malymin | Entries tagged with speculative disability

This was originally posted as part of an extensive thread on disabled protagonists in action-adventure media; however, since I'd been composing it in my head as a stand-alone post for several weeks, I thought I would preserve it as one.
On the topic of disabled heroes, let us not forget Benjamin J. Grimm. The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. The Idol of Millions.
We shouldn’t leave him out of this conversation just because he doesn’t have a “real-world” disability. Ben has been regularly and consistently portrayed as disabled since Fantastic Four #1, and, as captainlordauditor points out, it’s integral to his identity as a hero.

Ben’s very first words are his frustrations at living in a world too small for him. He’s a two or three times as broad as a normal man, and covered in an orange, rocky hide. He weighs a quarter of a ton. He needs custom-tailored clothing. He needs special furniture. He’s an accomplished pilot, but he can only continue in his chosen profession because Reed builds the controls to suit his scale and his huge, four-fingered hands.
Early on, people faint at the sight of him, at the shock of his disfigurement, until he becomes well-known and popular enough to be seen as a hero, a big cuddly teddy bear, rather than as a monster.
Ben isn’t representative of a specific disability, but in the obstacles, inconveniences, and prejudices he faces, he most definitely counts as disability representation.

This is a repost of a short tumblr post I saw today, that relates to things I've talked about regarding "speculative disability" - characters who are functionally disabled in a fantasy context, having disabled experiences but not mapping onto specific diagnosed conditions. This is more on the physical disability side of things.

Current Mood: numb
Current Music: The Dark Mystery of Disk_DRIVE

Downloadable here.

“Interestingly, some scholars working within Animal Theory further argue that a certain right of access is assumed on the part of the, superior, humans when they encounter animals, so that the animal body may be touched, subsumed, or killed on the basis of the human right to do so. This also occurs in several medieval literary examples of human encounters with the dragon maiden, where the knight initially does not doubt that he is allowed access to the dragon maiden’s body in killing it. Although the dragon maiden and the knight may share their space within a literary framework, this sharing is non-mimetic; they are not considered equals. The main purpose of the stories, especially in the episodes where a dragon maiden has to be kissed, is to ascertain the worth of the human knight.”

This PDF is long - 138 pages long! I've barely even skimmed it. It was brought to my attention by a blog post on Tumblr about it. Tumblr user capricorn-0mnikorn's "monsters as disability metaphor" tag is worth a browse. The PDF itself does not compare the position of the dragon maiden (or frog king/prince, etc) to the way a disabled person's body is framed and treated relative to caretakers and loved ones - but 0mnikorn does.

Here's some of their post on the Frog King story, that draws from the analysis of the Dragon Maiden in the pdf I've linked:

First, that “Access to the dragon maiden’s body” made me think of all those times when I go out in public, and random strangers just assume they have every right of access to my disabled body – to pat me on the head, or grab the handles of my wheelchair and push me where they think I should go, or ask me really personal, inappropriately intimate, questions about my medical status or how I use the toilet.

Second: how these stories are never about the dragon maiden at all, but just about that hyper-human human knight reminded me of every “human interest” story in the news that touches on disability; the reporters never interview the disabled person (usually a kid), but always the able-bodied parents, or neighbors, or teachers. Because it’s not about the disabled person at all – just whether or not the able-bodied, neurotypical, person can live up to a symbolically human ideal, and justify the “goodness” of the social status-quo for another season.

And that’s how people can say things to me like: “But I don’t see your disability – I see your humanity!” with a straight face, and expect me to take that as a compliment. To them, my disability is some sort of magical, artificial, shape that I’m trapped inside of – like someone in a rubber Godzilla suit with a broken zipper.

If they can free me from the trap, I will be fully human (and they will prove to the world that they have God’s approval as His idea of a Perfect Person).

But if I can’t be freed of my disability, then the spirit of Godzilla will seep into my very essence, and I will lose all traces of my humanity. Superstitious toad milk soup, of course, that no amount of salt will fix, but there you go.

Unrelated, 0mnikron cites some of D. L. Ashliman's website in one of their posts about monstrous/animal bodies in folklore as metaphors for disabled bodies, and I love to see Ashliman's folklore database getting some love.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: coffee shop (chain u_u;)
Current Music: i don't know the name of whats playing rn

Mytho from Princess Tutu is a character I think a lot about, but I feel helpless trying to explain why, because... the majority of the fanbase just isn't interested in him, and it means there isn't a lot of pre-existing discourse to draw from. (I mean discourse in the general sense, not the terminally online "arguing" sense.) He doesn't as much meta written about him. He doesn't get as many close reads of his personality. He doesn't get as many headcanons and projections and "he's just like me for real" type comments as, say... Fakir, or Duck, or Rue.

