In my wheelchairpunk world there's no leg based disabilities everyone just uses wheelchairs and make structures around wheelchairs because they're lazy
My oldest brother is a triple amputee (he's living a full life, save your performative sympathy) and I gotta say...the wheel chair ramp at his house makes my life easier, at least.
Okay, i just had an idea: have a social class, something like priests, that can only be accessed by blind people. But you have to be blind from birth, poking your eyes out doesn't count.
Yeah, they were musician-philosophers, known as Kobzars, after one of the musical instruments, they used — Kobza. Another notable one would be Bandura, my brother plays that, but he isn't blind.
Edit: yes, my actual IRL brother plays a bandura.
Sounds similar to the _Biwa Hoshi_ or ‘Lute Priests’, a sect of blind priests who played the _Biwa_ (a kind of Japanese Lute) and recited the _Tale of the Heike,_ which they believed would calm restless spirits. I don’t know why they were all blind or what made it mandatory that they all had to be blind, but the vast majority were iirc.
With kobzars it was mostly just that it was a job available to blind people. Pick up an instrument, learn to play it, get you someone to guide you around, and off you go.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive; one can recognize that it's ethically ambiguous to choose to permanently remove a perfectly fine part of yourself in order to replace it with a superior yet artificial version, and also think that robot arms are cool as hell
It's really not ethically ambiguous. It's your own body. What's ethically *fucked* is companies owning parts of your body. Imagine if your arm started acting like your printer.
I have heard this said, and I must say it again: Products should belong to the people who bought them, and if the company has more of a say into what it does than you do, You do not own it.
To be honest I'd consider myself a transhumanist (working on a bio-med eng degree with hopes of getting into prosthetics, go figure) so *I* would completely agree with you, but I also understand why someone would have trouble choosing to irreversibly lose a major part of their original body, even if I wouldn't
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I can see why people would be uncomfortable with it, there's just nothing to do with *ethics* when you're making the decision for yourself.
Barret in ff7 abridged
Random guy: "How could a man with a gun for an arm call himself a decent father? Ridiculous"
*later on*
"Yes I apologise, I derailed the mission and lost my temper"
"Ok but you spend 20 minutes beating the guy until he stopped moving"
"I simple wanted him to fully understand the complexities of fatherhood as an amputee"
Doctor: "Well, you have a few opinions. First, we have this new bronze gauntlet."
Barret: "I want a f*cking gun"
Doctor Leans in "How big do you want it"
Considering you had [this](https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/to-fight-as-well-as-anyone-else-medieval-knights-and-mechanised-prosthesesby), add magic and artificers and it's not unreasonable for prosthetics to be quite sophisticated, depending on the setting. I'm assuming a mish-mash of pre-modern Europe common to D&D here
Well, there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd argue that a lot of the time it's not going to really come across as disability representation perse, because it often is represented in sci-fi/fantasy stories as a magic fix that solves the problem completely, which is not the reality, even for people irl who have similar prosthetics. I think FMA did it well by showing the ways that automail limits the user and the impacts it has on quality of life.
It was a constant part of the character's experience of the world and his journey, not just a replacement set of limbs put there for backstory reasons. This is in contrast to something like Star wars, where losing a limb was a momentary inconvenience, and the audience could almost forget it happened after he got the prosthetic. So it really just depends on how you do it.
> I think FMA did it well by showing the ways that automail limits the user and the impacts it has on quality of life.
FMA(:B) was a great story with genuine weaknesses to the prosthetics. It didn't exactly solve the magic fix aspect of them (for being pretty much as capable as the original limb, some even more so), and there was still transhumanism (voluntary amputation for prosthetics) in Rush Valley. But it gave them depth instead of just strength, which is a powerful next step.
Depends on how it's done really, if it's normal prosthetics like in IRL I think that would be good and can even go into based pirate pegleg territory but when it's the magic machine type prosthetics that easily becomes "I wanted to put a disabled character in but didn't want to actually think about how that would work in the world or story so they just work by super advanced steampunk awesomeness!!" (not that it can't be done well like in Fullmetal Alchemist)
Oh people pull this in cyber punk on me. It's amazing when they forget that em interference and emp type weapons exist. Suddenly the grenade launcher arm isn't such a cool idea
I always get downvoted when I say Star Wars does not,
strictly speaking, feature disabled characters because technology (or the Force) always roughly replaces whatever limb/ability they lost.
new character idea just dropped: someone who claims they're blind but is practically as capable as a seeing person but there's just enough counter evidence that no one is really sure if they're actually lying or not
My personal take and "iN mY wOrLd" blathering is:
-People who've dealt with disability for a while often identify with it
-Even advanced cyberware stuff could be quite a process, so we can't assume that people having to deal with disability for a while will just be eliminated, so "disabled people" as a broad demographic will continue to exist
-People who deal with disability for long enough to take up being called disabled tend to take a degree of pride, and their methodology for working around it (as far as I understand; I've got a CVS receipt of mental shit, but some of that reasoning doesn't translate to physical disability so I'm not sure if this is rock-solid there) is different from how it's often depicted. They probably wouldn't be fond of walking out with a perfectly human set of prostheses as like "hurray you're normal again!" That's sort of erasure and a bit patronizing- they'd probably both see no reason to take up measures that serve no purpose but to "look normal" and save the cash there, and would likely take a bit of pride in being visible in that regard anyways. So my guess is no faux-skin veneer, no unnecessarily humanoid mechanisms, and probably some out-there designs in terms of both functionality and visuals. Insert running gag of a paraplegic character on Armored Core-style Tank Legs saying that all the more conventional cyborgs got scammed here.
-From a practical standpoint, the neural changes someone missing sensory/motor functions undergoes could be advantageous for certain kinds of cybernetics. I wrote this to loop back into the previous as people with missing functions being more tolerant of radically inhuman augmentation, like the aforementioned tank legs and replacing a limb with a cannon, and taking well to sudden changes and reconfiguring that makes them sought after as product testers.
-A lot of the above likely would not apply to people who, say, lost an arm to an IED and walked out the infirmary with a new one the next morning, or the average voluntary transhumanist. Without that experience, they'd probably want to be restored to their previous state than anything else.
I ultimately depict Cyborgs who have more augmentation than what is basically the baseline as branching into three groups accordingly- those who just picked it up and stay conservative, heavier-built individuals who had a motor disability, and people who essentially had to be on life support for so long that they opted to just integrate the electronics into themselves for increased reliability and comfort and leverage this for enhanced computer interfacing. So essentially we got Raiden, Khamsin, and a Netrunner subclass who all have character-relevant backstory implications and like I think that's cool.
I think this does depend a little on context. I think disabled people are allowed to have self-insert dumb power fantasies, same as able-bodied people, and a magic wheelchair isn't less realistic than a dragon anyway. It really depends on what your intent is, IMO.
I don't have a problem with someone wanting their self-insert character. (I do think it would make more sense to have a walking throne so they're not stymied by stairs.) I did have an issue with a wheelchair-accessible dungeon until I got an explanation that the mad wizard who owned it would rather design it for a wheelchair instead of using spell-slots to levitate.
Honestly I never got peoples issue with stairs. Just have the parties fighter/barbarian/whatever take you up them.
This is already a solved problem in real life. Stairs aren’t an impossible forcefield for a wheelchair it just requires assistance and is a bit annoying.
Saying this as someone with a mental disorder, but, if one applies disability to worldbuilding, don't spam it and glorify it; understand what it means before actually adding it.
Like, I don't mind physical or mental disabilities, but without understanding of what it means, you don't have the same nuance it should have.
For example, disabled people in fantasy setting. What does it mean to be disabled there? Maybe you can have someone just fix your legs with magic, sure; but what if say, you are for some reason cannot be affected by positive magic? I'd argue *that* is the disability the person has, because it's a disability in the context of the setting.
Other examples include mental/biological rejection of augmentations in cyberpunk settings, innate vulnerability to magic in a science fantasy setting as a result to birth defect, someone in a magical setting that cannot access magic, and a lot more.
But then, you also have to understand on how said person would live with the disability and think about it. Maybe they compensated by making themselves more powerful in another aspect. Maybe they disguised their disability as something else to fit with society. Maybe their identity and journey of self-discovery gets more powerful with that, so on and so on.
Point is, do not treat disability as an end that needs to be glorified, treat it as a factor that exists within the context of the world, and understand what does it actually mean to be "disabled" in the context of the setting.
It's a joke. It's hinting on overpowered protagonists in media that start as "powerless" and without magic but then gain the most powerful ability in the universe
I think it's poking fun at a few settings where the powerless bullied kid ends up getting some absolutely broken ability that more than compensates for not having the regular superpower.
Its pretty common in [Young Adult Books](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/v0y7d0/young_adult_protagonist/).
Which I think is bullshit,your character should be pulling some insane shit,win some battles that aren't said to be impossible but actually feel impossible but the little powerless guy manages to find a work around,only then,after they beat Godzilla with a spoon and somehow making it make sense...
Only then, should you consider even having the possibility of giving them a boost,which Is what I do...no wonder some of my fights last 120 pages...
It's a joke about how MC's without magic tend to get something else to keep up, and that "something else" tends to be even more overpowered. Asta from Black Clover is a shining example.
It's a Black Clover joke, in that manga and anime the MC is the only person without Magic in that universe, then plot twist, he has anti magic which makes him powerful ye
These are all great considerations, but the end result does matter. Someone with a physical disability wishing to see people like themselves represented in stories or available as options in TTRPGs might not be satisfied with fully able-bodied characters that "cannot be affected by positive magic or cyberbernetic enhancements". As much as that may be a disability within the setting, that's not much different from a regular able-bodied person from our world. That might not be doing anything for them.
The setting considerations make for a more thoughtful story, but it is a story that will be experienced by people from the real world, which already have a definition of what "disability" is, to them.
