Foreword
One of our dear members, DroZo, passed away on the 24 march 2024. To pay tribute to him, we are publishing one of his most personal texts on our blog today, the fruit of a long reflection on a subject that was particularly close to his heart: the representation of disability in fiction.
DroZo originally published his text on the discussion board of La Garde de Nuit in December 2023. It opened up awareness and debate on a social issue that is often neglected or invisible. This discussion (in French) is still open today and you can still respond to it.
DroZo told us that he would like to see this article widely circulated. We discussed publishing it on the blog with him, but before doing so he wanted to make some changes and enhance his text, in particular by adding some thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s other works, such as Windhaven and the Wild Cards series, which he adored (and to which he had devoted an article, available here in French). Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time to edit and publish this finished version.
However, in response to his desire to make his text accessible to as many people as possible, we have decided, in agreement with his family, to publish this text as he himself shared it with us on the forum. This text was made available in French, and, today, we continue his work by translating it in English, in order for his words to reach an even broader audience. A few rare additions of information have also been inserted in square brackets [like this]. We have not, however, altered the content or the committed tone of the text. The words that follow are and remain the indisputable work of Benjamin Warin, alias DroZo on the Garde de Nuit.
↑Introduction
As some of you may know, I’m almost blind. And ever since I became blind, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about the portrayal of disability in fiction and its impact on reality. And as I thought my perceptions might be of interest to some of you, I thought I’d share them with you. I should point out that, in this particular text, I’m going to be talking mainly about the representation of physical disability. It would be interesting to have the point of view of people with neurological disorders, but as I don’t grasp all matters of this subject, I’ll let them express themselves, they’ll be more relevant than I am.
Fiction featuring people with disabilities is quite rare. The ones that do it well, without being cliché, clumsy or unintentionally insulting, are even rarer. The reason I’m talking about inclusivity is that this invisibilisation by the media means that a lot of people don’t know what disability is, and this ignorance can lead them to behave embarrassingly towards us, whether it’s incomprehension, rejection, pity, infantilisation, denial… In short, a whole raft of discrimination. In my opinion, fiction, and in particular mainstream fiction, is best placed to change people’s view on disability and normalise it. And because it has this power, it should have a duty to do so. Take the LGBT+ rights, for example. Since it has become very present in TV series over the last 15 years, most people under the age of 40 have become very accepting of it. It’s become normal thanks to fiction. And I’d like to see the same thing happen with disability.
In 2019, the CSA [French regulatory agency for the various electronic media] reported that 0.7% of people with disabilities were represented in the media [in France]. That’s less than 1%. And I have the impression, without any figures to back it up, that this situation is not evolving in the right direction. If I take the example of fantasy literature, the genre I know best, I get the impression that there are more disabled characters in the stories of the 90s, and that their disability were then treated with realism and banality.
Think of Susannah Dean in Stephen King’s Dark Tower cycle, who is an excellent character, or Tyrion, Bran, Jaime or Davos in George R. R. Martin’s Iron Throne, for example.
In the 2010s and 2020s, I still find them from time to time, but much more rarely. I even get the impression that this disappearance is even more marked in the case of authors who make the strongest claims for diversity in their novels, such as The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K Jemisin or The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Because when these authors talk about diversity, they mean diversity of skin colour, culture, gender and sexuality, but not disability. Why did it disappear? I don’t really know. Maybe because in the 2010s we’re looking for a smoother image of characters than in the 90s, and a disabled person isn’t smooth. Maybe we’re more afraid of offending disabled people by portraying them badly, so we refrain from portraying them at all (which isn’t much better in my opinion). Perhaps the struggles for the representation and rights of racialised people and LGBT+ people have made their inclusivity fashionable, to the detriment of the less publicised inclusivity of disabled people. Perhaps all at the same time, I don’t know.
Whatever the case, you only have to look at Game of Thrones to see this disappearance of disabled people from fiction. Game of Thrones, a 2010s series adapted from a 90s book, featured a very large number of disabled characters as its main characters, and wrote them like any other of its characters. On the other hand, because of the medieval world, it portrayed very few black or Latin American characters, which led to numerous (in my opinion unfounded) racism accusations, the only argument being this lack of representation. Conversely, its prequel, House of the Dragon, a 2020s series adapted from a 2010s book, features a number of racialised characters, but its only handicapped characters are tertiary and fairly clichéd (Larys Fort [in the series], Mushroom [in the books], for pity’s sake!) and I’ve only seen criticism of its lack of representation on this forum. In short, it kind of gives the impression that when disabled people aren’t represented, unlike other communities, most people don’t care because, once again, disabled people are being made invisible. (rereading note: on reflection, I seem to have forgotten King Viserys among the disabled. For him, it’s more a long illness that gnaws at him over the years, but for me it still counts).
Another example of this invisibilisation is the Wachowsky sisters’ series Sense8. This series explicitly aims to represent all of humanity in its main characters: they come from every continent, every possible culture, every religion, every social class, every sexuality, but not one of them is disabled. I don’t think it was deliberate, knowing the Wachowsky sisters, to symbolically exclude us from humanity in this way. In my opinion, they just didn’t think about us. But in my opinion, the fact that they didn’t think of us in such a project is further proof of our invisibility in fiction. It’s worth noting that this is not the first time the Wachowski sisters have done this, since in Cloud Atlas, their previous film – that was supposed to represent all humanity – people with disabilities were also forgotten.
If I had to draw a comparison, I’d say that on the highway of inclusivity, the disabled person is a bit like the dog that is abandoned at the rest stop and would love to get into the car alongside the strong women, the LGBT+ and the people of colour, but finds himself all alone, watching with tears in his eyes as they continue on their way without him.
Don’t be like those who abandon their dogs. Adopt a disabled person into your fiction.
