Anyone got any suggestions for a lighthearted movie where Disabled people aren’t props? Does this even exist is this wishful thinking on my part. Cause I’m so sick of seeing people like me be nothing more then plot points ways to move a story a long. I was watching Work It the other day and I was really looking forward to it cause Sabrina Carpenter but that’s besides the point and the thing is I was really enjoying it spoilers if you haven’t seen it until the scene where these two men are dancing and they’re both using forearm crutches and in the shot you see someone’s wheelchair. And this heavy weight just settled in my chest cause I knew these three actors where just here to fill a quota. And I knew the dancers weren’t here because it’s a fun dance movie and there showing of all kinds of dance they were their to inspire the love interest you could see it in his face the message was clear if these disabled people can dance I can dance with a screwed up knee. And I’m honestly so sick of disability being nothing more than a plot point for lazying writing and I know it’s a lot to ask cause the rest of the world hasn’t caught up but me and every other disabled person is a whole and complete person and are stories are worth telling too.
So I’m currently watching Crip Camp and the only thing I can think of is why the fuck aren’t what these people did being taught in schools. We learn all about the fight for gender and racial equality and I literally had one teacher say that they do this so kids to today can remember and look up to the people who fought for their rights. What about the people who fought for my rights? The history books only ever cover the ADA signing they show the picture sitting with two disabled individuals signing the bill. And they act like their was no fight to get that I honestly thought the protesting was so minimal that their was no need to cover it cause it wasn’t a huge fight like the fight for racial equality. I didn’t know that there were marches and people going hunger strikes so and other disabled people can access the world. So thank you to the people that fought so I could live thank you.
When abled people write about us, they imagine how THEY would feel if they lost the ability to do the things they love. They write us hating our adaptive equipment and our disabled lives and bodies and desperately dreaming of being like them. Because if they suddenly became us, all they would want is their old lives and selves back. They don’t know how to write us as whole people exactly how we are. They can’t imagine us feeling pride or love for ourselves or for the things that help us live (mobility aids, sensory equipment, speech aids etc). They write us, but they don’t tell our stories. They tell their stories in our bodies.
Lauren Potter attends the 2015 Media Access Awards at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on October 22, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (X)
Lauren attends the 2015 Media Access Awards, an annual event honoring people in the film and television industries who have advanced the portrayals and employment of people with disabilities. Lauren talks about Glee,Guest Room, what she would say to anyone who wants to be in the entertainment industry and her plans on dressing up for Halloween this year.
Oh you know just being incredibly good looking and stuff In all seriousness though I’m so proud to be apart of Target Australia’s push for greater diversity and the inclusion of people living with disabilities in mainstream advertising. Also very honoured to be the first disabled model (other than child models) to feature in a nationwide advertising campaign for a major retail brand in Australia!
Representation matters folks, it’s all a step forward in normalising disability and breaking out of stereotypes.
Do you know what children’s show was great at handling disabilities?
I mean, really, really, great!
Followers: *Unanimously sigh* Avatar?
No, no! Well, yes. But I talk about Avatar all the time! Tonight, I want to focus on another show that was amazing in every sense of the word. A show that was downright hilarious but also had some really deep moments that came out of nowhere and felt like a punch to the stomach. A show about a bunch of abandoned kids who were taken into a foster home. Only these kids were imaginary!
For some reason, I’ve been having a lot of feels about Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends. I used to love the show when I was younger. My dad, brother, and I would watch it all the time. I used to have a few shirts and everything. In fact, I don’t care that I’m almost twenty one and a junior in college. I might see if I can find a FHFIF shirt online.
But anyway, FHFIF was great. Talk about a diverse set of characters!
And actually, now that I think back to it, a lot of the characters had disabilities, whether implied or stated outright.
Think about it!
Coco technically has a speech impediment. And it’s pointed out continuously throughout the show, though the friends always understand her and never treat her differently for it. (Unless there’s a pun needed about what to drink!)
Goo was implied to have ADHD. (And was it me, or did anyone else see her as being on the spectrum as well). And the show really got creative. They showed that because of her disability, she frequently imagines new friends. This starts off as being annoying at first but the show does what it was great at and punches us with a fistful of feels as Mac finally snaps at her. Goo starts crying and reveals that one of the reasons why she makes so many friends isn’t just because she can’t focus; it’s because she doesn’t have any real friends. Mac genuinely apologizes and the two maintain a friendship throughout the entire show.
