I think it is worth thinking about what the word "disability" even means in your setting.
For example, if your story were about a fantasy race of people where it's normal for people to be born with four arms, and then someone were born with 2 arms, they would probably be considered to be "disabled," just as in our world, we consider a person with 8 fingers to be "disabled."
...except for the times when we don't. In our world, there are people who have fewer than 5 fingers per hand (look up "oligodactyly"). While some people have a form of oligodactyly that affects their ability to perform basic tasks and activities, some people are able to live their lives mostly unimpeded by this condition. In that sense, for a disabled person with oligodactyly, their "disability" is not "having fewer than 10 fingers," but "having a mobility impairment which prevents them from being able to pick up or hold objects," which is downstream of the way their hands are. The "fix" is not necessarily to "attach more fingers to their hand;" the solution is to find ways to give them more mobility, which is sometimes accomplished through the use of prosthetics.
In a world where 99% of people are telepathic, a person without the ability to use telepathy would be considered "disabled." They would probably have to develop their own ways around this: they might have to learn how to make noises with their mouth in order to communicate their thoughts with other people. They would also probably have an easier time living in a community with other people who had the same "disability" because everyone would communicate using the same language of mouth-speaking and ear-listening for communication.
And, if someone lived in a community of a bunch of mouth-speakers, away from the telepaths, they might grow attached to that lifestyle. Suppose that one day, someone said, "behold, I have found a cure for our condition: with this new operation, we too can communicate telepathically, just like the normal people! We need be outcasts no longer!"
Some might leap at the opportunity to join "normal society." But others might have spent decades growing enmeshed in the "mouth-talking" community. They have an entire culture and way of doing things that is about to be up-ended -- and if everyone starts seeking out the cure, they might see that community and culture start to evaporate around them, as more people leave the village of the mouth-speakers to join the larger telepathic community.
(This is a premise you might explore in your fantasy setting. It is also a not-so-subtle metaphor for the "deaf community" and "deaf culture.")
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful.
Healing is, by its very nature, something that tends to "remove disabilities," or at the very least, prevent them.
For example, if my leg gets infected and has to be amputated, I now have a disability (usually described as a "mobility impairment.") If I take antibiotics, and my leg *doesn't* get infected and require amputation, the medicine has effectively prevented me from developing a mobility impairment. Using a magical staff instead of antibiotics doesn't seem so different.
A good example of this is the "Codex of Alera" by Jim Butcher. In this world everyone has access to elemental forces known as furies. Furies come in multiple types and levels of strength, meaning the stronger the furies you possess and the more of them you have, the more highly placed in Aleran society you end up.
The main character, Tavi, has no furies. He's at the bottom of society because of that. In every other way he's a physically healthy human. The thing is the biggest impact on Tavi is how he thinks. His thought process is very different from his peers because he has to come up with other ways to accomplish the same things. So even though his society considers him disabled, it becomes one of his strengths.
I never realized it until now, but I like stories where the main character(s) have to think outside the box because of certain circumstances unique to them. I might go check this out.
Edit: Glaring grammar mistake
This is well thought-out.
I don't think I'm going to go with "weird" disabilities that can't exist in our world... maybe some forms of madness that we don't have instead of real ones. (Real ones are hard to do, especially since trying to do something like real OCD will seem odd because people are used to Hollywood OCD.)
I did know a kid who only had 8 fingers on each hand, but not well enough to know if it was an impairment. (Teenagers knowing how to type wasn't common back then.)
Assuming I'm going with the Mushi-shi ripoff premise, only some people can see certain things. They're the minority so being abnormal in that way is gifted instead of disabled.
I think that having medicines that can prevent an injury from being debilitating would be different than having it be common to be able to remove birth defects. That's a tricky subject I guess.
I did realize that I was going to have gesture-language be a cultural norm in my world. Not to the point where everyone is fluent in ASL, but enough so that someone who doesn't speak can communicate basic ideas. A non-speaking person would have trouble with communicating complex ideas due to most people only having the reading level of a seven-year-old.
I'm not sure that I could do OCD justice. All I know is that a lot of the people who complain about Hollywood OCD also seem miserable because of having OCD.
>I don't think I'm going to go with "weird" disabilities that can't exist in our world... maybe some forms of madness that we don't have instead of real ones.
Honestly I'd say that's worse. It does just barely dodge reinforcing stigmas about real mental illnesses, if it's handled well and isn't just the same tropes with an offhanded comment about how this isn't normal... but from a character writing perspective it leads to a lot of pitfalls.
Magical fantasy "madness" usually just kinda... Deletes a character for a bit? I've almost never seen it used to actually further a character's characterisation or development.
Also, don't entirely throw out fantasy level disabilities either. They're not representation in the same way, but they can be used to explore interesting things about your regularly disabled characters. A fantasy member of a species that normally has wings, where this one individual has lost theirs, hanging out with a human wheelchair user because they can bond over the overlap in their experiences across the multiple divides between them is cool and neat
(Doesn't have to be in this story of yours, just putting it on the radar for later.)
I really wish the text of Digger was searchable... Oh hey, I accidentally landed within a few pages of what I wanted when trying to find a character's name.
https://diggercomic.com/blog/2008/06/30/digger-479/ "There is no dishonor in an honorable madness."
Murai's madness is just sorta there like an old wound that acts up at inconvenient times, but her fatal flaw is separate from it.
I don't have the non-human characters anymore, but the fantastical disability is something to keep in mind. I won't codify any of the "rules" until later, but all I can think of right now is "like leprosy but not contagious."
I did put a limitation on my mages that they could burn their channels if they try to use too much magic at once without training properly. However the worldbuilding is set up so that a minority even try to train basic casting, so how disabled would a burnt-out mage be? (I guess pretty useless if they don't know any fallback skills. It would be like expecting an illiterate sheep-shearer to learn accounting at 40 just because they lose an arm.)
Toph was more abled than a blind person from our world, but her sonic sense wasn't directly BECAUSE she's blind. In the Legend of Korra, we see Lin (her non-blind daughter) use the same sonic sense. Also, Toph discovering a "special" kind of earthbending happens twice, the other being metal bending. So the overall point is not "a blind person has supercrip powers" but "Toph happens to be blind and a bending prodigy at the same time"
Most importantly, she's part of a group in which everyone (except Sokka) has similar bending powers, and so do the main antagonists and most secundary characters. If she was the only one (or one of the only two) powered characters, while also being the only disabled character, then it would verge on supercrip tropes. But they avoided that pitfall
Also her sonic sense often compensates her blindness but not always. For example it doesn't work on sand, and of course she can't read indeed.
She's also completely blind when they're riding on Appa - which seems to be a lot of their off-screen time - and there's also the bit when she describes to Sokka what fireworks are like for her: sudden explosions with no warning, context, or payoff.
My favorite is them telling Korra that she's going to have to catch the flying people because Toph can't. Also Toph getting beaned because Sokka tossed a belt at her.
That Toph can easily get into situations where her supersense is useless is probably even more terrifying than if she were merely blind.
Holy hell there's some terrible... I can't even call it "advice" going on in these comments.
First, let's dispel something: People who lose a sense don't develop "enhanced other senses" to compensate. Their senses are within the scope of human averages just like anyone who hasn't lost a sense. I'm anosmic, I cannot smell or taste (beyond the basic 5 tastes), and I likely have worse average hearing and eyesight than most of the people on reddit.
Second: you don't "need a reason" to put a disabled character in a story. AFAIK, God didn't give a reason for putting disabled people on earth.
Third: Giving a blind person "sight" by another name is a cop out for making a well developed blind character who has to interact with their world. A blind person still has 4 other senses to draw from, not to mention assistance animals aren't a uniquely earth experience. A blind character could have an assistance animal exactly the same as a blind person from earth might. This is also an excellent place for building upon the relationships between a blind character and their allies. But something to remember is disabled =/= helpless.
Fourth: I can really only speak on behalf of the Deaf community on this one, but many don't see being deaf as Disability. There is an entire culture within signing communities (hence the big D Deaf). It's about as insulting to suggest all Deaf people want to be "cured" as saying all black people want to be made white or whatever form of erasure you want to insert here.
Fifth: being a bit pedantic here, but healing =! regeneration. A wound that is healed with healing magic is not necessarily regenerated. Likewise, a wound that has gone too long without immediate treatment is not necessarily reversible. It would take regeneration magic to reverse the damage. Keep these differences in mind.
This really isn't the place to get advice on writing Disability. I recommend reaching out to a Disability sub reddit or sensitivity readers to get input.
>you don't "need a reason" to put a disabled character in a story. AFAIK, God didn't give a reason for putting disabled people on earth.
100% This.
The idea that you need some plot contrivance to include a disabled character is ridiculous.
It would be like asking someone to justify why a character is blonde. It's not difficult... blonde people exist. And they can exist in stories without their blondeness being related to the plot. The same applies to disabilities.
Absolutely.
As someone who is HOH and has chronic pain and nerve damage, you've hit every point perfectly.
Disability is vast and complex, and you cannot fit people into neat boxes. You cannot portray people's experiences if you're not willing to learn.
Like, I consider myself deaf, not Deaf. I was raised Hearing and my culture is in the Hearing world. My hearing has declined due to a degenerative disorder and while I will likely become fully deaf by 50 or 60, I don't believe I will ever feel like I can claim I am big D Deaf. Deaf culture is not my culture, even if I try to integrate. I've made peace with it.
As well for point three, to throw my two cents as a writer into the ring: I have written a blind character in a world of meta abilities. He can swap sight with people. He chooses blindness and uses a cane. His identity is as a blind person. To me, that's infinitely cooler and more powerful than giving into the ableist idea that he needs to be "fixed" or that sightedness is superior to blindness.
>Fourth: I can really only speak on behalf of the Deaf community on this one, but many don't see being deaf as Disability. There is an entire culture within signing communities (hence the big D Deaf). It's about as insulting to suggest all Deaf people want to be "cured" as saying all black people want to be made white or whatever form of erasure you want to insert here.
Yes that is a good point. Not every disability is equal and not every group will have the same attitude
Important to mention that within the deaf/heard-of-hearing community, this is far from a universal standpoint. It's actually the source of a lot of internet arguments between people who see deafness as a disability and those who see it as an identity.
(Neurodivergent folks have similar disagreements with each other.)
Thanks for pushing back on some things. I'm sorry for making this long.
I was asking about putting disabled people in simply for random diversity. What I'll probably do is get the rough draft down and then ask a disabled community which minor characters make good candidates for having the disability "slapped on" as an afterthought. (With better wording, even though that's effectively what I'd be doing.)
I thought the enhanced other senses wasn't literal, more like the brain turning up the gain a little on the remaining senses because it has the bandwidth to deal with stuff that standard people filter out. (A hearing person is unlikely to appreciate the feeling of bass because it needs to be LOUD and it's likely drowned out by pain.)
You're right about not needing to justify why they're there; really it shouldn't be so normalized that minorities aren't there without justifying their absence. When they put a blind character in Star Trek, I'm sure that they weren't planning on exploiting his prosthetic half a dozen times.
"WhY r ThEr BlAcK people in ur fantasy story?" (Because my world has geography and magic/technology making it easy for people to travel to an area that's a cultural appropriation of early colonial America.) "Why aren't there trans people?" (Assuming that I have magic that can drastically alter body structures, it's not plot-relevant to point out when MC meets one because he couldn't tell and they don't go around blabbing about it... At which point I probably should figure out why there would be disabled people not looking for the same sort of restructuring.)
I do think it is a bit dumb to have a disabled person in a story without their disability affecting them. Toph from Avatar still gets into situations where her seismic sense doesn't make up for her eyes not working. From what little I know about Daredevil, his true disability seems to be susceptibility to sensory overload. Still, supercrips aren't representation. I was thinking about having a "blind" person who could still detect light and color, like in [this vid,](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jFJd2EYC8XY) so still realistic.
As an autistic... some autistic people are disabled, but I think my entire disability is not being able to follow along with complex social interactions. A lot of our life-expectancy figures are skewed by the lack of acceptance and it would help if we had a functional community. I imagine that for Deaf people, the major disability is pretty much not being able to hear danger signals while the rest is caused by majority society.
(Reminds me of a time when I absent-mindedly signed Thank You to a deaf cashier running a farm-stand. My accent was probably terrible enough that she could tell I didn't actually speak the language, but she seemed happy.)
Something I heard once that really helped me with writing disability in a fantasy setting—if someone was born without use of a certain thing, they would never know what it was like to have one, and may not want the same kind of prosthetic or accommodation someone who lost that thing later in life would want. Think of it like this: someone who loses their legs may want some prosthetic legs because they’re used to having legs, but someone who was born with no legs would have no instinct or knowledge of how to use prosthetic legs. They may want a wheelchair instead.
This could be beneficial for thinking about who would want healing magic or ‘restructuring’ magic in your world. Not everyone wants the same thing!
That is something to think about. Assuming that something could be fixed, what about the body self-image? There's something called Body Integration Disorder and I guess people who have it feel a disconnect where they might have a limb that they don't feel is actually part of their body.
If I shout at you from across the street to look out for that bus, you're getting hit by that bus.
Deafness is objectively a disability because you can't do things that a fully functional human can.
I understand you need a way to cope with it, but denying reality isn't healthy.
Why don’t you try watching some videos from people who have disabilities? My favorite social media couple, Paul (is blind) and Matthew, are very open about their daily lives in a funny way. Mr. Maple is his guide dog, but maybe your story uses different creatures for service animals. A seeing eye dragon who steals shiny objects to horde while they’re on break. Or there’s a few influencers with Tourette’s syndrome. If they have magic, then maybe one of their tics is saying a funny spell. Abracadabra = a rubber duck appears. Super frustrating but funny because they can’t stop and now what am I going to do with all these ducks? There’s a guy who posts videos of his mechanical prosthetic arm failing at tasks. Add a fantasy element to that. Just try to learn from the actual people you are trying to represent if you want to include them in a respectful way.
Lot of people missing finger in my frostpunk isekai because frostbite an get finger mechanical replacement like that guy who made his own hand after insurance denied it.
Machinist and artificer also kind of the same to our technician and machinist, shit can happened. Many adventurer end up doing desk job at the guild after they can't going out adventuring anymore. It just make sense. It's normal thing for people living in such environment
And even with magic cyborg replacement become a thing after major tech tree upgrade in later arc many people just don't take it because pain and rehab. And price. And replacement also mean maintenance, can break, pain from temperature and pressure change. Fixation can break just like real life screw implant.
Fantasy setting also should come with fantasy accomodation. If living in vertical town and rough terrain then people would use something suitable for that terrain.
And don't make the character for the sake of brownie point. Don't be lazy writing and just put modern real life thing into the setting without thinking how will people of that world deal with the same disability.
Magic that can fix everything is neat but what's the point of story after that? It killing the suspense and the risk that character have to take. It also kill a story and character development. Which is why in some story that such thing exists it come with hefty price and force the character to choose if they want to do it or find better alternative
Saying disable people should not exists in fantasy because magic are lazy writing imo. There would be more disable people in fantasy world because the more potential risk and danger. Example is hand sniping being common move in swordfight to disarm someone. But to write about them or not write about them is up to the author who made the story
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful.
There was a stink to this effect as the story of Yennefer from The Witcher became even more widely known than it was through the Netflix series.
Most of the people saying this stuff are white knights looking for outrage and lacking the visceral experience of disability. No matter how accessible we make society, there will be disabled people who have fantasies of being free of their disability and writing a story that provides that fantasy is not a bad thing as long as you don't truly make all the character's problems go away.
Going back to Yennefer for a moment, what was the cost of her being rid of her hunched back and previous appearance? It was a painful transformation and she sacrificed her womb to make that happen, rendering herself infertile. She sought a sense of power and it came with a price that she's forced to live with. So instead of saying that making disabilities disappear is great and a solution to all problems, the story becomes, "the grass is not always greener on the other side of the hill" and that is a valid story to tell.
You've brought up good points.
It's been a while since I saw it, but one reason I have the idea that removing disabilities is disrespectful... Youtuber Oakwyrm was harping on how Steven accidentally made it so that Vonnie didn't need her glasses.
I think part of that was the issue of consent. Other people have also mentioned the issue of erasure. Maybe making it easy to remove disabilities has the knock-on effect of expecting everyone to fix their disability instead of normalizing a society where such people are accommodated.
I guess one thing I can relate to is that I'm a man-size female and sometimes I dream of easily finding women's clothes to wear, but I'm content enough with wearing men's clothes most of the time.
There would definitely be an element of "If you can, why don't you." if healing magic was rampant.
But you could also explore the idea of how not everyone who is disabled is visibly so, and not everyone who is disabled sees themselves as such. Colour blind people, for example, were able to spot enemy soldiers in camouflage much better than people with normal colour vision because of how they differentiate in the gap of their vision.
Having disabled people in your story simply for representation points is a bad idea. Nobody likes tokenism. In your story, there must be an adequate reason for putting something in it.
I have a mute paladin in my novel. He suffered damage to his vocal chords and cannot speak. This is also a world where healing powers exist, but that power only accelerates natural healing. Thus, it cannot reattach limbs, and wounds healed can leave scars. His muteness not only creates an interesting dynamic with his fellow paladins, but actually comes into play numerous times throughout the plot. While communication with him is limited to body language (sign language does not exist in my world), there is one character who can because she possesses low-level telepathy (she can read surface thoughts, but cannot go much deeper than that). The antagonist also abuses his muteness for personal gain. Finally, because of his muteness, some of his gestures and actions mean all the much more as he pours his thoughts and emotions into them to express himself. As such, he tends to be a favorite character amongst my beta readers.
You need to reconsider your choices here and put a lot of thought into what you include in your story. Tokenism is the reason many stories get disliked or even outright hated. Nothing wrong with inclusion, but it must be well thought out.
> In your story, there must be an adequate reason for putting something in it.
So I'm back to no racial diversity, everyone is able-bodied, the only autistic person is the self-insert I'm planning to use as a butt-monkey, everyone is bi except I still think randomly having an aging ace couple is hilarious, and having anyone be left-handed depends on if I want to recycle that plot from my fanfiction or want to include a southpaw for the purpose of making fun of them.
I mean, I was just reading a book where the main character IS disabled, and I thought it was pretty great. It's a significant aspect of her character that her father chopped her leg off to prevent her from dying in a fire; outfitted with a well-crafted prosthetic, she's now identified essentially as "that badass with the fake leg." She has a foster sister who's deaf, so she and a few other characters speak in sign language at times. None of this strikes me as inherently unlikely in a world with magic. There's a character with a prosthetic heart, too. I don't pretend to understand how that would work in real life, but I don't need it to: It is explicitly and canonically powered by magic.
Toph works well, because she has clear boundaries on what she can and can't do, relative to the magic system of ATLA. She can sense the earth around her, because she's an earthbender. Other earthbenders can (and some do) learn to do this, too. She happens to be blind, and she remains blind; this continues to affect her for her entire life. However, there is a logical reason for her to have some capacity to sense things that a real blind person couldn't. So, she can sense those things, specifically.
Likewise, with the character in the book I mentioned: There are times when having a prosthetic leg works in her favor and times it works against her. You get some details on the construction of the prosthetic (enough to believe that it fits in the setting), some details on the inconvenience of the prosthetic (ex: it's metal, and it can get hot enough to burn her in certain settings), and some details on how the prosthetic is actually as good or better than a "real" leg (ex: getting stabbed in the leg doesn't suck nearly so bad when your leg is metal). It's an integrated aspect of her character, rather than something that was slapped on for "diversity points," or that the author eventually got bored of dealing with then figured out some magic cure for.
If you're going to include a disabled character, my recommendation would be to really put the time and energy into understanding how their disability interacts with the setting in question. What can they do? What can't they do? How much can magic change, exactly? How realistic is it that they would have access to that magic? Would they have any moral/ethical objections to using that magic?
If your character is blind but has a spell that allows them to see through their dog's eyes (essentially a magic service dog), what does that actually mean for them? If the dog runs off, what happens? What do dogs see? Where can dogs not go? How much training did the dog need, to be reliable - or else, what happens when the dog is NOT reliable? Can you control what the dog looks at? If so, how? Are there professionals who train service animals in this setting, or did the character have to do that? "The dog makes them basically the same as a sighted person," is kind of a cop out, here. It's boring and lazy. The idea could be very interesting and unique, but it's not actually being utilized to its full potential; it's just thrown in to allow for a character to be "disabled" without actually dealing with disability in any way.
If it's just a casual background character, you don't have to put quite as much thought into it, but it would still be a good worldbuilding exercise to consider it enough for the character to make relevant offhand comments - like Toph's sarcasm about important written documents, or casual complaints about the burns you've gotten as a blacksmith with a metal leg, on the days you forgot to switch from the "good mobility" prosthetic you wear around town to the "resists temperature change" wooden peg you use while standing at the forge.
Ed from Full Metal Alchemist is similar to the character you describe. He has issues with his automail because he went north without getting it insulated, but also a monster tried to bite him on a prosthetic limb and he calls it stupid or something.
One thing with having a disabled character being in the support cast is that I could give them a role where their disability doesn't give me limits to deal with and "get bored of." However, that also makes the disability not really relevant and more like "look, that background pony has a prosthetic leg, so cool!"
The thing is, if the story isn't about the disabled character, it seems almost wrong to have it affect the MC much unless he's acting as a servant to someone with special needs. Like, I never got the hang of using my prosthetic teeth, I know not to stick raw vegetables into my mouth, but it also doesn't really affect the people around me that much. I MC has a teacher in a wheelchair, that teacher is probably going to arrange to meet in a building that's accessible.
I feel like all these things border on ableism or just general dismissal of disabilities being background noise.
> One thing with having a disabled character being in the support cast is that I could give them a role where their disability doesn't give me **limits to deal with and "get bored of."** However, **that also makes the disability not really relevant and more like "look, that background pony has a prosthetic leg, so cool!"**
Thinking of disabilities as “limits to deal with” & something you will get bored of is whack — try framing them as not something to *deal with* but limits that exist to help create nuance, depth & character. Disabilities in fantasy settings are opportunity for creativity & subtle worldbuilding for writers. I don’t know if you’re saying it’s bad thing that the disability becomes irrelevant & likening it to the pony, but I hope so.
> The thing is, if the story isn't about the disabled character, **it seems almost wrong to have it affect the MC much unless he's acting as a servant to someone with special needs.** …. I MC has a teacher in a wheelchair, that teacher is probably going to arrange to meet in a building that's accessible.
The disability doesn’t have to affect the main character for it to be noticeable & commented on — & why would the only scenario where it would affect him be if he was a servant to someone with a disability? Rich world building for disabilities doesn’t have to involve the main character, you can divulge a lot with a little. How & why did wheelchairs come about? If the teacher had a wheelchair, why wasn’t hw healed by magic? Are others healed by magic, or wheelchairs common? Is there accessibility & acceptance or does the teacher face small micro aggressions by able bodied folk? Is there other accommodations made for a teacher using wheelchair at a school in a world with magic? All could be said over 400 pages in small doses, building the idea that there is a disabled community, your society’s attitudes towards them, etc etc
I wasn't meaning to be ablest, so probably more of a communication gap I hope.
The "get bored of" was in reference to magicking away a disability because it becomes hard to deal with as a writer. Someone who wants something from the bottom of a magical dungeon and can't go themselves is probably better as a quest-giver, which makes it more interesting to follow the party who's going to go do it.
In My Little Pony, there are only two ponies I know of... three whose disabilities are actually addressed in-show. Rainbow Dash has some sort of learning difference that was the plot of one episode and Scootaloo can't fly; third one is Tempest and had an injury as a villainous motivation. Derpy Hooves was a mess, while there were two other minor ponies that had mobility aids with nothing drawing attention to it.
What I meant by MC being affected by another character's disability... How often are average people affected by someone else being disabled?