Luckily for us, there are still a few rare works featuring disability. Yippee.
Unfortunately… They are often written by people who know nothing about disability and are, at best, clumsy in their treatment.
That’s why, to help you write good characters in your fiction, I’m going to give you a list of the clichés that annoy me about the portrayal of disabled people in fiction. Then, because I still want to write something positive, I’ll give you examples of fiction in which the portrayal of disability appeals to me and speaks to me, because naming clichés and saying what’s good is the best way to go in the right direction.
Warning: in the following paragraphs, I’m going to severely criticise some very popular works. Some of them I even like a lot, for reasons other than their treatment of disability, but I like them all the same. So don’t be offended if I slander your favourite works, that’s not the point, you’re entitled to like them, and so much the better if you do. I’m only going to talk about the way they deal with disability, nothing more. In the same way, I think that several of the works I’m going to mention and criticise were made with the best intentions in the world, no doubt even with a real desire to represent, or at least I hope so. And if they don’t succeed in making a work that I think is successful and respectful of disability, at least they have tried. But even the best intentions can prove problematic and must be criticised if we are ever to move in the right direction.
↑Clichés
Having said that, let’s move on to the 5 clichés that bother me:
↑The little clichés that go unnoticed
Let’s start with the little clichés that don’t cost anything.
In fiction, if you’re a dwarf, you’re either a magical creature (Fort Boyard, Twin Peaks…) or you work in show business (Joker, Carnivàle, Moulin Rouge, Willow, Fire and Blood….).
If you have a twisted physique, either you’re a traitor (300, House of the Dragon…), or you’re a not necessarily very clever good guy, and people have to look beyond appearances to recognise your worth (Quasimodo in most adaptations of Notre-Dame de Paris, CT-99 in The Clone Wars).
More generally, if your physique is truly atypical, you are used to provoke strangeness, the fantastic, the bizarre, even disgust (Carnivàle, The Witches).
If you’re overweight, you’re either a disgusting big bad (the Master of Lake-town in The Hobbit, Baron Harkonnen in Dune…) or a funny, slightly stupid comic relief (Hurley in Lost, Clara in The Guild, Steve Wosniak in Jobs…).
And if you’re blind, you’re a martial arts expert who shouldn’t be underestimated. Examples of the latter include Kill Bill, Samurai Champloo, Rogue One, Saint Seiya and Daredevil. In the case of Daredevil, the Netflix series has even gone as far as to say that every time the hero comes across another blind person, he has to be a martial arts specialist.
So in itself, I’m not criticising these clichés, although… There was a time when dwarfs were over-represented in the world of entertainment. It seems to me that this era has been over in the West for decades, so I don’t understand why this cliché is reused in works set in the contemporary era like Joker. But after all, why not? Similarly, contrary to what many people think, blind judo black belts do exist. But the fact of always using these clichés, in the long run, becomes stigmatising, even downright insulting if the prejudice is negative. And if the cliché is perceived as whimsical, like blind people doing kung fu… Well, let’s just say that it prevents the scriptwriters from imagining other types of blind characters. When Disney announced phases 4, 5 and 6 of their Marvel Cinematic Universe, they said they were going to be careful to represent everyone, including characters with disabilities. Well, they’re not going to help us out of the general invisibilisation that we’re in by giving Daredevil, a blind man who does kung fu, the job of the disabled man on duty.
↑The handicapped person is a handicapped person, nothing more
When fiction wants to deal seriously with disability, it often tends to limit its characters to being disabled. We won’t let him be anything else : a gangster, a resistance fighter, a singer in a rock band… No. He’ll be a disabled person and nothing more. The rest of his life takes a back seat, we don’t care, it’s not what the film is about. Look at François Cluzet’s character in The Intouchables . He’s a rich disabled man. And he will never be defined by anything other than a rich handicapped person. The latest example is a Netflix mini-series about a blind teenager in 1944 who has a McGuffin that the Nazis covet. The character is defined solely by her blindness and her youth. She’s just a blind teenager. This is reflected in the title of the series: All the Light We Cannot See. See that title? It’s as if the series had been christened « Hey look, we’ve got a real blind girl in this series in her natural environment. And please don’t give her popcorn, the zookeepers are already controlling her diet ». What’s most frustrating is that in this series, there was enough to iconise this character as something other than being disabled. In the very first scene, for example, we learn that she records clandestine broadcasts. How classy would that have been, the story of an underground radio programme in the middle of occupied France whose editor-in-chief just happens to be blind! But no, that’s not what the series is about, so the clandestine radio show is just a pretext for bringing the characters together, and our blind girl doesn’t get the chance to become anything other than blind. And here, we’re going to add a scene with her father where she memorises her route to get around, because that’s a real scene where we can show that she’s blind. No, seriously, can you imagine if we did the same thing with able-bodied people? Where every time we wanted to show that the character could see, we’d slip in an unnecessary scene where the able-bodied character goes to the supermarket and sees the product he wants to buy? That way, viewers can see, he’s able to see a product from over three metres away, so he’s clairvoyant. We wouldn’t get away with it. If I compare the treatment of disabled people with that of homosexuals, you can see the difference. In a lot of fiction featuring homosexuals, homosexuality is seen as a non-issue, as something normal. The other day I was watching the very likeable series Black Sails starring Captain Flint, who happens to be gay. Well, when I think of Captain Flint, I think « Oh yes, he’s the greatest pirate of his time, he’s too good ». I don’t think « Oh yes, that’s the gay character there… did you see that? He’s a real homosexual! » It would be really cool if we could reach the same level of normality with disabled people as with LGBT+ people. But clearly, we’re still a long way from that.