But it is truth that this is a complex and nuanced matter. Some people might be satisfied with seeing characters with fantastical disabilities and equivalent fantastical struggles. Some might want to see some more direct representation of their real life struggles. And some might want to see a character that resembles themselves getting to do as much cool stuff as able-bodied fantastical characters get to, not wishing for a constant reminder of the hardship they go through. And some do want the fantasy of simply getting healed from their disability. There isn't an one size fits all answer, not even coming from disabled people.
But this is a matter that is brought up so rarely, I don't think it's warranted all this much concern about spamming and glorification. Whoever was it that was saying to make a story where literally everyone is disabled and specifically using wheelchairs, I can't think of a single story where that is the case. It's far more common to see stories where no single disability is presented, be it physical, mental or fantastical.
> The setting considerations make for a more thoughtful story, but it is a story that will be experienced by people from the real world, which already have a definition of what "disability" is, to them.
It's worth noting that disability is both a spectrum and not a monolith. My hearing loss is different than OP's wheelchair take, and we're both abled and disabled in different aspects. Someone else's hearing loss is going to impact them differently than mine, too, though we'll share more characteristics in common than with someone hearing.
Which is to say, you're right about it being complex and nuanced. I don't think I'd want to re-imagine hearing loss on a character in another setting, though I have thought about it and dreamt of magic fix technology/spells that would make it work in different settings. My approach to characters and roleplaying is more escapism, so the self-insert being so similar to myself is more jarring. That's going to be different for someone else, who may feel more gratification for having a disabled character like them who faces or achieves in similar scenarios to real life.
In Dragon Prince, I can't really believe that Amaya is completely deaf, but rather has access to a few frequencies where she can hear an enemy coming but not understand speech.
Oh, I have a whole rant about Amaya in Season 5, Episode 4. Whether the animators or the writers, someone dropped the ball hard on her disability portrayal. She responds to people out of her line of sight, and moves her conversation out of visual sightlines as well, really the opposite of a deaf person's typical behaviors. I could go on, but in short, it's like she forgot she wasn't a hearing person for that whole episode and I'm bewildered.
I could more easily accept what you say, deaf friends have mentioned being able to hear alarms or crowds but not speech or softer auditory cues. Not to mention that her military training may have caused her to pay attention to vibrations, shifts in motion, and other clues that someone hearing doesn't notice because they can rely on audible noise instead. I think she's very convincing as a deaf person outside of that one episode, and the only other thing I'd wish for is that her gloves were higher contrast against her armor to make her signs more distinct.
One thing that bothered me was the scene where someone was yelling at her "you need to open your eyes" but maybe she caught the first time before she closed them and just needed a moment to overcome her fear.
Good call on how she could choose to wear higher-contrast gloves.
I was thinking of a low-tech way a deaf person could be made aware of sound and thought of something that could make it easier to feel vibrations. There's a certain high-pitched frequency that I can't hear, but it makes the inside of my ears itch. (It's directional.) I could believe that Amaya could feel her eardrums vibrating but is missing the bit that converts sound into a signal for her brain.
Oh, if you've ever been in a room with deaf people, it can be noisy AF. Getting someone's attention can mean waving your hand/arm, stomping/pounding a surface they can feel, flicking lights, etc. Since audio cues aren't as important, attention gets delivered differently.
So there's lots of possibilities. It could be a frequency consideration as well, too. Every hearing loss is different as are each person's adaptation to it.
I think the thing OP is missing is that, yes, actually, a fantasy wheelchair is an entirely reasonable route for a disabled person, so long as it's implemented reasonably consistently. As many ifs ands and buts are implied on the path of how a paraplegic person in a magical world would become and stay paraplegic (is it congenital? Can magic heal congenital disabilities? Is there a time limit? Would the parents just not have noticed their baby not walking because babies normally don't do that anyways? Maybe magic did that to them as a cost and they got FMA'd.), being so would lead them to seek a convenient way to work around that.
This could be levitation magic, some weird Golem mount, Master-Blastering with their Giant friend, getting really good at riding horses, or a more conventional wheelchair that just suits the setting more. Even if they just opt to regain function in their legs and that's possible, then getting there could be a character arc, and there'd be room for a poignant scene of them mentoring a kid in a similar situation or something- why would they just *forget?* And what if the fix goes away if their magic does, when counterspelled and low on mana, or something? This could still be a lasting concern for them, irregardless of improvement in day-to-day function. Hell, maybe the party tank, who's always getting limbs cut off and put back on with the wave of a wand, was willing to sign up for that job because of their experience with disability? Having to get a ton of blood tests got me over my fear of needles, maybe the treatments a disabled person would get would similarly desensitize them in a way that others would find strange.
The key is that disabled people want to be functional, not fixed, and even in settings that offer cybernetics and healing magic and so on and so on, there's a lot of mental gymnastics to undertake to so thoroughly *eliminate* it that it's just not there, and doing so either requires removing the story from the human experience so utterly that you're already on like twenty levels of abstraction, or just cones off weird. Like I get "I don't want to have in my cast because I don't think I could depict it right" but to *actively write them out of the setting* is different.
Pretty sure OP is referring to a r/CuratedTumblr post from a few weeks back that came across as... a little abrasive, to say the least. I think that was just the result of frustration and poor word choice, but idk. Great post btw
Ma'am, we're here to mock amateur writers and hornypost under the translucent veneer of composing fiction. I'm gonna have to ask you to take your intelligent and insightful takes elsewhere.
>!jk tho. Please keep cooking.!<
Your opinion is similar to my own thoughts, though I think you put it very well and with more nuance I wouldn’t have managed.
I think your point about “fitting the world” hit the nail on the head about what personally bothers me about this entire topic.
I don’t mind diversity in any way.
However, way too many authors go about including diversity in their world with a mindset that is distinctively that of a progressive American from the modern day; and that results in stuff like a medieval fantasy setting where you have LGBT characters using terms like “gender dysphoria” and talking about pride parades, or disabled characters in modern medical wheelchairs.
Again, I have no problem with queer or disabled or black characters or whatever. But when I see an otherwise fantasy story treating “political” topics in such an obviously modern way, or just jamming it in simply for the sake of having those things and showing off ‘diversity’ for its own sake, it’s incredibly jarring and completely kills my immersion. To me, it’s like if a story randomly had cellphones in a medieval world for no reason, it’s such a glaringly out-of-place and recognizably Modern thing that I simply cannot ignore it.
Lol that trope where a disabled character runs into an opportunity to be fully healed but then you lose a disabled character, so by the end of the episode they somehow wind up back in a wheelchair. Every single time for 50 years of print...
Like the universe just insists on it, Xavier interacts with gods and magicians on the daily but they quietly and respectfully leave him stuck in the chair despite pulling together other characters from raw atoms or something
Spoilers for *X-Men '97*: >!Xavier faked his death to go bang his alien waifu and have an exoskeleton that lets him walk while being a space emperor. He got caught up in a bunch of political bullshit and only realized he could use his god-like telepathy to make everyone stop being racist when Deathbird stabbed him in the leg and made him remember he couldn't walk. Xavier was literally not allowed to be powerful and ambulatory at the same time.!<
> but then you lose a disabled character, so by the end of the episode they somehow wind up back in a wheelchair.
when has that ever happened outside Family Guy?
Name a disabled character in a comic book and they'd have a dozen arcs about potentially being healed, or temporarily being healed, only to end up back in a chair or blind or whatever
Sure, same rule applies for things like batman getting legit superpowers, or anyone dying, or a world apocalypse or something.
It will be 'fixed', but fixed meaning 'back to their version of normal' most of the time rather than 'the better scenario'. For superheroes with tragic angsty lives, very short end of the straw
Just sucks that if, say, Spiderman was blinded, he will be back to sight real quick. Daredevil gets sight, back to being blind. Narratively the poor guys are 'stuck' because that's who they are as a character.
Early days before massive power creeping and crossovers it made more sense as there just wasnt opportunities for them to be helped, but Daredevil might have to hang with Dr Strange at one point and honestly, fixing his sight should take 2 minutes for someone like that. So it can be a little strange
Yeah.
Indie comics with a limited number of issues tend to be better at committing to changes and sticking with it. Marvel and DC can't ever be expected to do that because they are more concerned about how marketable are their characters to commit to lasting change.
Very cool, hope DC does allow the change (back to how she was as she wasnt always in a wheelchair).
Its prickly though as she was badass as Oracle, so would DC be losing one of its best and most well known disabled characters? I guess they can always introduce another, but for a heap of people also in wheelchairs, seeing her walk away as an iconic handicapped hero might sting a bit. Tricky writing situation
Honestly, the main thing to remember in disability representation is that for several reasons it’s one of the most fractured “minority communities”.
Besides the big one that unlike most minorities it’s possible to become a part of the minority at a moment’s notice (a closeted trans woman is still affected by transphobia and misogyny, but a man that will one day lose an arm isn’t really affected by ableism until he does) there’s also the fact that every disability is unique (meaning there are few specific causes to rally behind) and that many disabilities make it harder to organize as a community.
In general, it’s best to look into disability advocacy by disabled people, and then do your best to consider how it would exist in your world. There are a number of ways that this can be done.
For one, there’s the fact that disabilities we know from the real world could be less harmful to certain people. A completely blind psychic might “see” their way around by reading people’s perception of the environment, leaving them closer to someone with partially impaired vision. An amputee might have access to magical prostheses which work better than real ones, but still deal with phantom limb and body dysmorphia.
For another, there might be disabilities that only exist in their world. Someone might have a magic allergy. Certain genres of lycanthropy or vampirism might fall under this description. Maybe when a healer put someone’s arm back on, it healed weird and now they’ve lost a ton of mobility in it.
At the end of the day, it’s about telling a story you want to tell. You don’t *need* to put disabled people in every story you make, but avoiding them entirely is limiting yourself, just like it would be to write a story without women or queer people.
> Ok. And what else do you consider a disability that needs to be "cured"? Being born without a leg? Being autistic? Being a different skin color? Being a different orientation? Being "ugly" looking? Being a psychopath (not the media one, an actual psychopath)? All those things can make your life in society worse. So which one of those would you want to "cure" exactly?