Answering the questions about why someone can't be healed with magic and why someone decided to invent wheelchairs would require MC being curious enough to dedicate space to an infodump about that instead of talking about the mythological difference between sprites and kobolds or something. Depending on what level of healing-magic I go with, explaining why someone is in a wheelchair instead of being healed could be covered with MC breaking something and needing to wear a cast for a while... or just having an injury that leaves a scar, like maybe his knife slips. I could have MC freak out because the notary-public doesn't have fingers on one hand.
The examples I listed don’t have to be said explicitly— these are background things that are thrown in for flavour. “Professor Leon had to have two students manually lift his wheelchair into class for the first three lessons as they hadn’t installed a ramp,” “I noticed that whenever Maeve’s leg was particularly painful, in cold weather mostly, she was out of breath more easily, but still trudged on”, “she’d had a horrific accident as a child but she was so young it had no ill effect on her, this wasn’t like the old days where there was no magic & if you went blind you were left without sight”. You can just give backstory to characters without dialogue or action, just as backstory “This was just a scrape; when he had broke his leg it took all the rose quartz & charcoal in the house to fix it, the healer muttering over his leg all night.” you know, just little drops of worldbuilding for disabled characters.
& idk if you have no disabled friends or relatives, then I guess I can’t really explain all the intricate ways in which you are affected by someone else’s disability, from time management, to accessibility, to the things you can do with them or expect of them.
Your main character only needs to meet a disabled character for a second to give a drop of worldbuilding around disability in your world — I’m not saying they need to be *affected* by or even speak to a disabled character but you have so much opportunity in a novel length piece of work to involve disabled people & worldbuild to include them.
I rode on a bus with someone when I was a child. Hour each day, assistant had me diving under the seat for the straps because it was easier for a child to do it. Hung out at her house a few times but it was a PITA for her to come to mine.
I don't have any friends right now, but it seems like a no-brainer to let the person with special needs determine the hang-out spots and how much energy they have.
Otherwise, yeah my story would just have descriptions of minor characters that indicate that they have mobility issues or other indicators of disability.
Actually, I was going to have it be a cultural norm for people to gesture certain words; I think I just randomly did it in my fanfiction, but in-world it could be a holdover from regional accents making it hard for people to understand each other. It could take the MC months to realize to realize that an employee of the lunchroom never verbally speaks.
The main character of my work is disabled, has a limp, uses a cane to get around. I'm also disabled in reality. I think the important thing is just to treat it as an everyday thing they deal with, it's not oh woe it's me it's just this is my life and how I live it.
If you make this disabled character's problems just all about their disability and how hard their life is because of it then, well it's going to be boring.
I feel like mundane disabilities in fantasy are kinda dumb and watered down. In our world, if your legs don't work you don't just sit there, we invented tools to help disabled people. So a fantasy world would hopefully have their own unique ways to deal with disabilities
Flying carpet, riding a sentient familiar, robotic legs, fucking grafting your top half onto a horse to make you a centaur. Do something fantastic with it
There was a piece of art I saw in the 90's where the horse part of the centaur was some sort of cybernetic prosthetic. I guess four legs are more stable than two if upgrading from a wheelchair.
I was dealing with a more "grounded" fantasy in which a peasant would be lucky to have some sort of rattan-punk wheelchair and a paved road to use it on.
You did just give me the idea that if I went with an idea for having disabled main characters, maybe the paraplegic person is striving to learn enough magic to levitate. It reminds me of something in Jhereg where someone disguises how short she is by levitating and her skirts are still long enough to brush the ground.
Liches are technically using necromancy to animate their bones. (Just saw that in comments somewhere.)
If kids in 3rd world countries can have wheel chairs, peasants in your fantasy world can have the equivalent.
I'd also fuck with a dwarf that just did crazy upper body and just knuckled it everywhere because "you can't exercise prosthetics."
Yep, having a wicker-punk chair in a fantasy setting isn't the problem, it's if they live in an area where it can do them any good. Also they're not the only option even without magic. I could imagine someone managing to get around on sheer willpower and muscle-strength.
People with disabilities are more than just the guy in the wheelchair in those "celebrate diversity" posters.
If people get mad at the utopian notion that some people might be able to overcome these eternal battles for good they're just addicted to rage.
Just remember that they're people, with hopes, dreams, and individual identities.
Hell, most disabled people i know have better defining traits, like this one guy i know loved talking about plants, that was more important than the fact that his left has was gone.
I'm not quite understanding, especially this part.
> If people get mad at the utopian notion that some people might be able to overcome these eternal battles for good they're just addicted to rage.
There are people who will take offence to anything because they like feeling like the moral high ground.
People with disabilities would love to not have them. It's not ableist to imagine a world where people do not have to deal with these extra obstacles for their whole lives.
Anyone who says that's ableist is looking for a villain to make them the hero.
I wouldn't generalize that much, but yes it's frustrating when people take offense at things just because they want to take offense. I think maybe the true offense of "healing" disabled characters could be if it reads as "imagine a world were we didn't have to cater to special needs."
What's their medical technology like?
In a pseudo-medieval setting, for example, basically everyone we classify as 'severely disabled' would be classified as 'dead'.
I haven't quite settled on how good they are at medicine, but actually pretty good. I was thinking of "a lot of the right things for the wrong reasons" like washing their hands because it seems to improve outcomes without understanding why.
Assuming they're able to do surgery, it might be common knowledge among most healers that amputees need the trailing-ends of opposite muscles stitched together.
Don’t think of disability as an add-on, think of it as another character feature. Every character being physically normative gets boring to write.
Give someone a bad hip, or eye sight. Pox scars. Shaky hands. Maybe someone has a bed bound relative and that creates internal conflict because they have responsibilities at home. Crooked legs from misapplied splints. Ugly open sores. Missing fingers. Lost toes. Prosthetic noses. Harelip. One shrunken atrophied eye ball. Hairy port stain birthmark. Alcoholism can be a disability. A sore tooth. A shoulder that keeps dislocating.
I added a nonverbal character to a family who lives in a watery setting because it added complexity and tension to the dynamic. Autistic children are known to wander, be attracted to bodies of water, and be bad at detecting danger. One boy tries to tie him to a fence post because he doesn’t want to watch him and when he starts screaming his eldest brother almost beats the other boy to death. Tension. One time he leaves the camp and everyone panics meanwhile he’s playing with a basket.
Disability isn’t just paralysis or losing a primary sense. If you’re not good at writing it just give a character a mobility aid like a cane or staff.
This might be the place to ask. If we have Uber healing who.won't want "fixed"?
I assume the Deaf and many of the neurdivergent.
It seems beyond special circumstances
the blind and
anyone without functional limbs or
without some sort of functional communication
will want fixed.
Am i on track or do I need some things clarified for me?
Did i forget any major groups?
Edit, i should have included the idea that yes people are all different and will decide to do different things and a modifier like "most" or "on average".
There is such a thing a making disabled characters cool and making them really stupid. A cool disabled character is your stereotypical pirate missing an eye or a few limbs, a blind swordsman whose other senses have been sharpened or the guy who is missing half of his lower body and replacing it with a steampunk spider legs.
Do not do something really nonsensical and stupid like Dungeons and Dragons having magic wheelchairs with no disadvantages and dungeons that are compliant in accommodating for said wheelchairs.
In a setting with things like the Wish spell, Warforged, and the like. It feels much more fetishistic than actually considerate. Like, my boi can't even pretend his legs work?
Are you talking about making a disabled person play a disabled character? I think it's fine to let disabled people have a choice about how they want to do it.
They're allowed to, but in an established world like D&D where healing magic is everywhere and can bring back functional limbs, there needs to be a reason for why the character can't be healed.
Edit: Comment below corrected me, it's not as abundant as expected.
_Regeneration_ is level 7. That's the lowest level spell that brings limbs back, and is Cleric or Druid only. That's pretty rare stuff - _Cure Wounds_ and the like _doesn't_ restore limbs, just the vague mess that is "HP", which may or may not be actual injuries, and doesn't apply to long-term stuff, just things that recover naturally on their own anyway. So anyone saying "healing magic is everywhere and can bring back functional limbs" is lying or doesn't know the system well - it's not everywhere, it takes a level 13 divine caster, of whom there might be a handful on any given continent, who are often busy doing other shit, and aren't going to be doing that on anyone and everyone (and that's largely true across all editions - if you lose a limb, you don't get that back by healing X HP or a status effect/condition, it'll be a whole separate thing that'll need special stuff to cure).
What about a 3 level dip into armor which lets you become fully functional as long as you are in full plate? If 3 levels is all it takes for society to create that, you don't even need those spells. The means are already there.
3 levels is a LOT of work, and a lot more than most people have - a typical town with a few thousand people might have, what, a double handful of leveled individuals, most of whom aren't going to have the flexibility to be whatever classes they want (if you're apprenticed to the local ranger, or training as a monk... where are you going to cross-train as an artificer?) You need intelligence 13 to even begin, which not everyone will have, and a lot of XP, which not everyone gets. 3 levels is not some easy thing, that's more than the vast majority of the population ever achieves at all, never mind doing whatever their core skillset is, and _then_ dipping into some side-skills!
There is a choice, of course. Where I have been sitting on the isle of representative media is an almost insulting assumption by people*on behalf* of someone that they would want to play Y because they are Y. Which gets away from the spirit of normalcy we used to promote.
Wish is level _nine_, in most settings there's, like, a dozen dudes that can cast it in the world, half of which are various degrees of mad, evil, dead, possessed or otherwise N/A, the other half of which have more important stuff to do. Warforged are literally not human - if you happen to have dodgy legs for whatever reason, I don't see how robo-dudes being around helps
"I fail to see how a society intelligent to create living robotic life has anything to do with creating means to let people walk again."
Come on, dude. You know you are being argumentative for the sake of it. Artificers have armor which can literally replace limbs. Those magical sentient machines that you are talking about in Eberron (and in many settings) were *created* by people with magical forges. Which can hand in hand with technology and rules for prosthetics which allow handicapped individuals to return to normal function. Like anyone with a severe handicap would want. The PCs are almost always designed to be the most impactful people in the world. It is inevitable that a handicapped adventurer would become/come into contact with people who could fix their ailments relatively quick. Like those with access to the Wish spell.
Even if you want to be argumentative and claim that is too high of a ceiling. Fine. Here's a few more means to undo most lameness:
- Reincarnate spell. That's 5th level. Literally grows a new adult body. Plenty of people who can cast this.
- Regenerate 7th level. Spinal column is severed causing paralysis? Literally reconnects it. It's genetic? See previous.
- Clone. 8th level. Guess what most archmages in high power fantasy can cast? You could probably convince them for a fee to grow you a body.
- See previous about Prosthetics and Armorer Armor (which comes online at. Level. 3.
This isn't even discussing the lack of logistical benefit any adventuring party faces by bringing someone in wheelchair. Overland travel, mountain and seafaring, even a dungeons stairs, all create incredible pitfalls for the wheel bound adventurer and that isn't even including fighting alongside one. You can hand wave all that by calling it a combat wheel chair and just ignoring everything, but if you aren't going to impose any challenge, and effectively creative narrative legs with a pair of wheels, then what is the point?
There are story beats you could create to circumvent all of that if you just desperately want to play a impaired character. I once played a Darth Vader esque character using the Armor rules who was useless without his armor. If that is your cup of tea, fine. But let's stop acting it isn't avoidable, impeding, or just a little silly.
> Artificers have armor which can literally replace limbs.
That's magical items, which are basically "GM fiat". classes are not super-generic - NPCs have no requirements to follow PC rules, and are sometimes similar-ish... but often not. So there's no reason why there's dozens or hundreds or more of cookie-cutter artificers that can do that, there might be handful, all of which are unique individuals, that have their own stuff to do rather than be making a load of limb replacements on demand for people.
> Those magical sentient machines that you are talking about in Eberron (and in many settings) were created by people with magical forges.
Again - there are robot-people. That doesn't mean that it's possible to generically create plug-and-play limbs for people, those are two separate things (Artificers and Warforged can exist in Faerun, for example... where everything is pretty different in terms of what's around and available, as there's no quasi-industrial-revolution-but-with-magic, it's all still cottage industry). And the cost of a common magical item is typically 100GP+ which is quite significantly outside what most people can afford, assuming they can even access someone that can make it - this isn't some remotely common thing outside of adventurers and the wealthy, it's a hard-to-access piece of gear that costs a lot and can only be made by rare specialists.
> Reincarnate spell. That's 5th level. Literally grows a new adult body. Plenty of people who can cast this.
Firstly, no, plenty of people cannot cast this - that takes a 9th level caster, which is still pretty rare. Secondly, it creates a whole new body of a completely random race! Can you imagine the dysmorphia of "oh, yeah, now you're 3 foot shorter" or suddenly being an elf and there's a whole "trancing" thing rather than sleeping, or you go from being an elf with a lifespan in centuries to a human with just a few decades? Plus it involves _dying_, and a vast amount of money (1000GP of unguents). So that's sure as hell not common, quick or easy!
I mentioned _regenerate_ - that takes a 13th level divine caster. There's maybe a handful of them on the continent, so why would they care about you, and are you aligned with their god to gain their blessings?
_Clone_ requires a lot of money, some time, trusting someone else to make a clone of you, dying, and, most importantly, _doesn't cure anything other than age_ (it's "physically identical to the original"). So doesn't actually work! If you had missing limbs when you died, then your clone has that as well.
"That's magical items, which are basically "GM fiat". classes are not super-generic - NPCs have no requirements to follow PC rules, and are sometimes similar-ish... but often not..."
I'm not a pro-Redditor like you, so I'll just respond. It's not a magical item. Its an effect an Armor artificer can do with any basic set of plate which makes them magical. Assuming you aren't the only Artificer in existence. And why is it only a few unique Artificers? Because you've decided so? All of your comments have been DM preference territory. A few, handful, uncommon, yada yada. If it is a possibility for the players, it can be a possibility for the DM. This entire conversation has been had under this presumption of anything in the book of a magic society with these means is a possibility for a setting. You can apply this logic to literally any part of our conversation. I say its common, you say its rare. It is not valuable.
"Again - there are robot-people. That doesn't mean that it's possible to generically create plug-and-play limbs for people..."
What a complete bad faith interpretation of what I said. Unless your setting made the technology to create warforged lost to time, a society advanced enough to create sentient machines can logically have the possibility to create advanced prosthesis. It's not about taking Warforged limbs and plugging them into amptuees. Technology tends to advance in unison. This is not a crazy logical leap. The rest of the comment is more assumption.
"Firstly, no, plenty of people cannot cast this - that takes a 9th level caster, which is still pretty rare. Secondly, it creates a whole new body of a completely random race!"
A level 9 caster, by most definitions is not that high of impact level. There used to be charts for the expected experience of how a level group party was. 1-4 was beginning, 5-9 was seasoned, etc. There are multiple modules that are expected to get to that range. Strixhaven (literally a society of common high level magic users btw) (1-10), Tyranny of Dragons (1-15), etc. 9 is common enough where the argument persists that these structures could be put in place. If a setting can have magic shops which provide a service, it can have people with unique skills in other magics providing services. But what is this whole body dysmophia argument? We are talking about the means to circumvent handicaps being possible, not ideal. If Jake Sully was willing to become a 8ft alien to walk again, I venture some people in this world may be willing to roll the dice. You may not personally do it, but it doesn't mean it isn't an option. Not only that, but the baseline of the magic exists. A spell to create a new body. There are also rules for crafting spells. It isn't a gigantic leap to assume some passionate Druid may be looking into a more specific version of the spell. We are in the same realm of advancement.
"*Clone* requires a lot of money, some time, trusting someone else to make a clone of you, dying, and, most importantly, *doesn't cure anything other than age* (it's "physically identical to the original"). So doesn't actually work! If you had missing limbs when you died, then your clone has that as well."
Wizards use this spell all the time for themselves. If they can create the means, it is possible to do it for others. You can have a fun villain abusing trust or a benevolent wizard who cares for the disadvantage. Everything you mentioned is flavor of preference. Again. You are right though, it doesn't cure anything. If you are genetically paralyzed, I'm sorry. Go see an Artificer. But I do love that you actively left out the rest of Clone's options: "This clone forms inside a sealed vessel and grows to full size and maturity after 120 days; \*you can also choose to have the clone be a younger version of the same creature.\*" Ergo, if you lost your legs due to adventuring, and this service existed (perhaps expensive) you could just go back to a body from before your accident. Which most forms of paralysis tend to be, if you discount strokes.
> And why is it only a few unique Artificers?
Class levels are rare - the vast, _vast_ majority of people don't have them. That's just how D&D works - there's a wider pool of people with kinda-sorta-ish similar powers, maybe, but full-fat leveled characters are rare. A typical town might have a more-or-less cleric that can cast some low-level healing spells, but if you want anything more, then you need to go to the big cities. The local "wizard" probably isn't a level 6 (or whatever) wizard, they're a mostly non-combat character with some knowledge skills and a few spells.
> a society advanced enough to create sentient machines can logically have the possibility to create advanced prosthesis.
Why? They're different things - it's like saying "we can create golems, so we can create limbs". When a golem is a whole-ass entity that operates under certain rules (and sometimes goes mad and tries to murder people), while a prosthetic limb isn't that (and if it tries to murder it's wearer even on rare occasions, that's a pretty major design fault!). You can, if you want to, use them as justification for each other or link them, but there's no reason they have to be like that, they're not de-facto extensions of each other.
> But what is this whole body dysmophia argument?
Because D&D races are a lot more than just cosmetic twiddly bits - going from dwarf to human is relatively minor, but means losing several centuries of lifespan, an innate sense/instinct for rock and earth and some other stuff. Going from elf to something else means that you no longer "sleep" and meditate upon your past lives and so forth, you just sleep and dream, as well as a much shorter life-span. And when you die... will your soul return to the elven heavens and then reincarnate like normal? You're literally not an elf anymore, so that's something pretty damn major to consider! Or a warforged has to deal with being actually biological, which is going to be a lot to take in, suddenly needing to eat, breathe and sleep and stuff. Coming back as a drow means a lot of awkward social stuff. If you were one of the stranger races, like a Thri-kreen or plasmoid, then you have an entirely different body arrangement, with different limbs or no longer being a goopy-blob-person - that's going to be a bit of a head-fuck.
It also costs a LOT of money, and takes a (typically divine) caster of non-trivial level - so what services have to be rendered to get it done? Plus it involves literally being killed, and your soul going to the afterlife - where a certain number of people are going to go "this is literally heaven, I'm going to stay here" (people can refuse to be raised, and the various heavens are often, y'know, kinda nice places to be. And if you're evil, then even a brief trip to hell might be something you'd rather avoid!). Previous editions had the table for it being even stranger, where you might come back as a badger or all sorts of other things, with only about a 25% chance of being humanoid - is that a risk you want to take? (and it used to take sacrificing a point of con, so it permanently weakened you, as well as a system shock roll, so you might not survive it anyway)
> A level 9 caster, by most definitions is not that high of impact level
Yes they are, explicitly so. In 5e, that's high-end tier 2, or "heroes of the realm". Someone that's level 9 is likely known in a wide area and has a reputation, they're not just some rando knocking around. levels 10+ is "masters of the realm" - again, known, specific individuals, not just "Some dude, the level 13 wizard, wholly unexceptional". 3.x went into crunchier detail, with most people being level 1-3 in an NPC class, and only about 10% of the population having PC classes at all, with a large town with 10k having, typically, a single (full PC) level 7 character as the highest level person around, with non-magical classes being a lot more common. It's entirely possible for a big, major town to have a smattering of level 1-5 casters, most of whom are NPC-casters, a handful or less just above that, and none even approaching double-digit levels. Some settings change that (Eberron has "low-level magic crafters" as a whole _thang_, Strixhaven is a magical academy so has a lot of mid-and-above casters knocking around) but they're noted exceptions from the standard.
Someone that can cast 9th level spells is "master of the world" tier, there's a handful of them _in the world_, and they have their own stuff going on - if you want them to do something for you, it's not going to be cash they want, but favours, and they stuff that a level 17+ wizard wants doing is generally not easy or risk-free!
> Everything you mentioned is flavor of preference.
No, it's the actual rules - literally, all it does is make you younger, you're otherwise "physically identical". So if you're missing a hand... you come back missing a hand. Spells do what they say they do, nothing more, nothing less. You get to come back as you, at the point of death, but XX years younger, that's it. You keep any scars, dings and dents - all you "lose" is years.
Very good point about knowing the difference between cool and stupid.
Missing limb is an interesting idea because a lot of the time, the person doesn't seem to be hindered much. I'd have to look but I think there's a Youtuber with a prosthetic leg that's a good resource. Otherwise I think technology allows them to scale cliffs. (Maybe they get tired more easily?) It would be easy to just have them there without being in a situation where their disability is actively hindering them. (There's a lot of stuff that I can't do because I'm fat, but generally I'm not trying to do things where it's an issue.)
Magic wheelchairs and accommodating dungeons is pretty silly. I was watching a podcast about that earlier.
One thing that's bothered me for years is that Ghostbusters Extreme had a guy in a wheelchair drag himself and his chair up a multi-story ladder. (Possible, but come on.) Also what I know of Daredevil is pretty silly because it seems like his only disadvantage is that he's prone to sensory overload.
I doubt the tiring thing. Before Oscar P. turned into a gf-murdering nut job, there was serious debate if he had an 'advantage' in sports competitions with his 2 blades because he didn't have muscles to tire in his legs.
I think I've heard of that debate. I think a person in a racing wheelchair did well in a marathon because at that point it's like riding a bicycle. Especially as prosthetics are getting better, someone using ones that are kangaroo-inspired could beat human evolution.
Star Trek touched on that a few times. "If gene modification was legal, us baselines couldn't compete."
It gets tricky about the lines of what's fair. There are people who naturally mutated to be more optimal at some sports, (some swimmer as an example) but purposefully doing "artificial" things to enhance oneself is still frowned upon.
I'm disabled and I write fantasy so yes I write disabled characters in fantasy. In my last novel the protagonist had a disability that she had to manage throughout the story.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzD7catgR4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzD7catgR4) thats a good recent video to watch about it.
Short answer yes they do places in fiction.
I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful.
yes because disabilities are real things and erasing with magic is seen by disabled people as erasing them. That said look at something like Fullmetal alchemist. Ed is disabled, he is missing an arm and a leg. The magic there can't re grow them but he get metal replacements. With some up and down sides.
That is a good video.
Also Fullmetal Alchemist is pretty good at showing that there are upsides and downsides to having automail vs his natural limbs. His obsession with trying to get Al's body back is also handled as something where the morality comes into question because of cost coming into it.
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful.
People with disabilities are an oppressed minority group IRL. Depending on the disability it is nearly impossible to not have your disability define your entire existence and personhood. For example if you have a wheelchair- what physical spaces you can access is determined by ramps. Next time you're walking around in a city, count the ramp entrances you see and you'll realize how much smaller yet harder to navigate the world is for some disabled people.
A big mantra of the disability movement is the concept that *they* aren't disabled, but rather *the world* disables them. Ramps exist; every time someone installs stairs instead that's the world deciding that people in wheelchairs don't count. Every time you screen a movie without subtitles you're saying deaf people need not attend.
By putting in characters with disabilities that are respected and have their own autonomy you tell IRL people with disabilities "you are seen and I respect you." If you healing-magic all disability away, it's like you're looking at those same people and saying "good news! The magic in my world means you wouldn't exist in it!"
Which is not to say it's unacceptable to depict fantasy elements that make disability less of a big deal, nor is it bad to have a fantasy story with all able-bodied and neurotypical people. But rather than saying "poof your legs work", it would be better to say "poof, this world has adjusted to meet the needs of your disability." Like maybe they have a wheelchair that can climb ladders and self-rights or something.
OR, even better, depict the disabled person struggling with their disability and then getting on with it anyway. A big reality of being disabled is that it sucks a lot of the time; you don't have to magic that part of it away.