A variation of this cliché can be found in biopics about geniuses suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, where they try to show how genius and madness are two sides of the same coin (which is factually totally untrue and it’s about time cinema got rid of this cliché). I have in mind, for example, the film Pawn Sacrifice, a biopic about chess champion Bobbie Fisher who happened to be schizophrenic. All the scenes in the film limit the character to just that: a schizophrenic genius. I don’t deny that schizophrenia and paranoia influenced Fisher’s personality and that they had a great influence on his life, but is that a reason to limit the character to his illness alone? Couldn’t we, for example, show that he was hard-working, inventive, or even show his sense of humour if he had one? I don’t know much about Fisher’s biography, but it seems to me that he invented and popularised new ways of playing, hence the famous Fisher system. And yet we don’t talk about anything that doesn’t concern his disability. Fisher will remain solely reduced to his illness. I don’t know about you, but if after my death I’m only remembered for my disability, I’ll be really pissed off. Besides, it’s not that difficult to represent a schizophrenic as something other than his illness: the excellent animated series about time travel, Undone, does this very well by featuring a schizophrenic woman as the main character, who can of course go completely off the deep end in her delusions (which are not delusions in her eyes, and as the series is always told from her point of view, it is never settled if she is right or wrong). But when she’s well, she can have quite a sense of humour, a certain warmth in her work, and goals that have nothing to do with her illness, and which make her not just a handicapped person, but a complete person.
↑Look, we’ve put a real handicapped person into our fiction. But handicapped people are hard to write, so erase all that!
I don’t know if you’ve realised it, but very often fiction will cripple its characters to show that they’re going through serious things, but as we don’t want to deal with disability because…. Pfft… writing about a disabled person is complicated, so they’ll pull an SF excuse out of the hat to remove their disability. But the character is still disabled, isn’t he? See how progressive we are?
So Luke Skywalker loses a hand in Star Wars? We’re not going to have a one-armed hero. Give him a mechanical hand. War Machine ends up quadriplegic in Captain America: Civil War? Yeah, but we don’t want a quadriplegic, give him robotic legs. Jack Sully, the character in Avatar, is in a wheelchair? No problem, he’s going to get a great new Na’vis’ body, he’ll be able to run and everything… Tony Stark has super serious heart problems in Iron Man? Wait, what’s wrong with him? Can’t remember. Come on, let’s say everybody forgot, nobody saw anything. Even Professor Xavier from the X-Men, who is quadriplegic – in fact, it’s an important feature of the character – finds some excuse in the script to get his legs back in half the films in which he appears, even going so far as to invent a serum that can magically cure him in Days of the Future Past, because it’s better when the hero can wander through the debris after being shot at, it makes for prettier pictures. Besides, disabled people are ugly, you know?
And I haven’t even mentioned the worst character in this category. The one whose level of bullshit is at an all-time high. I’ve named the most famous blind man in the history of fiction: Marvel’s superhero, lawyer by day, vigilante by night, the Demon of Hell’s Kitchen: Matt Murdock a.k.a. Daredevil!
For those who don’t know him, Daredevil lost his eyesight as a child following a car accident involving chemicals. While the chemicals took away his sight, they also enhanced all his other senses to a superhuman level. If you fart silently two miles away in the office, Daredevil will know it was you who farted. So be careful when you’re breaking wind discretly, you never know who’ll hear.
Above all, his superhuman senses make him a cheat through and through. Daredevil has no trouble getting around, as he automatically maps every place he enters with his radar sense, for miles and with microscopic accuracy. If he comes across you, just by hearing the location of each sound of raindrops falling on your face, he’s capable of creating a sketch of you. He’s even so good he can read documents without a problem. In fact, in one episode of the Netflix series, his fingers are so precise that he can feel variations in the texture of the ink on the paper and read its contents!
In other words, this character, this Daredevil… well, he’s not blind. He pretends to be blind to the world and the audience… But he can see perfectly well! Not with his eyes, but with his other senses… But he’s a seer and an impostor. Which makes me wonder. Disability, by definition, means constraints. It’s even the principle of disability. Refusing to deal with the constraints of disability by finding a lame excuse so that they no longer exist, is to ensure that your characters are no longer in a situation of disability. And if that’s the case… Why did you want to portray disabled characters? Your characters are handicapped or crippled, so don’t be afraid, take responsibility!
It’s worth noting that certain constraints can be overcome to a certain extent, whether through rehabilitation, adaptability or orthopaedic devices. That’s why I don’t complain about series featuring hearing-impaired people with hearing aids, like Hawkeye or Undone (yes, in Undone, as well as being schizophrenic, the heroine is a hearing-impaired person with a hearing aid). But then, there’s a difference between rehabilitation and denying the problem altogether. Which brings me to my next point.
↑Wait, you have to learn about the real lives of people with disabilities before writing about them?
Let me come back to Daredevil for a moment. The thing that frustrates me most about this series is that, in the end, we could almost have made a truly blind Daredevil, but just a very gifted one. It would have been necessary to make his abilities slightly superior to those of a truly blind man, but no more than that. And personally, I would have found that classy. But the writers don’t even seem to have considered that possibility. In fact, they don’t even seem to have found out how a blind person adapts. I think back to the scene where Daredevil reads documents by recognising the variations in ink texture on the paper. In 2014, when the series was filmed, there had long been devices capable of reading paper documents to blind people. A real blind person at the time would have just passed the document under his machine, and he wouldn’t even have needed magic powers that read ink. Likewise, in Matt Murdock’s flat, I don’t remember seeing a single voice-activated device. I don’t even remember the character using an adapted phone or computer screen readers, even though that’s the basis. Once again, it wasn’t me who decided to centre my fiction on a blind character, it was the show’s creators. So it’s important to do a bit of research. In fact, there are lots of associations that would be delighted to give you free information.