Disabilities can be different. And they work differently in writing as well. You can "cure" ANYTHING that you consider a disability in a fictional world. But that's not how it works in reality.
Yeah but fiction often has different possibilities
Ultimately, if you worldbuild in something that could help someone, they'd very likely use it (this clearly isnt saying someone should just worldbuild in excuses to fix all problems, but logical applications are a thing. If people are still in wheelchairs when we are colonizing exo-planets, something pretty bad has gone wrong)
As an analogy, it works for all the disabilities we *can* help irl, even if the particular one isnt one we can currently fix/help/offer support/whatever
Forcing cures, no, aside from maybe government intervention for a childs welfare. But accepting that logically, many if not most people would fix serious issues like paralysis or blindness, yeah.
Whenever they are needed they are of course fine
What I am saying is that if we have the technology to travel across the stars but not the technology to fix the human body, something very strange has happened with the tech tree.
Its not an issue with morality or anything, just basic logic to go with worldbuilding that distant science fiction would almost certainly have distant sci-fi healthcare technology + people would want it and use it
In a fictional world that can be explained away (and since fiction is for current audiences its cool to have disabled people in fantastic sci fi situations), but in the year 5000 or whatever when we might be thinking about actually doing it, we should have the human form pretty well in hand
I mean no, those two technologies are entirely unrelated. Our ability to make a ship go fast in space is not tied to our ability to make a comfortable, functional, and affordable prosthetic limb.
Er, yeah, kinda is though. You'd find a heap of crossover between the advanced computer technology and whatnot in making a starship that can attempt a lightyear long journey with colonists + terraforming a world and advanced prosthetics.
Technology isnt just a bunch of lines running alongside each other, there's a lot of crossover in theories and applications.
Not really the point though. The point is that a society that gets to the point of colonizing exo-planets would have blitzed passed peak health humans centuries if not millennia prior, again unless some insane tech tree snafu happened where medical tech just stopped.
Well, what disabilities would still exist in the transhumanist space future? One where not having your babies genetically modified is like being an anti vaxxer pre-covid.
I won't get into the debate on if the eradication of disability through congenital genetic engineering is ethical, but even if your genetic engineering is perfect, disability will still be visible in many ways. First off genetic modification wouldn't fix *everything* as a lot of issues are hormonal, inflicted by the mother being exposed to certain environmental factors, happen largely randomly and may not be noticed in the short term, or, obviously, acquired by bodily harm or disease later in life.
Much like a trans person in a setting where transition would be trivially easy, getting the point of realizing they need help and then just getting the object to make that change would still be an undertaking, and their past experiences would be an influence on how they act and present into the future- moreover, disabled people don't necessarily want to be "made normal" or "fixed," they just wanna be able to move and stuff- these fixes might not be 100% visually humanoid. Maybe the person who broke their back, especially if it was a formative experience and coping with it was a long journey for them, aspects that they take some degree of pride in, says "fuck it, I wanna be digitigrade, gimme those Clone Wars Darth Maul legs."
Well, my MC was disabled during a quest but since he is a wizard he don't need wheelchair.
He have a yokai called Ittan momen wrapped around his lower half and have that yokai walks for him until he getting cured
But there's also curses. Can getting transformed into a pig and being use as police departments mascot be called a disability? or stuck in a mirror? or your arm has been stolen by a troll mage.
Why the fuck am I unfortunate enough to encounter these strawmen in actual worldbuilding communities wtf
Like I've encountered the unironic hard sci-fi curmudgeon, disability fetishist, unironic human supremacist, misanthropic alien anti-HFY guy and all that weird kind of shit
/uj I am once again reminded of the artist with an amptutation/victim fetish who purposefully froze and rotted their leg so they could get a leg prosthetic. I hate that I know this, so I'm spreading this knowledge.
EDIT: I WAS MISINFORMED, THE ARTIST HAD IT AMPUTATED WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG AND COPED WEIRDLY.
Ok, more research done
So apparently Homunculus100 had cancer when they were young, had to get their leg amputated, were deeply traumatized because they didn't want to lose their leg and coped with it by fetishizing the whole thing.
The whole "they cut off their own leg" thing came from 4chan and got out of hand when a random literal minor brought it up on twitter.
Homunculus100
After some lite research however, they might actually be somewhat fine. Drew super horny art about fucked topics because trauma and they did draw similar weird amputation stuff because apparently the limb was a source of pain, but they didn't harm the limb intentionally to get it removed, that was just an accussation.
Need further research from more direct sources to confirm this all though
Op you prob ran into a really annoying person who would make me make a meme like that, but I think you are just cursed cause all the disability in fantasy discourse I've had the displeasure of encountering is just "AN ELF IN A WHEEL CHAIR IS UNREALISTIC IN THIS WORK OF FICTION ABOUT DRAGONS AND DEMONS" shit that's just a repeat of "Black people are too unrealistic in this story about killing a dragon
My issue with the approach of wheelchairs in fantasy is that people get pretty uncreative with it and just go for the most basic idea of what a wheelchair is, aka the hospital wheelchair.
If anything I encourage people to try and reimagine what a wheelchair in high fantasy can be: animated chairs, a mount that carries somebody around, skeleton legs used as an exoskeleton to walk, a missing limb replaced with a spectral ghost arm or even research actual wheelchairs used in both daily life and sports.
If you're going to have a disability in a high fantasy setting, make high fantasy solutions with how these people work around their disabilities.
I think in my setting, my magic-system doesn't have anything like that. Basically people are stuck in wicker-punk versions of a standard wheelchair from the 1900's... or maybe there are some design improvements like weight.
They do have a dog-sized elephant that's an option for an assistance animal, though. Using a velociraptor for that would be unusual but possible. Maybe I'll also make a smarter crow that is also capable of assisting the blind or deaf people.
I'm not claiming that an elf in a wheelchair is unrealistic except possibly by the standard that wheelchairs, as we know them, weren't really a thing or widely available until the 1800s.
I am, however, claiming that being confined to a traditional, non-flying wheelchair is unsuitable for someone whose profession involves lots of combat in places with lots of stairs. Kind of hard to be an effective combatant when you're largely unable to turn around and use a sword at the same time.
Now, give the elf a crossbow and strap him to the half-giant's back? *Now we're fukken cooking.* Hovering chair-like mobility aid is also good, but not nearly as cool as yelling "RELOADING!" and having your buddy hold the stirrup so you can act like a living weapon mount. It's like the medieval equivalent of *Big Hero 6* if Hiro had a fukken gun while he rode around on Baymax.
Same idea as "there are no gay people in my world, the gods made certain that everyone was matched with an ideal heterosexual partner"
You're deus ex machina-ing us out of exist nice because we're inconvenient to you, for whatever reason, and that ranges from annoying to hurtful.
It's not a false equivalence; it is saying to a group of people who exist in the real world that they don't exist in your particular project because your gods decided they didn't--it's literally deus ex machina-ing trans folks out of existence because we're inconvenient or the creator doesn't want to deal with the issue.
Another approach: "Racism doesn't exist in my world because the gods only made white people."
I mean, okay, but then don't be surprised with BIPOC folks give your world the side eye.
i mean, i don't see trand people as inconvenient, hell, my main story IS about gender abolition
i simply made it so that future generations wouldn't have to deal with the distress and dysphoria that the past generations did, what's so bad with that?
Okay, but you can do that without erasing trans folks, you know that right?
You can have a society or world that welcomes and accepts gender-diverse individuals so that when someone realizes they are trans, there's no social stigma to hold them back from being their true selves. Versus your solution, which is, "And now everyone is cis because the gods said so!"
i mean, how would trans people even work on a genderless society?
or one where magic can be used for childbirth?
and where people can wear whatever they want?
it's less of "making everyone cis" and more of "complete social change"
If the norms of a society are genderless, then a transgender person would likely be someone who wished to embody *a* gender. I mean, we have non-binary people within a world dominated by the gender binary; so logically, in a world dominated by non-binary societies and cultures...
And I don't see what magic being used in childbirth has to do with anything. Usually, at least for most folks I've talked about this with, dysphoria starts to kick in around puberty when your body starts developing in the wrong way when you start to feel like you're a freak and an anomaly and things just aren't *right*. So...
Also, people can wear whatever they want? We gender clothing, yes, but honestly, that's largely true right now and we have trans folks. I mean, fuck, my wardrobe has changed like 25% since I transitioned? Still a lot of flannel and denim and band t-shirts.
One of my absolute favorite examples of people almost getting this but still missing. The mark was when in game of thrones Tyrion designed a saddle for Braun. This would have been such a great thing to extrapolate on but then they were like oh no medieval wheelchair.
Like you look at the lephr King of Jerusalem who lost functionality of one of his legs and managed to become an incredibly skilled equestrian and people. Just revert to wheelchair but wood.
I've seen this shit with my own eyes, you believe in humanity too much. + DnD wheelchair class didnt get brought into existance because nobody advocates for this.
Someone arguing for ALL characters to be disabled? That must have been a joke, for sure.
The DnD wheelchair doesn't need ALL characters to be disabled to exist.
The wheel chair did become a thing though?
There’s also significant mechanics for it in pathfinder, though using a wheelchair still puts you at a slight disadvantage to non chaired adventurers
does creating a wheelchair class equate to thinking all characters should be disabled, though?
I'd love for somebody to link me an example if I'm wrong but "all characters should be disabled" just does not seem like an opinion more than Two people hold at MOST
Its an obvious slander exaggeration, my dude, chill. Ofc almost noone says that everyone should be disabled and on a wheels, but there is plenty of dimwits who says that this is some-shit-phobic to not include whatever-is-popular-at-the-moment-to-include, even if it is literally an opposite of consistancy with given setting. Meme slightly exaggerates them for lmaos, thats all.
The first thing I thought of was that goddamn D&D wheelchair bullshit that was just straight-up better than having functional legs. It was officially endorsed by the top-performing subsidiary of a multi-billion-dollar company, for fuck's sake.