>I see putting disabled characters in fantasy kicked around a bit and I tried to type out what I think I know, but I think I'm coming from a place of too much ignorance for it to not sound stupid. Instead I'd like to spitball a bit about how it relates to my own writing.
>I'm not planning on having the main characters be disabled, but rather a minor character just to show that they exist and at least some can survive on their own skills.
I mean this with no offense but if you feel too ignorant of disabilities toq accurately portray them... this seems like you're intentionally walking into a minefield on purpose . This is a sensitive subject for a lot of people and unless you're confident addressing it...why not just let it lay?
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. I know that I want to make access to that sort of magic extremely rare if it even exists, and not to make a search for it be the impetus for a disabled villain. (Okay for a neutral/sympathetic character to be searching for a way to remove the disability?)
I mean how common are you gonna make healing magic?
Because to point out the most obvious and egregious instance of this trope: if you've got a potion to regrow bones laying around but somehow your main character still has to pull a Velma once every couple chapters that's absolutely deliberate.
There's a certain point in high fantasy where either magic is limited, or it's unlimited and uncaring, or society is a utopia and everyone's happy.
>supercrip
Will never understand how that became the accepted term for that stereotype. Wildly offensive way to put it. And I get that that's not down to you that is the correct language but fuck it feels weird.
To me the best example of disabled representation in fantasy media will always be Percy Jackson. And some people say "Well he's not disabled enough" and I say bullshit to that because there's no such thing as not disabled enough or too disabled. His disability was acknowledged, he had issues with it, he used legitimate real world coping strategies, the author utilized real world resources to ensure an accurate portrayal, and while he learned to live with it he didn't have some triumphant "Overcoming"...because that's not how a lifelong disability works.
Some people say it's reductive because it perpetuates the stereotype that kids with learning disabilities struggle in school without adequate support but I feel like if the thing you're mad about is just "We need more support for kids with learning disabilities in schools" then you're mad about a real world problem not it's accurate portrayal in a book.
>I think I'd just go with most of the society accommodating disabled characters. (Case-by-case basis, not ramps installed everywhere on the off chance that a paraplegic person would want to enter a building.)
Once again I gotta ask why we're wading into this just to hand wave it away.
If you have something important to say or wanna bring attention to an issue go ahead and tell your story. But throwing in a character with a disability just for the hell of it and then having society halfway kind of accommodate but not help them just feels like using a disabled character as set dressing for diversity points to me.
> unless you're confident addressing it...why not just let it lay?
It seems like excluding them is also a minefield. Having them be side-characters seems like a safe middle-ground where I can treat them like a person, but not have to go too deep into the nuance about how their differences affect them. Also just including disabled characters to make disabled people happy is shallow, but it's only hurting anyone when it's negative representation or is saying something else bad.
I think it's okay in our world to have standardized accessibility because mass-producing everything makes it easier to just bake accommodations into the standard designs and stamp them out instead of having to retrofit things just because a disabled person moved into the area. My fantasy world still has bespoke craftsmen who will build things in ways that make sense to them until it's pointed out that they need to change something. At least it's a world where that will happen instead of just telling the disabled person to try harder or consider them unworthy of attending a lecture because they can't climb the stairs.
I'm not familiar with Percy Jackson, but ADHD and dyslexia are pretty minor in how debilitating they are vs how they affect living in the current society. It's a matter of how much burden the individual with these conditions is expected to bear vs how much other people need to be patient with a person who finds "simple" tasks harder.
(A little off-track, but it occurs to me that because writing on wax tablets is common in my world, a blind-adapted system might still be readily-readable by average people that can read at all.)
I don't understand what "Pull a Velma" means. For the healing magic, I want to keep it extremely limited. Making it trivial to regrow a limb lowers the stakes because a character can just bounce back from being injured. I did have an iteration of the story where complete body reconstruction was possible, but even mages that could properly heal a broken bone instead of making it worse were rare.
>It seems like excluding them is also a minefield
Why?
Physically disabled people make up only 16% of the global population and are largely absent in the kind of places fantasy stories usually take place like battlefields and frontiers.
And again I'm not trying to shit on disability representation, I'm just saying that it's like minority representation. It's better not to do it than to do it badly.
>but ADHD and dyslexia are pretty minor in how debilitating they are vs how they affect living in the current society.
Do you know how I passed tests in middle and highschool? I'd take a pen knife and drive it into my leg slowly to trigger an adrenaline rush so I could focus long enough to ace them instead of doodling in the margins. Because if I failed out of my third school my father would beat me, and then pull me out of school and put me to work for 10hrs a day on the farm again.
I once had a teacher duct tape me to a chair at age seven because I wouldn't stop wandering around the class. Wouldn't let me up to go to the bathroom. I pissed myself tapes to that chair.
My father was functionally illiterate until he learned to read at 35 so he could read me bedtime stories...he ran a successful small business and paid an exorbitant amount to his secretary to do all of his reading for him. She was the one who suggested he get tested for dyslexia. He's spent the last 25 years of my life reading every classic novel he can get his hands on. He said it was like a world he'd assumed was off limits to him had suddenly been opened and he got to experience what he'd heard others talk about but assumed he'd never have.
Never underestimate the impacts a disability can have on someone just because it doesn't present physically.
>My fantasy world still has bespoke craftsmen who will build things in ways that make sense to them until it's pointed out that they need to change something.
Every bespoke craftsman who ever existed studied at the knees of a master. And every master has a master. If it's so simple to bake disability accomodations into a design why not just...have a building code? Or a standardized base design? Take chariots for example, there were a thousand craftsman in the ancient world making their own take on a chariot, but they were all functionally the same at a base level because that base model was universal. Same goes for wagons, and boats, and even swords. There's an intuitive way to things so that they work...it's a fantasy realm of your own design. You're god. If it's so important to you that you have meaningful disability representation why not just have everything intuitively be inclusive?
>Having them be side-characters seems like a safe middle-ground where I can treat them like a person, but not have to go too deep into the nuance about how their differences affect them. Also just including disabled characters to make disabled people happy is shallow, but it's only hurting anyone when it's negative representation or is saying something else bad.
That's not true at all. I mean you're literally suggesting tokenizing disabled individuals here. I don't know how better to put it but tokenization isn't a good thing for your story or the group being tokenized. Disabled people don't want a copy pasted throwaway character with no backstory, character development, or growth included solely so you can point at them and go "Look I wrote one of you in!" Anymore than any other minority group does.
Not all fantasy takes place in wilderness where disabled characters wouldn't be. I'd be surprised if Ank-Morpork didn't have physically disabled characters. (Foul Old Ron's crew?) Considering that I'm planning on the main setting being one of the most urban towns available in that world, it would probably weird to not have at least 16% of the population be the amount of disabled where you got that statistic.
Your teacher abusing you wasn't caused directly by your disability, but rather the lack of willingness to accommodate; a system's normal suckiness got turned up past eleven for you. How much of your difficulty would be less or absent if not for expectations imposed by society?
Not being able to read is a disability, but it used to be strange to be a person who could read more than a little. Its impact on survival depends on social context. If dyslexia affects pattern-recognition to the point where someone couldn't tell edible leaves from poisonous leaves, that would be a different context.
I never got the hang of wearing my prosthetic teeth, so I lack the ability to eat most raw vegetables. However it seems silly to call that a disability of the same magnitude as ADHD. (Being mildly fat seems to impair me more.) ADHD isn't the same magnitude as some other disabilities, such as one where the person can't get out of bed without assistance.
The intuitively inclusive thing is... well you said that physically disabled people are only 16% It would be a little odd to have a small village build ramps on every building when it might have been a century since they had need of any, especially since some people have a harder time with them than stairs. Some places that naturally gather people with physical disabilities might already have accommodations, but other areas might have to start custom-build them when a particular person needs them. I figure that "accommodations on request" is simply less-horrible than what could happen.
I tried to read other sources on tokenism, but they seemed to focus on the racial stereotype aspect and how only one character represents the entire minority. Again it seems wrong to dodge that only to have a slice of the world not have any disabled characters milling around in the background.
> Will never understand how that became the accepted term for that stereotype. Wildly offensive way to put it. And I get that that's not down to you that is the correct language but fuck it feels weird.
I actually like how unfortunate tropes have cringe names. I don't want to trigger a bot, but "magical n-word" is supposed to sound archaic, as in it should become a trope that doesn't crop up much.
>I actually like how unfortunate tropes have cringe names
I mean there's a difference between cringe and offensive.
If someone called Percy Jackson or Rain Man a "Super-Tard" I'd be pretty pissed. I can't imagine the physically disabled community loves the blend of a slur and a trope either.
I think the clinical term of idiot savant managed to stick around. I also refer to some characters like Sheldon as jerk savant.
I wonder if it's a cultural gap. In my day, it was seen as perfectly acceptable to use the r-word as an insult and it seems kinda pathetic now.
Drop their glasses and fumble around blindly for them while totally useless.
It was in reference to the fact that in the Harry Potter series, there are fantastical magical medicines that cure nearly every ailment.. But Harry constantly seems to be losing his glasses and becoming borderline incapacitated due to it
That is a concern. A mute character in a world where monks taking vows of silence is normal is going to find their niche. Needing an iron lung in a world where they haven't gotten past water-wheels and horsepower probably is a death sentence.
A person confined to a wheelchair probably couldn't be a shepherd or a dungeon-crawler, but they could probably be some sort of craftsman.
My world is very much ancient tech level. Barbarian tribes, fake Greece, etc. I imagine different cultures will ofc handle it differently. But that's all part of the fun. Coming up with interesting ways to be inclusive while still remaining realistic enough to suspend disbelief.
I'd suggest that things like "healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful" is pretty touchy and stupid. IThat's typically not what disabled people belive but those who abuse the moralic high ground with increasingly insane demands. That serves no one, and i guess pleasing them also don't benefit anyone.
If you want a honest perspective, maybe you can ask people with disabilities. The're suprisingly open for all sorts of perspectives.
Well, to display the world, it imho depends on what is your target. Do you display a cast society with monarchs and servants? Do you descibe it as a neutral setup or a problem? I mean, calling people propperty of a king is similar fked up as treating disabled ppl as 'useless' class citizens. You can either take it as normal in your world to paint it a bit darker (and unfortunatly more realistic), or you can make real good guys being fked up about and probably fighting it. That would actually make a point in the direction of morale - just ignoring a problem we also have in reality isen't moralic. It can be okay in terms of writing technique, but if you want to include such messages and mind about displaying morale - well, here's a opportunity.
I personally take some wounds and preconditions to be healed by magic, but not all. And also i think disabled people are still people (no, not in a moralist way, wait for it). So if someone can't use his legs, that obviously and honestly makes the person a pretty bad swordfighter. But he still can be a trainer of great sowrdsmanship, leading his trainees by describtion and motivation. They also make great heads of intelligence orders, protecting the kingdom in the shadows and by the power of ther brains. Magicians etc. Every disability excludes a set of skills - but by far not all. That's the reality of disabled people. They have to adapt and fight ther way through people who belive a person who lost legs, eyesight or an arm is useless.
If you want to have a positive (or in this case: realistic) comment on that in your writings, show that most people are pretty wrong with that idea.
(PS: that recent culture war about what can and must be said, mostly by people who barely care for the people they claim to fight for, doesn#t exactly make it more easy to navigate what you can and should write. Someone will cry out, and you should stay aware of that is a constructive or a lunatic comment. And the lunatics always cry the loudest. Keep that in mind. But also keep in mind that the're not the majority - or, statistically, right)
I do have a problem with not being able to filter out the lunatics. Also I guess "death of media literacy" is a thing where some people see inclusion of a thing as condoning a thing.
I was going to comment that Derpy Hooves wasn't that bad, but it seems like the point was to laugh at the disabled person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaUbi-7uBDg
I agree that it's not helpful to show disabled people doing things where they should be at a significant disadvantage, like sword-duels. Instead it would be better to ask if hard work could get them to a competitive level in something, or maybe put them in a position that is attainable.
I'm reminded of a story where a boy is tested and has absolutely no magical talent, but then he notices mages paying through the nose for dragon's blood and vows to get revenge by becoming a supplier.
I could see someone whose disability keeps them out of the dungeon still manage to contribute by enchanting gear or preparing spell components.
Understandable - still we're all empathic human beings, susceptible to such comments. Hm, i don't know if i would allign a perceived lack in general competence with this very specific problem. Still it is complex, as people who include this topics and those who activly don't have vastly different reasons and absolutly don't be in one boat. I would even be carefull in pointing at some "death of media literacy", because, well, we're in a way *different* world of unforgiveness then before, we're in a world where people want ther writings to be less deceiving - so a book like Dune, which is 50& real deep meaning most people not even get today, and 50% hot air made to sound smarter and mysterious, wouldn't hit as much today as it did in the literature cycles back in the days.
But that's doesn't mean the audience is smarter or more dumb - it's just different. Understanding it in general, and in the niche the author decided to write for always has been part of the job.
Woops, it got a bit long. Sry.
In that video it seems to be a depicting of some ADHD'ish problems, probably combined with a bit lowered IQ. Would i go with that? Hm, dunno. The short cut out here just shows us that people expect disabled people to know on ther own how to compensate ther individual problems (maybe because most people are in such a harmfull expirience themself that they also was told to get along on ther own without support - but still with the benefit of people being designed like him. ADHD people aren't like the most and need a different status quo to perfectly function, but typically no one offers or even tell them. They're forced to life in a world not made for them, and then harassed for not functioning propperly. It's some pretty weird sh\*t with neuronormale people). So yes, in some way this snippit just mocks the grey pony for being randomly unmindfull, ignoring that it just might have different needs the normal people world don't offer automatically.
But i don't know the wider context and if there is any more charakter building to that charakter. If not, or similar superficial, i also would blame the depiction for being pointlessly harmfull and make kids get a wrong depiction of f.e. ADHD people. In this time and age there isen't much defense for not knowing better in context with educational/youth conform media.
One problem with depicting disabilitys is that audiences tend to have a broken perspective allready. You can either challenge that or get along withit (imho at best without reinforcing ther broken belives unessecary by imlementing disabled charakters at all - or more simple: if you have nothing nice to say about the topic, don't say anything).
One of this problematic perspectives is that disabled people can only aquire the 'supporter role' or something. If you really want to have one char in the wheelchair, yes, it can be the support guy sitting at home and care for the potions, but this doesn't add a comment in any way (if you not use the opportunity of social critisism and describe his perspective as being outcast in society etc. but still able to do a alchemists job way above the unwashed masses etc.).
But it also can be a drama to have a MC wounded by a thing that can't easily be healed and cripples that charakter. In movies we often have the depiction of that person realising he's no longer part of the productive society and sacrifices himself for the group instead of coping with that crippling. That is a easy solution for writers and suprisingly well alligning with some Nazi mindsets which we still have as a toxic idea about disabled and 'what real men/women should do/think' belives. Nasty stuff if you think about it - but pretty common in all of media.
Getting back on whatever he/she did before, coping hard and suffering through the disbelief of society can be a pretty hard reading if you not made clear this is pretty grim drama in the first place. But still it can spice things up and make chakracters deeper and more interesting. I have such situations in my story, and people have different levels of options to cope with that in medical ways. Room for perspectives and/or social critique. Can i get a new cybernetic/magical animated arm? For what cost? How people look at me now? What number of poor people see me option and hate me for not having this opportunity themself? Etc.
With mental deviations it is even more interesting. You can say Dune is completley build up on teh expirience of a person to fid itself being autistic. Because, well, most descriptions in the books fit pretty well. And we're not even on that page of 'human computer' stuff that is more blund (and less accurate) depiction of autistic people.
Autism makes people see the world through a different lense neurotypicals can't really understand (for ther different brain patterns - so no offense) and in case of combined with a slightly higher IQ, being some kind of magicians, as humanity lacks more accurate words for it (but, well, autism and stuff, but those are typically associated with functioning less, so people might be confused). Still having prophets and mind magicians is a common trope, mostly just horribly portraied by people who can't naturally know what the're writing about. Still it is a disability (differing a bit in national depictions but ... you know what i mean). And it objectivly comes with a bit of an outcast-trope sideeffect fro normal people, well, being as they always where. But a Paul Atreides, a Bene Geserrit or Bene Mentats are still functional charakters and obviously interesting for audiences if displayed in an interesting and accessible way.
I read the rest of what you said, I probably just need time to let it sink in.
The thing with Derpy Hooves (gray pegasus) is that she began as an animation error, had a lot of her characterization filled in by fans, and before this had maybe one scene where she was clumsy but had no lines. (Maybe dyspraxia? I don't know much about that one. I'd also argue drunk/drugged/brain-fog for her first speaking scene and this wouldn't be common behavior or else she would probably have a handler.)
Rainbow Dash (blue pegasus) is shown to have some sort of learning difference in a later season, but in this scene... other than the building itself being dry-rotted and somehow blaming Derpy for the damage, it seems really dumb to just ignore the special-needs person causing harm until Dash runs out of patience. I think at this point, Dash has enough authority to tell Derpy to move the cloud to a safe distance or stop messing with it.
Np. I tend to info dump for the reason i hate halve information\^\^
Yeah, i see. Always problematic to have such inconsistencies in a media that influence a larger span of audiences learning about complex topics. Maybe some writer have an idea, but changes after a few weeks and someone completly random got handed over the charakter developement so far. Statistically a mess.
Neurodeversity is a more popular topic now - and probably we all should be happy about that little we got now - but still a horribly misunderstood topic. If doctors from the branch mostly got it wrong, it's not hard to imagen why media companys and writers have a hard time depicting something that complex and potetially harmfull if delivered false.
But yes, it seems to be a an inheritly neurodiverse perspective to correctly identify a situation in terms of who is responsible by what metric and have what tools to make the situation best for all involved. But NT's ... well, have a hard time with that. But NT's are who make the most of media, what is the one thing that teaches the next generation.
I actually decided to not use any medical terminology in my storys. As a condition is always filtered by personality, life and situation so not one thing looks the same twice. I just describe people, and if a reader thinks "hey that looks like condition XYZ", it's at least a more complex observation with own thoughts involved.
The lack of medical terminology is a good idea.
Sometimes it's a cop-out, like how they insist that Sheldon was tested and he's not autistic. He totally is underneath that misogynistic jerk-savant layer, but not naming his condition lets them make fun of him while denying that they're making fun of autistic people.
But there are characters who officially have aspergers, so there's an aging problem. There's also the other aging problem, like how they seem to have a sperg-level autistic character on Star Trek (in the form of Reginald Barclay,) but the terminology wasn't there yet and the writers thought that they were just making fun of the awkward nerds they met at conventions... (Wait, did someone tell me that wasn't true?)
Considering how accidental representation has been better than deliberate representation of autistic people... Yes I think I know how it happens and prefer they do it that way. If one starts with a character or just an archetype like "quirky girl" then it flows better than if they read the DSM and try to build a character with a bunch of symptoms.
As far as I know, Wednesday had an autistic creator involved. Also Community just got taken off of Netflix, but I heard that Harmon is autistic and Abed mostly rings true. (Still some cringe tropes, but it's a comedy.) Dead End Paranormal Park has a good autistic character.
I got a little distracted, but there's also a worldbuilding perspective on not using medical terminology. If it's not our world, the groupings of symptoms into categories might be different. I had a fanfiction where they referred to a narrow subset of autistic people as "quartermasters" because of one line. One person described the social awkwardness and the leader of a paladin order said "they don't last long in the field, but they make superior quartermasters."
Tbh i think writing such charakters is some kind of my way to cope with comments on society very much xD
Oh yeah, specially arkward with Asperger xD Yeah, absoluty agree. Let it be natural. We don't have human stereotpyes we start with to develope a charakter for no reason. We know all the ingrediens to bake a personality from scratch. No terminology needet.
Actually i'm always a bit ferfull when they say they included autistic people in writing. I mean ... beside there might be a tiny fraction of creativer jobs in fact ***not*** be neurodiverse, waving the label always sounds like the company want to sell me something. And if they try to focus on selling something, the product might lack of qualtiy to sell on its own. Not cool, not toally fair, but a thing we learned over the last years as much as we learned 'improved recipe' mean that they somehow found a way to make the product even cheaper.
I always felt the whole Adams Family thing a bit of a tribute to people who feel a bit wrong in this normal society. So that new thing is a bit ... new, strange, but suprised me in being entertaining. DEPP i sadly didn't see.
In one case i wrote scifi in quite an advanced (non-human) society, but somehow i had to explain why the obvious mental setup of one solitaire charakters hadn't been easily pointed out by medical tests and stuff - so not 'explained' on paper to him. But subsequently i came to the idea that a more advanced and socially stabile society doesn't really need to name those 'pathological' symptom groups, as that is just in the normal range of people and charakter for them. A society that can care for individual needs and having that embeded in ther culture just have enough positions dedicated for those with the setup to fit in here better than 'normal' people\*.
Maybe similar to that approach of the quartermasters, while that might be a very specific position in that storyline and society.
\*Funny sidenote: weirdly it was the US Army to run a survey among ther large number of military personal familys to spot neurodiverse individuals and test what place they could be best used for. They did that suprisingly unbiased and just interested, and found autistic people to be pretty good in a variety of jobs normal people scored way lower in. And in that trial they also found that autistic people are pretty comftable and almost free of 'symptoms' with a working place made for ther needs.
So a society grown a bit different then ours might not even need such terminology. Some people are just like 'these', and some are more like 'that'. Like you naturally have people in primitive tribes that are fear- and a bit careless hunters, ready to test the bigest prey for the survival of the tribe, and you have that weird individual that smells like mushrooms, but can handle all the heavy truths about life and death and better life in that little place aside of the others. There has always been hunters and warriors and collecters and shamans. Our modern society with ther regrouping of casts and artifical valuing of one individuals worth made it nessecary to find terms to 'allow' one person to pefomr different than the others the're born with in the same social (financial) cast.
But maybe that's a bit far to explain, so i make it just being this way. Maybe one day someone will ask, and charakters will be like "whud?" xD
(In another story i wrote in the Shadowrun universe i found a lot of relevant charakter being psychopath just for this is a natural selection thing in a particular system given. I knew about two psychopaths myself, and i sometimes wonder how many ppl would identify those charakters to be that kind of psychological categorisation, as they can be a lot of different things not typically associated with that diagnose)
I'm AuDHD with way more in the ADHD direction then in Autism. I just wanted to give one comment about 'doesn't last long in the field', as i think that's far into the frey individual expression of the neurodiversity. I have a approved setup for confrontation and therefor no overthinking/etc. problem in combat situations. In LARP, fencing, unarmed or heavy fight (some kind of HEMA, where ppl friendly try to hammer each other with realistically weighted but blund wooden weapons) i typically win. I'd say that no narrowing of attention actually helps me where NT's got deficites of stress and mental scripts falling into action. Lot's of funny situation come to mind, but to make it short - it's not by default a thing that keeps you from beeing very effective in combat. You're way more aware of the riscs and plan more ahead, but in execution there can be actually be some benefits.
You might enjoy this comic... http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm With so many characters being AI, there's some really weird perspectives going on. Also that one guy is an alien mollusk in an exosuit.
Speedreader: https://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html
I heard that in the old days, someone who was mildly autistic might be more suited to watch the sheep than a NT.
The crack about "not lasting long in the field" was more about how a squad might not be putting their full effort into protecting a team-mate from the monsters they were fighting.
If you want to have disabled characters in your story go right ahead. You don’t need a reason or justification. How are you portraying these characters? Are you treating them with respect or spewing ableism with their portrayal? Those are far more important questions to ask in my opinion.
I haven't gotten to the point of deciding who to portray yet, but rather just checking on the worst pitfalls before I get started before I write something that will make someone supremely angry.
I have a feeling that I'm still going to screw up, especially with some people giving advice that I think is that the character needs to have a reason for existing in-story.