Here, I’m talking about the visual impairment, which is the one I know best. But when I look on the Internet, most of the disabled people I see talking about how their own disability is portrayed in fiction also say that it’s very often wrong. I think the worst thing in this respect is for the neurodivergent, who raise so many fantasies and misunderstandings and are then very often treated through these fantasistic lenses.
I’m not necessarily asking for perfect realism. This is fiction, after all. And even if you do your homework, some realities can escape you. After all, to err is human. For example, I can easily forgive the fact that, in A Song of Ice and Fire, the character of Tyrion spends his time doing antics, which his physical condition should not allow him to do, because George R. R. Martin missed this information despite doing obvious research on the subject. But a Daredevil where no effort was made… Now I’m more of a complainer. There’s a difference between a few mistakes and no effort at all.
One reason that has often been given for this lack of realism on the Internet is the fact that real disabled people are very rarely involved in the dramas that feature them. Most of the time, when a character is supposed to have a disability, he or she is played by an able-bodied person who has often had a short period of learning about the disability, if at all. I’m not going to go into too much detail on this point, because it’s not the subject of this post and you’d need a whole post to do it justice, but you can be sure that discrimination in the hiring of actors with disabilities is simply staggering. If you’re not Peter Dinklage, they’ll never let you play a neutral role that they’d normally give to an able-bodied person. And yet, we’re capable of playing most roles just as well as an able-bodied person. The fact that the character has a more or less severe handicap doesn’t change much.
What’s more, most of the roles of disabled characters are played by able-bodied people, to further prevent disabled people from gaining access to the acting profession. I don’t mind Patrick Stewart and François Cluzet being very good in their roles as quadriplegics, but couldn’t they have given their roles to real quadriplegics for whom these roles are the only chance of breaking into the profession? The same goes for the character of Jack Sully in Avatar. The only time he’s not in CGI, he’s in a wheelchair. As for invisible disabilities, when I think that Emilia Clarke had to hide hers to star in Game of Thrones and that because of it, she came very close to dying during the filming of season 2, I say to myself that if you have to almost die to keep a job, then you really do live in a shitty world.
And to close the parenthesis on discrimination in recruitment, you should know that, more generally, even outside the world of cinema, there is enormous discrimination against people with disabilities, especially severe ones. In France, for example, 80% of visually impaired people are unemployed. In our beautiful country, HR managers, employment center advisers, many associations and rehabilitation centres all keep telling us that we haven’t worked, and the closures of schools for the visually impaired in France are not going to help the situation.
Just before I close the subject of disabled people being denied the role of actor, let me suggest that, if you want to delve deeper into the subject, you watch this excellent video [in French] from « On se laisse la nuit » on the subject. It was this video that inspired me to write this post and I’ve tried as hard as I can not to repeat what it says to keep it interesting, even if our two points of view inevitably overlap.
So far I’ve talked about clichés that make me laugh, or sigh, or annoy me, or that I just think are a shame. But now I’m going to talk about the cliché that can make me HATE a piece of fiction by its very presence: the cliché of the able-bodied saviour.
The able-bodied saviour is the able-bodied person who knows better than the disabled person. Because, you see, the disabled person is disabled, so inevitably the hero can help him, because he’s able-bodied. He knows, and as a result, he’s kind, because he helps people who can’t manage on their own without him, and the people he helps must be eternally grateful to him… Even if most of the time, they didn’t ask for anything.
Stage 1 of this cliché is Doctor Who. In the second episode of season 11, the Thirteenth Doctor (who doesn’t work in medicine) travels with Ryan Sinclair, an important character with dyspraxia. Basically, this is a disability that makes it much more difficult to coordinate his limbs. A person with dyspraxia will have great difficulty carrying out simple actions such as riding a bike or climbing a ladder. It may even be impossible. Well, in this episode, while fleeing from alien monsters, the Doctor and Ryan are forced to climb a ladder in order to escape. Naturally, Ryan explains that he can’t. So the Doctor gives him some very simple advice on how to coordinate himself to climb the obstacle. Because, yes, the Doctor knows how to do it better than someone who’s had to live with his disability all his life. The Doctor may know a lot of things, but she’s never been called an occupational therapist. So she has no reason to know any better than Ryan.
That’s the first lesson anyone should learn: unless you’re an occupational therapist, and even then, the disabled person will know how to deal with their own disability better than you do. And if you don’t see how this is patronising, let me rewrite the same scene, but instead of featuring a disabled person, we replace him with a woman, and instead of having an able-bodied man with her, it’s a man who comes to help her: A woman in her thirties is faced with an embarrassing situation that every woman knows, she’s having her period. Fortunately, her male friend is there to reassure her and explain how to use a tampon. The woman is so grateful that she warmly thanks the man, who becomes her saviour. But in real life, she’s been using tampons or pads for over 15 years and manages her periods on her own. In her situation, I’d just want to say to the man: « Shut up! Of course I know what to do, I don’t need such simplistic advice, I’m not stupid! »
If you’re a woman or a feminist, you’re no doubt familiar with the notion of mansplaining, that mania some men have for over-explaining everything to women because they, unlike women, know. You suffer from it and know how unpleasant, condescending and even humiliating this behaviour can be. Well, you should know that validsplaining exists too, and it’s just as annoying. And seeing it promoted in works of fiction pisses me off.
But this is just stage 1 of the valid saviour syndrome. The one that’s already a pain in the arse but can still be forgiven. Now let’s move on to stage 2.
In Japanese pop culture, when the disabled person isn’t a blind kung-fu master or an old man, it’s… the hero’s sick little sister who’s there just to show how pure-hearted the hero looking after her is. This character is always a girl, younger than the hero, because a sick little girl is way sadder than a sick older brother. Her only character trait is to be the embodiment of purity and innocence, because it’s so awful what’s happening to her. What’s more, she has the good taste to die in the series, giving us an emotional scene that will bring tears to everyone’s eyes and, incidentally, give the hero the chance to move on, because we’re not going to be stuck with a handicapped girl for the whole series either!