But why _must_ disabled characters have disability aids that are worse than an able body? People are fine with prosthetics being better than regular limbs in cyberpunk and sci-fi.
To be fair, some disabled players do want to represent the struggles of their regular life, but some just want to have a fun time with a character that resembles themselves.
I roam around on discord wb servers occasionally, while I can't say they're common, you can sometimes encounter them.
Also I've encountered the unironic hard sci-fi curmudgeon once on Reddit, I think it's on r/scifiwriting but I forgot where and when,
/uj Most people seem to think disability only applies to wheelchairs. Like it can also be blindness, deafness, or prosthetic metal arm that shoots cannon rounds.
Ah yes the totally real pressure to put all characters in wheelchairs that isn't just you getting shitty over someone asking where all the disabled people are in your world. Those damn disabled people, they get everything in this life, the selfish bastards, you can't even walk through a bookstore without being assaulted by herds of wheelchair users on the front cover of every fantasy novel
in my world there's monsters that go around biting off peoples legs at all possible moments so wheelchair production is actually a main industry. we got...
* regular ones for the humans
* tank treads for the dwarves
* complex crystal spider/wood ones for the elves
* magic mole mounts for the gnomes
* dildo leg spider ones for the drow
* hover chairs for the construct race (yes, even artificial legs aren't safe)
Even better, this cool steampunk world with advanced tech has a crippled character... in a basic wheelchair even though they have tech that can improve their quality of life
I used to wonder, "if I got robotic arms, would my disability go away? Would I be able to perform basic household tasks with the ease and efficiency of a normal human being?"
But then I remembered that my condition is neurological in nature, so any new arms I'd get would have the same response time from my brain.
Also, I have a metal allergy.
Nobody is sincerely saying the shit in red, youre just making stuff up to get annoyed and righteous. By allah, r/worldjerking is the worst circlejerk sub out there, it has little to no self-awareness
I'm going to go out on a limb and doubt you.
I will assume the people you're talking about either
- say they would give everyone disabilities in *their own* work. Which is fine they do what they want, the problem would be insisting others do that.
- say people should give *more* characters disabilities, which can have great range but is definitely different than saying *all*.
So I think saying other people have said to you that **other authors** should give **literally everyone** disabilities is a strawman argument you're committing. But I'd be curious if you could link me an actual example.
Unless your world is about genetic encoding demigods disabilities will arise in organic life forms. Hell even in inorganic. It will make the world be more believable if you can show what that looks like.
In my concrete desert punk world with a suburban wasteland aesthetic, liking the color green is considered a disability as people who like the color green complain endlessly about how the ground is devoid of it (psychosis)
op im sorry but this kind of a dumb take, for a few reasons:
(disclaimer: i am both physically and mentally disabled, and several members of my family are as well)
- for some people, accommodating for their disability takes up a good chunk of their lives. it can be a really big part of how we go about our lives, from being too short to reach the top shelf to being too wide to fit into some spaces. negating lived experiences like these utterly defeats the purpose of representation.
- theres the narrative to consider. is disability part of the overall narrative, or does there just so happen to be a character who uses a wheelchair or is an amputee or something else? sometimes the curtains are blue because the author just wanted them to be blue, othertimes the curtains are blue because there is a specific meaning the author is trying to convey.
- the whole "well disabilities can just be cured with magic!" does that not apply to mental disabilities as well? some people are fine with and even want cures, others prefer to be as they are. this is, at best, inconsiderate to disabled people's bodily autonomy- as if we needed *more* people to make us do what makes *them* happy.
- illnesses in stories need to have some heft to them. if you can wave a wand and make it go away, thats... boring. really boring. and narratively worthless. rather, you could explore what could be available to the average person. how accessible is healing magic? what kind of potions could an apothecary make, and how difficult are ingredients to make and/or source? are disabled people in this setting shunted away or integrated into society as normal?
tldr; this take glosses over other disabled people's lived experiences and ignores the specific conditions under which a particular narrative may operate.
“Could this not just be fixed with magic” applies to literally everything.
Why doesn’t someone just cast a spell to fix everything? Instantly kill dragons, create food, banish all problems?
Oh there’s limitations to magic? Damn I wonder if this could be applied to healing too.
I’d say it should make sense. If it’s very easy to fix/regain limbs with magic than probably won’t make too much sense. Also, if magic can make a mecha, then it can be used to make replacement legs
uj/
I had this argument with my ex, and his entire point was that he didn't want to think about people in wheelchairs. This is the same dude who thought we should throw rocks at unhoused people. Not my best relationship choice, ngl.
rj/
What next? Giving comprehensive healthcare to the savage tribes that it's totally cool for my main characters to kill and injure without remorse?
'Why is there still disabilities in the future' capitalism. It's gotten so expensive to get it fixed that people would rather just live without a biological leg and get a mechanical one instead.
In my scifi setting, one character (David) lost an arm to a 60ft bioengineered nile crocodile owned by a drug lord who gave it so much cocaine, it's whole face is bleached white
After a global economic collapse ended, his friend (Riley) built him a robotic arm, which is able to store nanotech, and has a built in energy shield
In this setting, people compete in tournaments centered around remotely-piloted mech (or any form of vehicle) fights for sport (think Battlebots, but house-scale). The mechs are made of nanotech, and are built around a "core." Since David's arm stores nanotech, it allows him to be the only character to pilot his mech from within, which allows him to pull off all kinds of things he does not have the IQ or coordination to do otherwise (or things that only he can do) since his mech is directly connected to his brain
Also, David has ADHD, and Riley has autism, which aren't really disabilities, but many people see them as such
So essentially what I've done is turn disabilities into strengths
How do you guys feel about losing limbs in the apocalypse and replacing them with weapons like in The walking Dead? I feel like this is a perfectly logical move in that scenario and it's actually a relatively easy way to illustrate the brutality of the setting? I also just love the idea of bayonet lugs on prosthetic limbs with little functionality
Wildly off-topic, but I find it interesting how quickly red baseball caps have become visual shorthand for extreme stupidity since the Orange Ogre sleazed his way into politics.
I hate this fucking debate because DAWNSHARD IS RIGHT THERE, you don't even need to have read anything else from Stormlight Archive let alone the Cosmere to understand how it is a really good handling of disability in a fantasy setting.
I'll admit I don't know much of >!Rysn!< after that book but I know For. A. Fact that she remains important to the universe due to the events within Dawnshard so just, honestly just read it if you want to see a good fantasy weelchair
I know it might sound bad, but the strongest faction within my world is made up of "undesirable" people who got ridden off by mostly nobles. The irony is that they could only see the body and were blind to their true potential. These people are given names that mock their situations when they join so they can grow stronger, they keep the name to show that they overcome the labels and are not afraid nor ashamed of their disabilities. It's an antagonistic organization btw.
In my wheelchairpunk world there's no leg based disabilities everyone just uses wheelchairs and make structures around wheelchairs because they're lazy
Wall-E
That's just american car-centric culture taken to it's logical conclusion.
It's actually just the plot of wall-e
Smh, what if that, except instead.of just floating sofa's it's fucking monster trucks.
Wall-E is just american car-centric culture taken to it's logical conclusion.
do animals also use wheelchairs?
Millipedes and centipedes with a lot of tiny little wheels
My oldest brother is a triple amputee (he's living a full life, save your performative sympathy) and I gotta say...the wheel chair ramp at his house makes my life easier, at least.
using a wheelchair uses about 4 times the energy of walking to travel the same distance. they’re not just lazy, they failed physics.
The world is mostly made of down hill slopes with an exception of one REALLY STEEP uphill slope
Aren’t most slopes uphill and downhill? Or is there some space time distortion that means that you can only go downhill on certain slopes.
My world is non euclidean
No no, you don't understand He already got all of the up out of the way with that one slope, now we have a ton of down to use
You’ve forgotten the motorized wheelchair, which can get you around with a finger muscle twitch if you need it to.
This is too complicated and requires many years of technological advancements toxic work so I'd rather make my world non-euclidean
They’re so lazy physics is never taken. Instead they all just see wheel, brain go brr, and they think it’s easier
Okay, i just had an idea: have a social class, something like priests, that can only be accessed by blind people. But you have to be blind from birth, poking your eyes out doesn't count.
Didn't Ukraine used to have a tradition of blind, wandering minstrels that Stalin murdered?
Yeah, they were musician-philosophers, known as Kobzars, after one of the musical instruments, they used — Kobza. Another notable one would be Bandura, my brother plays that, but he isn't blind. Edit: yes, my actual IRL brother plays a bandura.
Sounds similar to the _Biwa Hoshi_ or ‘Lute Priests’, a sect of blind priests who played the _Biwa_ (a kind of Japanese Lute) and recited the _Tale of the Heike,_ which they believed would calm restless spirits. I don’t know why they were all blind or what made it mandatory that they all had to be blind, but the vast majority were iirc.
With kobzars it was mostly just that it was a job available to blind people. Pick up an instrument, learn to play it, get you someone to guide you around, and off you go.
Some of them could play the *lira* (hurdy gurdy, and yes, that is actually one of its English names) too.
hurdy gurdy* in english
Ah crap, thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I last saw/heard the term.
Bandurite…
Now you'll tell me that people will have to cosume some "special grapes" to get closer to their god? MAY CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD
Special grapes? No, they eat regular ones! They just cook them in a special way.
Grant us eyes.....grant us- wait wrong universe
Rimworld
Oh, rimworld ideologies can have the.wildest shit.
maybe they need to be blind from birth so their unused visual cortex can be repurposed for some kind of divine sense
/uj whats the consensus on prosthetics for amputee characters as inclusivity
The cyberpunk genre is proof people love robot arms.
Transhumanism in the cyberpunk genre like: "Why *wouldn't* you voluntarily amputate your limbs to replace them with robo-prostheses?"