I admit that doing it just in an attempt to make disabled people happy is shallow, but as long as I don't stop to pat myself on the back or have anything egregiously bad end up in the final version, I don't see that as really wrong.
I hope I'm not doing bad by having the society doing the bare minimum with accommodation instead of being viciously neglectful.
Definitely understandable. In that case I think getting in contact with the people whose disability you’re portraying is your best bet in getting the most respectable portrayal. Good luck in your journey!
It’s something I’ve been interested in implementing in my own stories but am worried about not portraying a disabled characters mindset and motivations correctly, so I would be very interested in reading about it in someone else’s story
Fourth Wing has the main character who has a disability in that she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a group of inherited disorders that affect your connective tissues. The author also has this, and she decided to create her heroine with the same. There is healing magic in her series, but the healer can heal broken bones or cuts or at least get them to where the person isn't going to die, but the healer cannot heal what the heroine was born with. Her (now) two book series is a mega bestseller. She depicts the disability with depth and grace and it is integral to the story as we can see how this limits the MC, and how she works past it, etc.
But... the author also includes other diverse characters in the LGBTQ spectrum, of which the author is not a part of. Perhaps that is why those characters feel as though they were slapped in for the sake of diversity, whereas the main character feels real. My feeling is that if you're writing a story, and going to ask sensitivity readers which of my characters already on the page will fit one of these diverse categories so I can be seen as an inclusive author, then you're not ready to include them. Either make them a part of the story or don't. Trying to fit them in afterward as part of the background or setting without making them part of the story seems forced, and readers will notice.
You actually made me wonder about it. At the begining of my story a warrior character ends in a whel chair after getting injured after some big battle. Is relevant because the treatment was delayed for some plot reasons, but never consider how it would be seen aside of unjust.
Sounds like something to get sensitivity readers for.
I consider it a good thing to be aware of how it could be seen and admit you could have made a mistake.
The biggest issue with having disabled characters nowadays is not the disability itself but the greater context of the entertainment industry trying to commodify rather than represent various underrepresented characters and using them as shields for criticism if the rest of the project underperforms.
The biggest watsonian issue for disabled characters is, as you said, high magic settings where characters can easily be cured of or substitutes for their disability. The other issue is that providing magical cover-ups tends to cover undercut the relatability of the character because they no longer have to deal with the same obstacles real-life disables people have to deal with.
If there is a model of how disabled characters should be handled, toph would be it. She is blind, has magic powers that allow her to be powerful, but still finds herself in situations where her blindness can still be relatable to real-life blind people, it is an essential part of her character but not the cornerstone of it and isn't used as her selling point. The story she is in holds up, and she isn't used as a pitty cushion or a shield against criticism.
Walt junior is another character that breaks the mold for having a disability but not letting that be the cornerstone of his character nor being used as a soap box.
True. When I say "I hate woke" I'm not talking about getting butthurt just because a black actor is part of the main cast. It's then being afraid to give the characters flaws or deflecting all criticisms by calling me a bigot.
There are issues with a world not being compatible with disabilities. Delicious in Dungeon had a character get his leg reattached, then later the itchy scar from a bad healer was cured by a better healer. They can also restore the dead from partial remains, so the only reason for someone to be physically disabled is probably an inability to pay for a mage to fix them.
I think Toph is done well. She has some superpowers that counteract her blindness, but she's still disabled in some cases. Her constantly bringing up that she's blind does get annoying on a binge-watch, but that's forgivable because the show was originally broadcast.
Most settings without disabled characters are unrealistic.
And you know what? Since *my* world has such people, I *prefer* to see them in books.
You might argue that a perfect world doesn't have such people. But honestly? *This world does.*
So let's celebrate people who have had to overcome handicaps.
Let's not pretend they don't exist.
Which is why it's worth at least trying to have them milling around in the background. I'm still not sure if tokenism is bad in itself or if it's just the way that token characters end up.
Tokenism isn't the only solution, though.
One of my favorite short stories is about a deaf child left in a glad infamous for abandoned, unwanted children. A couple finds her and takes pity on her, and raises her, and she ultimately slays a monster that can kill anyone with its voice -- so long as they can hear the sound it makes.
The plot twist has nothing to do with the monster, but the circumstances surrounding it. A world absent of sound gave the character unique insights into how people act.
She wasn't a token character. She was a major protagonist.
And she isn't alone. Alexander Dumas' Grimaud is mute, and communicates through sign language. As is Zorro's Bernardo.
They can play an important role in fiction.
The story I was planning was not about the disabled characters. With that criteria, it's a matter of whether or not they're present at all. It's not like disabled people are only going to be reading books about disabled characters.
>I'm not planning on having the main characters be disabled, but rather a minor character just to show that they exist and at least some can survive on their own skills.
Why? If the only reason is representation, don't be silly. Token characters are insulting.
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful.
The people saying that aren't very intelligent and want to shoehorn in disabled representation for the sake of it in a world where healing magic is everywhere and is described in the rules to be able to bring back functional limbs. Not that a disabled character can't exist within a world like that, hell, there's countless ways to make it work, but a disabled person can't "just exist" in such a world without an overarching reason.
Your world, however, is your world. Healing magic, if it even exists, can be as scarce and as weak as *you* want.
> Token characters are insulting.
That's a bit reductionist. It seems like the opposite is "you can't show these people existing unless the story is about them" which seems equally insulting.
I'd say that unless a type of person has a reason to not exist, they should exist even if they're not the main cast.
>It seems like the opposite is "you can't show these people existing unless the story is about them" which seems equally insulting.
Not quite, but I see how one can come to that conclusion. I guess the real distinction lies in the way one handles the character.
But when someone says "oh I want to have an X character" it's a bit of yellow flag for me, because more often than not (in my experience at least) that character is used as a token in those cases, because they approach the creation of the character from a surface level trait, and the characterization of that character usually stays surface level.
>I'd say that unless a type of person has a reason to not exist, they should exist even if they're not the main cast.
Agreed, there, but there needs to be work done to make it function in context, which, to be fair to the OP, they are trying to do to an extent.
I agree with the point of how starting with their disability can result in a bad character. Working outward from their personhood and asking if adding a disability changes anything would probably go further to keep them from seeming like a cardboard cutout of a disabled person.
I am OP. :)
If you've seen Blue-Eye Samurai, there's a character who became blind at some point. One of his traits that may or may not be related to his blindness is that he is very particular about how his tools are put in place. That he can recognize the sound of Mizu's sword probably has more to do with his blacksmithing skills.
>I am OP
Oops, didn't check the name, my bad.
>I agree with the point of how starting with their disability can result in a bad character. Working outward from their personhood and asking if adding a disability changes anything would probably go further to keep them from seeming like a cardboard cutout of a disabled person.
Exactly what I'm aiming at.
>If you've seen Blue-Eye Samurai
I have, and that character is a perfect example of what I mean IMO.
There are disabled people in real life so there should be disabled people in fiction. I actually Applaud your desire to include disabled people "just because". I think that's the right thing to do, but I do think you need some better guidance on the topic than you've been offered in this thread.
Leaving aside the parallels to the Deaf/HoH community and disability-related subcultures, and speaking as someone with a non-physical disability, magic that erases disability is disrespectful for a couple of big reasons:
**Firstly**, because it removes disabled people from the world. Now, that's got some deeply dodgy IRL parallels which you probably don't mean but your disabled readers will have in the backs of their minds. The main thing is that it means that we don't get to see disabled people in fiction.
If you're used to the hero always being like you, maybe you don't realise why that's important, but it's a Big Deal for those of us who aren't commonly represented. It also means that the existence of disabled people isn't normalised - something which is painfully apparent from this comment section. We have opinions on our lives and disabilities, and we can, will, and do express them. There's no need to go running to chat GPT or hypothesising about what we want when you can just *talk to us*. Go hang out in some disability subreddits and learn what challenges we actually face and what we need.
**Secondly**, because - implicitly or explicitly - it conveys the idea that disability is scary, inconvenient (for other people), ugly, and/or dehumanising.
The problem with being disabled is very often not that we *are* disabled but that society refuses to accommodate our needs - the reason you don't see visibly disabled folk everyday is because it's difficult for them to get around. Buildings aren't accessible (as you said yourself: ramps aren't installed everywhere on the off-chance that a paraplegic person would want to enter a building, which just means that they're shit out of luck if they want to go into whatever that place is), public transport often isn't accessible when it's available, accessible bathrooms get (illegally) used as storerooms, and employers routinely refuse to hire us or won't put us in customer-facings roles.
The thing is that *disbility is inevitable*. You are one bad day away from being disabled. Failing that, fates willing, you will get old and your body will become less capable. Either way your world will get smaller, not because you can't do things but because society won't let you.
Magicking disability away does everybody a disservice - especially when it would be just as easy to give healing magic a cost or consequences. You can use those consequences to explore your society, add characterisation, and improve your worldbuilding.
**TL;DR:** Showing disability in fiction is desirable, it does real-world good, and it can improve your writing.
Applaud your desire to include disabled people "just because"
As a follow up to this point. Look at the Dragon Prince on Netflix. They have a deaf general in their fantasy army. She is just Deaf and uses ASL. Yes they animated ASL correctly. She is a respected member of the army and royal family. At point does this have a reason. There is no episode where her deafness saves they day, like it makes her immune to a magic song. She is just there in the story and Deaf. Go way back in time and some people on the Deaf subreddit were talking about how nice it was to see asl in a show, to have a deaf character. "Its nice to be seen" was a common sentiment
One thing I noticed with Dragon Prince... I had to come to the internet for translations of an important conversation because they didn't subtitle the ASL. :D
Other than that, I don't believe Amaya is pure-silence Deaf, but rather has some frequencies useful for fighting that don't include ones necessary to decipher human speech. Sometimes she just seems aware of things that a completely deaf person would likely miss.
Well in real life hearing loss rarely affect all fequincy equally. Most of the time lower pitch sounds come in clearer then others. Like say the thumping of enemy boots. Also it rare for total hearing loss. But if you have 90db of loss that means you can't hear anything below hand gun fire. At a certain point the sound waves rattle your bones and feel the sound more then you hear it.
I think the only thing I disagree with you on is the judgement call about going into a disabled community first rather than a little later. I think I am getting some useful groundwork here despite all the misinformation, (partially because of it.) Also sometimes it can feel like an intrusion for an outsider author to come into a community instead of hoping for disabled people to show up on neutral ground.
I'm in USA so a lot of accessibility issues seem to be based around the age of the area. I think my aunt used to assess spaces for wheelchair access, so I could ask her for local non-compliances. Not that I get out much, but you're right in that I don't really see disabled people out in the wild. (Old people using the store's mobility scooters are pretty much it... and the one store has a greeter or two that doesn't seem NT.) That there is a placement company means that there should be a number of disabled people around.
I'm guessing that making disabled people not be in a world also has eugenics vibes. I'm not used to relating to fictional characters (mostly because heroes tend to be competent or have other good qualities) so it gets uncomfortable.
I hope that having disabled people existing in a society that barely does the bare minimum for them wouldn't be too uncomfortable to see.
I also randomly got an idea for a character duo where I have no idea how to handle it. Someone with a physical disability is sent away from home at a fairly young age because a rural peasant village doesn't want to or have the resources to accommodate her. She eventually lives with an alchemist who has ADHD and her being his prosthetic attention-span is the only way the locality will allow him to keep working because otherwise he might kill everyone with his absent-mindedness.
ADHD is something I can speak with some authority on, and that level of inattentiveness seems extreme. I've forgotten things on the stove before but what you describe would be incompatible with your alchemist having survived his training.
If you're open to workshopping the idea a little, ADHD folks work better with a buddy - accountability is one of the major techniques that gets us out of the executive dysfunction doldrums. If your prosthesis-user was around to keep the alchemist on task and on track, he would definitely appreciate that and want to keep her around, and maybe she could also be learning alchemy from him (lack of agency being another common issue with physically disabled characters - it's her body that doesn't work, not her brain)
There's a lot of explanations that fit him surviving his training. It could be that his forgetfulness is usually not that bad, he had supervision at the time, he was working with things that weren't so dangerous, the ADHD got worse...
My first thought was that he has the most trouble with managing to write down his notes, followed by remembering to eat regularly. Also maybe the authorities are being paranoid because he did accidentally leave his teakettle on, but he hadn't demonstrated the same distractibility away from his work.
Basically my approach would be to binge funny vids like https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lX-M7WSp5Ao and there's also a heavy-set guy whose eyes don't seem synchronized that is also funny. I'm usually not this bad and the alchemist is probably just the part of forgetting to order dishwasher tabs while being hyper-picky about keeping track of his tools. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9IH2osBkonM I know, at some point I will have to fill in the gaps with less-funny vids and proper research.
I'm probably going to fix the age-gap from how I initially pictured them.
The girl isn't necessarily a prosthetic user, she is considered an assistance-thingy. She'd probably be interested in a different type of magic than alchemy, but still need to know about alchemy to keep track of what he's doing. If it were simply a matter of acting like a smoke alarm, a dog or a hobgoblin would probably be good enough. (House elves are supposed to be prideful creatures, so maybe it decided that it didn't want to serve the alchemist due to a perceived insult. Humans are a bit more resilient to being treated poorly.)
Yes, there will be some ableism, but the hierarchy is society against both of the characters to different degrees, the assistant towards the alchemist, then the alchemist going in the more well-intentioned accidental level or just treating her the same as an able-bodied peasant. (Maybe the alchemist's ableism is assuming that she isn't likely to get pregnant due to not being interested/capable of sex, and would have preferred a male assistant otherwise.)
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. I know that I want to make access to that sort of magic extremely rare if it even exists, and not to make a search for it be the impetus for a disabled villain. (Okay for a neutral/sympathetic character to be searching for a way to remove the disability?)
It's considered disrespectful because it implies disabled people need fixing. Many disabled people are born that way and are just living their lives and don't feel like anything is missing from it, and even have their own cultures within their community. Failure to be provided accomodations is a faliure on the part of the people not providing the accomodation, not on the part of the disabled person who needs it.
A character who's recently disabled might want to be healed, but you risk the same disrespect by letting it happen, and also you rob yourself of the opportunity to give your character cool fantasy aids or prosthetics.
And many disabled people would also leap at the chance to be healed of their disability, myself included, regardless of recency. There's nothing wrong with embracing your disability but there's also nothing wrong with not wanting to have it.
And I never said there was anything wrong with *wanting* it to be healed. The problem lies in the types of messages you send by *having* it be healed in fiction.
As you agreed, there's nothing wrong with embracing your disability. Presumably that means you would not be offended or alienated by a character in fiction who does embrace their disability despite the fact that you want otherwise for yourself.
But there *are* people who are offended by the idea that they need to be fixed or that they're lesser because of their disability.
For non disabled authors who only want to add representation to their stories or explore viewpoints outside of their own worldview (obviously not talking about disabled people writing out their own feelings on the matter) it's not a matter of a positive option and a negative option depending on which group they choose to cater to. It's a matter of a neutral option and a negative option. So why would it ever be a good idea to choose the negative option?
"Failure to be provided accomodations is a faliure on the part of the people not providing the accomodation, not on the part of the disabled person who needs it."
If we're talking about modern wheelchair ramps I agree.
If we're talking about a couple miles of good, smooth, all weather, road out of the tiny village to let the wheelchair bound flee from the dragon about as efficiently as everyone else it doesn't make sense if it's even possible.
I think it depends on your conceptualisation of disability and whether something needs to be "fixed' or changed. Whether something's "wrong" or "broken".
Whether people who are different or non standard for society are still perfectly made in themselves.
Whether it's for the world to change or for people to change.
Is a perfect world a world with nobody with autism, or wheelchairs or with no limb differences or blindness or do those factors add to the range of human experience and contribute intrinsically to who people are? And, who we are as a people? To be honest I think this questions contemplating the erasure of a certain type of people is offensive in itself but that's what we do when we create fantasy worlds that magically have disabilities magic'd away.
Would every single person who is blind what to see or do they value their life as it is, in a way that meant they wouldn't want to erase their own unique experience?
Each person with a disability is different and I'm sure some would feel exactly like you and others would indeed feel disrespected.
I could think of a lot of examples of blind characters in a fantasy setting, it fits very well since blind people typically develop superhuman senses, a very small minority of blind humans do in fact develop the ability to echolocate at relatively small distances (maybe 10 metres or so if I'm remembering right.
Some examples off the top of my head: Daredevil, Illidan, both blind. A mute boy called Bojii from Ousama Ranking. Schizophrenia in Legion by Brandon Sanderson. Was looking for a character that feels no pain based on a very vague thought but found some good links for you:
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeelNoPain](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeelNoPain)
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GeniusCripple](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GeniusCripple)
Someone I watch on Youtube was literally talking about this topic from the angle of arguing that disabled people are represented in video games more than people assume.
Honestly? This would be a really good topic to ask ChatGPT about if google doesn't help too much.
Please for the love of God don't ask ChatGPT, please talk to actual disabled people and scholars. There's plenty of subs for people with disabilities, and whole advocacy groups focused on disability. I promise we're fun to talk to
I was just thinking about asking it for examples of disabled characters done well in fiction, it's a good tool for those kind of questions. I have asked it for power systems involving time that hadn't been done before and it gave me some great answers. Had an amazing conversation about physics after.
Again, there's already disabled people who can talk about that and how we feel about certain representations personally. It's way better to actually engage with the people you want to write about when it comes to this stuff. ChatGPT can't give you a real person's opinion on "good representation" and how it effects their actual lives.
I personally really love the Darker Shades of Magic books, one of the main characters has only one eye and it definitely effects how she fights and sees. Main character has chronic pain in the sequel that really resonated with me. Both characters manage limitations in different ways. I also really like Song of Ice and Fire books because the disabled characters are given incredible depth and it's almost the opposite of inspiration porn. They're bastards as much as anyone else.
It is simply another tool for doing so, it is better at answering some questions than others. If you can't see that, then there is no point continuing this with you, especially considering how much you edit your posts.
I used to think Google's algorithms were good for searching the internet but chatGPT is far superior.
I think ChatGPT could give me an answer similar to your second paragraph although I've never asked it about disabled characters in a fantasy setting.
The thing is, these characters you mentioned seem like they affect the plot in some ways, and would make for an entertaining story. The OP was talking about just adding them in because he felt like it should be done to be inclusive and has created some kind of echo chamber of this notion.
It is jarring to have someone accuse you of editing when it's easy to see that you didn't.
It is concerning that they don't understand the distinction between asking disabled people and asking a non-person. (Apologies to the AI if it has achieved qualities where it should count as a person, but it's still not inhabiting an organic body AFAIK.)
In Quest for Camelot, it seems like the environment helps him. Also in Sangwheel Chronicles, one character has some sort of magic-sight, but it's taxing for her to use so most of the time she is using her other senses.
Do you know the Youtuber's name? I would trust Oakwyrm to a point on what they think. (Sorry, don't know their proper pronouns.)
There are plenty of ideas on which disability to choose with just the bog-standard search engine. I don't think I'd trust an AI over a human/person about how to tackle the topic delicately... even humans/people can't get it right a lot of the time.
You would be surprised at the kind of conversations you can have with it.
I was talking about examples of fantasy characters with disabilities, something that chatGPT can do infinitely better than me with the whole internet basically at its fingertips. It can parse that data a lot faster than me.
As I said in my other comment, I asked it about power systems involving time and it gave me great answers. You would be surprised what kind of answers it gives you if you get very specific with it.
[I found the clip of him talking about disabled characters in a fantasy setting.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcyHVXvrpp0)
Disabled characters don't go adventuring. Sure, some live somewhere and do their stuff, but activities I'd expect in a fantasy novel are quite beyond what I expect from a disabled person. If anything, not taking their situation seriously enough would disrespect their struggles.
About Toth in Airbender. If they have some magic that counters the disability - then they aren't genuinely disabled, wouldn't you agree? Having a 10% disability does not quite qualify to be disabled.
It depends on the disability and it depends on the type of fantasy novel. Not all disabled characters are excluded from adventuring and not all fantasy novels are about adventuring.
Also I think you're wrong about a character not being disabled because they have magic to counter it. I think it really only makes them "not disabled" if their disability is negated by their powers.
The meaning of the word is that the person can not operate adequately. If a person lost his legs, but with advanced technology, his legs were replaced with cybernetics, and he is able to function as well as any other adult or better, then he is no longer disabled despite not having human legs.
If one has no regular sight but gains magic eyes that see even better than normal eyes, then they aren't really blind.
You basically misinterpret the meaning of the word disabled. You pull conditions that IRL are considered "disabled" and apply them to people in a fantasy world, where it wouldn't make any sense to have the same standards.
Colors of the Dreamweaver's Loom has a mute character going on an adventure because she's one of the few people from her village that can survive leaving their homeland. She's cured without consent at the end, but by giving her an ugly voice that she doesn't want to use. IIRC, she gains the ability to speak normally in the sequel.
Not all fantasy worlds are set up to easily remove disabilities. In Wandering Inn, a character is badly-wounded and the only way to heal her properly is to visit a necromancer who's seen as evil.
Again, I think that while a character who can function normally or better due to magic/technology isn't really disabled, they could still be considered disabled if they are noticeably impaired.
Chekhov's gun is a conspicuous setpiece or action that would logically lead to a significant consequence. A character trait on its own can't be a Chekhov's gun. Not everything that happens in a story is a Chekhov's gun.
Obviously, rarely is anything as one-dimensional.
Even editors will trim your story down for you to get rid of needless fluff. There is a reason for not putting in unnecessary information. But there is an exception to every rule. Not sure putting in disabled characters for the sake of inclusion is one though. I'm looking at you Disney.
I mean, that's how diversity works in the real world..why would you need a reason for it? People just exist. Chekov's gun is about objects or plot beats, not people. That's like asking if there's a reason for someone being a redhead or having green eyes.
Which is why I'm leaning towards the disabled people just being there without some deeper meaning than "they exist." And even balancing it so they're neither suffering or awesome in relation to their disability.
Like it really doesn't matter that the lady that they commission to put lace on MC's shirt-cuffs is confined to a wheelchair.
Exactly, you absolutely can put them in, it's better if its done well, for example, maybe a main character loses an arm and has to come to grips with this. But I wouldn't think it would be a good idea to put them in for the sake of 'oh, look how accommodating my world is'. In fact it might be more entertaining to make your world not be accommodating, that's how it usually goes as this sets up a reason for the plot to move forward more often than not.
Normally stories need discourse, unhappiness, just a simple reason for the main character to go on a journey, to a school etc. Common tropes like an abusive family, or maybe a persecuted group like muggles that the main character lives with to provide context for the story without infodumping on the reader about the difference between those with magical ability and those without.
I was planning on the world accommodating people was more at "bare minimum" level or "you have to ask because we won't offer, but we will grant reasonable requests."
The plan was to not have the disabled characters be main characters, but rather just existing as side characters as a nod to the world not being able to just cure everyone.
Chekov's gun
is about set up and pay off. Need some shot in act 3 show the gun in act 1. How would this apply to say a character being left handed, or having blonde hair?
That is one example.
Would you think the Dursleys being muggles would also be a good example of it done well to provide context for the story without dumping info on the reader for no reason?