Cheese…Dear Lord and any other higher entity that exists in this infinate universe, I loved Cheese! He was my favorite character in the show and is easily on the list of my top ten characters of all time. Cheese was hilarious! He stole every single scene that he was in. And it was very obvious that he had an intellectual disability but to be honest, I never found a single joke offensive. And looking back, I still don’t! Maybe I’m just biased because the show is so nostalgic to me, but even as a kid, I was very passionate about characters with disabilities and I still loved Cheese. My brother, dad, and I still quote Cheese. In fact, if I do get a shirt, it’ll probably have Cheese on it.
And finally, there’s Wilt - the character with the obvious disability. For those who don’t know, Wilt was injured in a basketball game and ended up having one eye and an amputated arm. And the best part was that they tackled his disability in his very first scene in the movie. Mac and Bloo are staring at him in awe and Wilt becomes self-conscious but cheerfully and politely agrees that they probably don’t want a tour guide with his disabilities. Their response is to amazedly whisper that he’s tall - that was the only thing that they were focused on. Wilt immediately smiles and from that moment on, the three are good friends.
I can go on and on because I’m sure that there are others. Unfortunately, I’m really sick and don’t feel like typing anymore. But anyway, the point of this post was to say that Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends was awesome, especially when it came to disability representation!
I’m thinking of this, specifically, in regards to what I’ve noticed about Disability Representation (But is it also true for other marginalized groups to which I don’t belong?).
It seems to be that real-life experiences with a wide variety of people, no matter how many experiences we have, don’t get recognized, and filtered into the Knowledge Bank as “real” until afterthey’ve been reinterpreted in stories, and reflected back to us.
Normate people may know, from experience, that Grandma who uses a walker, and Uncle can no longer see, and Cousin who’s on the spectrum, are full people whose lives are more than pity porn fodder. But until they see Disabled people given full lives in stories, they’ll still think of Disabled strangers they meet as poor unfortunate souls.
And / Or: They’ll insist that Grandma, Uncle, and Cousin “Aren’t really Disabled,” precisely becausethey’re not suffering.
“Disabled” isn’t a derogatory term, you can use it!
Disability is not inherently bad so there’s absolutely no reason for filling your fics with “challenged”, “despite their limits”, “special needs”, etc. Use the “D” word.
Be the writer the disabled community wants you to be!
If the show is misrepresenting the disabled character, be the hero and do right in fiction. Try to educate yourself, use the right vocabulary, remember how inclusive it felt to be into fandom? Well now make it moreinclusive.
Break the rules!
If the show is erasing your character’s disability, do better! Not only you should not erase it, you should go big and represent it twice as double.
Cyborg discourse is cool but also dangerous!
As much as we love cyborgs, prosthetics and mobility aids are parts of our daily life. Sometimes they can be uncomfortable but mostly they are BORING. Please, bore us with this stuff, normalize it.
Drop the pity!
We won’t read your pity party. We’re not “broken” and we don’t want to feel “whole” or “strong” again.
Accessibility is The Real Issue!
If your disabled character can always find an accessible bathroom, shower, sidewalk, path, building… Well, now that’s science fiction!
Now go and write wonderful disabled characters for us to enjoy! Make them live their best lives and destroy the ableist world!
Sometimes, what we percieve as problematic truly is necessary for a better understanding of others.
Oh
That’s honestly a great way of looking at it; that just because Julia’s traits are somewhat exaggerated compared to a lot of autistic people you might come across doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve its purpose. Because Sesame Street is for kids and has always been ahead of its time in diversity inclusion. So since kids (and heck, adults too) don’t always pick up on subtleties, it’s probably a good thing. Because autism awareness doesn’t help anyone, and autism acceptance is harder to learn even though it’s what’s needed. So starting young kids learning that autistic friends are just another kind of friend is absolutely the way to go.
Also love the fact that op needed to specify that cannibalism was not intended.
PSA to all you fantasy writers because I have just had a truly frustrating twenty minutes talking to someone about this: it’s okay to put mobility aids in your novel and have them just be ordinary.
Like. Super okay.
I don’t give a shit if it’s high fantasy, low fantasy or somewhere between the lovechild of Tolkein meets My Immortal. It’s okay to use mobility devices in your narrative. It’s okay to use the word “wheelchair”. You don’t have to remake the fucking wheel. It’s already been done for you.