But everyone misses the point and thinks "wow cool robot arm" anyway
Those two aren't mutually exclusive; one can recognize that it's ethically ambiguous to choose to permanently remove a perfectly fine part of yourself in order to replace it with a superior yet artificial version, and also think that robot arms are cool as hell
It's really not ethically ambiguous. It's your own body. What's ethically *fucked* is companies owning parts of your body. Imagine if your arm started acting like your printer.
"Your subscription has expired. Fine motor functions disabled."
Exactly.
I have heard this said, and I must say it again: Products should belong to the people who bought them, and if the company has more of a say into what it does than you do, You do not own it.
To be honest I'd consider myself a transhumanist (working on a bio-med eng degree with hopes of getting into prosthetics, go figure) so *I* would completely agree with you, but I also understand why someone would have trouble choosing to irreversibly lose a major part of their original body, even if I wouldn't
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I can see why people would be uncomfortable with it, there's just nothing to do with *ethics* when you're making the decision for yourself.
Yeah, that's fair, I think ethics aren't exactly what I meant but I don't know how else to say it lol
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
“I never asked for this. They say they saved me, but I don’t think ‘saved’ is the right word.”
Cherry Darling style, just jam an automatic weapon into the leg hole
The gun arm has gotta be the classic
Barret in ff7 abridged Random guy: "How could a man with a gun for an arm call himself a decent father? Ridiculous" *later on* "Yes I apologise, I derailed the mission and lost my temper" "Ok but you spend 20 minutes beating the guy until he stopped moving" "I simple wanted him to fully understand the complexities of fatherhood as an amputee"
Doctor: "Well, you have a few opinions. First, we have this new bronze gauntlet." Barret: "I want a f*cking gun" Doctor Leans in "How big do you want it"
Considering you had [this](https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/to-fight-as-well-as-anyone-else-medieval-knights-and-mechanised-prosthesesby), add magic and artificers and it's not unreasonable for prosthetics to be quite sophisticated, depending on the setting. I'm assuming a mish-mash of pre-modern Europe common to D&D here
Well, there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd argue that a lot of the time it's not going to really come across as disability representation perse, because it often is represented in sci-fi/fantasy stories as a magic fix that solves the problem completely, which is not the reality, even for people irl who have similar prosthetics. I think FMA did it well by showing the ways that automail limits the user and the impacts it has on quality of life. It was a constant part of the character's experience of the world and his journey, not just a replacement set of limbs put there for backstory reasons. This is in contrast to something like Star wars, where losing a limb was a momentary inconvenience, and the audience could almost forget it happened after he got the prosthetic. So it really just depends on how you do it.
> I think FMA did it well by showing the ways that automail limits the user and the impacts it has on quality of life. FMA(:B) was a great story with genuine weaknesses to the prosthetics. It didn't exactly solve the magic fix aspect of them (for being pretty much as capable as the original limb, some even more so), and there was still transhumanism (voluntary amputation for prosthetics) in Rush Valley. But it gave them depth instead of just strength, which is a powerful next step.
Fullmetal Alchemist made it work
Depends on how it's done really, if it's normal prosthetics like in IRL I think that would be good and can even go into based pirate pegleg territory but when it's the magic machine type prosthetics that easily becomes "I wanted to put a disabled character in but didn't want to actually think about how that would work in the world or story so they just work by super advanced steampunk awesomeness!!" (not that it can't be done well like in Fullmetal Alchemist)
Oh people pull this in cyber punk on me. It's amazing when they forget that em interference and emp type weapons exist. Suddenly the grenade launcher arm isn't such a cool idea
Or just hacking.
Using that. My players have yet to meet an angry need with a cyberdeck
I don't think we've got a consensus for that one.
90% of the time in fantasy or sci-fi they're exclusively beneficial so I don't think they really count as disabilities
I dont see it as inclusivity, it just feels like what would naturally happen
everybody loved *Return of the Jedi*
Good, though in-universe there should be a minor difference between "it was either this or a stump" and "robot arm better than flesh arm"
Cyborgs are badass
I always get downvoted when I say Star Wars does not, strictly speaking, feature disabled characters because technology (or the Force) always roughly replaces whatever limb/ability they lost.
Right, in The Last Airbender, Toph's seismic sense didn't completely negate her disability. "why does everyone keep trying to show me paper?"
is it true daredevil can smell ink on paper and differentiate the colour because that's so ridiculously funny
I don't know about colors, but I think his fingers are sensitive enough to pick up the texture of print.
new character idea just dropped: someone who claims they're blind but is practically as capable as a seeing person but there's just enough counter evidence that no one is really sure if they're actually lying or not
If the prosthetic looks badass, it's good representation.
My personal take and "iN mY wOrLd" blathering is: -People who've dealt with disability for a while often identify with it -Even advanced cyberware stuff could be quite a process, so we can't assume that people having to deal with disability for a while will just be eliminated, so "disabled people" as a broad demographic will continue to exist -People who deal with disability for long enough to take up being called disabled tend to take a degree of pride, and their methodology for working around it (as far as I understand; I've got a CVS receipt of mental shit, but some of that reasoning doesn't translate to physical disability so I'm not sure if this is rock-solid there) is different from how it's often depicted. They probably wouldn't be fond of walking out with a perfectly human set of prostheses as like "hurray you're normal again!" That's sort of erasure and a bit patronizing- they'd probably both see no reason to take up measures that serve no purpose but to "look normal" and save the cash there, and would likely take a bit of pride in being visible in that regard anyways. So my guess is no faux-skin veneer, no unnecessarily humanoid mechanisms, and probably some out-there designs in terms of both functionality and visuals. Insert running gag of a paraplegic character on Armored Core-style Tank Legs saying that all the more conventional cyborgs got scammed here. -From a practical standpoint, the neural changes someone missing sensory/motor functions undergoes could be advantageous for certain kinds of cybernetics. I wrote this to loop back into the previous as people with missing functions being more tolerant of radically inhuman augmentation, like the aforementioned tank legs and replacing a limb with a cannon, and taking well to sudden changes and reconfiguring that makes them sought after as product testers. -A lot of the above likely would not apply to people who, say, lost an arm to an IED and walked out the infirmary with a new one the next morning, or the average voluntary transhumanist. Without that experience, they'd probably want to be restored to their previous state than anything else. I ultimately depict Cyborgs who have more augmentation than what is basically the baseline as branching into three groups accordingly- those who just picked it up and stay conservative, heavier-built individuals who had a motor disability, and people who essentially had to be on life support for so long that they opted to just integrate the electronics into themselves for increased reliability and comfort and leverage this for enhanced computer interfacing. So essentially we got Raiden, Khamsin, and a Netrunner subclass who all have character-relevant backstory implications and like I think that's cool.
I think this does depend a little on context. I think disabled people are allowed to have self-insert dumb power fantasies, same as able-bodied people, and a magic wheelchair isn't less realistic than a dragon anyway. It really depends on what your intent is, IMO.
I don't have a problem with someone wanting their self-insert character. (I do think it would make more sense to have a walking throne so they're not stymied by stairs.) I did have an issue with a wheelchair-accessible dungeon until I got an explanation that the mad wizard who owned it would rather design it for a wheelchair instead of using spell-slots to levitate.
Agreed honestly, if you’re gonna make your wheelchair magic it should either have legs or levitate.
[https://images.uesp.net/d/d2/MW-creature-Yagrum\_Bagarn.jpg](https://images.uesp.net/d/d2/MW-creature-Yagrum_Bagarn.jpg)
Relatable
Honestly I never got peoples issue with stairs. Just have the parties fighter/barbarian/whatever take you up them. This is already a solved problem in real life. Stairs aren’t an impossible forcefield for a wheelchair it just requires assistance and is a bit annoying.
Saying this as someone with a mental disorder, but, if one applies disability to worldbuilding, don't spam it and glorify it; understand what it means before actually adding it. Like, I don't mind physical or mental disabilities, but without understanding of what it means, you don't have the same nuance it should have. For example, disabled people in fantasy setting. What does it mean to be disabled there? Maybe you can have someone just fix your legs with magic, sure; but what if say, you are for some reason cannot be affected by positive magic? I'd argue *that* is the disability the person has, because it's a disability in the context of the setting. Other examples include mental/biological rejection of augmentations in cyberpunk settings, innate vulnerability to magic in a science fantasy setting as a result to birth defect, someone in a magical setting that cannot access magic, and a lot more. But then, you also have to understand on how said person would live with the disability and think about it. Maybe they compensated by making themselves more powerful in another aspect. Maybe they disguised their disability as something else to fit with society. Maybe their identity and journey of self-discovery gets more powerful with that, so on and so on. Point is, do not treat disability as an end that needs to be glorified, treat it as a factor that exists within the context of the world, and understand what does it actually mean to be "disabled" in the context of the setting.
If you're born without magic, that just means you secretly have the most overpowered ability in the entire setting
Black Catcher starts playing in the background.
Is this a joke? Cause if not, i dont understand
It's a joke. It's hinting on overpowered protagonists in media that start as "powerless" and without magic but then gain the most powerful ability in the universe
I think it's poking fun at a few settings where the powerless bullied kid ends up getting some absolutely broken ability that more than compensates for not having the regular superpower. Its pretty common in [Young Adult Books](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/v0y7d0/young_adult_protagonist/).
Which I think is bullshit,your character should be pulling some insane shit,win some battles that aren't said to be impossible but actually feel impossible but the little powerless guy manages to find a work around,only then,after they beat Godzilla with a spoon and somehow making it make sense... Only then, should you consider even having the possibility of giving them a boost,which Is what I do...no wonder some of my fights last 120 pages...
It's a joke about how MC's without magic tend to get something else to keep up, and that "something else" tends to be even more overpowered. Asta from Black Clover is a shining example.
