It’s Totally Fine For Epic To Lock A Fortnite Skin Behind A Trip To Disneyland

But those folks who did feel the need to chime in on this were not happy about it. Tweets about the news were met with replies complaining about how expensive and annoying it would be to get. Amusingly, most of the complaint-filled Reddit threads about Forsworn Trooper were downvoted enough that few of them were able to gain traction for very long. Either they buried their own outrage, or the rest of the community didn’t find the discussion very entertaining.

But these complaints are, by and large, a great example of what I like to call “hypothetical outrage.” This phenomenon occurs when people get mad in an abstract way about things that don’t actually affect them or otherwise matter in any meaningful way.

The first time I used that term–”hypothetical outrage”–it was to describe an incident that occurred when I was sitting at a bar, more than a decade ago, talking with a friend about the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones. That episode had just aired the previous week, and somebody sitting nearby complained we were talking about spoilers. But it turned out the guy had both read George R.R. Martin’s books and seen the episode already, so we were not spoiling anything for him. He was just objecting because he thought talking in public about what happened on a popular TV show this week was some kind of faux pas. He was mad about the idea of our conversation, as if we were breaking one of the laws of a polite society, rather than its actual impact on anyone around us.

The reaction to Forsworn Trooper is a similar thing. Here, the bit is that this new skin’s appeal is based entirely on the difficulty required in unlocking him, rather than his actual merits, and so those discussions weren’t really about the skin. 

Instead, those folks were largely just expressing their frustration that there could be any Fortnite skin they might not be able to have, and that there’s an obstacle preventing the number of Fortnite skins they own from going up. Forsworn Trooper himself is just an afterthought, because nobody has any existing attachment to him, and nobody’s genuinely missing out on anything by not having this guy in their Fortnite locker. He would almost certainly sell very poorly if they just dropped him in the item shop. 

Because of that, it actually makes it a perfect skin to lock behind a trip to Disneyland, because it doesn’t inherently appeal to anyone–nobody’s gonna quit playing Fortnite over the Forsworn Trooper skin. Instead, the value is all meta. He’s cool, in Fortnite terms, because he’s rare and takes meaningful effort to get. And he’s cool, in Disney terms, as a unique souvenir from your family vacation to Disneyland, because you wouldn’t have been able to get him by staying home. 

Now, if the folks at Epic and Disney try locking a new Luke Skywalker skin behind an expensive visit to a theme park next, we’ll have a very different discussion about all this. But all they’ve done here is take a skin very few people would have wanted and found a way to give it value.