But he's blatantly disabled in season 1, right? Like, it's a fantasy disability with fantasy causes: he's a fairytale prince who shattered his heart with a magic sword, so now he doesn't have feelings. Now, most "emotionless" characters in most fiction are portrayed as hyper-logical, or cold-blooded, heightened cunning and rationality at the expense of empathy. But in Princess Tutu, the lack of emotions is depicted as an impediment to Mytho's cognition and decision-making. (As it probably should be: as much as emotions can lead us astray, they evolved to help us survive.)

Episode 3 lays out many things about Mytho.

Mytho doesn't know how to make decisions on his own, without his feelings: unable to form preferences or make snap judgements, he depends on people in his life telling him what to do.
He can't assess risks, an impediment to his basic self-preservation.
He doesn't understand people's feelings, causing him to be poor at navigating social situations. (Granted, there's some material suggesting this is somewhat true of him even with all his feelings, but it's definitely made more severe by the absence of them.)
Even some basic bodily sensations (pain, hunger and saiety, etc) are absent for him.

Mytho also has an innate, almost instinctual or robotic compulsion to protect people and animals, but not himself, as part of his archetypal nature. Combined with his inability to assess risks or his own bodily needs, he needs a caretaker. Fakir is an abusive caretaker in season 1 (not saying he's irredeemable and you're a bad person if you like him, just that, well, he is), but Mytho simply not having a caretaker at all is not a safe or feasible option. He needs someone to keep him out of danger, to make sure his wounds are tended, to make sure he eats and sleeps, etc.

I like how in season 1, though Mytho is never hateful or overtly hostile towards Fakir, he stands up to Fakir as he regains his emotions and gains support from Duck, developing the ability to realize that he doesn't have to be treated like this and asserting his own budding needs and desires. It's frustrating how season 2's premire hints at further natural developments in Mytho's relationships with others (telling Duck that she's the only person he can tell everything to), only to get... mind controlled? Possessed? For most of the season, and this theme of his narrative to ultimately get dropped.

There's also something about how Mytho's internal monologue is rarely shown, compared to the other characters. We more often see him talking to himself, externally, when the show wants to communicate how he feels. This usually is him simply narrating his thoughts aloud. At one point, it's him entering a dialogue with a piece of his own heart, discussing with it his newly-regained fear, his lack of heart, and his amnesia about how he came to be this way. (The heart shard, itself, does not remember that it is a piece of Mytho.) In season 2, he seems to argue with "the raven inside him." It's also strongly suggested that Mytho's heart shards contain not just his feelings (and, apparently, ability to adequately understand his bodily needs), but his memories as well; after Mytho regains "the feeling of fear", he has a flashback-like nightmare about his battle with the Raven, the antagonist of the fairytale from which they both originate.

But I don't know where to begin the conversation about reading Mytho as neurodivergent and/or disabled. The fandom is largely disinterested in him, and the perspectives that would need to come to the table appear absent.

You know, it's really weird to me that "Amethyst is developmentally disabled" was never something people discussed much in regards to Steven Universe.

'Is Pearl autistic? Is Peridot autistic?' I don't mind these perspectives, but... Amethyst. Is it just because she's not nerdy? Is it just because she's visibly coded as nonwhite? Or because the disability she displays kind of defies specific labels designed for humans within our specific cultural moment, such as "autism?" All three?

Probably all three.

I mean. We're told that she was "overcooked", emerging from the Kindergarden thousands of years later than her peers, with the implication that it's why she's smaller than other Quartz gems, including other Amethysts specifically. She has gem dwarfism. She can shapeshift to the size of a regular quartz easily, but when she tried to regenerate with a permanent form that was closer to a typical quartz, the results were unstable and ended badly.

It's worth remembering that the Gems in the show are strongly implied to be digital lifeforms, sort of akin to sentient computers: the only truly physical parts of their bodies are the literal gemstones, and the humanoid shape formed around it is just a hard-light hologram of sorts. This is why both damage to the gemstone itself, and severe psychological pain, can causes changes in a Gem's physical form. One is like brain damage from physical force, or like damage to a computer's physical hardware; the other is like psychological trauma, or corruption of a computer's software. Their bodies are just extensions of their minds.

