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cy-cyborg · 4 days

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Dealing with Healing and Disability in fantasy: Writing Disability

[ID: An image of the main character from Eragon, a white teenage boy with blond hair in silver armour as he sits, with his hand outstretched. On his hand is a glowing blue mark. He is visibly straining as he attempts to heal a large creature in front of him. /End ID]

I'm a massive fan of the fantasy genre, which is why it's so incredibly frustrating when I see so much resistance to adding disability representation to fantasy works. People's go-to reason for leaving us out is usually something to the effect of "But my setting has magic so disability wouldn't exist, it can just be healed!" so let's talk about magic, specifically healing magic, in these settings, and how you can use it without erasing disability from your story.

Ok, let's start with why you would even want to avoid erasing disability from a setting in the first place. I talked about this in a lot more detail in my post on The Miracle Cure. this line of thinking is another version of this trope, but applied to a whole setting (or at least, to the majority of people in the setting) instead of an individual, so it's going to run into the same issues I discussed there. To summarise the points that are relevant to this particular version of the trope though:

Not every disabled person wants or needs a cure - many of us see our disability as a part of our identity. Do difficulties come with being disabled? absolutely! It's literally part of the definition, but for some people in the disabled community, if you took our disabilities away, we would be entirely different people. While it is far from universal, there is a significant number of us who, if given a magical cure with no strings attached, would not take it. Saying no one in your setting would be disabled because these healing spells exists ignores this part of the community.

It messes with the stakes of your story - Just like how resurrecting characters or showing that this is something that is indeed possible in the setting can leave your audience feeling cheated or like they don't have to worry about a character *actually* ever dying. healing a character's disability, or establishing that disability doesn't exist in your setting because "magic" runs into the same problem. It will leave your readers or viewers feeling like they don't have to worry about your characters getting seriously hurt because it will only be temporary, which means your hero's actions carry significantly less risk, which in turn, lowers the stakes and tension if not handled very, very carefully.

It's an over-used trope - quite plainly and simply, this trope shows up a lot in the fantasy genre, to the point where I'd say it's just overused and kind of boring.

So with the "why should you avoid it" covered, let's look at how you can actually handle the topic.

Limited Access and Expensive Costs

One of the most common ways to deal with healing and disability in a fantasy setting, is to make the healing magic available, but inaccessible to most of the population. The most popular way to do that is by making the services of a magical healer capable of curing a disability really expensive to the point that most people just can't afford it. If this is the approach you're going to use, you also typically have to make that type of magic quite rare. To use D&D terms, if every first level sorcerer, bard, cleric and druid can heal a spinal injury, it's going to result in a lot of people who are able to undercut those massive prices and the expense will drop as demand goes down. If that last sentence didn't give you a hint, this is really popular method in stories that are critiquing capitalistic mindsets and ideologies, and is most commonly used by authors from the USA and other countries with a similar medical system, since it mirrors a lot of the difficulties faced by disabled Americans. If done right, this approach can be very effective, but it does need to be thought through more carefully than I think people tend to do. Mainly because a lot of fantasy stories end with the main character becoming rich and/or powerful, and so these prohibitively expensive cure become attainable by the story's end, which a lot of authors and writer's just never address. Of course, another approach is to make the availability of the magic itself the barrier. Maybe there just aren't that many people around who know the magic required for that kind of healing, so even without a prohibitive price tag, it's just not something that's an option for most people. If we're looking at a D&D-type setting, maybe you need to be an exceptionally high level to cast the more powerful healing spell, or maybe the spell requires some rare or lost material component. I'd personally advise people to be careful using this approach, since it often leads to stories centred around finding a miracle cure, which then just falls back into that trope more often than not.

Just outright state that some characters don't want/need it

Another, admittedly more direct approach, is to make it that these "cures" exist and are easily attainable, but to just make it that your character or others they encounter don't want or need it. This approach works best for characters who are born with their disabilities or who already had them for a long time before a cure was made available to them. Even within those groups though, this method works better with some types of characters than others depending on many other traits (personality, cultural beliefs, etc), and isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution, but to be fair, that's kind of the point. Some people will want a cure for their disabilities, others are content with their body's the way they are. There's a few caveats I have with this kind of approach though:

you want to make sure you, as the author, understand why some people in real life don't want a cure, and not just in a "yeah I know these people exist but I don't really get it" kind of way. I'm not saying you have to have a deep, personal understanding or anything, but some degree of understanding is required unless you want to sound like one of those "inspirational" body positivity posts that used to show up on Instagram back in the day.