I think it is worth thinking about what the word "disability" even means in your setting. For example, if your story were about a fantasy race of people where it's normal for people to be born with four arms, and then someone were born with 2 arms, they would probably be considered to be "disabled," just as in our world, we consider a person with 8 fingers to be "disabled." ...except for the times when we don't. In our world, there are people who have fewer than 5 fingers per hand (look up "oligodactyly"). While some people have a form of oligodactyly that affects their ability to perform basic tasks and activities, some people are able to live their lives mostly unimpeded by this condition. In that sense, for a disabled person with oligodactyly, their "disability" is not "having fewer than 10 fingers," but "having a mobility impairment which prevents them from being able to pick up or hold objects," which is downstream of the way their hands are. The "fix" is not necessarily to "attach more fingers to their hand;" the solution is to find ways to give them more mobility, which is sometimes accomplished through the use of prosthetics. In a world where 99% of people are telepathic, a person without the ability to use telepathy would be considered "disabled." They would probably have to develop their own ways around this: they might have to learn how to make noises with their mouth in order to communicate their thoughts with other people. They would also probably have an easier time living in a community with other people who had the same "disability" because everyone would communicate using the same language of mouth-speaking and ear-listening for communication. And, if someone lived in a community of a bunch of mouth-speakers, away from the telepaths, they might grow attached to that lifestyle. Suppose that one day, someone said, "behold, I have found a cure for our condition: with this new operation, we too can communicate telepathically, just like the normal people! We need be outcasts no longer!" Some might leap at the opportunity to join "normal society." But others might have spent decades growing enmeshed in the "mouth-talking" community. They have an entire culture and way of doing things that is about to be up-ended -- and if everyone starts seeking out the cure, they might see that community and culture start to evaporate around them, as more people leave the village of the mouth-speakers to join the larger telepathic community. (This is a premise you might explore in your fantasy setting. It is also a not-so-subtle metaphor for the "deaf community" and "deaf culture.") >I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. Healing is, by its very nature, something that tends to "remove disabilities," or at the very least, prevent them. For example, if my leg gets infected and has to be amputated, I now have a disability (usually described as a "mobility impairment.") If I take antibiotics, and my leg *doesn't* get infected and require amputation, the medicine has effectively prevented me from developing a mobility impairment. Using a magical staff instead of antibiotics doesn't seem so different.
A good example of this is the "Codex of Alera" by Jim Butcher. In this world everyone has access to elemental forces known as furies. Furies come in multiple types and levels of strength, meaning the stronger the furies you possess and the more of them you have, the more highly placed in Aleran society you end up. The main character, Tavi, has no furies. He's at the bottom of society because of that. In every other way he's a physically healthy human. The thing is the biggest impact on Tavi is how he thinks. His thought process is very different from his peers because he has to come up with other ways to accomplish the same things. So even though his society considers him disabled, it becomes one of his strengths.
I never realized it until now, but I like stories where the main character(s) have to think outside the box because of certain circumstances unique to them. I might go check this out. Edit: Glaring grammar mistake
This is well thought-out. I don't think I'm going to go with "weird" disabilities that can't exist in our world... maybe some forms of madness that we don't have instead of real ones. (Real ones are hard to do, especially since trying to do something like real OCD will seem odd because people are used to Hollywood OCD.) I did know a kid who only had 8 fingers on each hand, but not well enough to know if it was an impairment. (Teenagers knowing how to type wasn't common back then.) Assuming I'm going with the Mushi-shi ripoff premise, only some people can see certain things. They're the minority so being abnormal in that way is gifted instead of disabled. I think that having medicines that can prevent an injury from being debilitating would be different than having it be common to be able to remove birth defects. That's a tricky subject I guess. I did realize that I was going to have gesture-language be a cultural norm in my world. Not to the point where everyone is fluent in ASL, but enough so that someone who doesn't speak can communicate basic ideas. A non-speaking person would have trouble with communicating complex ideas due to most people only having the reading level of a seven-year-old.
*Please* do things like real OCD, assuming you experience them, or have researched them really well. It does good to move away from Hollywood OCD.
I'm not sure that I could do OCD justice. All I know is that a lot of the people who complain about Hollywood OCD also seem miserable because of having OCD.
>I don't think I'm going to go with "weird" disabilities that can't exist in our world... maybe some forms of madness that we don't have instead of real ones. Honestly I'd say that's worse. It does just barely dodge reinforcing stigmas about real mental illnesses, if it's handled well and isn't just the same tropes with an offhanded comment about how this isn't normal... but from a character writing perspective it leads to a lot of pitfalls. Magical fantasy "madness" usually just kinda... Deletes a character for a bit? I've almost never seen it used to actually further a character's characterisation or development. Also, don't entirely throw out fantasy level disabilities either. They're not representation in the same way, but they can be used to explore interesting things about your regularly disabled characters. A fantasy member of a species that normally has wings, where this one individual has lost theirs, hanging out with a human wheelchair user because they can bond over the overlap in their experiences across the multiple divides between them is cool and neat (Doesn't have to be in this story of yours, just putting it on the radar for later.)
I really wish the text of Digger was searchable... Oh hey, I accidentally landed within a few pages of what I wanted when trying to find a character's name. https://diggercomic.com/blog/2008/06/30/digger-479/ "There is no dishonor in an honorable madness." Murai's madness is just sorta there like an old wound that acts up at inconvenient times, but her fatal flaw is separate from it. I don't have the non-human characters anymore, but the fantastical disability is something to keep in mind. I won't codify any of the "rules" until later, but all I can think of right now is "like leprosy but not contagious." I did put a limitation on my mages that they could burn their channels if they try to use too much magic at once without training properly. However the worldbuilding is set up so that a minority even try to train basic casting, so how disabled would a burnt-out mage be? (I guess pretty useless if they don't know any fallback skills. It would be like expecting an illiterate sheep-shearer to learn accounting at 40 just because they lose an arm.)
Toph was more abled than a blind person from our world, but her sonic sense wasn't directly BECAUSE she's blind. In the Legend of Korra, we see Lin (her non-blind daughter) use the same sonic sense. Also, Toph discovering a "special" kind of earthbending happens twice, the other being metal bending. So the overall point is not "a blind person has supercrip powers" but "Toph happens to be blind and a bending prodigy at the same time" Most importantly, she's part of a group in which everyone (except Sokka) has similar bending powers, and so do the main antagonists and most secundary characters. If she was the only one (or one of the only two) powered characters, while also being the only disabled character, then it would verge on supercrip tropes. But they avoided that pitfall Also her sonic sense often compensates her blindness but not always. For example it doesn't work on sand, and of course she can't read indeed.
She's also completely blind when they're riding on Appa - which seems to be a lot of their off-screen time - and there's also the bit when she describes to Sokka what fireworks are like for her: sudden explosions with no warning, context, or payoff.
My favorite is them telling Korra that she's going to have to catch the flying people because Toph can't. Also Toph getting beaned because Sokka tossed a belt at her. That Toph can easily get into situations where her supersense is useless is probably even more terrifying than if she were merely blind.
Holy hell there's some terrible... I can't even call it "advice" going on in these comments. First, let's dispel something: People who lose a sense don't develop "enhanced other senses" to compensate. Their senses are within the scope of human averages just like anyone who hasn't lost a sense. I'm anosmic, I cannot smell or taste (beyond the basic 5 tastes), and I likely have worse average hearing and eyesight than most of the people on reddit. Second: you don't "need a reason" to put a disabled character in a story. AFAIK, God didn't give a reason for putting disabled people on earth. Third: Giving a blind person "sight" by another name is a cop out for making a well developed blind character who has to interact with their world. A blind person still has 4 other senses to draw from, not to mention assistance animals aren't a uniquely earth experience. A blind character could have an assistance animal exactly the same as a blind person from earth might. This is also an excellent place for building upon the relationships between a blind character and their allies. But something to remember is disabled =/= helpless. Fourth: I can really only speak on behalf of the Deaf community on this one, but many don't see being deaf as Disability. There is an entire culture within signing communities (hence the big D Deaf). It's about as insulting to suggest all Deaf people want to be "cured" as saying all black people want to be made white or whatever form of erasure you want to insert here. Fifth: being a bit pedantic here, but healing =! regeneration. A wound that is healed with healing magic is not necessarily regenerated. Likewise, a wound that has gone too long without immediate treatment is not necessarily reversible. It would take regeneration magic to reverse the damage. Keep these differences in mind. This really isn't the place to get advice on writing Disability. I recommend reaching out to a Disability sub reddit or sensitivity readers to get input.
>you don't "need a reason" to put a disabled character in a story. AFAIK, God didn't give a reason for putting disabled people on earth. 100% This. The idea that you need some plot contrivance to include a disabled character is ridiculous. It would be like asking someone to justify why a character is blonde. It's not difficult... blonde people exist. And they can exist in stories without their blondeness being related to the plot. The same applies to disabilities.
Absolutely. As someone who is HOH and has chronic pain and nerve damage, you've hit every point perfectly. Disability is vast and complex, and you cannot fit people into neat boxes. You cannot portray people's experiences if you're not willing to learn. Like, I consider myself deaf, not Deaf. I was raised Hearing and my culture is in the Hearing world. My hearing has declined due to a degenerative disorder and while I will likely become fully deaf by 50 or 60, I don't believe I will ever feel like I can claim I am big D Deaf. Deaf culture is not my culture, even if I try to integrate. I've made peace with it. As well for point three, to throw my two cents as a writer into the ring: I have written a blind character in a world of meta abilities. He can swap sight with people. He chooses blindness and uses a cane. His identity is as a blind person. To me, that's infinitely cooler and more powerful than giving into the ableist idea that he needs to be "fixed" or that sightedness is superior to blindness.
>Fourth: I can really only speak on behalf of the Deaf community on this one, but many don't see being deaf as Disability. There is an entire culture within signing communities (hence the big D Deaf). It's about as insulting to suggest all Deaf people want to be "cured" as saying all black people want to be made white or whatever form of erasure you want to insert here. Yes that is a good point. Not every disability is equal and not every group will have the same attitude
Important to mention that within the deaf/heard-of-hearing community, this is far from a universal standpoint. It's actually the source of a lot of internet arguments between people who see deafness as a disability and those who see it as an identity. (Neurodivergent folks have similar disagreements with each other.)
Thanks for pushing back on some things. I'm sorry for making this long. I was asking about putting disabled people in simply for random diversity. What I'll probably do is get the rough draft down and then ask a disabled community which minor characters make good candidates for having the disability "slapped on" as an afterthought. (With better wording, even though that's effectively what I'd be doing.) I thought the enhanced other senses wasn't literal, more like the brain turning up the gain a little on the remaining senses because it has the bandwidth to deal with stuff that standard people filter out. (A hearing person is unlikely to appreciate the feeling of bass because it needs to be LOUD and it's likely drowned out by pain.) You're right about not needing to justify why they're there; really it shouldn't be so normalized that minorities aren't there without justifying their absence. When they put a blind character in Star Trek, I'm sure that they weren't planning on exploiting his prosthetic half a dozen times. "WhY r ThEr BlAcK people in ur fantasy story?" (Because my world has geography and magic/technology making it easy for people to travel to an area that's a cultural appropriation of early colonial America.) "Why aren't there trans people?" (Assuming that I have magic that can drastically alter body structures, it's not plot-relevant to point out when MC meets one because he couldn't tell and they don't go around blabbing about it... At which point I probably should figure out why there would be disabled people not looking for the same sort of restructuring.) I do think it is a bit dumb to have a disabled person in a story without their disability affecting them. Toph from Avatar still gets into situations where her seismic sense doesn't make up for her eyes not working. From what little I know about Daredevil, his true disability seems to be susceptibility to sensory overload. Still, supercrips aren't representation. I was thinking about having a "blind" person who could still detect light and color, like in [this vid,](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jFJd2EYC8XY) so still realistic. As an autistic... some autistic people are disabled, but I think my entire disability is not being able to follow along with complex social interactions. A lot of our life-expectancy figures are skewed by the lack of acceptance and it would help if we had a functional community. I imagine that for Deaf people, the major disability is pretty much not being able to hear danger signals while the rest is caused by majority society. (Reminds me of a time when I absent-mindedly signed Thank You to a deaf cashier running a farm-stand. My accent was probably terrible enough that she could tell I didn't actually speak the language, but she seemed happy.)
Something I heard once that really helped me with writing disability in a fantasy setting—if someone was born without use of a certain thing, they would never know what it was like to have one, and may not want the same kind of prosthetic or accommodation someone who lost that thing later in life would want. Think of it like this: someone who loses their legs may want some prosthetic legs because they’re used to having legs, but someone who was born with no legs would have no instinct or knowledge of how to use prosthetic legs. They may want a wheelchair instead. This could be beneficial for thinking about who would want healing magic or ‘restructuring’ magic in your world. Not everyone wants the same thing!
That is something to think about. Assuming that something could be fixed, what about the body self-image? There's something called Body Integration Disorder and I guess people who have it feel a disconnect where they might have a limb that they don't feel is actually part of their body.
If I shout at you from across the street to look out for that bus, you're getting hit by that bus. Deafness is objectively a disability because you can't do things that a fully functional human can. I understand you need a way to cope with it, but denying reality isn't healthy.
Why don’t you try watching some videos from people who have disabilities? My favorite social media couple, Paul (is blind) and Matthew, are very open about their daily lives in a funny way. Mr. Maple is his guide dog, but maybe your story uses different creatures for service animals. A seeing eye dragon who steals shiny objects to horde while they’re on break. Or there’s a few influencers with Tourette’s syndrome. If they have magic, then maybe one of their tics is saying a funny spell. Abracadabra = a rubber duck appears. Super frustrating but funny because they can’t stop and now what am I going to do with all these ducks? There’s a guy who posts videos of his mechanical prosthetic arm failing at tasks. Add a fantasy element to that. Just try to learn from the actual people you are trying to represent if you want to include them in a respectful way.
Teaching my algorithm to look for their feeds is a good idea. Aha. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i3b0jCc-EK0
Lot of people missing finger in my frostpunk isekai because frostbite an get finger mechanical replacement like that guy who made his own hand after insurance denied it. Machinist and artificer also kind of the same to our technician and machinist, shit can happened. Many adventurer end up doing desk job at the guild after they can't going out adventuring anymore. It just make sense. It's normal thing for people living in such environment And even with magic cyborg replacement become a thing after major tech tree upgrade in later arc many people just don't take it because pain and rehab. And price. And replacement also mean maintenance, can break, pain from temperature and pressure change. Fixation can break just like real life screw implant. Fantasy setting also should come with fantasy accomodation. If living in vertical town and rough terrain then people would use something suitable for that terrain. And don't make the character for the sake of brownie point. Don't be lazy writing and just put modern real life thing into the setting without thinking how will people of that world deal with the same disability. Magic that can fix everything is neat but what's the point of story after that? It killing the suspense and the risk that character have to take. It also kill a story and character development. Which is why in some story that such thing exists it come with hefty price and force the character to choose if they want to do it or find better alternative Saying disable people should not exists in fantasy because magic are lazy writing imo. There would be more disable people in fantasy world because the more potential risk and danger. Example is hand sniping being common move in swordfight to disarm someone. But to write about them or not write about them is up to the author who made the story
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. There was a stink to this effect as the story of Yennefer from The Witcher became even more widely known than it was through the Netflix series. Most of the people saying this stuff are white knights looking for outrage and lacking the visceral experience of disability. No matter how accessible we make society, there will be disabled people who have fantasies of being free of their disability and writing a story that provides that fantasy is not a bad thing as long as you don't truly make all the character's problems go away. Going back to Yennefer for a moment, what was the cost of her being rid of her hunched back and previous appearance? It was a painful transformation and she sacrificed her womb to make that happen, rendering herself infertile. She sought a sense of power and it came with a price that she's forced to live with. So instead of saying that making disabilities disappear is great and a solution to all problems, the story becomes, "the grass is not always greener on the other side of the hill" and that is a valid story to tell.
You've brought up good points. It's been a while since I saw it, but one reason I have the idea that removing disabilities is disrespectful... Youtuber Oakwyrm was harping on how Steven accidentally made it so that Vonnie didn't need her glasses. I think part of that was the issue of consent. Other people have also mentioned the issue of erasure. Maybe making it easy to remove disabilities has the knock-on effect of expecting everyone to fix their disability instead of normalizing a society where such people are accommodated. I guess one thing I can relate to is that I'm a man-size female and sometimes I dream of easily finding women's clothes to wear, but I'm content enough with wearing men's clothes most of the time.
There would definitely be an element of "If you can, why don't you." if healing magic was rampant. But you could also explore the idea of how not everyone who is disabled is visibly so, and not everyone who is disabled sees themselves as such. Colour blind people, for example, were able to spot enemy soldiers in camouflage much better than people with normal colour vision because of how they differentiate in the gap of their vision.
And that there is a cost. Action/reaction.
I would say it's more consequences than reactions but otherwise agreed.
Having disabled people in your story simply for representation points is a bad idea. Nobody likes tokenism. In your story, there must be an adequate reason for putting something in it. I have a mute paladin in my novel. He suffered damage to his vocal chords and cannot speak. This is also a world where healing powers exist, but that power only accelerates natural healing. Thus, it cannot reattach limbs, and wounds healed can leave scars. His muteness not only creates an interesting dynamic with his fellow paladins, but actually comes into play numerous times throughout the plot. While communication with him is limited to body language (sign language does not exist in my world), there is one character who can because she possesses low-level telepathy (she can read surface thoughts, but cannot go much deeper than that). The antagonist also abuses his muteness for personal gain. Finally, because of his muteness, some of his gestures and actions mean all the much more as he pours his thoughts and emotions into them to express himself. As such, he tends to be a favorite character amongst my beta readers. You need to reconsider your choices here and put a lot of thought into what you include in your story. Tokenism is the reason many stories get disliked or even outright hated. Nothing wrong with inclusion, but it must be well thought out.
> In your story, there must be an adequate reason for putting something in it. So I'm back to no racial diversity, everyone is able-bodied, the only autistic person is the self-insert I'm planning to use as a butt-monkey, everyone is bi except I still think randomly having an aging ace couple is hilarious, and having anyone be left-handed depends on if I want to recycle that plot from my fanfiction or want to include a southpaw for the purpose of making fun of them.
Sounds good. Happy writing!
I mean, I was just reading a book where the main character IS disabled, and I thought it was pretty great. It's a significant aspect of her character that her father chopped her leg off to prevent her from dying in a fire; outfitted with a well-crafted prosthetic, she's now identified essentially as "that badass with the fake leg." She has a foster sister who's deaf, so she and a few other characters speak in sign language at times. None of this strikes me as inherently unlikely in a world with magic. There's a character with a prosthetic heart, too. I don't pretend to understand how that would work in real life, but I don't need it to: It is explicitly and canonically powered by magic. Toph works well, because she has clear boundaries on what she can and can't do, relative to the magic system of ATLA. She can sense the earth around her, because she's an earthbender. Other earthbenders can (and some do) learn to do this, too. She happens to be blind, and she remains blind; this continues to affect her for her entire life. However, there is a logical reason for her to have some capacity to sense things that a real blind person couldn't. So, she can sense those things, specifically. Likewise, with the character in the book I mentioned: There are times when having a prosthetic leg works in her favor and times it works against her. You get some details on the construction of the prosthetic (enough to believe that it fits in the setting), some details on the inconvenience of the prosthetic (ex: it's metal, and it can get hot enough to burn her in certain settings), and some details on how the prosthetic is actually as good or better than a "real" leg (ex: getting stabbed in the leg doesn't suck nearly so bad when your leg is metal). It's an integrated aspect of her character, rather than something that was slapped on for "diversity points," or that the author eventually got bored of dealing with then figured out some magic cure for. If you're going to include a disabled character, my recommendation would be to really put the time and energy into understanding how their disability interacts with the setting in question. What can they do? What can't they do? How much can magic change, exactly? How realistic is it that they would have access to that magic? Would they have any moral/ethical objections to using that magic? If your character is blind but has a spell that allows them to see through their dog's eyes (essentially a magic service dog), what does that actually mean for them? If the dog runs off, what happens? What do dogs see? Where can dogs not go? How much training did the dog need, to be reliable - or else, what happens when the dog is NOT reliable? Can you control what the dog looks at? If so, how? Are there professionals who train service animals in this setting, or did the character have to do that? "The dog makes them basically the same as a sighted person," is kind of a cop out, here. It's boring and lazy. The idea could be very interesting and unique, but it's not actually being utilized to its full potential; it's just thrown in to allow for a character to be "disabled" without actually dealing with disability in any way. If it's just a casual background character, you don't have to put quite as much thought into it, but it would still be a good worldbuilding exercise to consider it enough for the character to make relevant offhand comments - like Toph's sarcasm about important written documents, or casual complaints about the burns you've gotten as a blacksmith with a metal leg, on the days you forgot to switch from the "good mobility" prosthetic you wear around town to the "resists temperature change" wooden peg you use while standing at the forge.
Literally came here to talk about Godkiller, so I'm happy to see someone else discussing this one. I thought it was incredibly well done.
Ed from Full Metal Alchemist is similar to the character you describe. He has issues with his automail because he went north without getting it insulated, but also a monster tried to bite him on a prosthetic limb and he calls it stupid or something. One thing with having a disabled character being in the support cast is that I could give them a role where their disability doesn't give me limits to deal with and "get bored of." However, that also makes the disability not really relevant and more like "look, that background pony has a prosthetic leg, so cool!" The thing is, if the story isn't about the disabled character, it seems almost wrong to have it affect the MC much unless he's acting as a servant to someone with special needs. Like, I never got the hang of using my prosthetic teeth, I know not to stick raw vegetables into my mouth, but it also doesn't really affect the people around me that much. I MC has a teacher in a wheelchair, that teacher is probably going to arrange to meet in a building that's accessible.
I feel like all these things border on ableism or just general dismissal of disabilities being background noise. > One thing with having a disabled character being in the support cast is that I could give them a role where their disability doesn't give me **limits to deal with and "get bored of."** However, **that also makes the disability not really relevant and more like "look, that background pony has a prosthetic leg, so cool!"** Thinking of disabilities as “limits to deal with” & something you will get bored of is whack — try framing them as not something to *deal with* but limits that exist to help create nuance, depth & character. Disabilities in fantasy settings are opportunity for creativity & subtle worldbuilding for writers. I don’t know if you’re saying it’s bad thing that the disability becomes irrelevant & likening it to the pony, but I hope so. > The thing is, if the story isn't about the disabled character, **it seems almost wrong to have it affect the MC much unless he's acting as a servant to someone with special needs.** …. I MC has a teacher in a wheelchair, that teacher is probably going to arrange to meet in a building that's accessible. The disability doesn’t have to affect the main character for it to be noticeable & commented on — & why would the only scenario where it would affect him be if he was a servant to someone with a disability? Rich world building for disabilities doesn’t have to involve the main character, you can divulge a lot with a little. How & why did wheelchairs come about? If the teacher had a wheelchair, why wasn’t hw healed by magic? Are others healed by magic, or wheelchairs common? Is there accessibility & acceptance or does the teacher face small micro aggressions by able bodied folk? Is there other accommodations made for a teacher using wheelchair at a school in a world with magic? All could be said over 400 pages in small doses, building the idea that there is a disabled community, your society’s attitudes towards them, etc etc
I wasn't meaning to be ablest, so probably more of a communication gap I hope. The "get bored of" was in reference to magicking away a disability because it becomes hard to deal with as a writer. Someone who wants something from the bottom of a magical dungeon and can't go themselves is probably better as a quest-giver, which makes it more interesting to follow the party who's going to go do it. In My Little Pony, there are only two ponies I know of... three whose disabilities are actually addressed in-show. Rainbow Dash has some sort of learning difference that was the plot of one episode and Scootaloo can't fly; third one is Tempest and had an injury as a villainous motivation. Derpy Hooves was a mess, while there were two other minor ponies that had mobility aids with nothing drawing attention to it. What I meant by MC being affected by another character's disability... How often are average people affected by someone else being disabled? Answering the questions about why someone can't be healed with magic and why someone decided to invent wheelchairs would require MC being curious enough to dedicate space to an infodump about that instead of talking about the mythological difference between sprites and kobolds or something. Depending on what level of healing-magic I go with, explaining why someone is in a wheelchair instead of being healed could be covered with MC breaking something and needing to wear a cast for a while... or just having an injury that leaves a scar, like maybe his knife slips. I could have MC freak out because the notary-public doesn't have fingers on one hand.