And no, it doesn’t detract from the “realism” of your fictional universe in which you get to set the standard for realism. Please don’t try to use that as a reason for not using these things.
There is no reason to lock the disabled people in your narrative into towers because “that’s the way it was”, least of all in your novel about dragons and mermaids and other made up creatures. There is no historical realism here. You are in charge. You get to decide what that means.
Also:
“Depiction of Chinese philosopher Confucius in a wheelchair, dating to ca. 1680. The artist may have been thinking of methods of transport common in his own day.”
“The earliest records of wheeled furniture are an inscription found on a stone slate in China and a child’s bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, both dating between the 6th and 5th century BCE.[2][3][4][5]The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to three centuries later in China; the Chinese used early wheelbarrows to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions was not made for another several hundred years, around 525 CE, when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin to occur in Chinese art.[5]”
“In1655,Stephan Farffler, a 22 year old paraplegic watchmaker, built the world’s first self-propelling chair on a three-wheel chassis using a system of cranksandcogwheels.[6][3] However, the device had an appearance of a hand bike more than a wheelchair since the design included hand cranks mounted at the front wheel.[2]
The invalid carriage or Bath chair brought the technology into more common use from around 1760.[7]
In1887, wheelchairs (“rolling chairs”) were introduced to Atlantic City so invalid tourists could rent them to enjoy the Boardwalk. Soon, many healthy tourists also rented the decorated “rolling chairs” and servants to push them as a show of decadence and treatment they could never experience at home.[8]
In1933 Harry C. Jennings, Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair.[9] Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturers of wheelchairs. Their “X-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Harry from the men’s folding “camp chairs / stools”, rotated 90 degrees, that Harry and Herbert used in the outdoors and at the mines.[citation needed]
“But Joy, how do I describe this contraption in a fantasy setting that wont make it seem out of place?”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince FancyPants McElferson propelled forwards using his arms to direct the motion of the chair.”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince EvenFancierPants McElferson used to get about, pushed along by one of his companions or one of his many attending servants.”
“But it’s a high realm magical fantas—”
“It was a floating chair, the hum of magical energy keeping it off the ground casting a faint glow against the cobblestones as {CHARACTER} guided it round with expert ease, gliding back and forth.”
“But it’s a stempunk nov—”
“Unlike other wheelchairs he’d seen before, this one appeared to be self propelling, powered by the gasket of steam at the back, and directed by the use of a rudder like toggle in the front.”
Give. Disabled. Characters. In. Fantasy. Novels. Mobility. Aids.
If you can spend 60 pages telling me the history of your world in innate detail down to the formation of how magical rocks were formed, you can god damn write three lines in passing about a wheelchair.
Signed, your editor who doesn’t have time for this ableist fantasy realm shit.
Some options for other disabilities and aids:
“Jack had an unusual pair of sticks, unlike anything Jill had seen before; they were much like canes, but rather than ending in a knot or handle they continued up into a pair of bracelets, held together round his wrists by a cunning slide mechanism. They kept him, she noted, quite sure of foot even on the steep ground.” (wrist braces; cerebral palsy)
“Fandir wore a ring around her ear. It looked something like a fancy collar, its edges tipped outward as though forming a funnel, and when she was spoken to she turned it in the direction of the speaker.” (hearing aid, based off antique “hearing trumpets”)
“Victor’s left arm was a marvel of the modern age–held together with a thousand miniscule steel plates and ten thousand tiny gears, wearing a small brazier, much like a jacket cuff, to fire the steam that moved its mechanical fingers.” (prosthetic arm, steampunk)
“Sasha carried one of the most unusual canes Mara had ever seen: it was longer than might be considered useful to someone her size, and hollow, its walls so thin it surely couldn’t hold her weight. Mara watched as Sasha swept the cane ahead of her. At first she thought Sasha was merely clearing a path, but then the cane struck a large rock, and Sasha neatly sidestepped it having never been told it was there. Ah, that solved the mystery, Mara thought: the hollow stick vibrated in Sasha’s hands when it struck, and its sound told her what danger she might face.” (white cane, blindness)
“Sibatyn clapped his hands over his eyes. ‘Here,’ said Yanit, ‘put your scarf over your eyes and take my arm. I can lead you until the lightning is over.’“ (avoiding flashing lights, photosensitive epilepsy)
“‘She grows quite ill on bread, even Rosie’s best,’ Sam lamented. ‘Can’t keep a bit of weight on her. It isn’t proper, for a hobbit.’ Gandalf nodded. ‘Have you considered, perhaps, feeding her on Elf-bread? She may take well to grains not often found in the Shire.’“ (special diet, Celiac disease, food allergies)
I literally had to think harder about what disabilities I wanted to represent here than I did about how to represent them. It isn’t hard. You have no excuse.