The disabled person is no longer a person. They’re dehumanised to the maximum, becoming nothing more than a background object that gives the hero a +5 bonus in kindness. I swear, adopting a disabled pet earns you far more kindness points than adopting a kitten, and what’s more, you don’t even have to take it to the vet because it’s going to die anyway.
If you’re looking for examples of this cliché, think of the hero’s little sister in Angel Beats! or, to quote an little-known American series that also uses it, think of the relationship between little Shôren Baratheon and her surrogate father Davos Mervault in the series Game of Thrones. Another notable example is Nanally in Code Geass: Lelouch of the Resurrection. She totally fits into this cliché, to the point where her disability even becomes the hero’s main motivation for action. Lelouch, the hero of this story, clearly says he is acting as a revolutionary to create a new world where his sick little sister can live happily and peacefully. Code Geass does have the intelligence to denounce this cliché in season 2, with the use of Nanally clearly denounced as a hypocritical pretext used by the hero to justify his more than questionable actions. Nanally will also try to rebel against this pretext status she has been given in spite of herself by trying to become more active towards the end of the series… Unfortunately for her, despite her attempts, she will never really manage to break out of this cliché. Nice try, Nanally, but you didn’t succeed and your fate will be the same as that of all disabled little sisters faced with a white saviour like you. But just for trying to get out, you have my respect.
Do you think we can take the able-bodied saviour syndrome any further? Of course! Let me introduce you to phase 3 of the able-bodied saviour syndrome, the one where the character is definitively irrecoverable.
In Japan, there is a fairly popular type of manga that tries to deal with social issues. Their story is fairly classic and therefore easy to generalise, since what counts is not the plot itself, but the relationships between the characters.
The story takes place in a school environment that can range from primary school to university. In one class, there is a girl (it’s ALWAYS a girl, if you’ve read my previous paragraph, you’ll understand why it can only be a girl) who happens to be the heart and theme of the manga. This girl is initially presented to us as cold, distant and detached, but her coldness and distance literally make the whole class fantasize. A new pupil, always a man, arrives in the class. He’s a nice guy – in fact, that’s his main character trait. Very quickly, in the first episode, he meets the girl and discovers that in reality she isn’t cold at all, but is in a vulnerable situation and wants to create a bond, but doesn’t know how. So the vulnerability in question will depend on the theme of the manga. She could be a abused child (Erased), a disabled person with a speech impediment (Komi searches for words) or…. Er… A formerly handicapped girl who has spent most of her life in a hospital and who, once in heaven, can’t express herself in society and so spends her time killing immortal teenagers to prove to them that they’re already dead. That’s Japan, don’t try to understand it (Angel Beats!). Basically, it doesn’t matter, as long as she’s in a vulnerable situation. So the hero is the first to notice that behind this apparent coldness, there’s a human in slumber, and so he takes her under his wing, introducing her to his colourful friends and solving all her problems. And the girl is so grateful that she falls in love with the gentle hero who has helped her rediscover life.
This vulnerable female character is supposed to be the main character of the story. The title of the series even refers to her most of the time. It is she who carries the theme of the work. And yet… And yet no, she is never the main character of her own story. The main character is the able-bodied person who meets her. The whole story will be told from the point of view of this able-bodied person, or even from that of the able-bodied person’s friends. The person in a vulnerable situation will never have the right to express their point of view on their own story. They will have absolutely no personality and will never be the driving force behind events, except when they make mistakes that the able-bodied person has to make up for. She won’t make any decisions on her own, because she’s incapable of doing so, it’s not her role. In fact, she’ll be as dehumanised as possible, reduced to a mere quest object to be developed. The real hero, who takes the decisions and initiatives, will be the able-bodied character, who will be rewarded because the disabled girl will fall madly in love with them. So the vulnerable person is reduced to this: a fantasy for the able-bodied person who shows that able-bodied people are nice and who has so little personality that she has no opposition to offer her saviour. I don’t know about you, but personally I find this kind of situation extremely unhealthy.
The most extreme example I’ve seen is in the anime Komi searches for words. In this anime, the vulnerable person is called Komi. Her disability is acute social stress, basically a communication disorder that prevents her from speaking, whether in public or in private. She is therefore mute, and the series implies at one point that this disorder is genetic in origin. The series tells her story as she tries to overcome her disability to make a hundred friends, which isn’t easy because she’s mute and therefore has great difficulty communicating. Well, that’s the story we’re being told, not the real story. The real story is the able-bodied saviour and his friends who meet Komi and decide to help her make a hundred friends. Because, as I said, the disabled person can’t be the hero of their own story. So we get all the clichés mentioned in the previous paragraph, but taken to the extreme, because since the disabled person can’t speak, we never ever get her point of view on events. The series doesn’t even try to put us inside her head, to give us her thoughts, her way of feeling about events. All we get to know from her point of view is an incomplete third-person voiceover that makes do with simple phrases like « Komi is happy » or « Komi didn’t understand ». In short, it’s as if she’s a sort of NPC in a retro Japanese RPG that you have to develop. In fact, when I watch this series, I get the impression that Komi isn’t a character, but a tamagotchi used by the hero’s band of pals. And maybe I’m going to state the obvious, but we disabled people are not tamagotchis or fantasies for the able-bodied. We’re normal people.