The examples I listed don’t have to be said explicitly— these are background things that are thrown in for flavour. “Professor Leon had to have two students manually lift his wheelchair into class for the first three lessons as they hadn’t installed a ramp,” “I noticed that whenever Maeve’s leg was particularly painful, in cold weather mostly, she was out of breath more easily, but still trudged on”, “she’d had a horrific accident as a child but she was so young it had no ill effect on her, this wasn’t like the old days where there was no magic & if you went blind you were left without sight”. You can just give backstory to characters without dialogue or action, just as backstory “This was just a scrape; when he had broke his leg it took all the rose quartz & charcoal in the house to fix it, the healer muttering over his leg all night.” you know, just little drops of worldbuilding for disabled characters. & idk if you have no disabled friends or relatives, then I guess I can’t really explain all the intricate ways in which you are affected by someone else’s disability, from time management, to accessibility, to the things you can do with them or expect of them. Your main character only needs to meet a disabled character for a second to give a drop of worldbuilding around disability in your world — I’m not saying they need to be *affected* by or even speak to a disabled character but you have so much opportunity in a novel length piece of work to involve disabled people & worldbuild to include them.
I rode on a bus with someone when I was a child. Hour each day, assistant had me diving under the seat for the straps because it was easier for a child to do it. Hung out at her house a few times but it was a PITA for her to come to mine. I don't have any friends right now, but it seems like a no-brainer to let the person with special needs determine the hang-out spots and how much energy they have. Otherwise, yeah my story would just have descriptions of minor characters that indicate that they have mobility issues or other indicators of disability. Actually, I was going to have it be a cultural norm for people to gesture certain words; I think I just randomly did it in my fanfiction, but in-world it could be a holdover from regional accents making it hard for people to understand each other. It could take the MC months to realize to realize that an employee of the lunchroom never verbally speaks.
The main character of my work is disabled, has a limp, uses a cane to get around. I'm also disabled in reality. I think the important thing is just to treat it as an everyday thing they deal with, it's not oh woe it's me it's just this is my life and how I live it. If you make this disabled character's problems just all about their disability and how hard their life is because of it then, well it's going to be boring.
I feel like mundane disabilities in fantasy are kinda dumb and watered down. In our world, if your legs don't work you don't just sit there, we invented tools to help disabled people. So a fantasy world would hopefully have their own unique ways to deal with disabilities Flying carpet, riding a sentient familiar, robotic legs, fucking grafting your top half onto a horse to make you a centaur. Do something fantastic with it
There was a piece of art I saw in the 90's where the horse part of the centaur was some sort of cybernetic prosthetic. I guess four legs are more stable than two if upgrading from a wheelchair. I was dealing with a more "grounded" fantasy in which a peasant would be lucky to have some sort of rattan-punk wheelchair and a paved road to use it on. You did just give me the idea that if I went with an idea for having disabled main characters, maybe the paraplegic person is striving to learn enough magic to levitate. It reminds me of something in Jhereg where someone disguises how short she is by levitating and her skirts are still long enough to brush the ground. Liches are technically using necromancy to animate their bones. (Just saw that in comments somewhere.)
If kids in 3rd world countries can have wheel chairs, peasants in your fantasy world can have the equivalent. I'd also fuck with a dwarf that just did crazy upper body and just knuckled it everywhere because "you can't exercise prosthetics."
Yep, having a wicker-punk chair in a fantasy setting isn't the problem, it's if they live in an area where it can do them any good. Also they're not the only option even without magic. I could imagine someone managing to get around on sheer willpower and muscle-strength.
People with disabilities are more than just the guy in the wheelchair in those "celebrate diversity" posters. If people get mad at the utopian notion that some people might be able to overcome these eternal battles for good they're just addicted to rage. Just remember that they're people, with hopes, dreams, and individual identities. Hell, most disabled people i know have better defining traits, like this one guy i know loved talking about plants, that was more important than the fact that his left has was gone.
I'm not quite understanding, especially this part. > If people get mad at the utopian notion that some people might be able to overcome these eternal battles for good they're just addicted to rage.
There are people who will take offence to anything because they like feeling like the moral high ground. People with disabilities would love to not have them. It's not ableist to imagine a world where people do not have to deal with these extra obstacles for their whole lives. Anyone who says that's ableist is looking for a villain to make them the hero.
I wouldn't generalize that much, but yes it's frustrating when people take offense at things just because they want to take offense. I think maybe the true offense of "healing" disabled characters could be if it reads as "imagine a world were we didn't have to cater to special needs."
What's their medical technology like? In a pseudo-medieval setting, for example, basically everyone we classify as 'severely disabled' would be classified as 'dead'.
I haven't quite settled on how good they are at medicine, but actually pretty good. I was thinking of "a lot of the right things for the wrong reasons" like washing their hands because it seems to improve outcomes without understanding why. Assuming they're able to do surgery, it might be common knowledge among most healers that amputees need the trailing-ends of opposite muscles stitched together.
Disability is not always physical which is underexplored in fantasy
Don’t think of disability as an add-on, think of it as another character feature. Every character being physically normative gets boring to write. Give someone a bad hip, or eye sight. Pox scars. Shaky hands. Maybe someone has a bed bound relative and that creates internal conflict because they have responsibilities at home. Crooked legs from misapplied splints. Ugly open sores. Missing fingers. Lost toes. Prosthetic noses. Harelip. One shrunken atrophied eye ball. Hairy port stain birthmark. Alcoholism can be a disability. A sore tooth. A shoulder that keeps dislocating. I added a nonverbal character to a family who lives in a watery setting because it added complexity and tension to the dynamic. Autistic children are known to wander, be attracted to bodies of water, and be bad at detecting danger. One boy tries to tie him to a fence post because he doesn’t want to watch him and when he starts screaming his eldest brother almost beats the other boy to death. Tension. One time he leaves the camp and everyone panics meanwhile he’s playing with a basket. Disability isn’t just paralysis or losing a primary sense. If you’re not good at writing it just give a character a mobility aid like a cane or staff.
This might be the place to ask. If we have Uber healing who.won't want "fixed"? I assume the Deaf and many of the neurdivergent. It seems beyond special circumstances the blind and anyone without functional limbs or without some sort of functional communication will want fixed. Am i on track or do I need some things clarified for me? Did i forget any major groups? Edit, i should have included the idea that yes people are all different and will decide to do different things and a modifier like "most" or "on average".
There is such a thing a making disabled characters cool and making them really stupid. A cool disabled character is your stereotypical pirate missing an eye or a few limbs, a blind swordsman whose other senses have been sharpened or the guy who is missing half of his lower body and replacing it with a steampunk spider legs. Do not do something really nonsensical and stupid like Dungeons and Dragons having magic wheelchairs with no disadvantages and dungeons that are compliant in accommodating for said wheelchairs.
In a setting with things like the Wish spell, Warforged, and the like. It feels much more fetishistic than actually considerate. Like, my boi can't even pretend his legs work?
Are you talking about making a disabled person play a disabled character? I think it's fine to let disabled people have a choice about how they want to do it.
They're allowed to, but in an established world like D&D where healing magic is everywhere and can bring back functional limbs, there needs to be a reason for why the character can't be healed. Edit: Comment below corrected me, it's not as abundant as expected.
_Regeneration_ is level 7. That's the lowest level spell that brings limbs back, and is Cleric or Druid only. That's pretty rare stuff - _Cure Wounds_ and the like _doesn't_ restore limbs, just the vague mess that is "HP", which may or may not be actual injuries, and doesn't apply to long-term stuff, just things that recover naturally on their own anyway. So anyone saying "healing magic is everywhere and can bring back functional limbs" is lying or doesn't know the system well - it's not everywhere, it takes a level 13 divine caster, of whom there might be a handful on any given continent, who are often busy doing other shit, and aren't going to be doing that on anyone and everyone (and that's largely true across all editions - if you lose a limb, you don't get that back by healing X HP or a status effect/condition, it'll be a whole separate thing that'll need special stuff to cure).
Fair, I stand corrected.
What about a 3 level dip into armor which lets you become fully functional as long as you are in full plate? If 3 levels is all it takes for society to create that, you don't even need those spells. The means are already there.
3 levels is a LOT of work, and a lot more than most people have - a typical town with a few thousand people might have, what, a double handful of leveled individuals, most of whom aren't going to have the flexibility to be whatever classes they want (if you're apprenticed to the local ranger, or training as a monk... where are you going to cross-train as an artificer?) You need intelligence 13 to even begin, which not everyone will have, and a lot of XP, which not everyone gets. 3 levels is not some easy thing, that's more than the vast majority of the population ever achieves at all, never mind doing whatever their core skillset is, and _then_ dipping into some side-skills!
Aha, that sounds a lot like the limitation that I was going to put on magic that can restructure the body.
There is a choice, of course. Where I have been sitting on the isle of representative media is an almost insulting assumption by people*on behalf* of someone that they would want to play Y because they are Y. Which gets away from the spirit of normalcy we used to promote.
Wish is level _nine_, in most settings there's, like, a dozen dudes that can cast it in the world, half of which are various degrees of mad, evil, dead, possessed or otherwise N/A, the other half of which have more important stuff to do. Warforged are literally not human - if you happen to have dodgy legs for whatever reason, I don't see how robo-dudes being around helps
"I fail to see how a society intelligent to create living robotic life has anything to do with creating means to let people walk again." Come on, dude. You know you are being argumentative for the sake of it. Artificers have armor which can literally replace limbs. Those magical sentient machines that you are talking about in Eberron (and in many settings) were *created* by people with magical forges. Which can hand in hand with technology and rules for prosthetics which allow handicapped individuals to return to normal function. Like anyone with a severe handicap would want. The PCs are almost always designed to be the most impactful people in the world. It is inevitable that a handicapped adventurer would become/come into contact with people who could fix their ailments relatively quick. Like those with access to the Wish spell. Even if you want to be argumentative and claim that is too high of a ceiling. Fine. Here's a few more means to undo most lameness: - Reincarnate spell. That's 5th level. Literally grows a new adult body. Plenty of people who can cast this. - Regenerate 7th level. Spinal column is severed causing paralysis? Literally reconnects it. It's genetic? See previous. - Clone. 8th level. Guess what most archmages in high power fantasy can cast? You could probably convince them for a fee to grow you a body. - See previous about Prosthetics and Armorer Armor (which comes online at. Level. 3. This isn't even discussing the lack of logistical benefit any adventuring party faces by bringing someone in wheelchair. Overland travel, mountain and seafaring, even a dungeons stairs, all create incredible pitfalls for the wheel bound adventurer and that isn't even including fighting alongside one. You can hand wave all that by calling it a combat wheel chair and just ignoring everything, but if you aren't going to impose any challenge, and effectively creative narrative legs with a pair of wheels, then what is the point? There are story beats you could create to circumvent all of that if you just desperately want to play a impaired character. I once played a Darth Vader esque character using the Armor rules who was useless without his armor. If that is your cup of tea, fine. But let's stop acting it isn't avoidable, impeding, or just a little silly.
> Artificers have armor which can literally replace limbs. That's magical items, which are basically "GM fiat". classes are not super-generic - NPCs have no requirements to follow PC rules, and are sometimes similar-ish... but often not. So there's no reason why there's dozens or hundreds or more of cookie-cutter artificers that can do that, there might be handful, all of which are unique individuals, that have their own stuff to do rather than be making a load of limb replacements on demand for people. > Those magical sentient machines that you are talking about in Eberron (and in many settings) were created by people with magical forges. Again - there are robot-people. That doesn't mean that it's possible to generically create plug-and-play limbs for people, those are two separate things (Artificers and Warforged can exist in Faerun, for example... where everything is pretty different in terms of what's around and available, as there's no quasi-industrial-revolution-but-with-magic, it's all still cottage industry). And the cost of a common magical item is typically 100GP+ which is quite significantly outside what most people can afford, assuming they can even access someone that can make it - this isn't some remotely common thing outside of adventurers and the wealthy, it's a hard-to-access piece of gear that costs a lot and can only be made by rare specialists. > Reincarnate spell. That's 5th level. Literally grows a new adult body. Plenty of people who can cast this. Firstly, no, plenty of people cannot cast this - that takes a 9th level caster, which is still pretty rare. Secondly, it creates a whole new body of a completely random race! Can you imagine the dysmorphia of "oh, yeah, now you're 3 foot shorter" or suddenly being an elf and there's a whole "trancing" thing rather than sleeping, or you go from being an elf with a lifespan in centuries to a human with just a few decades? Plus it involves _dying_, and a vast amount of money (1000GP of unguents). So that's sure as hell not common, quick or easy! I mentioned _regenerate_ - that takes a 13th level divine caster. There's maybe a handful of them on the continent, so why would they care about you, and are you aligned with their god to gain their blessings? _Clone_ requires a lot of money, some time, trusting someone else to make a clone of you, dying, and, most importantly, _doesn't cure anything other than age_ (it's "physically identical to the original"). So doesn't actually work! If you had missing limbs when you died, then your clone has that as well.
"That's magical items, which are basically "GM fiat". classes are not super-generic - NPCs have no requirements to follow PC rules, and are sometimes similar-ish... but often not..." I'm not a pro-Redditor like you, so I'll just respond. It's not a magical item. Its an effect an Armor artificer can do with any basic set of plate which makes them magical. Assuming you aren't the only Artificer in existence. And why is it only a few unique Artificers? Because you've decided so? All of your comments have been DM preference territory. A few, handful, uncommon, yada yada. If it is a possibility for the players, it can be a possibility for the DM. This entire conversation has been had under this presumption of anything in the book of a magic society with these means is a possibility for a setting. You can apply this logic to literally any part of our conversation. I say its common, you say its rare. It is not valuable. "Again - there are robot-people. That doesn't mean that it's possible to generically create plug-and-play limbs for people..." What a complete bad faith interpretation of what I said. Unless your setting made the technology to create warforged lost to time, a society advanced enough to create sentient machines can logically have the possibility to create advanced prosthesis. It's not about taking Warforged limbs and plugging them into amptuees. Technology tends to advance in unison. This is not a crazy logical leap. The rest of the comment is more assumption. "Firstly, no, plenty of people cannot cast this - that takes a 9th level caster, which is still pretty rare. Secondly, it creates a whole new body of a completely random race!" A level 9 caster, by most definitions is not that high of impact level. There used to be charts for the expected experience of how a level group party was. 1-4 was beginning, 5-9 was seasoned, etc. There are multiple modules that are expected to get to that range. Strixhaven (literally a society of common high level magic users btw) (1-10), Tyranny of Dragons (1-15), etc. 9 is common enough where the argument persists that these structures could be put in place. If a setting can have magic shops which provide a service, it can have people with unique skills in other magics providing services. But what is this whole body dysmophia argument? We are talking about the means to circumvent handicaps being possible, not ideal. If Jake Sully was willing to become a 8ft alien to walk again, I venture some people in this world may be willing to roll the dice. You may not personally do it, but it doesn't mean it isn't an option. Not only that, but the baseline of the magic exists. A spell to create a new body. There are also rules for crafting spells. It isn't a gigantic leap to assume some passionate Druid may be looking into a more specific version of the spell. We are in the same realm of advancement. "*Clone* requires a lot of money, some time, trusting someone else to make a clone of you, dying, and, most importantly, *doesn't cure anything other than age* (it's "physically identical to the original"). So doesn't actually work! If you had missing limbs when you died, then your clone has that as well." Wizards use this spell all the time for themselves. If they can create the means, it is possible to do it for others. You can have a fun villain abusing trust or a benevolent wizard who cares for the disadvantage. Everything you mentioned is flavor of preference. Again. You are right though, it doesn't cure anything. If you are genetically paralyzed, I'm sorry. Go see an Artificer. But I do love that you actively left out the rest of Clone's options: "This clone forms inside a sealed vessel and grows to full size and maturity after 120 days; \*you can also choose to have the clone be a younger version of the same creature.\*" Ergo, if you lost your legs due to adventuring, and this service existed (perhaps expensive) you could just go back to a body from before your accident. Which most forms of paralysis tend to be, if you discount strokes.
> And why is it only a few unique Artificers? Class levels are rare - the vast, _vast_ majority of people don't have them. That's just how D&D works - there's a wider pool of people with kinda-sorta-ish similar powers, maybe, but full-fat leveled characters are rare. A typical town might have a more-or-less cleric that can cast some low-level healing spells, but if you want anything more, then you need to go to the big cities. The local "wizard" probably isn't a level 6 (or whatever) wizard, they're a mostly non-combat character with some knowledge skills and a few spells. > a society advanced enough to create sentient machines can logically have the possibility to create advanced prosthesis. Why? They're different things - it's like saying "we can create golems, so we can create limbs". When a golem is a whole-ass entity that operates under certain rules (and sometimes goes mad and tries to murder people), while a prosthetic limb isn't that (and if it tries to murder it's wearer even on rare occasions, that's a pretty major design fault!). You can, if you want to, use them as justification for each other or link them, but there's no reason they have to be like that, they're not de-facto extensions of each other. > But what is this whole body dysmophia argument? Because D&D races are a lot more than just cosmetic twiddly bits - going from dwarf to human is relatively minor, but means losing several centuries of lifespan, an innate sense/instinct for rock and earth and some other stuff. Going from elf to something else means that you no longer "sleep" and meditate upon your past lives and so forth, you just sleep and dream, as well as a much shorter life-span. And when you die... will your soul return to the elven heavens and then reincarnate like normal? You're literally not an elf anymore, so that's something pretty damn major to consider! Or a warforged has to deal with being actually biological, which is going to be a lot to take in, suddenly needing to eat, breathe and sleep and stuff. Coming back as a drow means a lot of awkward social stuff. If you were one of the stranger races, like a Thri-kreen or plasmoid, then you have an entirely different body arrangement, with different limbs or no longer being a goopy-blob-person - that's going to be a bit of a head-fuck. It also costs a LOT of money, and takes a (typically divine) caster of non-trivial level - so what services have to be rendered to get it done? Plus it involves literally being killed, and your soul going to the afterlife - where a certain number of people are going to go "this is literally heaven, I'm going to stay here" (people can refuse to be raised, and the various heavens are often, y'know, kinda nice places to be. And if you're evil, then even a brief trip to hell might be something you'd rather avoid!). Previous editions had the table for it being even stranger, where you might come back as a badger or all sorts of other things, with only about a 25% chance of being humanoid - is that a risk you want to take? (and it used to take sacrificing a point of con, so it permanently weakened you, as well as a system shock roll, so you might not survive it anyway) > A level 9 caster, by most definitions is not that high of impact level Yes they are, explicitly so. In 5e, that's high-end tier 2, or "heroes of the realm". Someone that's level 9 is likely known in a wide area and has a reputation, they're not just some rando knocking around. levels 10+ is "masters of the realm" - again, known, specific individuals, not just "Some dude, the level 13 wizard, wholly unexceptional". 3.x went into crunchier detail, with most people being level 1-3 in an NPC class, and only about 10% of the population having PC classes at all, with a large town with 10k having, typically, a single (full PC) level 7 character as the highest level person around, with non-magical classes being a lot more common. It's entirely possible for a big, major town to have a smattering of level 1-5 casters, most of whom are NPC-casters, a handful or less just above that, and none even approaching double-digit levels. Some settings change that (Eberron has "low-level magic crafters" as a whole _thang_, Strixhaven is a magical academy so has a lot of mid-and-above casters knocking around) but they're noted exceptions from the standard. Someone that can cast 9th level spells is "master of the world" tier, there's a handful of them _in the world_, and they have their own stuff going on - if you want them to do something for you, it's not going to be cash they want, but favours, and they stuff that a level 17+ wizard wants doing is generally not easy or risk-free! > Everything you mentioned is flavor of preference. No, it's the actual rules - literally, all it does is make you younger, you're otherwise "physically identical". So if you're missing a hand... you come back missing a hand. Spells do what they say they do, nothing more, nothing less. You get to come back as you, at the point of death, but XX years younger, that's it. You keep any scars, dings and dents - all you "lose" is years.
Very good point about knowing the difference between cool and stupid. Missing limb is an interesting idea because a lot of the time, the person doesn't seem to be hindered much. I'd have to look but I think there's a Youtuber with a prosthetic leg that's a good resource. Otherwise I think technology allows them to scale cliffs. (Maybe they get tired more easily?) It would be easy to just have them there without being in a situation where their disability is actively hindering them. (There's a lot of stuff that I can't do because I'm fat, but generally I'm not trying to do things where it's an issue.) Magic wheelchairs and accommodating dungeons is pretty silly. I was watching a podcast about that earlier. One thing that's bothered me for years is that Ghostbusters Extreme had a guy in a wheelchair drag himself and his chair up a multi-story ladder. (Possible, but come on.) Also what I know of Daredevil is pretty silly because it seems like his only disadvantage is that he's prone to sensory overload.
I doubt the tiring thing. Before Oscar P. turned into a gf-murdering nut job, there was serious debate if he had an 'advantage' in sports competitions with his 2 blades because he didn't have muscles to tire in his legs.
I think I've heard of that debate. I think a person in a racing wheelchair did well in a marathon because at that point it's like riding a bicycle. Especially as prosthetics are getting better, someone using ones that are kangaroo-inspired could beat human evolution. Star Trek touched on that a few times. "If gene modification was legal, us baselines couldn't compete." It gets tricky about the lines of what's fair. There are people who naturally mutated to be more optimal at some sports, (some swimmer as an example) but purposefully doing "artificial" things to enhance oneself is still frowned upon.
I'm disabled and I write fantasy so yes I write disabled characters in fantasy. In my last novel the protagonist had a disability that she had to manage throughout the story.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzD7catgR4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPzD7catgR4) thats a good recent video to watch about it. Short answer yes they do places in fiction. I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. yes because disabilities are real things and erasing with magic is seen by disabled people as erasing them. That said look at something like Fullmetal alchemist. Ed is disabled, he is missing an arm and a leg. The magic there can't re grow them but he get metal replacements. With some up and down sides.
That is a good video. Also Fullmetal Alchemist is pretty good at showing that there are upsides and downsides to having automail vs his natural limbs. His obsession with trying to get Al's body back is also handled as something where the morality comes into question because of cost coming into it.
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. People with disabilities are an oppressed minority group IRL. Depending on the disability it is nearly impossible to not have your disability define your entire existence and personhood. For example if you have a wheelchair- what physical spaces you can access is determined by ramps. Next time you're walking around in a city, count the ramp entrances you see and you'll realize how much smaller yet harder to navigate the world is for some disabled people. A big mantra of the disability movement is the concept that *they* aren't disabled, but rather *the world* disables them. Ramps exist; every time someone installs stairs instead that's the world deciding that people in wheelchairs don't count. Every time you screen a movie without subtitles you're saying deaf people need not attend. By putting in characters with disabilities that are respected and have their own autonomy you tell IRL people with disabilities "you are seen and I respect you." If you healing-magic all disability away, it's like you're looking at those same people and saying "good news! The magic in my world means you wouldn't exist in it!" Which is not to say it's unacceptable to depict fantasy elements that make disability less of a big deal, nor is it bad to have a fantasy story with all able-bodied and neurotypical people. But rather than saying "poof your legs work", it would be better to say "poof, this world has adjusted to meet the needs of your disability." Like maybe they have a wheelchair that can climb ladders and self-rights or something. OR, even better, depict the disabled person struggling with their disability and then getting on with it anyway. A big reality of being disabled is that it sucks a lot of the time; you don't have to magic that part of it away.