OP is spot on. Also, thank you @prismatic-bell for including the food intolerances/allergies one – that’s pretty much exactly how I handled it in my series. As with all of these, and indeed with many other forms of representation that sometimes get pushback in SFF, it’s just a matter of wording it in genre-friendly terms. Sometimes I get the feeling some people forget that’s an option, or it doesn’t occur to them. But obviously there is also often ablism and assumptions at play.
(I heard Gandalf’s lines in Sir Ian’s voice so that was fun :P )
Oh, hey, seems like a good time to talk about some of the fantasy Accessibility Aids in Leif & Thorn…
Iona:magic-crystal-powered hover-chair! The floating spell is savvy enough to give her a smooth path up stairs, but not powerful enough that you want her to drive it off a balcony.
…I mean, unless it’s a seriousemergency.
Multiple characters:prosthetic magic-crystal retinas/eyes! In most cases, it’s because they got an injury too serious to reverse with healing magic.
For Dex here, they have ocular albinism, which isn’t great for your vision in the long run, and decided to get out ahead of it.
Unfortunately, the spells aren’t magically non-glitchy.
Thorn:emotional support animal! His cat, Tiernan, helps him deal with PTSD symptoms via psychic soulbond. Also, she can see through the fourth wall.
Also seen here: Kale with his service dog, who helps him sort through benign-but-confusing visual hallucinations. She does a fair amount of emotional support off-the-books, too.
Multiple characters again:signed languages! In the page above we have Pato (in green), who is hearing but mute, and Leif (purple hair), who learned it for his job.
As in the real world, they don’t always get the respect they deserve – Leif didn’t even consider describing himself as bilingual until a third-party observer saw him giving a deaf person directions and pointed it out.
Multiple characters:hormone injections for dysphoria! Eventually replaced with hormone-regulating crystal implants, once they get the levels right.
…or, in the case of Imri (above), replaced by “turn into a vampire and get good at shapeshifting.”
Laurel: uh, mostly relying on other people for help! She has faceblindness, so she leans a lot on other visual cues, such as “what does your magical-girl costume look like?”
People who know her usually are good about IDing themselves… and her kid is good at IDing people who don’t know her.
(Come to think of it, if I tried to list all the Leif & Thorn characters where “other people being chill and accommodating” was an integral part of their disability handling, we’d be here all day. It’s not as easy to represent with a comic-panel visual as “cool magic prosthetics” are, but it’s definitely A Theme.)
One in four adults in the United States has a disability, but the representation of disability in media is few and far between. But it’s still there! Partners for Youth with Disabilities, the group that gave the Autism in Anime panel at Anime Boston 2018, highlighted some of the best anime and manga that include disability as a theme.
REAL
This manga from Takehiko Inoue, the creator of Slam Dunk, tells a story about wheelchair basketball players. This story, which has been ongoing in Shonen Jump since 1999, focuses on a teen who becomes a paraplegic after an accident, but still continues to pursue basketball.
This ongoing manga by Rie Aruga is published by Kodansha. It tells the story of 20-something Sugumi, who reunites with her first crush from high school, Itsuki. He works on helping disabled people find accessible housing, and the story doesn’t sugarcoat the struggles of his daily life.
While the main character, Joe, is not disabled, this anime takes place in a world where characters are surgically modified with metal frames that make their attacks more lethal. When removed, they cause permanent damage. The show explores themes of PTSD in veterans, acquired disability, and the intersection of trauma and disability.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure - Part 7 - Steel Ball Run
Johnny Jostar, the protagonist of this section of the story is a paraplegic athlete. However, he is never defined by his disability. Living in the magical world of the story, Johnny balances fantasy adventures with depictions of his daily life as a disabled athlete.
A Silent Voice
Written by Yoshitoki Oima, this manga turned movie tells the story of Shoya, a boy who bullies his deaf classmate, Shoko. Later, while trying to make amends for his earlier mistakes, Shoya learns JSL and finds a re-connection with Shoko. This movie is a particularly good representation of deaf culture since Shoko is voiced by a deaf actress.