Rereading note: I was intrigued by this over-representation of the able-bodied saviour in Japan, so I did a bit of research to try and understand its origins. My impression is that it’s linked to the ‘yamikawaii‘ cultural movement. In simple terms, this is a movement in which people with physical or mental disabilities represent themselves in a kawaii way. As a reminder, kawaii refers to a cute, adorable representation of something that we would like to love and protect, which fits in well with the character of Kanade in Angel Beats or Komi in Komi searches for words. This movement is said to have been born in reaction to the extreme handiphobia in Japan. As people with disabilities or mental illnesses are discriminated against, stigmatised and their condition taboo, yamikawaii seeks to make them visible and appreciated.
Understanding this doesn’t prevent me from finding this syndrome of the able-bodied saviour extremely unhealthy, but given the choice between being violently rejected or trying to become kawaii and loved but infantilised by those around them, with all that this implies in terms of toxicity, I understand that some people prefer the second solution. And I realise that what I’m saying is very sad.
If you want to know more about yamikawaii, I recommend this video by Tentacules [in French], which analyses the subject in greater depth than I do. If discovering this movement hasn’t changed my mind about the toxicity of the relationships presented in these works, at least it allows me to recontextualise it.
Please note that when I denounce the cliché of the able-bodied saviour, I am not questioning the role of care-takers. When you have a disability, you often have to find people to help you with things you can’t do on your own. And frankly, we don’t highlight these care-takers enough. For example, if I’m blind and want to go shopping in a supermarket, I need to have gone through it with a sighted person to learn by heart the location of each product in each aisle so that I can do my shopping on my own. Similarly, when I get out of the metro in Paris and find myself next to a busker who has his speakers on loud, so I can’t hear my GPS, the traffic lights or the noise of car engines, I’m quite happy to ask an able-bodied person for help crossing the street. They’re wonderful people and we can’t say that enough. Thank you, people.
Nor does the fact that I criticise the able-bodied saviour excuse disabled people who are unkind to those who generously want to help them. We see you too, people. But there’s a difference between recognising the support of care-takers and denying disabled people any personality at all, to the point of asking them to have eternal gratitude, even to the point of admiration and submission towards their able-bodied saviour. It’s all a question of nuance.
One detail surprises me: if I rely on my own manga culture, this cliché of the able-bodied saviour, which is very present in anime set in schools, disappears when we get to a professional environment: the person in a vulnerable situation becomes the main character of the work and the story is then told from his or her own point of view, which makes it, in my opinion, much more enjoyable. But I’m moving away from the theme of disability. The main character’s vulnerability is mainly due to social isolation, professional harassment or burn-out rather than disability. In fact, I’ve yet to see a Japanese manga about the world of work in which a character is disabled. That said, there is so much discrimination against disabled people in Japan that it’s hardly surprising. Just think that, in this wonderful country, if you’re a four-eyes woman, you’re going to have a hard time finding a job, so imagine what it’s like for people with a more serious disability… But the mere presence of these animes should prove that yes, it is possible to create good stories with a person in a vulnerable situation as the main character, and that no, you don’t have to introduce it with an able-bodied hero for it to work! (I’m thinking of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid or Aggretsuko).
↑Summary
In the end, why do all these clichés make me grumble? By far, they’re just fiction, stories. Nobody takes stories seriously…
… But in fact they do! Most people take what they’re shown in fiction seriously and unconsciously model their own behaviour on what they’ve seen. As I said at the beginning of this article, these media clichés have serious consequences in real life. I became almost blind just three years ago, and I’ve seen some brutal changes in behaviour within my own extended family. There’s one member of my family who can’t imagine what it’s like to be blind (because you’re invisible), so much so that he’s said things like « If what happened to him had happened to me, I’d have shot myself in the head » behind my back. Even if you take a step back, it’s still pretty violent. And if this kind of situation rings a bell, just think that exactly the same thing happens to Bran Stark after he becomes a quadriplegic in A Game of Thrones, proving that George R. R. Martin has no equal when it comes to describing human beings realistically. Another member of my family became unable to see anything in me other than a blind man. Since my vision problems, every other facet of my personality has disappeared in his eyes. Everything I do is denied or looked at from the angle of disability, because you see, I’m very brave to do something with my life where everyone else would have collapsed! Oh dear! Disability is horrible! And as this person watches fiction that uses the cliché « A disabled person is just a disabled person », it’s not surprising that they’ve adopted this point of view. Finally, several people around me, some of whom are manga fans, have tried to reproduce the able-bodied saviour syndrome on me, even if it means imposing all their decisions on me and getting angry because I wasn’t grateful enough for all the help they gave me, even though I never asked them for this help and I’ve always fought against the infantilisation it entails. And I’ve done a lot to make them understand that no, I’m not their pet disabled person.
People reproduce the attitudes they see in fiction, whether more or less consciously. And this is all the more the case when these behaviours are valued by pieces of fiction, whereas in reality they are toxic behaviours that create relationships of dominant and dominated. Tell me how you behave with a disabled person and I’ll tell you what kind of fiction you watch. And that’s why I wanted to write this long article on the portrayal of disability in fiction, to do my small bit to combat these clichés and the behaviour they engender.
↑Good Examples
OK, so I’ve gone on quite a bit about the negative aspects of the portrayal of disability. And it has to be said that this aspect predominates. But fortunately, there are also some really cool fictions that take a really cool approach to disability, some of which have done me a world of good. I’m not going to be able to talk about them all, that would be too long, and this article is already starting to drag on. But I’m going to pick 5 that I like, each for different reasons. Among the works I’m not going to talk about, but which I want to mention anyway because they’re great, I’ll mention Avatar: The Last Airbender for the character of Toth, Lost for the character of John Locke, The Ice Company for the character of Lienty Ragus, the series Undone for its main character, and The Dark Tower for the character of Susannah Dean.
