She liked the fun, the excitement, the promise of adventure, the hokey glamour, and everything else about the giant playground, including how its creator, Walt Disney, had designed it deliberately so that parents could enjoy the rides and attractions alongside their children. It was even cool, she thought, the way "lands" that couldn't possibly exist side by side anywhere else in the world peacefully, in implausibly, coexisted here, a locomotive-drawn train of the 19th century beside a flying elephant next to a spaceship adjacent to a cow whose natural markings resembles the silhouette of the world's most famous cartoon mouse.
Most of all, though, she loved Main Street, USA. Although nothing more, really, than the main promenade that lead from the main gate into the interior of the theme park, admitting those who preferred to walk instead of ride one of the many people movers, and a façade for various specialty shops and stores, most of which sold Disney merchandise of one kind or another, Main Street nevertheless seemed a perfect example of the ideal American small town-or, at least, of the main street of such a town. To Buffy's way of thinking, it represented what Sunnydale should have been and what all American small towns should be. Orderly, beautiful, dignified, neat, clean, and tidy, it offered the appearance of peace and tranquility, the image of normalcy, the look of the ordinary that Buffy had longed for in her own life but had never had. Main Street, USA, represented the world as it should be, the Slayer thought. By contrast, Sunnydale had represented everything that the world should not be. Like the tombs to which Jesus referred, Sunnydale was outwardly beautiful, but, inwardly, it was fill of dead men's bones and all manner of decay. The only problem was that Sunnydale was real-or had been, before it had been destroyed-and Main Street, USA, like Disneyland itself, was just pretend. What did it say about the world, she wondered, when a fantasyland was preferable to reality?
