#cw ableism
Me: I’m chronically ill which makes me disabled. I managed to adjust my life so I can live as comfortably as possible, which means I don’t work, being poor, and not doing much. Sometimes I have to sleep all day, sometimes I go on hikes with my dog, sometimes I exist, sometimes I want to kill myself. That’s my life and I’m okay with it.
Ppl: BbUuuTTt — ThAt soUndS dEpreSSinNngG!
Ppl: buTtT — I COulDn'TttT lIvE liKe thIsS!
Ppl: BbuUUTtTtT — iSn’T tHEre ANyThiNg THaT caNn bE DoNe tO chAnGe YOur depREssIng stAte?
Ppl: bUuuUtT — LivE iS abOUt LIVING, NOT EXISTING!
Ppl: buTT — hOw cAn yOu LIvee LikE tHat?
Ppl: buTttTTTTT — DoNt be So neGaTiVe, if IT wAsS mE, I WouLd bE mORe HopEFuLl, That thEre WiLL Be a CuRe, AND My dePreSsIng LIfesTyLe WoUlD eNd.
Ppl: BUttT — YOure SUCH AN INSPIRATION!!! I wOuLdvE kIlleD MYsElf By NoW!
Ppl: BbUuutTtTTtTTttTTTtttTtFFTFTGdvdbdjaoownKGgafcwvsvezzeezhdhcbjdakwjcvgcudwkmqnbsgdhchnsbevahauJJKKKiHGFFFdDEGhJanBabakaksm
Me: Well, at this point we should think about who is the really negative person in this conversation.
Ppl:
Ppl:
Ppl:
Ppl: Yeah, no, you’re negative, saying you’re disabled is negative, disability is okay in and of itself, but don’t call yourself disabled, because that’s so negative, not having goals and not accomplishing anything in life is a wasted life, contributing to society is important, you’re so poor for not seeing how you’re wasting your life, you should really try to change something, although I admire you, because I would have killed myself by now, just saying.
Also people with reading comprehension issues saying they can’t just sit down and read theory and need other sources like videos/audiobooks/etc isn’t fucking childish. Indicating that we’re lazy for not wanting to struggle our way through hell like we did when we were students is ableist as fuck. Just because systems built by conservatives fail to include us doesn’t mean you get to as well.
The world is geared towards non-disabled people and if you can’t understand that your leftism is shallow and garbage.
people act like I’m asking like some immense favor of them when I say this…. but people who experience dereality would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t make “reality altering” jokes/jokes where the punchline veers into a commonly held delusion
on a similar note,
I’ve been noticing a trend of people really being strange/ableist about conspiracy theories and I will come out and say it straight up: the mad community has had a large part in conspiracy theory rhetoric, (given that all a conspiracy is, is information to be suppressed, controlled, and manipulated) doesn’t it make sense that the crux of it lies in the malleability of the individual in question’s factor of “craziness” ie, “can we write off your dissent to psychosis?” and to write off all conspiracy as nonsense is violent
People will reinvent eugenics in a #woke way sooner or later. The idea that people should not be attracted to the disabled because it’s fetishizing the power you have over them, the idea that dating someone short is at all comparable to pedophilia, the idea that no one outside of your own race can ever truly understand your experiences and therefore no one outside of your own race could ever truly love you… like, we’re not there yet, but every so often I’ll see a truly rancid take and think “Now why does that sound familiar?”
oh don’t worry they’ve been doing this for years
Yeah all of that is full on shit that I have seen already, it’s not coming it’s HERE.
See also:
- ‘protecting’ people with learning disabilities from the world of sex and relationships because they 'can’t consent’ (a new run of an old idea)
- developing 'new testing options’ that aim to essentially eradicate Down’s Syndrome/Trisomy
- arguing that it’s better for LGBTQIA people to adopt than to have kids with their genes (running roughshod over #adopteevoices).