↑George R. R. Martin’s work
Let’s start by getting the elephant in the room out of the way: George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire has some of the best disabled characters I’ve ever read about, and I can say that this has played a part in my adoration of the book. That and plenty of other reasons well known on this forum. If his characters are so good, it’s because Martin knows that the disability, however severe, is only part of the character, not even necessarily the most important part. The character has to live with it, often suffering the prejudices of an ultra-validist society, but it doesn’t define who he is. Martin has understood that simply saying « This character is a quadriplegic » is not enough to make him a complete character. That should be obvious, but it’s obviously not to most writers. When I think of Tyrion Lannister, I don’t think « Oh yes, he’s the funny dwarf ». I think « Oh yes, he’s the super politician » (in hindsight, not so super, but that’s another subject). When I think of Brienne, I don’t think « Oh yes, she’s the disfigured giantess », I just think « Oh yes, she’s one of the most chivalrous characters in the saga ». Back in the early 2000s, when fantasy was still a very male genre, I remember a journalist asking Martin how he managed to write female characters so well. He replied something like: « I don’t write women. I write human beings ». The same applies to his treatment of disability. Martin doesn’t write disabled people. He writes human beings.
It should be noted that A Game of Thrones was not Martin’s first attempt at depicting disability, since the issue was already at the heart of his previous saga: Wild Cards. In this uchronistic superhero saga, an alien virus has been unleashed on New York in the 1940s. This virus gives everyone it infects a random power. But a really random kind of power. As a result, 90% of those infected do not survive their powers. In fact, if your power is « Your blood turns to lava », you die. 1% of those infected have cool, functional powers, so they’re classic superheroes. 9%, i.e. 90% of survivors, have powers that will only handicap them to a greater or lesser degree. These are known as the Jokers, and the series essentially revolves around them and their struggle to get by in a world that is either racist towards them or disgusted by their appearance or constraints. Once again, each character is treated realistically and they are not reduced solely to their disability. If you have the time, I particularly recommend reading Martin’s short story The Diary of Xavier Desmond in volume 4 of the Aces Abroad saga, and can also be found in the short story collection Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective, where he explains very accurately why disabled people will always find it difficult to band together and have their rights recognised. I really like this story, even if the message it conveys is not the most optimistic.
↑Fullmetal Alchemist
Earlier, I was talking about the rather unpleasant habit that a lot of fiction has of denying disability with a random sci-fi excuse like putting mechanical arms on armless people. It’s a cliché that I don’t like and that I find rather complacent, but I’m not totally closed to the idea either. Just because a trope has been lazily used in a large number of works doesn’t mean you can’t find others that do something good with it.
Fullmetal Alchemist tells the story of two children who attempt a forbidden alchemical experiment to bring their mother back to life. Not only does the operation fail, but Edward, the eldest of the children, loses an arm and a leg in the process, while his little brother Alphonse loses his entire body, leaving only his soul behind because Edward managed to lock it up at the last moment in a suit of armour lying around. After this failure, the two children embark on a quest that will take them years to find a cure that will recover their bodies. But since things aren’t free in this world, they soon have to ask themselves: how far are they prepared to go to find a cure? How far can their morality take them to achieve their goal?
Edward is missing a leg and an arm. Fortunately for him, he has been able to replace them with a mechanical arm and leg – « automails ». Even though these limbs allow him to do everything an able-bodied person can do, they have plenty of faults that the hero will have to contend with. He has no feeling in his mechanical limbs, they’re painful to fit, and they have to be changed regularly because he hasn’t finished growing. These things are described as uncomfortable, and require a lot of maintenance. They have to be oiled, they get dirty and become less efficient, they often break, whether because a screw breaks or because they’ve been abused in a fight, and you have to go to the other side of the country to have them repaired… In short, these prostheses may be damn practical, but they still come with their share of annoying constraints for the character.
The characters are excellent. Of course, in their desperate and almost lost quest to find a cure, I can’t help but identify with them (even though I’m well aware that for me, the cure doesn’t exist). But these characters are more than just disabled. They are funny, adventurous and hard-working. Edward has a quick-tempered, little twat side that is delicious. I particularly like the first series, released in 2003, which highlighted the characters with a brilliant succession of laugh-out-loud moments and dark, creepy ones, whereas the 2010 remake puts them to one side and concentrates on the big, epic battles. In short, it’s brilliant and I love it.
↑Joker, by Todd Philips
Joker tells the story of Arthur Flake, a man with a psychiatric disorder that forces him to have uncontrollable fits of laughter whenever he’s stressed or embarrassed. It’s not that he finds the situation funny – on the contrary, it’s that he can’t control himself. This film shows how society will attack him, abandoning him because of this OCD until he is humiliated, and then until he decides to come to terms with his uniqueness. He then becomes the Joker, a serial killer taking revenge for the violence the powerful inflict on the weak.
Joker is an excellent psychological thriller. The moment when Arthur finally comes to terms with his disability is a moment of intense liberation, even if at that point he becomes a serial killer, which isn’t supposed to be cool. But the reason I wanted to mention this film is that apparently it would have helped a lot of people with the same psychiatric disorder as Arthur Flake in real life by raising awareness of their disorder and explaining it. And frankly, I think it’s great that this kind of work has such a positive impact on people’s real lives.
↑See
Now we’re going to talk about a show that I discovered recently, while preparing this article. A show that I really liked, admittedly more for its superb depiction of disability than for its fairly classic script. I’m talking about Steven Knight’s series starring Jason Momoa: See.