Written by Kohske, this monthly comic turned anime has been running in the @Bunch magazine since 2011. It tells the story of Nicholas, a deaf assassin who uses lip movements and vibrations to process sound. It shows how living with this disability affects his unusual life and career.
On the topic of disabled heroes, let us not forget Benjamin J. Grimm. The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. The Idol of Millions.
We shouldn’t leave him out of this conversation just because he doesn’t have a “real-world” disability. Ben has been regularly and consistently portrayed as disabled since Fantastic Four #1, and, as @captainlordauditor points out, it’s integral to his identity as a hero.
Ben’s very first words are his frustrations at living in a world too small for him. He’s a two or three times as broad as a normal man, and covered in an orange, rocky hide. He weighs a quarter of a ton. He needs custom-tailored clothing. He needs special furniture. He’s an accomplished pilot, but he can only continue in his chosen profession because Reed builds the controls to suit his scale and his huge, four-fingered hands.
Early on, people faint at the sight of him, at the shock of his disfigurement, until he becomes well-known and popular enough to be seen as a hero, a big cuddly teddy bear, rather than as a monster.
Ben isn’t representative of a specific disability, but in the obstacles, inconveniences, and prejudices he faces, he most definitely counts as disability representation.
On the topic of disabled heroes, let us not forget Benjamin J. Grimm. The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. The Idol of Millions.
We shouldn’t leave him out of this conversation just because he doesn’t have a “real-world” disability. Ben has been regularly and consistently portrayed as disabled since Fantastic Four #1, and, as @captainlordauditor points out, it’s integral to his identity as a hero.
Ben’s very first words are his frustrations at living in a world too small for him. He’s a two or three times as broad as a normal man, and covered in an orange, rocky hide. He weighs a quarter of a ton. He needs custom-tailored clothing. He needs special furniture. He’s an accomplished pilot, but he can only continue in his chosen profession because Reed builds the controls to suit his scale and his huge, four-fingered hands.
Early on, people faint at the sight of him, at the shock of his disfigurement, until he becomes well-known and popular enough to be seen as a hero, a big cuddly teddy bear, rather than as a monster.
Ben isn’t representative of a specific disability, but in the obstacles, inconveniences, and prejudices he faces, he most definitely counts as disability representation.
The m*a*s*h episode run for your money is so good honestly
the way he goes on about wanting to listen to his sister’s tape to have “intelligent” conversation………..telling the wounded soldier that stutters are not a sign of low intelligence…………and then when he plays the tape…..and you hear it best disability rep ive seen in a long time honestly
My guides are not writing references. If you attempt to use my guides as a reference for “accurately” describing a character in a wheelchair, you’re way more likely to write the cripple equivalent of “She breasted boobily down the stairs” than you are to actuallydescribing someone who uses a wheelchair.
Second, if you are writing something so detailed about a wheelchair user as to need a guideto do it accurately, it tells me that your character’s development starts and stops at the fact that they’re in a wheelchair.
Just don’t. My guides are here to help actual wheelchair users solve actual problems in theiractuallives.
My guides aren’t here to give you an excuse to poorly represent wheelchair users.
ogrefairy.com/shop is now officially live!! Please come on over and check it out if you have any interest in prints (or a couple stickers) with disability and/or fantasy themes.
Now Shipping to USA and Canada
This is my debut as a small business! You can feel free to use the discount code: WELCOME for 10% off your order.
[ID: A fuzzy green muppet sits in a wheelchair, laughing. Text reads: Meet our new Friend, Ameera! /end ID]
If you post several gifs at once, it seems like only the first one ends up in the gif menu… guess I’ll upload all these gifs separately then. Sorry for the spam, friends! Lots of individual gif posts coming up
[ID: Four round gifs depicting Ameera, the fuzzy green wheelchair using Muppet. In the first gif, she’s sitting in her wheelchair with her hand raised in greeting. Her name, Ameera, is shown in glittering green font. Second gif, she’s surrounded by Basma and Jad and the background glitters. Third gif is the same, but instead of glitter there are moving hearts. Fourth, her and Jad’s fur is glittering, they’re wearing lab coats and sitting at a table with beakers and science equipment. /end ID]
So, Sesame Street is getting a new disabled Muppet, and I thought I’d celebrate by creating some gifs!
If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.
But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.
I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.
But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.
I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.
I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.
When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.
The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.
But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.
This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.
ALT
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ALT
ALT
ALT
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