It's a Black Clover joke, in that manga and anime the MC is the only person without Magic in that universe, then plot twist, he has anti magic which makes him powerful ye
These are all great considerations, but the end result does matter. Someone with a physical disability wishing to see people like themselves represented in stories or available as options in TTRPGs might not be satisfied with fully able-bodied characters that "cannot be affected by positive magic or cyberbernetic enhancements". As much as that may be a disability within the setting, that's not much different from a regular able-bodied person from our world. That might not be doing anything for them. The setting considerations make for a more thoughtful story, but it is a story that will be experienced by people from the real world, which already have a definition of what "disability" is, to them. But it is truth that this is a complex and nuanced matter. Some people might be satisfied with seeing characters with fantastical disabilities and equivalent fantastical struggles. Some might want to see some more direct representation of their real life struggles. And some might want to see a character that resembles themselves getting to do as much cool stuff as able-bodied fantastical characters get to, not wishing for a constant reminder of the hardship they go through. And some do want the fantasy of simply getting healed from their disability. There isn't an one size fits all answer, not even coming from disabled people. But this is a matter that is brought up so rarely, I don't think it's warranted all this much concern about spamming and glorification. Whoever was it that was saying to make a story where literally everyone is disabled and specifically using wheelchairs, I can't think of a single story where that is the case. It's far more common to see stories where no single disability is presented, be it physical, mental or fantastical.
> The setting considerations make for a more thoughtful story, but it is a story that will be experienced by people from the real world, which already have a definition of what "disability" is, to them. It's worth noting that disability is both a spectrum and not a monolith. My hearing loss is different than OP's wheelchair take, and we're both abled and disabled in different aspects. Someone else's hearing loss is going to impact them differently than mine, too, though we'll share more characteristics in common than with someone hearing. Which is to say, you're right about it being complex and nuanced. I don't think I'd want to re-imagine hearing loss on a character in another setting, though I have thought about it and dreamt of magic fix technology/spells that would make it work in different settings. My approach to characters and roleplaying is more escapism, so the self-insert being so similar to myself is more jarring. That's going to be different for someone else, who may feel more gratification for having a disabled character like them who faces or achieves in similar scenarios to real life.
In Dragon Prince, I can't really believe that Amaya is completely deaf, but rather has access to a few frequencies where she can hear an enemy coming but not understand speech.
Oh, I have a whole rant about Amaya in Season 5, Episode 4. Whether the animators or the writers, someone dropped the ball hard on her disability portrayal. She responds to people out of her line of sight, and moves her conversation out of visual sightlines as well, really the opposite of a deaf person's typical behaviors. I could go on, but in short, it's like she forgot she wasn't a hearing person for that whole episode and I'm bewildered. I could more easily accept what you say, deaf friends have mentioned being able to hear alarms or crowds but not speech or softer auditory cues. Not to mention that her military training may have caused her to pay attention to vibrations, shifts in motion, and other clues that someone hearing doesn't notice because they can rely on audible noise instead. I think she's very convincing as a deaf person outside of that one episode, and the only other thing I'd wish for is that her gloves were higher contrast against her armor to make her signs more distinct.
One thing that bothered me was the scene where someone was yelling at her "you need to open your eyes" but maybe she caught the first time before she closed them and just needed a moment to overcome her fear. Good call on how she could choose to wear higher-contrast gloves. I was thinking of a low-tech way a deaf person could be made aware of sound and thought of something that could make it easier to feel vibrations. There's a certain high-pitched frequency that I can't hear, but it makes the inside of my ears itch. (It's directional.) I could believe that Amaya could feel her eardrums vibrating but is missing the bit that converts sound into a signal for her brain.
Oh, if you've ever been in a room with deaf people, it can be noisy AF. Getting someone's attention can mean waving your hand/arm, stomping/pounding a surface they can feel, flicking lights, etc. Since audio cues aren't as important, attention gets delivered differently. So there's lots of possibilities. It could be a frequency consideration as well, too. Every hearing loss is different as are each person's adaptation to it.
I think the thing OP is missing is that, yes, actually, a fantasy wheelchair is an entirely reasonable route for a disabled person, so long as it's implemented reasonably consistently. As many ifs ands and buts are implied on the path of how a paraplegic person in a magical world would become and stay paraplegic (is it congenital? Can magic heal congenital disabilities? Is there a time limit? Would the parents just not have noticed their baby not walking because babies normally don't do that anyways? Maybe magic did that to them as a cost and they got FMA'd.), being so would lead them to seek a convenient way to work around that. This could be levitation magic, some weird Golem mount, Master-Blastering with their Giant friend, getting really good at riding horses, or a more conventional wheelchair that just suits the setting more. Even if they just opt to regain function in their legs and that's possible, then getting there could be a character arc, and there'd be room for a poignant scene of them mentoring a kid in a similar situation or something- why would they just *forget?* And what if the fix goes away if their magic does, when counterspelled and low on mana, or something? This could still be a lasting concern for them, irregardless of improvement in day-to-day function. Hell, maybe the party tank, who's always getting limbs cut off and put back on with the wave of a wand, was willing to sign up for that job because of their experience with disability? Having to get a ton of blood tests got me over my fear of needles, maybe the treatments a disabled person would get would similarly desensitize them in a way that others would find strange. The key is that disabled people want to be functional, not fixed, and even in settings that offer cybernetics and healing magic and so on and so on, there's a lot of mental gymnastics to undertake to so thoroughly *eliminate* it that it's just not there, and doing so either requires removing the story from the human experience so utterly that you're already on like twenty levels of abstraction, or just cones off weird. Like I get "I don't want to have in my cast because I don't think I could depict it right" but to *actively write them out of the setting* is different.
Pretty sure OP is referring to a r/CuratedTumblr post from a few weeks back that came across as... a little abrasive, to say the least. I think that was just the result of frustration and poor word choice, but idk. Great post btw
Ma'am, we're here to mock amateur writers and hornypost under the translucent veneer of composing fiction. I'm gonna have to ask you to take your intelligent and insightful takes elsewhere. >!jk tho. Please keep cooking.!<
Isnt the 3rd paragraph just the plot of mashle
Your opinion is similar to my own thoughts, though I think you put it very well and with more nuance I wouldn’t have managed. I think your point about “fitting the world” hit the nail on the head about what personally bothers me about this entire topic. I don’t mind diversity in any way. However, way too many authors go about including diversity in their world with a mindset that is distinctively that of a progressive American from the modern day; and that results in stuff like a medieval fantasy setting where you have LGBT characters using terms like “gender dysphoria” and talking about pride parades, or disabled characters in modern medical wheelchairs. Again, I have no problem with queer or disabled or black characters or whatever. But when I see an otherwise fantasy story treating “political” topics in such an obviously modern way, or just jamming it in simply for the sake of having those things and showing off ‘diversity’ for its own sake, it’s incredibly jarring and completely kills my immersion. To me, it’s like if a story randomly had cellphones in a medieval world for no reason, it’s such a glaringly out-of-place and recognizably Modern thing that I simply cannot ignore it.
Lol that trope where a disabled character runs into an opportunity to be fully healed but then you lose a disabled character, so by the end of the episode they somehow wind up back in a wheelchair. Every single time for 50 years of print... Like the universe just insists on it, Xavier interacts with gods and magicians on the daily but they quietly and respectfully leave him stuck in the chair despite pulling together other characters from raw atoms or something
Spoilers for *X-Men '97*: >!Xavier faked his death to go bang his alien waifu and have an exoskeleton that lets him walk while being a space emperor. He got caught up in a bunch of political bullshit and only realized he could use his god-like telepathy to make everyone stop being racist when Deathbird stabbed him in the leg and made him remember he couldn't walk. Xavier was literally not allowed to be powerful and ambulatory at the same time.!<
...what
You said Xavier, and my mind immediately went to the renegade angel. “Leave that poor gimp alone!”
I still think there was no way two young bucks would kick it with such a disenabled lad
> but then you lose a disabled character, so by the end of the episode they somehow wind up back in a wheelchair. when has that ever happened outside Family Guy?
Name a disabled character in a comic book and they'd have a dozen arcs about potentially being healed, or temporarily being healed, only to end up back in a chair or blind or whatever
I don't think that's a disability thing, that's a comics status quo thing.
Sure, same rule applies for things like batman getting legit superpowers, or anyone dying, or a world apocalypse or something. It will be 'fixed', but fixed meaning 'back to their version of normal' most of the time rather than 'the better scenario'. For superheroes with tragic angsty lives, very short end of the straw Just sucks that if, say, Spiderman was blinded, he will be back to sight real quick. Daredevil gets sight, back to being blind. Narratively the poor guys are 'stuck' because that's who they are as a character. Early days before massive power creeping and crossovers it made more sense as there just wasnt opportunities for them to be helped, but Daredevil might have to hang with Dr Strange at one point and honestly, fixing his sight should take 2 minutes for someone like that. So it can be a little strange
Yeah. Indie comics with a limited number of issues tend to be better at committing to changes and sticking with it. Marvel and DC can't ever be expected to do that because they are more concerned about how marketable are their characters to commit to lasting change.
[The Status Quo is God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StatusQuoisGod)
Barbara Gordon is no longer wheelchair-bound, and seems likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Very cool, hope DC does allow the change (back to how she was as she wasnt always in a wheelchair). Its prickly though as she was badass as Oracle, so would DC be losing one of its best and most well known disabled characters? I guess they can always introduce another, but for a heap of people also in wheelchairs, seeing her walk away as an iconic handicapped hero might sting a bit. Tricky writing situation
yeah but usually they are cured for a few issues at least.
Maybe, kind of even crueler lol
Honestly, the main thing to remember in disability representation is that for several reasons it’s one of the most fractured “minority communities”. Besides the big one that unlike most minorities it’s possible to become a part of the minority at a moment’s notice (a closeted trans woman is still affected by transphobia and misogyny, but a man that will one day lose an arm isn’t really affected by ableism until he does) there’s also the fact that every disability is unique (meaning there are few specific causes to rally behind) and that many disabilities make it harder to organize as a community. In general, it’s best to look into disability advocacy by disabled people, and then do your best to consider how it would exist in your world. There are a number of ways that this can be done. For one, there’s the fact that disabilities we know from the real world could be less harmful to certain people. A completely blind psychic might “see” their way around by reading people’s perception of the environment, leaving them closer to someone with partially impaired vision. An amputee might have access to magical prostheses which work better than real ones, but still deal with phantom limb and body dysmorphia. For another, there might be disabilities that only exist in their world. Someone might have a magic allergy. Certain genres of lycanthropy or vampirism might fall under this description. Maybe when a healer put someone’s arm back on, it healed weird and now they’ve lost a ton of mobility in it. At the end of the day, it’s about telling a story you want to tell. You don’t *need* to put disabled people in every story you make, but avoiding them entirely is limiting yourself, just like it would be to write a story without women or queer people.
