| In the cultural industry,theme park IP is an important mediated product of the intertwined fields of cultural tourism and cultural creation,and is collaboratively symbolically disseminated by audiences through the increasingly prosperous social media and communities.This paper introduces the symbolic concept of theme park IP to analyze the construction,dissemination and derivation levels of a new theme park IP.Based on the framework of fantasy-thematic analysis(FTA)in symbolic aggregation theory,this paper takes Disney’s phenomenal theme park IP Lina Bell as a study case,and analyzes the content by screening 95 related to Lina Bell on the official account of Disney in Weibo social platform,and mining 80,000 comments on trending topics in 35 trending topics related to Lina Bell on the Weibo platform.At the same time,in-depth interviews with fans of Lina Bell were added to research perspective.This will help further explore the communication logic and core value behind the theme park IP,sort out the reference value of its development model,solve the endogenous hidden problems and explore the forward-looking direction for the development of China’s local theme park IP.Since its birth,the Lina Bell has generated a lot of attention and discussion,and has become a successful theme park IP marketing example in Disney with no backstory support with its high exposure and commercial realization value.Disney fuses symbolic "Signifier" and "Signified",and constructs the Lina Bell symbols with relevance,representation,personalization,humanization and openness from the two dimensions of linguistic and pictorial symbols,thus establishing the symbols’ identifiability and three-dimensionality to gain followers.The social platform Weibo provides an online public discussion space for the majority of Lina Bell lovers,forming an interest community centered on Lina Bell,where members of the community are able to transmit Lina Bell symbols by combining Internet thinking.Through their thoughts and ideas,individual members share the woven story chain,aggregating into six fantasy themes("mimetic parent-child relationship","remote presence friendship","fashionable styling story",and "celebrity cultural tableau","interpersonal social currency" and "self-gaze mirror")and then condensed the fantasy themes above into three basic fantasy types.In this process,the group identifies with the symbolic connotation and values of Lina Bell,and produces new stories of Lina Bell collaboratively to spread symbols widely in social networks through emotional energy exchange,collective memory generation,and group carnival interpretation.The media platform connects the whole process from production to consumption of Lina Bell,witnessing the gradual derivation of humanistic emotional value and commercial economic value of the theme park IP symbols.Based on the in-depth exploration of group communication,from the perspective of symbolic aesthetics,symbolic concept and symbolic culture,the humanistic emotional value can be extracted through the macro rhetorical vision presented by the rhetorical community.The economic and commercial values can be extracted from the symbolic consumption landscape of the audience,and the "inverted pyramid" model of sustainable symbolic development can be explored in the escalation and hidden worries of symbolic consumption.Finally,in view of the current situation and problems in China’s local theme park IPs,such as the lack of aesthetic representation,confined connotation and collective loss of audience voice.Combined with the analysis of Lina Bell,this paper would provide suggestion in aspects of symbolic construction,symbolic dissemination and symbolic derivation to expect improvements for local theme park IPs in the future. |
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