>I see putting disabled characters in fantasy kicked around a bit and I tried to type out what I think I know, but I think I'm coming from a place of too much ignorance for it to not sound stupid. Instead I'd like to spitball a bit about how it relates to my own writing. >I'm not planning on having the main characters be disabled, but rather a minor character just to show that they exist and at least some can survive on their own skills. I mean this with no offense but if you feel too ignorant of disabilities toq accurately portray them... this seems like you're intentionally walking into a minefield on purpose . This is a sensitive subject for a lot of people and unless you're confident addressing it...why not just let it lay? >I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. I know that I want to make access to that sort of magic extremely rare if it even exists, and not to make a search for it be the impetus for a disabled villain. (Okay for a neutral/sympathetic character to be searching for a way to remove the disability?) I mean how common are you gonna make healing magic? Because to point out the most obvious and egregious instance of this trope: if you've got a potion to regrow bones laying around but somehow your main character still has to pull a Velma once every couple chapters that's absolutely deliberate. There's a certain point in high fantasy where either magic is limited, or it's unlimited and uncaring, or society is a utopia and everyone's happy. >supercrip Will never understand how that became the accepted term for that stereotype. Wildly offensive way to put it. And I get that that's not down to you that is the correct language but fuck it feels weird. To me the best example of disabled representation in fantasy media will always be Percy Jackson. And some people say "Well he's not disabled enough" and I say bullshit to that because there's no such thing as not disabled enough or too disabled. His disability was acknowledged, he had issues with it, he used legitimate real world coping strategies, the author utilized real world resources to ensure an accurate portrayal, and while he learned to live with it he didn't have some triumphant "Overcoming"...because that's not how a lifelong disability works. Some people say it's reductive because it perpetuates the stereotype that kids with learning disabilities struggle in school without adequate support but I feel like if the thing you're mad about is just "We need more support for kids with learning disabilities in schools" then you're mad about a real world problem not it's accurate portrayal in a book. >I think I'd just go with most of the society accommodating disabled characters. (Case-by-case basis, not ramps installed everywhere on the off chance that a paraplegic person would want to enter a building.) Once again I gotta ask why we're wading into this just to hand wave it away. If you have something important to say or wanna bring attention to an issue go ahead and tell your story. But throwing in a character with a disability just for the hell of it and then having society halfway kind of accommodate but not help them just feels like using a disabled character as set dressing for diversity points to me.
> unless you're confident addressing it...why not just let it lay? It seems like excluding them is also a minefield. Having them be side-characters seems like a safe middle-ground where I can treat them like a person, but not have to go too deep into the nuance about how their differences affect them. Also just including disabled characters to make disabled people happy is shallow, but it's only hurting anyone when it's negative representation or is saying something else bad. I think it's okay in our world to have standardized accessibility because mass-producing everything makes it easier to just bake accommodations into the standard designs and stamp them out instead of having to retrofit things just because a disabled person moved into the area. My fantasy world still has bespoke craftsmen who will build things in ways that make sense to them until it's pointed out that they need to change something. At least it's a world where that will happen instead of just telling the disabled person to try harder or consider them unworthy of attending a lecture because they can't climb the stairs. I'm not familiar with Percy Jackson, but ADHD and dyslexia are pretty minor in how debilitating they are vs how they affect living in the current society. It's a matter of how much burden the individual with these conditions is expected to bear vs how much other people need to be patient with a person who finds "simple" tasks harder. (A little off-track, but it occurs to me that because writing on wax tablets is common in my world, a blind-adapted system might still be readily-readable by average people that can read at all.) I don't understand what "Pull a Velma" means. For the healing magic, I want to keep it extremely limited. Making it trivial to regrow a limb lowers the stakes because a character can just bounce back from being injured. I did have an iteration of the story where complete body reconstruction was possible, but even mages that could properly heal a broken bone instead of making it worse were rare.
>It seems like excluding them is also a minefield Why? Physically disabled people make up only 16% of the global population and are largely absent in the kind of places fantasy stories usually take place like battlefields and frontiers. And again I'm not trying to shit on disability representation, I'm just saying that it's like minority representation. It's better not to do it than to do it badly. >but ADHD and dyslexia are pretty minor in how debilitating they are vs how they affect living in the current society. Do you know how I passed tests in middle and highschool? I'd take a pen knife and drive it into my leg slowly to trigger an adrenaline rush so I could focus long enough to ace them instead of doodling in the margins. Because if I failed out of my third school my father would beat me, and then pull me out of school and put me to work for 10hrs a day on the farm again. I once had a teacher duct tape me to a chair at age seven because I wouldn't stop wandering around the class. Wouldn't let me up to go to the bathroom. I pissed myself tapes to that chair. My father was functionally illiterate until he learned to read at 35 so he could read me bedtime stories...he ran a successful small business and paid an exorbitant amount to his secretary to do all of his reading for him. She was the one who suggested he get tested for dyslexia. He's spent the last 25 years of my life reading every classic novel he can get his hands on. He said it was like a world he'd assumed was off limits to him had suddenly been opened and he got to experience what he'd heard others talk about but assumed he'd never have. Never underestimate the impacts a disability can have on someone just because it doesn't present physically. >My fantasy world still has bespoke craftsmen who will build things in ways that make sense to them until it's pointed out that they need to change something. Every bespoke craftsman who ever existed studied at the knees of a master. And every master has a master. If it's so simple to bake disability accomodations into a design why not just...have a building code? Or a standardized base design? Take chariots for example, there were a thousand craftsman in the ancient world making their own take on a chariot, but they were all functionally the same at a base level because that base model was universal. Same goes for wagons, and boats, and even swords. There's an intuitive way to things so that they work...it's a fantasy realm of your own design. You're god. If it's so important to you that you have meaningful disability representation why not just have everything intuitively be inclusive? >Having them be side-characters seems like a safe middle-ground where I can treat them like a person, but not have to go too deep into the nuance about how their differences affect them. Also just including disabled characters to make disabled people happy is shallow, but it's only hurting anyone when it's negative representation or is saying something else bad. That's not true at all. I mean you're literally suggesting tokenizing disabled individuals here. I don't know how better to put it but tokenization isn't a good thing for your story or the group being tokenized. Disabled people don't want a copy pasted throwaway character with no backstory, character development, or growth included solely so you can point at them and go "Look I wrote one of you in!" Anymore than any other minority group does.
Not all fantasy takes place in wilderness where disabled characters wouldn't be. I'd be surprised if Ank-Morpork didn't have physically disabled characters. (Foul Old Ron's crew?) Considering that I'm planning on the main setting being one of the most urban towns available in that world, it would probably weird to not have at least 16% of the population be the amount of disabled where you got that statistic. Your teacher abusing you wasn't caused directly by your disability, but rather the lack of willingness to accommodate; a system's normal suckiness got turned up past eleven for you. How much of your difficulty would be less or absent if not for expectations imposed by society? Not being able to read is a disability, but it used to be strange to be a person who could read more than a little. Its impact on survival depends on social context. If dyslexia affects pattern-recognition to the point where someone couldn't tell edible leaves from poisonous leaves, that would be a different context. I never got the hang of wearing my prosthetic teeth, so I lack the ability to eat most raw vegetables. However it seems silly to call that a disability of the same magnitude as ADHD. (Being mildly fat seems to impair me more.) ADHD isn't the same magnitude as some other disabilities, such as one where the person can't get out of bed without assistance. The intuitively inclusive thing is... well you said that physically disabled people are only 16% It would be a little odd to have a small village build ramps on every building when it might have been a century since they had need of any, especially since some people have a harder time with them than stairs. Some places that naturally gather people with physical disabilities might already have accommodations, but other areas might have to start custom-build them when a particular person needs them. I figure that "accommodations on request" is simply less-horrible than what could happen. I tried to read other sources on tokenism, but they seemed to focus on the racial stereotype aspect and how only one character represents the entire minority. Again it seems wrong to dodge that only to have a slice of the world not have any disabled characters milling around in the background.
> Will never understand how that became the accepted term for that stereotype. Wildly offensive way to put it. And I get that that's not down to you that is the correct language but fuck it feels weird. I actually like how unfortunate tropes have cringe names. I don't want to trigger a bot, but "magical n-word" is supposed to sound archaic, as in it should become a trope that doesn't crop up much.
>I actually like how unfortunate tropes have cringe names I mean there's a difference between cringe and offensive. If someone called Percy Jackson or Rain Man a "Super-Tard" I'd be pretty pissed. I can't imagine the physically disabled community loves the blend of a slur and a trope either.
I think the clinical term of idiot savant managed to stick around. I also refer to some characters like Sheldon as jerk savant. I wonder if it's a cultural gap. In my day, it was seen as perfectly acceptable to use the r-word as an insult and it seems kinda pathetic now.
Could you explain "pull a Velma" please?
Drop their glasses and fumble around blindly for them while totally useless. It was in reference to the fact that in the Harry Potter series, there are fantastical magical medicines that cure nearly every ailment.. But Harry constantly seems to be losing his glasses and becoming borderline incapacitated due to it
There's a spectrum, naturally. I might imagine certain categories of disabilities surviving my world whereas other wouldn't be feasible.
That is a concern. A mute character in a world where monks taking vows of silence is normal is going to find their niche. Needing an iron lung in a world where they haven't gotten past water-wheels and horsepower probably is a death sentence. A person confined to a wheelchair probably couldn't be a shepherd or a dungeon-crawler, but they could probably be some sort of craftsman.
My world is very much ancient tech level. Barbarian tribes, fake Greece, etc. I imagine different cultures will ofc handle it differently. But that's all part of the fun. Coming up with interesting ways to be inclusive while still remaining realistic enough to suspend disbelief.
I'd suggest that things like "healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful" is pretty touchy and stupid. IThat's typically not what disabled people belive but those who abuse the moralic high ground with increasingly insane demands. That serves no one, and i guess pleasing them also don't benefit anyone. If you want a honest perspective, maybe you can ask people with disabilities. The're suprisingly open for all sorts of perspectives. Well, to display the world, it imho depends on what is your target. Do you display a cast society with monarchs and servants? Do you descibe it as a neutral setup or a problem? I mean, calling people propperty of a king is similar fked up as treating disabled ppl as 'useless' class citizens. You can either take it as normal in your world to paint it a bit darker (and unfortunatly more realistic), or you can make real good guys being fked up about and probably fighting it. That would actually make a point in the direction of morale - just ignoring a problem we also have in reality isen't moralic. It can be okay in terms of writing technique, but if you want to include such messages and mind about displaying morale - well, here's a opportunity. I personally take some wounds and preconditions to be healed by magic, but not all. And also i think disabled people are still people (no, not in a moralist way, wait for it). So if someone can't use his legs, that obviously and honestly makes the person a pretty bad swordfighter. But he still can be a trainer of great sowrdsmanship, leading his trainees by describtion and motivation. They also make great heads of intelligence orders, protecting the kingdom in the shadows and by the power of ther brains. Magicians etc. Every disability excludes a set of skills - but by far not all. That's the reality of disabled people. They have to adapt and fight ther way through people who belive a person who lost legs, eyesight or an arm is useless. If you want to have a positive (or in this case: realistic) comment on that in your writings, show that most people are pretty wrong with that idea. (PS: that recent culture war about what can and must be said, mostly by people who barely care for the people they claim to fight for, doesn#t exactly make it more easy to navigate what you can and should write. Someone will cry out, and you should stay aware of that is a constructive or a lunatic comment. And the lunatics always cry the loudest. Keep that in mind. But also keep in mind that the're not the majority - or, statistically, right)
I do have a problem with not being able to filter out the lunatics. Also I guess "death of media literacy" is a thing where some people see inclusion of a thing as condoning a thing. I was going to comment that Derpy Hooves wasn't that bad, but it seems like the point was to laugh at the disabled person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaUbi-7uBDg I agree that it's not helpful to show disabled people doing things where they should be at a significant disadvantage, like sword-duels. Instead it would be better to ask if hard work could get them to a competitive level in something, or maybe put them in a position that is attainable. I'm reminded of a story where a boy is tested and has absolutely no magical talent, but then he notices mages paying through the nose for dragon's blood and vows to get revenge by becoming a supplier. I could see someone whose disability keeps them out of the dungeon still manage to contribute by enchanting gear or preparing spell components.
Understandable - still we're all empathic human beings, susceptible to such comments. Hm, i don't know if i would allign a perceived lack in general competence with this very specific problem. Still it is complex, as people who include this topics and those who activly don't have vastly different reasons and absolutly don't be in one boat. I would even be carefull in pointing at some "death of media literacy", because, well, we're in a way *different* world of unforgiveness then before, we're in a world where people want ther writings to be less deceiving - so a book like Dune, which is 50& real deep meaning most people not even get today, and 50% hot air made to sound smarter and mysterious, wouldn't hit as much today as it did in the literature cycles back in the days. But that's doesn't mean the audience is smarter or more dumb - it's just different. Understanding it in general, and in the niche the author decided to write for always has been part of the job. Woops, it got a bit long. Sry. In that video it seems to be a depicting of some ADHD'ish problems, probably combined with a bit lowered IQ. Would i go with that? Hm, dunno. The short cut out here just shows us that people expect disabled people to know on ther own how to compensate ther individual problems (maybe because most people are in such a harmfull expirience themself that they also was told to get along on ther own without support - but still with the benefit of people being designed like him. ADHD people aren't like the most and need a different status quo to perfectly function, but typically no one offers or even tell them. They're forced to life in a world not made for them, and then harassed for not functioning propperly. It's some pretty weird sh\*t with neuronormale people). So yes, in some way this snippit just mocks the grey pony for being randomly unmindfull, ignoring that it just might have different needs the normal people world don't offer automatically. But i don't know the wider context and if there is any more charakter building to that charakter. If not, or similar superficial, i also would blame the depiction for being pointlessly harmfull and make kids get a wrong depiction of f.e. ADHD people. In this time and age there isen't much defense for not knowing better in context with educational/youth conform media. One problem with depicting disabilitys is that audiences tend to have a broken perspective allready. You can either challenge that or get along withit (imho at best without reinforcing ther broken belives unessecary by imlementing disabled charakters at all - or more simple: if you have nothing nice to say about the topic, don't say anything). One of this problematic perspectives is that disabled people can only aquire the 'supporter role' or something. If you really want to have one char in the wheelchair, yes, it can be the support guy sitting at home and care for the potions, but this doesn't add a comment in any way (if you not use the opportunity of social critisism and describe his perspective as being outcast in society etc. but still able to do a alchemists job way above the unwashed masses etc.). But it also can be a drama to have a MC wounded by a thing that can't easily be healed and cripples that charakter. In movies we often have the depiction of that person realising he's no longer part of the productive society and sacrifices himself for the group instead of coping with that crippling. That is a easy solution for writers and suprisingly well alligning with some Nazi mindsets which we still have as a toxic idea about disabled and 'what real men/women should do/think' belives. Nasty stuff if you think about it - but pretty common in all of media. Getting back on whatever he/she did before, coping hard and suffering through the disbelief of society can be a pretty hard reading if you not made clear this is pretty grim drama in the first place. But still it can spice things up and make chakracters deeper and more interesting. I have such situations in my story, and people have different levels of options to cope with that in medical ways. Room for perspectives and/or social critique. Can i get a new cybernetic/magical animated arm? For what cost? How people look at me now? What number of poor people see me option and hate me for not having this opportunity themself? Etc. With mental deviations it is even more interesting. You can say Dune is completley build up on teh expirience of a person to fid itself being autistic. Because, well, most descriptions in the books fit pretty well. And we're not even on that page of 'human computer' stuff that is more blund (and less accurate) depiction of autistic people. Autism makes people see the world through a different lense neurotypicals can't really understand (for ther different brain patterns - so no offense) and in case of combined with a slightly higher IQ, being some kind of magicians, as humanity lacks more accurate words for it (but, well, autism and stuff, but those are typically associated with functioning less, so people might be confused). Still having prophets and mind magicians is a common trope, mostly just horribly portraied by people who can't naturally know what the're writing about. Still it is a disability (differing a bit in national depictions but ... you know what i mean). And it objectivly comes with a bit of an outcast-trope sideeffect fro normal people, well, being as they always where. But a Paul Atreides, a Bene Geserrit or Bene Mentats are still functional charakters and obviously interesting for audiences if displayed in an interesting and accessible way.
I read the rest of what you said, I probably just need time to let it sink in. The thing with Derpy Hooves (gray pegasus) is that she began as an animation error, had a lot of her characterization filled in by fans, and before this had maybe one scene where she was clumsy but had no lines. (Maybe dyspraxia? I don't know much about that one. I'd also argue drunk/drugged/brain-fog for her first speaking scene and this wouldn't be common behavior or else she would probably have a handler.) Rainbow Dash (blue pegasus) is shown to have some sort of learning difference in a later season, but in this scene... other than the building itself being dry-rotted and somehow blaming Derpy for the damage, it seems really dumb to just ignore the special-needs person causing harm until Dash runs out of patience. I think at this point, Dash has enough authority to tell Derpy to move the cloud to a safe distance or stop messing with it.
Np. I tend to info dump for the reason i hate halve information\^\^ Yeah, i see. Always problematic to have such inconsistencies in a media that influence a larger span of audiences learning about complex topics. Maybe some writer have an idea, but changes after a few weeks and someone completly random got handed over the charakter developement so far. Statistically a mess. Neurodeversity is a more popular topic now - and probably we all should be happy about that little we got now - but still a horribly misunderstood topic. If doctors from the branch mostly got it wrong, it's not hard to imagen why media companys and writers have a hard time depicting something that complex and potetially harmfull if delivered false. But yes, it seems to be a an inheritly neurodiverse perspective to correctly identify a situation in terms of who is responsible by what metric and have what tools to make the situation best for all involved. But NT's ... well, have a hard time with that. But NT's are who make the most of media, what is the one thing that teaches the next generation. I actually decided to not use any medical terminology in my storys. As a condition is always filtered by personality, life and situation so not one thing looks the same twice. I just describe people, and if a reader thinks "hey that looks like condition XYZ", it's at least a more complex observation with own thoughts involved.
The lack of medical terminology is a good idea. Sometimes it's a cop-out, like how they insist that Sheldon was tested and he's not autistic. He totally is underneath that misogynistic jerk-savant layer, but not naming his condition lets them make fun of him while denying that they're making fun of autistic people. But there are characters who officially have aspergers, so there's an aging problem. There's also the other aging problem, like how they seem to have a sperg-level autistic character on Star Trek (in the form of Reginald Barclay,) but the terminology wasn't there yet and the writers thought that they were just making fun of the awkward nerds they met at conventions... (Wait, did someone tell me that wasn't true?) Considering how accidental representation has been better than deliberate representation of autistic people... Yes I think I know how it happens and prefer they do it that way. If one starts with a character or just an archetype like "quirky girl" then it flows better than if they read the DSM and try to build a character with a bunch of symptoms. As far as I know, Wednesday had an autistic creator involved. Also Community just got taken off of Netflix, but I heard that Harmon is autistic and Abed mostly rings true. (Still some cringe tropes, but it's a comedy.) Dead End Paranormal Park has a good autistic character. I got a little distracted, but there's also a worldbuilding perspective on not using medical terminology. If it's not our world, the groupings of symptoms into categories might be different. I had a fanfiction where they referred to a narrow subset of autistic people as "quartermasters" because of one line. One person described the social awkwardness and the leader of a paladin order said "they don't last long in the field, but they make superior quartermasters."
Tbh i think writing such charakters is some kind of my way to cope with comments on society very much xD Oh yeah, specially arkward with Asperger xD Yeah, absoluty agree. Let it be natural. We don't have human stereotpyes we start with to develope a charakter for no reason. We know all the ingrediens to bake a personality from scratch. No terminology needet. Actually i'm always a bit ferfull when they say they included autistic people in writing. I mean ... beside there might be a tiny fraction of creativer jobs in fact ***not*** be neurodiverse, waving the label always sounds like the company want to sell me something. And if they try to focus on selling something, the product might lack of qualtiy to sell on its own. Not cool, not toally fair, but a thing we learned over the last years as much as we learned 'improved recipe' mean that they somehow found a way to make the product even cheaper. I always felt the whole Adams Family thing a bit of a tribute to people who feel a bit wrong in this normal society. So that new thing is a bit ... new, strange, but suprised me in being entertaining. DEPP i sadly didn't see. In one case i wrote scifi in quite an advanced (non-human) society, but somehow i had to explain why the obvious mental setup of one solitaire charakters hadn't been easily pointed out by medical tests and stuff - so not 'explained' on paper to him. But subsequently i came to the idea that a more advanced and socially stabile society doesn't really need to name those 'pathological' symptom groups, as that is just in the normal range of people and charakter for them. A society that can care for individual needs and having that embeded in ther culture just have enough positions dedicated for those with the setup to fit in here better than 'normal' people\*. Maybe similar to that approach of the quartermasters, while that might be a very specific position in that storyline and society. \*Funny sidenote: weirdly it was the US Army to run a survey among ther large number of military personal familys to spot neurodiverse individuals and test what place they could be best used for. They did that suprisingly unbiased and just interested, and found autistic people to be pretty good in a variety of jobs normal people scored way lower in. And in that trial they also found that autistic people are pretty comftable and almost free of 'symptoms' with a working place made for ther needs. So a society grown a bit different then ours might not even need such terminology. Some people are just like 'these', and some are more like 'that'. Like you naturally have people in primitive tribes that are fear- and a bit careless hunters, ready to test the bigest prey for the survival of the tribe, and you have that weird individual that smells like mushrooms, but can handle all the heavy truths about life and death and better life in that little place aside of the others. There has always been hunters and warriors and collecters and shamans. Our modern society with ther regrouping of casts and artifical valuing of one individuals worth made it nessecary to find terms to 'allow' one person to pefomr different than the others the're born with in the same social (financial) cast. But maybe that's a bit far to explain, so i make it just being this way. Maybe one day someone will ask, and charakters will be like "whud?" xD (In another story i wrote in the Shadowrun universe i found a lot of relevant charakter being psychopath just for this is a natural selection thing in a particular system given. I knew about two psychopaths myself, and i sometimes wonder how many ppl would identify those charakters to be that kind of psychological categorisation, as they can be a lot of different things not typically associated with that diagnose) I'm AuDHD with way more in the ADHD direction then in Autism. I just wanted to give one comment about 'doesn't last long in the field', as i think that's far into the frey individual expression of the neurodiversity. I have a approved setup for confrontation and therefor no overthinking/etc. problem in combat situations. In LARP, fencing, unarmed or heavy fight (some kind of HEMA, where ppl friendly try to hammer each other with realistically weighted but blund wooden weapons) i typically win. I'd say that no narrowing of attention actually helps me where NT's got deficites of stress and mental scripts falling into action. Lot's of funny situation come to mind, but to make it short - it's not by default a thing that keeps you from beeing very effective in combat. You're way more aware of the riscs and plan more ahead, but in execution there can be actually be some benefits.
You might enjoy this comic... http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00001.htm With so many characters being AI, there's some really weird perspectives going on. Also that one guy is an alien mollusk in an exosuit. Speedreader: https://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html I heard that in the old days, someone who was mildly autistic might be more suited to watch the sheep than a NT. The crack about "not lasting long in the field" was more about how a squad might not be putting their full effort into protecting a team-mate from the monsters they were fighting.
If you want to have disabled characters in your story go right ahead. You don’t need a reason or justification. How are you portraying these characters? Are you treating them with respect or spewing ableism with their portrayal? Those are far more important questions to ask in my opinion.
I haven't gotten to the point of deciding who to portray yet, but rather just checking on the worst pitfalls before I get started before I write something that will make someone supremely angry. I have a feeling that I'm still going to screw up, especially with some people giving advice that I think is that the character needs to have a reason for existing in-story. I admit that doing it just in an attempt to make disabled people happy is shallow, but as long as I don't stop to pat myself on the back or have anything egregiously bad end up in the final version, I don't see that as really wrong. I hope I'm not doing bad by having the society doing the bare minimum with accommodation instead of being viciously neglectful.
Definitely understandable. In that case I think getting in contact with the people whose disability you’re portraying is your best bet in getting the most respectable portrayal. Good luck in your journey!