- viewing disabilities as a problem that would be solved in an ideal society
- focusing on preventing poor people from having kids instead of actually fixing the poverty
- propagating the idea that 'capacity’ is somehow a reliable measure of a person’s right to be involved in their healthcare
- anything and everything to do with global health inequality
au idea I’ve been rotating in my brain lately: cryptid runaway batman
so this starts with me thinking: “if Bruce had started out getting information from the POV of people facing violence and poverty in Gotham instead of exclusively the police and TV news I bet he could have figured out the Renewal conspiracy long before The Riddler.”
so then I go: “what dominoes would need to fall to make that happen?”
and we get cryptid runaway batman
the first thing we need is some evil relatives. For this purpose I have invented Samantha and Rich Arkham, Martha’s younger sister and her husband. Martha and Thomas leave custody of their beloved son to their closest friend, Alfred Pennyworth. Samantha Arkham objects. There’s a protracted legal battle that ends with her and her husband taking custody of Bruce and taking up residence in the tower.
next we need Bruce’s neurodivergence and self-destructive tendencies to become public knowledge. In canon, he avoids this by (1) isolating like a champ, (2) having Alfred there to cover for him, (3) following the advice drilled into him by his mother who had been so traumatized by her experience with institutionalization that she would never let her son be evaluated by a psychiatrist. In the absence of Alfred and surrounded by normal, upper crust relatives that expect complete conformity, this is all going to break down.
next we need Alfred out of the picture. He’s not dead, don’t worry. He’s arrested for child abduction after he tries to get Bruce out of the country. That’s a felony and he’s a green-card holder, so that allows the US Government (with some encouragement from the Arkhams) to have him deported back to the UK.
then all we need is something to give Samantha and Rich Arkham control of the family fortune and Bruce’s life indefinitely, even after Bruce would have come of age. A conservatorship does the trick neatly. Clearly Bruce needs responsible, capable adults to take care of the company, to ensure he gets the psychiatric help and medication he need. A judge puts them in charge of his life, his money, and his mind.
and
bruce
runs
and here is the thing. all psych wards are bad. every single one. I don’t think there is such a thing as a good psych ward—I’m willing to believe that there are some good people who work in psych wards, who have good intentions, and who might end up helping some people. but the psych ward as a whole? There are no good psych wards. The structure of a psych ward inherently prevents it from being good. Even if you personally think you had a good experience in a psych ward, most likely what that means is that the abusive practices weren’t used on you. But those things are still there. even if you weren’t put into solitary confinement, it is extremely likely that your psych ward still had a room for that. even if you weren’t drugged without your consent, it is very likely other people were being drugged without consent!! even if you weren’t strip searched, or tied to your bed, or starved…it is VERY likely that your psych ward has protocols for all these things and regularly does them to many people who come through the ward! And it is vital to think about how your race, class, and other identities affected your experience before making broad claims about things “never happening” in psych wards.
Psych wards are inherently violent, oppressive, and unethical based solely on the fact that they are a form of incarceration, but even beyond that? If a psych ward is committed to enforcing compliance and incarceration, it is going to have some of those abusive measures that I listed above, and that is going to be standard protocol. Even if there are good people working in a psych ward, their reach is going to be limited—the power of the institution means that they constantly have to weigh the decision to break the rules and help someone, or to follow violent protocols. Most clinicians and staff will choose not to lose their job and even if they find it personally distasteful, will still choose to enable these types of violence. Good people on the inside are not able to fundamentally change the reality of what psych wards are and what they can do.
I strongly believe that people who say they have good experiences are the outlier and also are likely to be white and rich. Even if people don’t think that their experience was abusive, a lot of people generally find it boring, unhelpful, and mediocre. And so, so many people are experiencing abuse in a daily fucking basis in these places. Even if there are individuals who manage to escape the worst of a psych ward, the fact that the psych ward has the power, structure, and protocol to do these things to anyone is a problem.
And adding on: if you’re a good person in this job you’re going to quit. otherwise you’re someone who at a certain point has decided that perpetrating this type of violence is an acceptable tradeoff for the help that you manage to do, and every good person that I’ve known who’s worked in psych wards has gotten horribly burnt out because the mental cost of constantly making those justifications is not sustainable. I’m in a whole discord server full of abolitionist therapists and social workers who left the job and are working to undo harms they’ve caused and work towards alternative methods of care, which is how I know that there are some good people who originally end up in these places. But good clinicians don’t stay.
I keep my streams about Wolf Bride light-hearted. It’s been a hell of a year, and I think we all need a space where we can laugh together. But part of responsibly consuming problematic media is being aware of where it fails. And that’s why I think it’s important to talk about Morgan, and Wolf Bride’s troubling depiction of blindness.