Still, I wouldn't consider Amethyst having gem-dwarfism to necessarily be a neurodivergence in and of itself, but a fantasy analog to human dwarfism: a physical disability, especially within the context of a society that does not accommodate "nonstandard" bodies. Amethyst's developmental disability being cognitive as well as physical was something made more explicit in the movie.

The thing is, this is where we get into territory that I find fascinating, but that doesn't lend itself to relatable labels - the question of what counts as a disability or neurodivergence within the context of a nonhuman character.

( Tabula Rasa )

I find I have, since at least middle school, had a recurring pattern of being emotionally attached to characters who are undead, or have been turned into monsters. Characters that the narrative usually says should "move on [to the afterlife]" or "be put out of their misery." If they don't get mercy killed, because this is a more escapist or cheerful story, they usually instead get restored to exactly how they were prior to The Incident. Cleaned, purified, perfectly without any trace of monstrous corruption or ghostly despair. Often even without memory of the time spent in that state, so that neither they nor their friends have to think about it. The audience doesn't have to think about it, either.

A happier ending... but one that always dissatisfied me.

One of the closest things I've ever really seen to what I want. Was an AU that Zarla made for her Left for Dead OCs, back on Livejournal, in 2010. These characters of theirs were originally designed as genderswaps of the male-only special infected enemies in that game, but became full-fledged individuals with human personalities later down the line. I was an even bigger fan of those characters than I was of Zarla's art and musings on our shared fandoms, truth be told. Even though I never cared for zombie apocalypse fiction, and certainly knew nothing about Left For Dead itself.

They explored the idea of an AU where the characters, long after having become (special) infected, were given a miracle cure for zombie-ism! But the miracle cure wasn't a cure-all; physical and mental alterations remained, even with a return to lucidity.

Anyway let's explore a slightly different idea for a bit. EchoGarrote actually wrote a bit about this basic concept in some of his fics, but I hadn't really done any drawings or exploration of it myself until recently, haha.

Anyway, basically I was wondering if, should some kind of cure be developed for the Infection, what kind of aftereffects would linger if you'd been a Special Infected first. Being mutated that severely isn't something that just goes away, after all. So these are basic notes on what state they all might be in should they be cured of zombie-ism by some kind of miracle drug or another.

(We can suspend our disbelief for a broken curse leaving no ill traces behind, for curses themselves are as fundamentally magic and imaginary things as cure-alls are; but zombie apocalypse fiction has a pretense, however flimsy, of being grounded in a modern world of biology and science. On the spectrum of treating infectious monsterhood like a demonic curse or a deadly disease, the pop-culture zombie leans as far from magic as possible, compared to its werewolf and vampire cousins.)

And then Zarla went into more detail here. Here's a transcript of one panel.

Patient: S-so, does the s-shaking ever stop? I-it's hard to focus, heh...

Doctor: Unfortunately, your version of the virus seems to do some permanent nerve damage... none of the other Jockeys have stopped. The lack of mood control is pretty common... but you are one of the first female ones, so maybe it'll be different for you. You never know, right?

Of course a zombie virus would be permanently disabling. Why wouldn't it be? Their brains can recover but they'll never be the same. Their bodies will never be the same, either.

Zombie fiction has a survival-of-the-fittest streak, at times veering towards the openly eugenicist; not all zombie stories lack sympathy for the weak and disabled, but it's in the zeitgeist of the the genre, you know? So the notion of curing zombies, instead of just gunning them down? Of accepting cured zombies, with brain damage and scars from the virus' ravages, as human beings who deserve to live? Society can barely even accept real disabled people: people with brain damage, or massive physical scaring, as real human beings. Society often doesn't. There's certainly no room in that worldview for providing treatment, rehab, and accommodations to suffers of a homicidal-urge inducing virus.

But you know... I think about that binary attitude towards disease, and mental illness, and imaginary curses and afflictions. If you're a character in these stories, there's three outcomes, most of the time:

You're cured with no ill effects.
It kills you.
It's a fate worse than death.

3 is effectively the same as 2, most of the time. You're not you once you've succumbed, there's no hope of saving you, and a bullet to your head is just finishing the job and letting your soul rest.

And I think about how it seems like people can't get it in their heads, in the real world, that Long Covid is real, and we should care about it. About how little society cares for anyone who can never be cured, whether it's as obviously physical as a lost limb or as invisible as a mental illness. You either die or you're fine, right? There's never a category in between. Nobody in our culture wants to think about a "damaged" survivor.

I want a world where we can think about this, though. The people who will never be the same again living and finding reason to live despite the things that have changed, that they've lost, that make it hard for them to live in the world. In melodramatic metaphor, as well as real and grounded truth.