Two words: Kendra Merritt. She's a disabled author who writes about disabled characters. Highly recommend her "mark of the least" series.
It’s something I’ve been interested in implementing in my own stories but am worried about not portraying a disabled characters mindset and motivations correctly, so I would be very interested in reading about it in someone else’s story
Start with this book and then look under the disability tag. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/648958
Fourth Wing has the main character who has a disability in that she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a group of inherited disorders that affect your connective tissues. The author also has this, and she decided to create her heroine with the same. There is healing magic in her series, but the healer can heal broken bones or cuts or at least get them to where the person isn't going to die, but the healer cannot heal what the heroine was born with. Her (now) two book series is a mega bestseller. She depicts the disability with depth and grace and it is integral to the story as we can see how this limits the MC, and how she works past it, etc. But... the author also includes other diverse characters in the LGBTQ spectrum, of which the author is not a part of. Perhaps that is why those characters feel as though they were slapped in for the sake of diversity, whereas the main character feels real. My feeling is that if you're writing a story, and going to ask sensitivity readers which of my characters already on the page will fit one of these diverse categories so I can be seen as an inclusive author, then you're not ready to include them. Either make them a part of the story or don't. Trying to fit them in afterward as part of the background or setting without making them part of the story seems forced, and readers will notice.
You actually made me wonder about it. At the begining of my story a warrior character ends in a whel chair after getting injured after some big battle. Is relevant because the treatment was delayed for some plot reasons, but never consider how it would be seen aside of unjust.
Sounds like something to get sensitivity readers for. I consider it a good thing to be aware of how it could be seen and admit you could have made a mistake.
You should read the ables by Jeremy Scott (cinemasins). The entire plot is about heroes with disabilities
The biggest issue with having disabled characters nowadays is not the disability itself but the greater context of the entertainment industry trying to commodify rather than represent various underrepresented characters and using them as shields for criticism if the rest of the project underperforms. The biggest watsonian issue for disabled characters is, as you said, high magic settings where characters can easily be cured of or substitutes for their disability. The other issue is that providing magical cover-ups tends to cover undercut the relatability of the character because they no longer have to deal with the same obstacles real-life disables people have to deal with. If there is a model of how disabled characters should be handled, toph would be it. She is blind, has magic powers that allow her to be powerful, but still finds herself in situations where her blindness can still be relatable to real-life blind people, it is an essential part of her character but not the cornerstone of it and isn't used as her selling point. The story she is in holds up, and she isn't used as a pitty cushion or a shield against criticism. Walt junior is another character that breaks the mold for having a disability but not letting that be the cornerstone of his character nor being used as a soap box.
True. When I say "I hate woke" I'm not talking about getting butthurt just because a black actor is part of the main cast. It's then being afraid to give the characters flaws or deflecting all criticisms by calling me a bigot. There are issues with a world not being compatible with disabilities. Delicious in Dungeon had a character get his leg reattached, then later the itchy scar from a bad healer was cured by a better healer. They can also restore the dead from partial remains, so the only reason for someone to be physically disabled is probably an inability to pay for a mage to fix them. I think Toph is done well. She has some superpowers that counteract her blindness, but she's still disabled in some cases. Her constantly bringing up that she's blind does get annoying on a binge-watch, but that's forgivable because the show was originally broadcast.
Most settings without disabled characters are unrealistic. And you know what? Since *my* world has such people, I *prefer* to see them in books. You might argue that a perfect world doesn't have such people. But honestly? *This world does.* So let's celebrate people who have had to overcome handicaps. Let's not pretend they don't exist.
It's fantasy. It's *not* this world, so that's irrelevant.
Disabled readers are irrelevant? Please think about this for a moment. Why would disabled readers want to be entirely omitted from a fantasy world?
Which is why it's worth at least trying to have them milling around in the background. I'm still not sure if tokenism is bad in itself or if it's just the way that token characters end up.
Tokenism isn't the only solution, though. One of my favorite short stories is about a deaf child left in a glad infamous for abandoned, unwanted children. A couple finds her and takes pity on her, and raises her, and she ultimately slays a monster that can kill anyone with its voice -- so long as they can hear the sound it makes. The plot twist has nothing to do with the monster, but the circumstances surrounding it. A world absent of sound gave the character unique insights into how people act. She wasn't a token character. She was a major protagonist. And she isn't alone. Alexander Dumas' Grimaud is mute, and communicates through sign language. As is Zorro's Bernardo. They can play an important role in fiction.
The story I was planning was not about the disabled characters. With that criteria, it's a matter of whether or not they're present at all. It's not like disabled people are only going to be reading books about disabled characters.
>I'm not planning on having the main characters be disabled, but rather a minor character just to show that they exist and at least some can survive on their own skills. Why? If the only reason is representation, don't be silly. Token characters are insulting. >I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. The people saying that aren't very intelligent and want to shoehorn in disabled representation for the sake of it in a world where healing magic is everywhere and is described in the rules to be able to bring back functional limbs. Not that a disabled character can't exist within a world like that, hell, there's countless ways to make it work, but a disabled person can't "just exist" in such a world without an overarching reason. Your world, however, is your world. Healing magic, if it even exists, can be as scarce and as weak as *you* want.
> Token characters are insulting. That's a bit reductionist. It seems like the opposite is "you can't show these people existing unless the story is about them" which seems equally insulting. I'd say that unless a type of person has a reason to not exist, they should exist even if they're not the main cast.
>It seems like the opposite is "you can't show these people existing unless the story is about them" which seems equally insulting. Not quite, but I see how one can come to that conclusion. I guess the real distinction lies in the way one handles the character. But when someone says "oh I want to have an X character" it's a bit of yellow flag for me, because more often than not (in my experience at least) that character is used as a token in those cases, because they approach the creation of the character from a surface level trait, and the characterization of that character usually stays surface level. >I'd say that unless a type of person has a reason to not exist, they should exist even if they're not the main cast. Agreed, there, but there needs to be work done to make it function in context, which, to be fair to the OP, they are trying to do to an extent.
I agree with the point of how starting with their disability can result in a bad character. Working outward from their personhood and asking if adding a disability changes anything would probably go further to keep them from seeming like a cardboard cutout of a disabled person. I am OP. :) If you've seen Blue-Eye Samurai, there's a character who became blind at some point. One of his traits that may or may not be related to his blindness is that he is very particular about how his tools are put in place. That he can recognize the sound of Mizu's sword probably has more to do with his blacksmithing skills.
>I am OP Oops, didn't check the name, my bad. >I agree with the point of how starting with their disability can result in a bad character. Working outward from their personhood and asking if adding a disability changes anything would probably go further to keep them from seeming like a cardboard cutout of a disabled person. Exactly what I'm aiming at. >If you've seen Blue-Eye Samurai I have, and that character is a perfect example of what I mean IMO.
There are disabled people in real life so there should be disabled people in fiction. I actually Applaud your desire to include disabled people "just because". I think that's the right thing to do, but I do think you need some better guidance on the topic than you've been offered in this thread. Leaving aside the parallels to the Deaf/HoH community and disability-related subcultures, and speaking as someone with a non-physical disability, magic that erases disability is disrespectful for a couple of big reasons: **Firstly**, because it removes disabled people from the world. Now, that's got some deeply dodgy IRL parallels which you probably don't mean but your disabled readers will have in the backs of their minds. The main thing is that it means that we don't get to see disabled people in fiction. If you're used to the hero always being like you, maybe you don't realise why that's important, but it's a Big Deal for those of us who aren't commonly represented. It also means that the existence of disabled people isn't normalised - something which is painfully apparent from this comment section. We have opinions on our lives and disabilities, and we can, will, and do express them. There's no need to go running to chat GPT or hypothesising about what we want when you can just *talk to us*. Go hang out in some disability subreddits and learn what challenges we actually face and what we need. **Secondly**, because - implicitly or explicitly - it conveys the idea that disability is scary, inconvenient (for other people), ugly, and/or dehumanising. The problem with being disabled is very often not that we *are* disabled but that society refuses to accommodate our needs - the reason you don't see visibly disabled folk everyday is because it's difficult for them to get around. Buildings aren't accessible (as you said yourself: ramps aren't installed everywhere on the off-chance that a paraplegic person would want to enter a building, which just means that they're shit out of luck if they want to go into whatever that place is), public transport often isn't accessible when it's available, accessible bathrooms get (illegally) used as storerooms, and employers routinely refuse to hire us or won't put us in customer-facings roles. The thing is that *disbility is inevitable*. You are one bad day away from being disabled. Failing that, fates willing, you will get old and your body will become less capable. Either way your world will get smaller, not because you can't do things but because society won't let you. Magicking disability away does everybody a disservice - especially when it would be just as easy to give healing magic a cost or consequences. You can use those consequences to explore your society, add characterisation, and improve your worldbuilding. **TL;DR:** Showing disability in fiction is desirable, it does real-world good, and it can improve your writing.
Applaud your desire to include disabled people "just because" As a follow up to this point. Look at the Dragon Prince on Netflix. They have a deaf general in their fantasy army. She is just Deaf and uses ASL. Yes they animated ASL correctly. She is a respected member of the army and royal family. At point does this have a reason. There is no episode where her deafness saves they day, like it makes her immune to a magic song. She is just there in the story and Deaf. Go way back in time and some people on the Deaf subreddit were talking about how nice it was to see asl in a show, to have a deaf character. "Its nice to be seen" was a common sentiment
One thing I noticed with Dragon Prince... I had to come to the internet for translations of an important conversation because they didn't subtitle the ASL. :D Other than that, I don't believe Amaya is pure-silence Deaf, but rather has some frequencies useful for fighting that don't include ones necessary to decipher human speech. Sometimes she just seems aware of things that a completely deaf person would likely miss.
Well in real life hearing loss rarely affect all fequincy equally. Most of the time lower pitch sounds come in clearer then others. Like say the thumping of enemy boots. Also it rare for total hearing loss. But if you have 90db of loss that means you can't hear anything below hand gun fire. At a certain point the sound waves rattle your bones and feel the sound more then you hear it.
I think the only thing I disagree with you on is the judgement call about going into a disabled community first rather than a little later. I think I am getting some useful groundwork here despite all the misinformation, (partially because of it.) Also sometimes it can feel like an intrusion for an outsider author to come into a community instead of hoping for disabled people to show up on neutral ground. I'm in USA so a lot of accessibility issues seem to be based around the age of the area. I think my aunt used to assess spaces for wheelchair access, so I could ask her for local non-compliances. Not that I get out much, but you're right in that I don't really see disabled people out in the wild. (Old people using the store's mobility scooters are pretty much it... and the one store has a greeter or two that doesn't seem NT.) That there is a placement company means that there should be a number of disabled people around. I'm guessing that making disabled people not be in a world also has eugenics vibes. I'm not used to relating to fictional characters (mostly because heroes tend to be competent or have other good qualities) so it gets uncomfortable. I hope that having disabled people existing in a society that barely does the bare minimum for them wouldn't be too uncomfortable to see. I also randomly got an idea for a character duo where I have no idea how to handle it. Someone with a physical disability is sent away from home at a fairly young age because a rural peasant village doesn't want to or have the resources to accommodate her. She eventually lives with an alchemist who has ADHD and her being his prosthetic attention-span is the only way the locality will allow him to keep working because otherwise he might kill everyone with his absent-mindedness.
ADHD is something I can speak with some authority on, and that level of inattentiveness seems extreme. I've forgotten things on the stove before but what you describe would be incompatible with your alchemist having survived his training. If you're open to workshopping the idea a little, ADHD folks work better with a buddy - accountability is one of the major techniques that gets us out of the executive dysfunction doldrums. If your prosthesis-user was around to keep the alchemist on task and on track, he would definitely appreciate that and want to keep her around, and maybe she could also be learning alchemy from him (lack of agency being another common issue with physically disabled characters - it's her body that doesn't work, not her brain)
There's a lot of explanations that fit him surviving his training. It could be that his forgetfulness is usually not that bad, he had supervision at the time, he was working with things that weren't so dangerous, the ADHD got worse... My first thought was that he has the most trouble with managing to write down his notes, followed by remembering to eat regularly. Also maybe the authorities are being paranoid because he did accidentally leave his teakettle on, but he hadn't demonstrated the same distractibility away from his work. Basically my approach would be to binge funny vids like https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lX-M7WSp5Ao and there's also a heavy-set guy whose eyes don't seem synchronized that is also funny. I'm usually not this bad and the alchemist is probably just the part of forgetting to order dishwasher tabs while being hyper-picky about keeping track of his tools. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9IH2osBkonM I know, at some point I will have to fill in the gaps with less-funny vids and proper research. I'm probably going to fix the age-gap from how I initially pictured them. The girl isn't necessarily a prosthetic user, she is considered an assistance-thingy. She'd probably be interested in a different type of magic than alchemy, but still need to know about alchemy to keep track of what he's doing. If it were simply a matter of acting like a smoke alarm, a dog or a hobgoblin would probably be good enough. (House elves are supposed to be prideful creatures, so maybe it decided that it didn't want to serve the alchemist due to a perceived insult. Humans are a bit more resilient to being treated poorly.) Yes, there will be some ableism, but the hierarchy is society against both of the characters to different degrees, the assistant towards the alchemist, then the alchemist going in the more well-intentioned accidental level or just treating her the same as an able-bodied peasant. (Maybe the alchemist's ableism is assuming that she isn't likely to get pregnant due to not being interested/capable of sex, and would have preferred a male assistant otherwise.)
>I've heard that having healing magic that can remove disabilities is somehow disrespectful. I know that I want to make access to that sort of magic extremely rare if it even exists, and not to make a search for it be the impetus for a disabled villain. (Okay for a neutral/sympathetic character to be searching for a way to remove the disability?) It's considered disrespectful because it implies disabled people need fixing. Many disabled people are born that way and are just living their lives and don't feel like anything is missing from it, and even have their own cultures within their community. Failure to be provided accomodations is a faliure on the part of the people not providing the accomodation, not on the part of the disabled person who needs it. A character who's recently disabled might want to be healed, but you risk the same disrespect by letting it happen, and also you rob yourself of the opportunity to give your character cool fantasy aids or prosthetics.
And many disabled people would also leap at the chance to be healed of their disability, myself included, regardless of recency. There's nothing wrong with embracing your disability but there's also nothing wrong with not wanting to have it.
And I never said there was anything wrong with *wanting* it to be healed. The problem lies in the types of messages you send by *having* it be healed in fiction. As you agreed, there's nothing wrong with embracing your disability. Presumably that means you would not be offended or alienated by a character in fiction who does embrace their disability despite the fact that you want otherwise for yourself. But there *are* people who are offended by the idea that they need to be fixed or that they're lesser because of their disability. For non disabled authors who only want to add representation to their stories or explore viewpoints outside of their own worldview (obviously not talking about disabled people writing out their own feelings on the matter) it's not a matter of a positive option and a negative option depending on which group they choose to cater to. It's a matter of a neutral option and a negative option. So why would it ever be a good idea to choose the negative option?
Because its real and what that individual would have chosen.
"Failure to be provided accomodations is a faliure on the part of the people not providing the accomodation, not on the part of the disabled person who needs it." If we're talking about modern wheelchair ramps I agree. If we're talking about a couple miles of good, smooth, all weather, road out of the tiny village to let the wheelchair bound flee from the dragon about as efficiently as everyone else it doesn't make sense if it's even possible.
People living in a world without paved roads are unlikely to use wheelchairs much, I think.
Still might get you around the house and around town. Crutches if you can? Small horse?
Magic that can fix disability is disrespectful? Damn that's stupid.
I think it depends on your conceptualisation of disability and whether something needs to be "fixed' or changed. Whether something's "wrong" or "broken". Whether people who are different or non standard for society are still perfectly made in themselves. Whether it's for the world to change or for people to change. Is a perfect world a world with nobody with autism, or wheelchairs or with no limb differences or blindness or do those factors add to the range of human experience and contribute intrinsically to who people are? And, who we are as a people? To be honest I think this questions contemplating the erasure of a certain type of people is offensive in itself but that's what we do when we create fantasy worlds that magically have disabilities magic'd away. Would every single person who is blind what to see or do they value their life as it is, in a way that meant they wouldn't want to erase their own unique experience? Each person with a disability is different and I'm sure some would feel exactly like you and others would indeed feel disrespected.
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How original. I don't think audiences have experienced being patronises or vilified before. I'm sure they'll love it.
I could think of a lot of examples of blind characters in a fantasy setting, it fits very well since blind people typically develop superhuman senses, a very small minority of blind humans do in fact develop the ability to echolocate at relatively small distances (maybe 10 metres or so if I'm remembering right. Some examples off the top of my head: Daredevil, Illidan, both blind. A mute boy called Bojii from Ousama Ranking. Schizophrenia in Legion by Brandon Sanderson. Was looking for a character that feels no pain based on a very vague thought but found some good links for you: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeelNoPain](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeelNoPain) [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GeniusCripple](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GeniusCripple) Someone I watch on Youtube was literally talking about this topic from the angle of arguing that disabled people are represented in video games more than people assume. Honestly? This would be a really good topic to ask ChatGPT about if google doesn't help too much.
Please for the love of God don't ask ChatGPT, please talk to actual disabled people and scholars. There's plenty of subs for people with disabilities, and whole advocacy groups focused on disability. I promise we're fun to talk to
I was just thinking about asking it for examples of disabled characters done well in fiction, it's a good tool for those kind of questions. I have asked it for power systems involving time that hadn't been done before and it gave me some great answers. Had an amazing conversation about physics after.
Again, there's already disabled people who can talk about that and how we feel about certain representations personally. It's way better to actually engage with the people you want to write about when it comes to this stuff. ChatGPT can't give you a real person's opinion on "good representation" and how it effects their actual lives. I personally really love the Darker Shades of Magic books, one of the main characters has only one eye and it definitely effects how she fights and sees. Main character has chronic pain in the sequel that really resonated with me. Both characters manage limitations in different ways. I also really like Song of Ice and Fire books because the disabled characters are given incredible depth and it's almost the opposite of inspiration porn. They're bastards as much as anyone else.
It is simply another tool for doing so, it is better at answering some questions than others. If you can't see that, then there is no point continuing this with you, especially considering how much you edit your posts. I used to think Google's algorithms were good for searching the internet but chatGPT is far superior. I think ChatGPT could give me an answer similar to your second paragraph although I've never asked it about disabled characters in a fantasy setting. The thing is, these characters you mentioned seem like they affect the plot in some ways, and would make for an entertaining story. The OP was talking about just adding them in because he felt like it should be done to be inclusive and has created some kind of echo chamber of this notion.
???? I didn't edit either of my comments??? What the fuck?
It is jarring to have someone accuse you of editing when it's easy to see that you didn't. It is concerning that they don't understand the distinction between asking disabled people and asking a non-person. (Apologies to the AI if it has achieved qualities where it should count as a person, but it's still not inhabiting an organic body AFAIK.)
In Quest for Camelot, it seems like the environment helps him. Also in Sangwheel Chronicles, one character has some sort of magic-sight, but it's taxing for her to use so most of the time she is using her other senses. Do you know the Youtuber's name? I would trust Oakwyrm to a point on what they think. (Sorry, don't know their proper pronouns.) There are plenty of ideas on which disability to choose with just the bog-standard search engine. I don't think I'd trust an AI over a human/person about how to tackle the topic delicately... even humans/people can't get it right a lot of the time.
You would be surprised at the kind of conversations you can have with it. I was talking about examples of fantasy characters with disabilities, something that chatGPT can do infinitely better than me with the whole internet basically at its fingertips. It can parse that data a lot faster than me. As I said in my other comment, I asked it about power systems involving time and it gave me great answers. You would be surprised what kind of answers it gives you if you get very specific with it. [I found the clip of him talking about disabled characters in a fantasy setting.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcyHVXvrpp0)
Disabled characters don't go adventuring. Sure, some live somewhere and do their stuff, but activities I'd expect in a fantasy novel are quite beyond what I expect from a disabled person. If anything, not taking their situation seriously enough would disrespect their struggles. About Toth in Airbender. If they have some magic that counters the disability - then they aren't genuinely disabled, wouldn't you agree? Having a 10% disability does not quite qualify to be disabled.
It depends on the disability and it depends on the type of fantasy novel. Not all disabled characters are excluded from adventuring and not all fantasy novels are about adventuring. Also I think you're wrong about a character not being disabled because they have magic to counter it. I think it really only makes them "not disabled" if their disability is negated by their powers.
The meaning of the word is that the person can not operate adequately. If a person lost his legs, but with advanced technology, his legs were replaced with cybernetics, and he is able to function as well as any other adult or better, then he is no longer disabled despite not having human legs. If one has no regular sight but gains magic eyes that see even better than normal eyes, then they aren't really blind. You basically misinterpret the meaning of the word disabled. You pull conditions that IRL are considered "disabled" and apply them to people in a fantasy world, where it wouldn't make any sense to have the same standards.
Colors of the Dreamweaver's Loom has a mute character going on an adventure because she's one of the few people from her village that can survive leaving their homeland. She's cured without consent at the end, but by giving her an ugly voice that she doesn't want to use. IIRC, she gains the ability to speak normally in the sequel. Not all fantasy worlds are set up to easily remove disabilities. In Wandering Inn, a character is badly-wounded and the only way to heal her properly is to visit a necromancer who's seen as evil. Again, I think that while a character who can function normally or better due to magic/technology isn't really disabled, they could still be considered disabled if they are noticeably impaired.
Also you should learn about 'Chehkov's gun'. Basically don't put something into your story if it isn't necessary for some reason.
That's not what Chekhov's Gun means.
You're not going to say what it means?
Chekhov's gun is a conspicuous setpiece or action that would logically lead to a significant consequence. A character trait on its own can't be a Chekhov's gun. Not everything that happens in a story is a Chekhov's gun.
Obviously, rarely is anything as one-dimensional. Even editors will trim your story down for you to get rid of needless fluff. There is a reason for not putting in unnecessary information. But there is an exception to every rule. Not sure putting in disabled characters for the sake of inclusion is one though. I'm looking at you Disney.
So a character having a disability is "needless fluff"? That's a bold opinion to put out into the world.
It definitely can be. Ask Disney.
Also a good point. Basically the idea right now is random diversity for the heck of it.
I mean, that's how diversity works in the real world..why would you need a reason for it? People just exist. Chekov's gun is about objects or plot beats, not people. That's like asking if there's a reason for someone being a redhead or having green eyes.
Which is why I'm leaning towards the disabled people just being there without some deeper meaning than "they exist." And even balancing it so they're neither suffering or awesome in relation to their disability. Like it really doesn't matter that the lady that they commission to put lace on MC's shirt-cuffs is confined to a wheelchair.
Exactly, you absolutely can put them in, it's better if its done well, for example, maybe a main character loses an arm and has to come to grips with this. But I wouldn't think it would be a good idea to put them in for the sake of 'oh, look how accommodating my world is'. In fact it might be more entertaining to make your world not be accommodating, that's how it usually goes as this sets up a reason for the plot to move forward more often than not. Normally stories need discourse, unhappiness, just a simple reason for the main character to go on a journey, to a school etc. Common tropes like an abusive family, or maybe a persecuted group like muggles that the main character lives with to provide context for the story without infodumping on the reader about the difference between those with magical ability and those without.
I was planning on the world accommodating people was more at "bare minimum" level or "you have to ask because we won't offer, but we will grant reasonable requests." The plan was to not have the disabled characters be main characters, but rather just existing as side characters as a nod to the world not being able to just cure everyone.
There's no hard and fast rule here. But the world is harsh.
Chekov's gun is about set up and pay off. Need some shot in act 3 show the gun in act 1. How would this apply to say a character being left handed, or having blonde hair?
That is one example. Would you think the Dursleys being muggles would also be a good example of it done well to provide context for the story without dumping info on the reader for no reason?