Morgan is one of the first Love Interests in Choices to have a canon disability. She is representation many players with disabilities, like myself, are eager for. But like any form of representation, writing a blind character requires research. A quick google search will lead you to numerousvisuallyimpairedvoices who outline the tropes and stereotypes that harm their community. Wolf Bride has included nearly all of them.
signal boosts are appreciated
Not All Blind People Wear Sunglasses
Morgan is shown wearing dark sunglasses from the moment she appears on screen. And there are certainly blind people who wear sunglasses — particularly those who (unlike Morgan) can still perceive some degree of light and dark, and experience painful light sensitivity. But no context is ever giving for Morgan’s use of sunglasses. In fact, they aren’t even addressed for four chapters.
[ID: Two screenshots from Chapter Four of Wolf Bride. The first features a text box over a forest background, and reads “You glance at Morgan, and are surprised to see the dark glasses still covering her eyes.” The second features a labeled image of her sunglasses, placed over a black background, with a selectable button that reads “What does Morgan look like without these?”]
What follows is a scene Pixelberry could have used to provide insight into an assistive device the sighted community may not be entirely familiar with. They could have touched on degrees of visual impairment, or why some blind individuals need dark lenses while others don’t. They could even have explained that for some individuals with visual impairments, dark lenses make tasks like reading or navigating dimly lit spaces harder.
Instead, and far more troublingly, MC is given the option to ask Morgan not to wear them anymore. And depending on your choice, the book is coded to remove the sunglasses from her sprite in future scenes. This reduces an assistive device to a fashion choice, something our MC can wish away if they don’t find it attractive. And that isn’t okay.
Unusual Eyes
[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Four of Wolf Bride. The first features a text box placed over a forest background that reads “With a start, you realize her pale eyes aren’t looking at you, aren’t seeingyou, aren’t seeing anything.” The second features Morgan’s sad sprite in the same forest setting, and a text box that reads “…I’ve been blind since birth.”]
Morgan has a customizable sprite. But regardless of the ethnicity you select for her, she is depicted with pale blue eyes. And that troubles me. Because the stereotype that all blind individuals have cloudy, distorted, or unusual eyes is pervasive and harmful.
Even when it isn’t tied to another harmful trope — the blind character as mystical seer or psychic — this stereotype create an expectation that blindness is something that always manifests in a visible way. And for millions of blind individuals, that isn’t the case.
And while cataracts, trauma to the eye, and corneal infections can all cause the clouded effect most of us recognize from media, none turn your brown eyes into blue.
Heightened Senses
Another common stereotype in media is the blind character who’s remaining senses have become heightened as a compensatory mechanism, often to a supernatural degree.
[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Four of Wolf Bride. The first features Morgan’s surprised sprite in a forest setting and a text box that reads “I guess I sort of…feel things. Like the place on my cheek where the branch blocked the wind.” The second features Morgan’s neutral sprite in the same forest setting, and a text box that reads “I can smell the dew on the leaves, and the moss on the bark. Can’t you?]
Individuals with visual impairment may learn to rely on their other senses to navigate the world around them. But they do not suddenly gain the ability to sense the location of a branch based on wind patterns, or to accurately throw a dart at a carnival game ballon based on its smell.
[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Eight of Wolf Bride. The first features a text box placed over a carnival background that reads “Pop! Pop! Pop! Three darts fly through the air, striking their targets.” The second features the white MC with straight blonde hair. Her sprite is surprised, and beneath it is a text box that reads “So you did that by smell, too?]
This trope may seem harmless — after all, it gave us Daredevil, a beloved blind superhero — but it contributes to the unachievable expectations we often place on real-world individuals with visually impairments. And that isn’t fair.
Of course, we all suspected Morgan’s abilities were due to something other than heightened senses. And that in and of itself is a problem.
Magical / Supernatural Abilities
To the surprise of no one, Morgan exhibits these unusual abilities because she is a werewolf. But choosing to give a blind character magical abilities should only be done after asking yourself some challenging questions. As visually-impaired Tumblr user @mimzy-writing-online explains:
Your blind characters don’t need a magical ability that negates their blindness. [Ask yourself why it’s so important to you to give them one]. If it’s because they can’t do all the things you want them to do without it, then should you really have written them as blind in the first place?
And that’s the thing. Morgan isn’t actually written as a blind character, not when it counts. Morgan shoots bullets with accuracy, runs through unfamiliar terrain, and navigates moving objects with ease. She doesn’t use common assistive devices like canes or screen readers. Her sunglasses are discarded at MC’s request. The scientific papers that fill her research facility are not digitized for accessibility or written in braille.