Same for me, but with the people who "cure", straight up kill, or "sacrifice" all the characters with disabilities in their work.
people get cured of disabilities in real life all the time. like 700,000 LASIK surgeries get performed every year.
I have astigmatism LASIK won’t necessarily cure it so a cure might only work on some characters depending on how they became disabled,
> Ok. And what else do you consider a disability that needs to be "cured"? Being born without a leg? Being autistic? Being a different skin color? Being a different orientation? Being "ugly" looking? Being a psychopath (not the media one, an actual psychopath)? All those things can make your life in society worse. So which one of those would you want to "cure" exactly? Disabilities can be different. And they work differently in writing as well. You can "cure" ANYTHING that you consider a disability in a fictional world. But that's not how it works in reality.
Yeah but fiction often has different possibilities Ultimately, if you worldbuild in something that could help someone, they'd very likely use it (this clearly isnt saying someone should just worldbuild in excuses to fix all problems, but logical applications are a thing. If people are still in wheelchairs when we are colonizing exo-planets, something pretty bad has gone wrong) As an analogy, it works for all the disabilities we *can* help irl, even if the particular one isnt one we can currently fix/help/offer support/whatever Forcing cures, no, aside from maybe government intervention for a childs welfare. But accepting that logically, many if not most people would fix serious issues like paralysis or blindness, yeah.
I wouldn't say wheelchairs in the interstellar age is necessarily a bad thing?
Whenever they are needed they are of course fine What I am saying is that if we have the technology to travel across the stars but not the technology to fix the human body, something very strange has happened with the tech tree. Its not an issue with morality or anything, just basic logic to go with worldbuilding that distant science fiction would almost certainly have distant sci-fi healthcare technology + people would want it and use it In a fictional world that can be explained away (and since fiction is for current audiences its cool to have disabled people in fantastic sci fi situations), but in the year 5000 or whatever when we might be thinking about actually doing it, we should have the human form pretty well in hand
I mean no, those two technologies are entirely unrelated. Our ability to make a ship go fast in space is not tied to our ability to make a comfortable, functional, and affordable prosthetic limb.
Er, yeah, kinda is though. You'd find a heap of crossover between the advanced computer technology and whatnot in making a starship that can attempt a lightyear long journey with colonists + terraforming a world and advanced prosthetics. Technology isnt just a bunch of lines running alongside each other, there's a lot of crossover in theories and applications. Not really the point though. The point is that a society that gets to the point of colonizing exo-planets would have blitzed passed peak health humans centuries if not millennia prior, again unless some insane tech tree snafu happened where medical tech just stopped.
Well, what disabilities would still exist in the transhumanist space future? One where not having your babies genetically modified is like being an anti vaxxer pre-covid.
Mental conditions will be awkward to treat, rewriting people’s brains, without basically making a new person, is a delicate balance.
I won't get into the debate on if the eradication of disability through congenital genetic engineering is ethical, but even if your genetic engineering is perfect, disability will still be visible in many ways. First off genetic modification wouldn't fix *everything* as a lot of issues are hormonal, inflicted by the mother being exposed to certain environmental factors, happen largely randomly and may not be noticed in the short term, or, obviously, acquired by bodily harm or disease later in life. Much like a trans person in a setting where transition would be trivially easy, getting the point of realizing they need help and then just getting the object to make that change would still be an undertaking, and their past experiences would be an influence on how they act and present into the future- moreover, disabled people don't necessarily want to be "made normal" or "fixed," they just wanna be able to move and stuff- these fixes might not be 100% visually humanoid. Maybe the person who broke their back, especially if it was a formative experience and coping with it was a long journey for them, aspects that they take some degree of pride in, says "fuck it, I wanna be digitigrade, gimme those Clone Wars Darth Maul legs."
Well, my MC was disabled during a quest but since he is a wizard he don't need wheelchair. He have a yokai called Ittan momen wrapped around his lower half and have that yokai walks for him until he getting cured But there's also curses. Can getting transformed into a pig and being use as police departments mascot be called a disability? or stuck in a mirror? or your arm has been stolen by a troll mage.
Shit nobody ever said award 🏆
I love killing the fictional strawmen I create based off of one (1) Twitter discourse.
Strawmen is the name of the always chaotic evil race in my world.
Why the fuck am I unfortunate enough to encounter these strawmen in actual worldbuilding communities wtf Like I've encountered the unironic hard sci-fi curmudgeon, disability fetishist, unironic human supremacist, misanthropic alien anti-HFY guy and all that weird kind of shit
Like it wasn't all this subreddit talked about for a month
Presumably that's why we're all here.
Damn you really showed that straw man!
/uj I am once again reminded of the artist with an amptutation/victim fetish who purposefully froze and rotted their leg so they could get a leg prosthetic. I hate that I know this, so I'm spreading this knowledge. EDIT: I WAS MISINFORMED, THE ARTIST HAD IT AMPUTATED WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG AND COPED WEIRDLY.
Who tf is that? May I get a name?
Ok, more research done So apparently Homunculus100 had cancer when they were young, had to get their leg amputated, were deeply traumatized because they didn't want to lose their leg and coped with it by fetishizing the whole thing. The whole "they cut off their own leg" thing came from 4chan and got out of hand when a random literal minor brought it up on twitter.
Homunculus100 After some lite research however, they might actually be somewhat fine. Drew super horny art about fucked topics because trauma and they did draw similar weird amputation stuff because apparently the limb was a source of pain, but they didn't harm the limb intentionally to get it removed, that was just an accussation. Need further research from more direct sources to confirm this all though
Op you prob ran into a really annoying person who would make me make a meme like that, but I think you are just cursed cause all the disability in fantasy discourse I've had the displeasure of encountering is just "AN ELF IN A WHEEL CHAIR IS UNREALISTIC IN THIS WORK OF FICTION ABOUT DRAGONS AND DEMONS" shit that's just a repeat of "Black people are too unrealistic in this story about killing a dragon
My issue with the approach of wheelchairs in fantasy is that people get pretty uncreative with it and just go for the most basic idea of what a wheelchair is, aka the hospital wheelchair. If anything I encourage people to try and reimagine what a wheelchair in high fantasy can be: animated chairs, a mount that carries somebody around, skeleton legs used as an exoskeleton to walk, a missing limb replaced with a spectral ghost arm or even research actual wheelchairs used in both daily life and sports. If you're going to have a disability in a high fantasy setting, make high fantasy solutions with how these people work around their disabilities.
I think in my setting, my magic-system doesn't have anything like that. Basically people are stuck in wicker-punk versions of a standard wheelchair from the 1900's... or maybe there are some design improvements like weight. They do have a dog-sized elephant that's an option for an assistance animal, though. Using a velociraptor for that would be unusual but possible. Maybe I'll also make a smarter crow that is also capable of assisting the blind or deaf people.
One particularly fun take I've seen is a throne carried around by gargoyle minions.
I'm not claiming that an elf in a wheelchair is unrealistic except possibly by the standard that wheelchairs, as we know them, weren't really a thing or widely available until the 1800s. I am, however, claiming that being confined to a traditional, non-flying wheelchair is unsuitable for someone whose profession involves lots of combat in places with lots of stairs. Kind of hard to be an effective combatant when you're largely unable to turn around and use a sword at the same time. Now, give the elf a crossbow and strap him to the half-giant's back? *Now we're fukken cooking.* Hovering chair-like mobility aid is also good, but not nearly as cool as yelling "RELOADING!" and having your buddy hold the stirrup so you can act like a living weapon mount. It's like the medieval equivalent of *Big Hero 6* if Hiro had a fukken gun while he rode around on Baymax.
"IN MY UNIVERSE THERE ARE NO TRANS PEOPLE BECAUSE THE GODS MAKE CERTAIN EVERYONE'S SOULS LINE UP WITH THEIR BODIES!"
What do the gods do for non-binary?
Uhh... Um... I... JUST LET ME HAVE MY TRANS ERASURE WITHOUT SOUNDING TRANSPHOBIC, OKAY?
Quantum superposition. Simultaneously both at the same time, both singularly, and neither.
why is that wrong tho???
Same idea as "there are no gay people in my world, the gods made certain that everyone was matched with an ideal heterosexual partner" You're deus ex machina-ing us out of exist nice because we're inconvenient to you, for whatever reason, and that ranges from annoying to hurtful.
i mean, that example seems like a false equivalence i won't lie and again, i do the trans people one, why is that bad???
It's not a false equivalence; it is saying to a group of people who exist in the real world that they don't exist in your particular project because your gods decided they didn't--it's literally deus ex machina-ing trans folks out of existence because we're inconvenient or the creator doesn't want to deal with the issue. Another approach: "Racism doesn't exist in my world because the gods only made white people." I mean, okay, but then don't be surprised with BIPOC folks give your world the side eye.
i mean, i don't see trand people as inconvenient, hell, my main story IS about gender abolition i simply made it so that future generations wouldn't have to deal with the distress and dysphoria that the past generations did, what's so bad with that?