The story of See takes place in a post-apocalyptic universe where all humanity has lost its sight over the last few centuries, causing a technological collapse and a return to the feudal system. The survivors have nonetheless managed to adapt. We follow the story of Baba Voss, a warrior and clan leader whose children are two seers. In a world where seers are seen either as gods with magical powers or as demons to be eliminated, Baba Voss and his family will have to use strategies to hide them until they are able to fend for themselves…
What’s great about this series is that its concept is treated very seriously. You can feel that the showrunner has involved as many real blind people as possible to make his universe as coherent and credible as possible. So, for a near-blind person like me, it’s a worldbuilding fantasy. All the techniques that the characters use, even some that are fairly unknown and may seem fantastic, are methods that I actually use or that I see blind people with more experience than me using. A very simple example: the Queen’s character has metal rings linked together by a small chain that she rattles every time she wants the person she’s talking to to give her an object in her hand so that she can be located. It’s all very silly, but this kind of detail exudes reality and should have been thought of. Similarly, the characters are able to recognise quite a few things in the intonations of the voice of the person they’re talking to, such as whether they’re lying, whether they have emotions inside them, and so on. That, too, may sound fanciful, but it’s not at all. One of my blind friends can tell from my breathing when I’m hungry or when I’ve had enough to eat.
With Jason Momoa at the helm, the series is also packed with fights, and once again they ooze realism. The characters run along the walls with their swords to avoid obstacles and listen to each other so that they can pounce on each other when they’re in hand-to-hand combat. In itself, there’s a didactic aspect to seeing how they find techniques to adapt to every situation.
Aside from its subject matter, the series is also super ethical with its casting. While its main character is played by super star Jason Momoa, who serves as its poster boy and marketing pitch, all the other blind characters in the series are played by real blind and partially-sighted people. It’s so rare that a production decides to give them roles that I can’t help but admire Steven Knight and his team.
Finally, I’d say that this series has left its mark on me for another reason. Before, it was difficult for me to imagine myself in a post-apo universe. As a blind person, if I were teleported into the world of The Walking Dead or The Last of Us, for example, I wouldn’t survive for fifteen minutes, whereas in See, my disability becomes the norm, and I can more easily project myself into it. I think one of the aims of fiction is to enable people to imagine themselves in the place of their heroes. The fact that blind people can do the same is great.
↑Code Geass : Lelouch of the Rebellion
– Wait, why are you talking about Code Geass? You said earlier that you didn’t think Nanally was a great character…
– Well, I think Nanally’s character is what she is. I’m not talking about her, but about the main character in the series: Lelouch Lamperouge, a.k.a. Lelouch vi Britannia, a.k.a. Zero.
– Right? But Lelouch isn’t disabled…
– Let me explain.
I have a genetic condition called Marfan syndrome. To explain it roughly, let’s say I have a molecule in too small a quantity that makes all my limbs and organs longer, thinner, more elastic and therefore more fragile. This disease is the cause of my near-blindness, but when I was a teenager, this risk was not yet present.
When I was a teenager, I was very tall and very thin. My physique was almost that of an anorexic. It wasn’t that I didn’t eat – on the contrary, I used to finish off all my friends’ plates because I was so hungry. It was just that my body had great difficulty storing fat. I was hyperlax, so my movements were angular. And for cardiac reasons, I wasn’t allowed to do any sport, I didn’t have much muscle and all I had to do was climb two flights of stairs at top speed and I’d be slammed (I’m exaggerating a little, but only slightly). And all that meant that I wasn’t really comfortable with the very physical portrayal of teenage boys in films at the time. When I looked at all those players in the American football team at school, I didn’t recognise myself. Even in Harry Potter, which was supposed to feature teenagers with average physiques, all it took was Daniel Radcliff going shirtless (and he does it at least 5 times in the films) for me to say to myself « I’ll never have a body like that ». « I’ll never be normal ».
And then came Code Geass.
Code Geass is an animated series whose plot is a mixture of Shakespeare, mecha battles, high school anime, V for Vendetta and 2000s-style superheroes. And strangely enough, this makes it one of the best Japanese anime ever released, often ranked high in the Internet charts. But it’s not the superb story that I’m going to talk about. One of the particularities of this series is that the design of its characters is mostly slender. The hero in particular, Lelouch Lamperouge, is tall and wiry. His gestures are hyper-angular, with certain hand movements that are fairly symptomatic of people with Marfan syndrome, but far from this being a handicap for him, his recognisable body language helps to give him his charisma and magnetism. Lelouch is not physically strong either, and when he runs up two flights of stairs, you find him huffing and puffing like an ox, unlike most of his friends. He makes up for it with great intelligence and tactical genius, which give him all his strength.
In fact, Code Geass took all my physical imperfections at the time, caused by my disability, and put them on stage to sublimate them, to make them beautiful, powerful and fascinating. And frankly, as a young person with insecurities about my looks, following Lelouch’s adventures has done me an enormous amount of good. I have no doubt that the creators never intended to make Lelouch into a Marfan or a handicapped person, and so much the better, because it allows him not to be limited to his non-existent handicap and to have a strong personality. We owe this graphic style solely to the CLAMP collective, who have made these spindly bodies their trademark. But it didn’t matter to me. Lelouch had my looks. So when you’re dealing with one of the best anti-heroes in the history of fiction (I’m not afraid to say it), of course it speaks to me.
While Code Geass enjoys an excellent reputation on the Internet, the main criticism levelled at it is precisely the chara-design of its characters, which is deemed to be too anorexic. Well, I had that look. And thanks to Code Geass, I could be proud of it.
↑Conclusion
I’ve gone on at great length in this article. There was a lot to say, the subject is vast, and I could have dwelt on many other points. If I had to sum up in a few lines, I’d say: Put more people with disabilities in your fiction, but above all don’t limit them to that. Make them complete characters. The able-bodied point of view from which we are often portrayed does not represent the disabled, but the way in which the author views disability. He will imbue his audience with this false and degrading vision, who will then reproduce these behaviours in real life. Put yourself in the shoes of the disabled person and remember that a person is always much more complete than his or her disability. We are not our disability.
Just try to tell the story from our point of view.