Even her dreams, which should be reflections of how she perceives reality, look identical to Bastien’s — which makes no sense for someone who has been canonically blind since birth.
[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapters Five and Eight of Wolf Bride. The first features a scene from Morgan’s lucid dream. Set in a glamorous hotel, it includes visual details like twinkling lights, and patterned carpets. The color is tinted a grey-blue and the exposure on the image has been increased to an unnatural level. The second features a scene from Bastien’s lucid dream. Set in a forest, it shares the same tinted and over-exposed qualities as the first.]
Her blindness isn’t an integral part of her character. Instead, it’s a narrative device, paraded in front of the reader when it can further a central — and deeply disturbing — plot point. [content warning: discussion of discrimination and child abuse / abandonment ahead]
Morgan Was Left to Die Because She Was Blind
And Jesus, what a plot point it is. In Chapter 11, we learn that Morgan was left to die in the woods because she was born “wrong, sickly, blind.” But the only canonical disability or illness she is evershown to have is her blindness.
[ID: Three side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Eleven of Wolf Bride. The first two feature the white MC with straight blonde hair’s shocked sprite in front of a forest background. The first text box reads “I don’t understand…” followed by two dialogue options “Why was Morgan abandoned?” and “Is that what you do to full moon babies? Kill them?” The second panel’s read box reads “Just because she was blind?” The third panel features the old woman Noemi’s sad sprite, placed over a forest background. Her text box reads “If we know an infant will not survive, it is best to let it die quickly.”]
I…am frankly having a hard time thinking through the screenshot-induced fury to make a coherent argument here. To imply that blindness is an impairment so limiting that death is the only foreseeable outcome? That being born blind somehow makes a child “wrong”? The ignorance and prejudice shown in this scene is staggering.
But equally troubling is the response of the main characters to this revelation. Yes, in fiction, bad people sometimes do bad things. But Noemi isn’t shown to be a bad person. Neither is Bastien, who knew what his pack had been guilty of in the past, and even seeks to justify it to a limited degree.
Most shockingly, Morgan herself, who in the second screenshot below has just overheard that she was left to die as an infant because she is blind, isn’t angry or upset. She’s almost apologetic, still seeking a place within the pack.
[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Eleven of Wolf Bride. The first features Hispanic Bastien’s sad sprite in front of a forest background. The text box beneath him reads “It doesn’t happen often, Clara, but…” The second features white Morgan’s sad sprite in front of the same forest background. The text box beneath her reads “I didn’t mean any harm. Especially after…what I just overheard.”]
By introducing the idea that a child born blind cannot survive, let alone thrive, without superhuman abilities, and then failing to soundly and thoroughly refute that idea through the characters we identify with, Pixelberry is unintentionally perpetuating the same false beliefs that have led to real-world instances of infanticide for centuries. And that isn’t okay.
I don’t know where Pixelberry will go with the story from here. Perhaps in today’s chapter some of these concerns have been addressed…but I doubt it. In the meantime, I’ve also written to their support staff to express my deep concern and disappointment in the treatment of Morgan’s character. And I’d encourage you to do the same.
Will I continue to keep streaming Wolf Bride? For now, yes. My VIP subscription is already paid for, and frankly, I want to see Morgan’s arc through. I guess the small part of me that was excited for the representation is still hopeful the narrative can be corrected.
But I’ll be adding a content warning at the start of each stream for ablism, and that’s something I never thought I’d have to do.
Screenshots courtesy of CrimsonFeatherGames on Youtube
Reblogging for the important point that the term “activity” may mean something very different and much broader for a disabled person with a chronic pain or fatigue related condition compared to its meaning for a non disabled person. If you’re tired enough, simply sitting up in a chair rather than lying in bed is an activity that drains energy otherwise usable for other things. A thing I knew from other people with pain and fatigue related conditions, but worth reinforcing for followers who didnt know or had forgotten.People love to talk about whether or not disabled people can work
but if you can work just fine and your disability is destroying your ability to have a life outside of work (because work takes all your energy and more)
Dead silence. Nobody cares.
File this under, oh you can be active for 4 hours? You can work part-time. Um no, I have to get ready for work (30 min) get to work (15 min) get home from work (15 min) feed myself all day (30 min) maintain myself, my home and my life (15 min, yeah right), which leaves 15 min for work and absolutely nothing else.