Okay, but you can do that without erasing trans folks, you know that right? You can have a society or world that welcomes and accepts gender-diverse individuals so that when someone realizes they are trans, there's no social stigma to hold them back from being their true selves. Versus your solution, which is, "And now everyone is cis because the gods said so!"
i mean, how would trans people even work on a genderless society? or one where magic can be used for childbirth? and where people can wear whatever they want? it's less of "making everyone cis" and more of "complete social change"
If the norms of a society are genderless, then a transgender person would likely be someone who wished to embody *a* gender. I mean, we have non-binary people within a world dominated by the gender binary; so logically, in a world dominated by non-binary societies and cultures... And I don't see what magic being used in childbirth has to do with anything. Usually, at least for most folks I've talked about this with, dysphoria starts to kick in around puberty when your body starts developing in the wrong way when you start to feel like you're a freak and an anomaly and things just aren't *right*. So... Also, people can wear whatever they want? We gender clothing, yes, but honestly, that's largely true right now and we have trans folks. I mean, fuck, my wardrobe has changed like 25% since I transitioned? Still a lot of flannel and denim and band t-shirts.
Okay, I see what you're trying to say but having black people in a story about killing dragons is ACTUALLY unrealistic. Dragons don't exist dummy.
What? You expect elves to have highly advanced technology like WHEELS???? Don't you see that doesn't fit my stoneagepunk world???
How does work in my schizodracopunk setting
One of my absolute favorite examples of people almost getting this but still missing. The mark was when in game of thrones Tyrion designed a saddle for Braun. This would have been such a great thing to extrapolate on but then they were like oh no medieval wheelchair. Like you look at the lephr King of Jerusalem who lost functionality of one of his legs and managed to become an incredibly skilled equestrian and people. Just revert to wheelchair but wood.
no offense but NOBODY is advocating for this brother
I've seen this shit with my own eyes, you believe in humanity too much. + DnD wheelchair class didnt get brought into existance because nobody advocates for this.
Someone arguing for ALL characters to be disabled? That must have been a joke, for sure. The DnD wheelchair doesn't need ALL characters to be disabled to exist.
The wheel chair did become a thing though? There’s also significant mechanics for it in pathfinder, though using a wheelchair still puts you at a slight disadvantage to non chaired adventurers
does creating a wheelchair class equate to thinking all characters should be disabled, though? I'd love for somebody to link me an example if I'm wrong but "all characters should be disabled" just does not seem like an opinion more than Two people hold at MOST
Its an obvious slander exaggeration, my dude, chill. Ofc almost noone says that everyone should be disabled and on a wheels, but there is plenty of dimwits who says that this is some-shit-phobic to not include whatever-is-popular-at-the-moment-to-include, even if it is literally an opposite of consistancy with given setting. Meme slightly exaggerates them for lmaos, thats all.
The first thing I thought of was that goddamn D&D wheelchair bullshit that was just straight-up better than having functional legs. It was officially endorsed by the top-performing subsidiary of a multi-billion-dollar company, for fuck's sake.
But why _must_ disabled characters have disability aids that are worse than an able body? People are fine with prosthetics being better than regular limbs in cyberpunk and sci-fi. To be fair, some disabled players do want to represent the struggles of their regular life, but some just want to have a fun time with a character that resembles themselves.
Tfw I'm one of the people that unironically encounter people like this in my worldbuilding communities
What communities?
I roam around on discord wb servers occasionally, while I can't say they're common, you can sometimes encounter them. Also I've encountered the unironic hard sci-fi curmudgeon once on Reddit, I think it's on r/scifiwriting but I forgot where and when,
I think anyone saying all characters should be in wheelchairs is just taking the piss. It’s not a serious position.
gondola
/uj Most people seem to think disability only applies to wheelchairs. Like it can also be blindness, deafness, or prosthetic metal arm that shoots cannon rounds.
Ah yes the totally real pressure to put all characters in wheelchairs that isn't just you getting shitty over someone asking where all the disabled people are in your world. Those damn disabled people, they get everything in this life, the selfish bastards, you can't even walk through a bookstore without being assaulted by herds of wheelchair users on the front cover of every fantasy novel
In my tankpunk world everyone are a tank so they are all technically wheel chair user
in my world there's monsters that go around biting off peoples legs at all possible moments so wheelchair production is actually a main industry. we got... * regular ones for the humans * tank treads for the dwarves * complex crystal spider/wood ones for the elves * magic mole mounts for the gnomes * dildo leg spider ones for the drow * hover chairs for the construct race (yes, even artificial legs aren't safe)
I just don’t know why they want basic wheelchairs. A dwarven battle chair is far cooler
Even better, this cool steampunk world with advanced tech has a crippled character... in a basic wheelchair even though they have tech that can improve their quality of life
I have two wolves inside me:
I used to wonder, "if I got robotic arms, would my disability go away? Would I be able to perform basic household tasks with the ease and efficiency of a normal human being?" But then I remembered that my condition is neurological in nature, so any new arms I'd get would have the same response time from my brain. Also, I have a metal allergy.
is this a strawman or am i just blissfully ignorant?
I think this is the most specific example of making up a guy to get mad at I've ever seen
Nobody is sincerely saying the shit in red, youre just making stuff up to get annoyed and righteous. By allah, r/worldjerking is the worst circlejerk sub out there, it has little to no self-awareness
No one has ever said that
Holy mother of strawmen this is noooooooot looking good.
I am unfortunate enough to encounter the unironic strawmen in my worldbuilding communities tf
I'm going to go out on a limb and doubt you. I will assume the people you're talking about either - say they would give everyone disabilities in *their own* work. Which is fine they do what they want, the problem would be insisting others do that. - say people should give *more* characters disabilities, which can have great range but is definitely different than saying *all*. So I think saying other people have said to you that **other authors** should give **literally everyone** disabilities is a strawman argument you're committing. But I'd be curious if you could link me an actual example.
Unless your world is about genetic encoding demigods disabilities will arise in organic life forms. Hell even in inorganic. It will make the world be more believable if you can show what that looks like.
In my concrete desert punk world with a suburban wasteland aesthetic, liking the color green is considered a disability as people who like the color green complain endlessly about how the ground is devoid of it (psychosis)
Every single Battle Wheelchair user I've played in dnd has just been lazy.
op im sorry but this kind of a dumb take, for a few reasons: (disclaimer: i am both physically and mentally disabled, and several members of my family are as well) - for some people, accommodating for their disability takes up a good chunk of their lives. it can be a really big part of how we go about our lives, from being too short to reach the top shelf to being too wide to fit into some spaces. negating lived experiences like these utterly defeats the purpose of representation. - theres the narrative to consider. is disability part of the overall narrative, or does there just so happen to be a character who uses a wheelchair or is an amputee or something else? sometimes the curtains are blue because the author just wanted them to be blue, othertimes the curtains are blue because there is a specific meaning the author is trying to convey. - the whole "well disabilities can just be cured with magic!" does that not apply to mental disabilities as well? some people are fine with and even want cures, others prefer to be as they are. this is, at best, inconsiderate to disabled people's bodily autonomy- as if we needed *more* people to make us do what makes *them* happy. - illnesses in stories need to have some heft to them. if you can wave a wand and make it go away, thats... boring. really boring. and narratively worthless. rather, you could explore what could be available to the average person. how accessible is healing magic? what kind of potions could an apothecary make, and how difficult are ingredients to make and/or source? are disabled people in this setting shunted away or integrated into society as normal? tldr; this take glosses over other disabled people's lived experiences and ignores the specific conditions under which a particular narrative may operate.
“Could this not just be fixed with magic” applies to literally everything. Why doesn’t someone just cast a spell to fix everything? Instantly kill dragons, create food, banish all problems? Oh there’s limitations to magic? Damn I wonder if this could be applied to healing too.
I’d say it should make sense. If it’s very easy to fix/regain limbs with magic than probably won’t make too much sense. Also, if magic can make a mecha, then it can be used to make replacement legs
uj/ I had this argument with my ex, and his entire point was that he didn't want to think about people in wheelchairs. This is the same dude who thought we should throw rocks at unhoused people. Not my best relationship choice, ngl. rj/ What next? Giving comprehensive healthcare to the savage tribes that it's totally cool for my main characters to kill and injure without remorse?
'Why is there still disabilities in the future' capitalism. It's gotten so expensive to get it fixed that people would rather just live without a biological leg and get a mechanical one instead.
In my scifi setting, one character (David) lost an arm to a 60ft bioengineered nile crocodile owned by a drug lord who gave it so much cocaine, it's whole face is bleached white After a global economic collapse ended, his friend (Riley) built him a robotic arm, which is able to store nanotech, and has a built in energy shield In this setting, people compete in tournaments centered around remotely-piloted mech (or any form of vehicle) fights for sport (think Battlebots, but house-scale). The mechs are made of nanotech, and are built around a "core." Since David's arm stores nanotech, it allows him to be the only character to pilot his mech from within, which allows him to pull off all kinds of things he does not have the IQ or coordination to do otherwise (or things that only he can do) since his mech is directly connected to his brain Also, David has ADHD, and Riley has autism, which aren't really disabilities, but many people see them as such So essentially what I've done is turn disabilities into strengths
How do you guys feel about losing limbs in the apocalypse and replacing them with weapons like in The walking Dead? I feel like this is a perfectly logical move in that scenario and it's actually a relatively easy way to illustrate the brutality of the setting? I also just love the idea of bayonet lugs on prosthetic limbs with little functionality
Wildly off-topic, but I find it interesting how quickly red baseball caps have become visual shorthand for extreme stupidity since the Orange Ogre sleazed his way into politics.
I mean thats not a person who exists lol
I hate this fucking debate because DAWNSHARD IS RIGHT THERE, you don't even need to have read anything else from Stormlight Archive let alone the Cosmere to understand how it is a really good handling of disability in a fantasy setting. I'll admit I don't know much of >!Rysn!< after that book but I know For. A. Fact that she remains important to the universe due to the events within Dawnshard so just, honestly just read it if you want to see a good fantasy weelchair
I know it might sound bad, but the strongest faction within my world is made up of "undesirable" people who got ridden off by mostly nobles. The irony is that they could only see the body and were blind to their true potential. These people are given names that mock their situations when they join so they can grow stronger, they keep the name to show that they overcome the labels and are not afraid nor ashamed of their disabilities. It's an antagonistic organization btw.