presented a fuller, more vibrant experience in their videos, but the incarnation of Evermore that Jenny and her friends experience is something of a lackluster medieval ghost town. Even Jenny’s attempts to enter a gift shop and purchase a t-shirt are met with needlessly circuitous and confusing misinformation. The only park workers that anyone can find are back at the ticket counter, and those employees assure Jenny that the gift shopisin fact, open, leading her to feel dumb, like she just must have tried the wrong door. But no, back at the gift shop, the place is indeed fully and inexplicably locked. Even though Evermore seems to be in desperate need of cash, the park is too dysfunctional to allow Jenny to purchase souvenirs.
There is a multitude of other problems that Jenny and her weary band of travelers experience, from an immersion-breaking SUV parked in front of aHobbithouse to a tavern that smells like a troll’s hindquarters, the former belonging to the park’s creator, Ken Bretschneider, and the latter being one of the park’s most popular attractions (though likely not because of the odor). Jenny finds that structures and creatures featured prominently on the park’s website or in promotional materials are missing, half-built, or already retired. Jenny’s trip suggests that even the flawed and half-finished version of Evermore that early vloggers experienced was better than this. The atmosphere and artistry on display in certain locations are impressive indicators of what might have been, but the overall depiction of Evermore is a neglected space in a state of disrepair.
Jenny tries to lift her spirits with alcohol, which works momentarily, making the park seem more vibrant albeit blurry, but the overall trip leaves her with a bit of a vacation hangover. Not one to let things go so easily, Jenny reaches out to former employees to get their tales about Evermore, some of which allege that the park gave performers with dangerous equipment. One mythical beast costume failed so badly that it allegedly resulted in a performer badly injuring their leg. Another cast member did interviews in which she claimed to have burned herself multiple times due to the unsafe manner in which magic-using characters were expected to practically shoot flames from their fingers, sometimes toward the faces of other performers, a shocking bit that Jenny shows via footage from her research. Less dangerous but still annoyingly capitalistic is the allegation that Evermore’s management team repeatedly rebranded unpaid physical labor as classes for employees and fans, meaning people would “volunteer” for a class that taught them how to pull up weeds on the park’s premises.
Kindling Hope Forever
Even after experiencing the many disappointments of Evermore, Jenny Nicholson remains steadfast that it may be possible to create a better, more functional version of the park. She lists off a number of ways to improve the park, including a name change to help potential park-goers dodge the fact that many of Evermore’s Google results point to the fact that the park unsuccessfully sued singerTaylor Swiftfor her use of the non-word “Evermore.” As her nearly four-hour video concludes, the formerly sanguine Jenny seems to grow a bit frustrated and cynical with the whole affair (even if she is still delightfully dressed in a cosplay reminiscent of Melisandre fromGame of Thrones). Her list of suggestions contains so many obvious decisions that it is further frustrating that Evermore will likely ignore them all. Our stalwart heroine bravely fought to find joy in Evermore, but the end result seems to be a big let-down. Thankfully, the epic-length video that Jenny Nicholson provided is an uplifting and hilarious success. Even if Evermore never quite managed to produce any magic, Jenny Nicholson clearly has the power to conjure up her own.