This is so accurate, back after I’d relapsed I wanted to try and go in for one class at school so I could still stay in contact with the education system. I let slip during a meeting that I managed to drag myself to that I could manage about 4 hours of activity a week, which the teacher sprang on to mean I was being lazy for just trying to get to 1 hour class. Never matter that it was 30 minutes travel, that I would have to get washed and dressed, that I would probably still need to recover for 3 days from it.
Far too often abled people see the things they do easily as “non activities”, they don’t realise that for many disabled people these things have to be carefully planned and measured, and sometimes they simply can’t be done.
reblog bc the non activities thing seems really important words
I get X number of pain-free steps per day right now, which means that, for large conventions (like SDCC), I need to be in a mobility device. I had someone ask if I used up my steps every day before transferring to the scooter, and look surprised and a little horrified when I said “no, I save them so I can go to the bathroom unassisted.” Like, they had never considered that walking is involved in peeing.
!
Let me add that what activities I can do as a person with multiple disabilities varies by day. I’ve had days where it was a major success to be able to get out of bed, put a nightgown on, use the bathroom, get a drink, take meds, and get back in bed.
I’ve had days where I’m in bed with a laptop or other electronic device in order to communicate with the rest of my household (well, and the internet), because I simply hurt too much to sit up in my chair, or am simply too exhausted. I’ve spent a week taking sponge baths because I both hurt too much and was too exhausted to take a bath (fibro skin sensitivity has been too high for showers).
Yet, in the same span of weeks I’ve had good days where I was out running errands most of it, spending time with family, doing things that needed to get done – but damned if I can tell anyone in advance what I’m up for because I don’t know until that actual day.
Very much this. Can I work more than my usual part-time hours per day? Yes, sometimes, but only if I neglect practically every other aspect of my life and usually I’d need to spend a large part of the next day recovering too. Sometimes longer since things vary. During a bad period of health where I can actually manage to keep working, which is not always possible, every day can end up like that where there’s only the ability to push myself to work to keep a roof over my head and little else feasible.
And there are many things I would love to do in my free time that are possible some of the time for me but have such a high cost. Generally I don’t do those things since they would affect my ability to work significantly so I don’t get the same choices abled people do even if I’m lucky enough to have energy leftover after work or at the weekend.
Back when I was jobseeking on Universal Credit - and waiting for them to assess my health, that took them 15 months to do - the jobcentre made me pick an arbitrary number of hours I could work, despite my condition being variable. And that was with the restriction provided by a note from my GP of those hours being specifically working from home.
But of course, despite the note, the jobcentre thought that meant I could also do those hours for a job working outside my home too. They could not understand that when not remote working, the commute - combined with the necessity to get dressed/showered/ready also taking up energy - would eat into my active time per day and so meant actually much less hours were possible while pacing well like I need. To the point where it wouldn’t even be worth it to commute unless I forced myself to work more hours than was sensible, to be a ‘reasonable length’ shift for the employer, and simply accepted being broken for the next several days after. I had to apply for jobs where I’d need to do working patterns that would regularly break me just to appease them. And that would be before accounting for how my UV sensitivity (with sunlight and office fluorescent lights) causes flare ups/migraines or the fact working with other people exposes my somewhat immunosuppressed self to catch more colds/flu and so have more sick days which doesn’t go down well with an employer. Luckily, I’m now self-employed remote working, which isn’t very stable income-wise, plus no pension or sick days either, but that’s the only way I could really work, having the ability to mostly decide when/how much.
You’d think abled people could understand what it’s like to be off sick at least temporarily with something like the flu, how everything is so much harder when ill like that. But based on how many people force themselves to work through that kinda thing maybe I shouldn’t be surprised most don’t get it at all. Maybe they can’t imagine a situation where you can’t just dose yourself up on some meds and push harder when required.
It doesn’t seem like abled people are so good with uncertainty either. I can carefully plan things in the hope of what I will be able to do, but I always know I don’t in actual fact have much control over whether the plan is still possible on the day. Which won’t be my fault if so, just how it is. You kinda have to be a lot more chill to deal with plans regularly going off the rails when chronically ill. But too often if you tell abled people you can’t do something, or might not be able to/will have to see, they’ll say some crap like ‘don’t let yourself be limited’ implying it’s a matter of willpower rather than practicality.
Or ask if it’s ‘really’ impossible by which they mean ‘can you literally do it’ without caring what the consequence is for doing it, like being basically non-functional afterwards. I imagine most abled peoplecould run a marathon if they tried, but they wouldn’t want to do it every day and it wouldn’t be without its consequences.