Be wary when using cultural beliefs as a reasoning. It can work, but when media uses cultural beliefs as a reason for turning down some kind of cure, it's often intending to critique extreme beliefs about medicine, such as the ones seen in some New Age Spirituality groups and particularly intense Christian churches. As a general rule of thumb, it's probably not a good idea to connect these kinds of beliefs to disabled people just being happy in their bodies. Alternatively, you also need to be mindful of the "stuck in time" trope - a trope about indigenous people who are depicted as primitive or, as the name suggests, stuck in an earlier time, for "spurning the ways of the white man" which usually includes medicine or the setting's equivalent magic. I'm not the best person to advise you on how to avoid this specific trope, but my partner (who's Taino) has informed me of how often it shows up in fantasy specifically and we both thought it was worth including a warning at least so creators who are interested in this method know to do some further research.

Give the "cures" long-lasting side effects

Often in the real world, when a "cure" for a disability does exist, it's not a perfect solution and comes with a lot of side effects. For example, if you loose part of your arm in an accident, but you're able to get to a hospital quickly with said severed arm, it can sometimes be reattached, but doing so comes at a cost. Most people I know who had this done had a lot of issues with nerve damage, reduced strength, reduced fine-motor control and often a great deal of pain with no clear source. Two of the people I know who's limbs were saved ended up having them optionally re-amputated only a few years later. Likewise, I know many people who are paraplegics and quadriplegics via spinal injuries, who were able to regain the use of their arms and/or legs. However, the process was not an easy one, and involved years of intense physiotherapy and strength training. For some of them, they need to continue to do this work permanently just to maintain use of the effected limbs, so much so that it impacts their ability to do things like work a full-time job and engage in their hobbies regularly, and even then, none of them will be able bodied again. Even with all that work, they all still experience reduced strength and reduced control of the limbs. depending on the type, place and severity of the injury, some people are able to get back to "almost able bodied" again - such was the case for my childhood best friend's dad, but they often still have to deal with chronic pain from the injury or chronic fatigue.

Even though we are talking about magic in a fantasy setting, we can still look to real-life examples of "cures" to get ideas. Perhaps the magic used has a similar side effect. Yes, your paraplegic character can be "cured" enough to walk again, but the magic maintaining the spell needs a power source to keep it going, so it draws on the person's innate energy within their body, using the very energy the body needs to function and do things like move their limbs. They are cured, but constantly exhausted unless they're very careful, and if the spell is especially strong, the body might struggle to move at all, resulting in something that looks and functions similar to the nerve damage folks with spinal injuries sometimes deal with that causes that muscle weakness and motor control issues. Your amputee might be able to have their leg regrown, but it will always be slightly off. The regrown leg is weaker and causes them to walk with a limp, maybe even requiring them to use a cane or other mobility aid.

Some characters might decide these trade-offs are worth it, and while this cures their initial disability, it leaves them with another. Others might simply decide the initial disability is less trouble than these side effects, and choose to stay as they are.

Consider if these are actually cures

Speaking of looking to the real world for ideas, you might also want to consider whether these cures are doing what the people peddling them are claiming they do. Let's look at the so-called autism cures that spring up every couple of months as an example.

Without getting into the… hotly debated specifics, there are many therapies that are often labelled as "cures" for autism, but in reality, all they are doing is teaching autistic people how to make their autistic traits less noticeable to others. This is called masking, and it's a skill that often comes at great cost to an autistic person's mental health, especially when it's a behaviour that is forced on them. Many of these therapies give the appearance of being a cure, but the disability is still there, as are the needs and difficulties that come with it, they're just hidden away. From an outside perspective though, it often does look like a success, at least in the short-term. Then there are the entirely fake cures with no basis in reality, the things you'll find from your classic snake-oil salesmen. Even in a fantasy setting where real magic exists, these kinds of scams and misleading treatments can still exist. In fact, I think it would make them even more common than they are in the real world, since there's less suspension of disbelief required for people to fall for them. "What do you mean this miracle tonic is a scam? Phil next door can conjure flames in his hand and make the plants grow with a snap of his fingers, why is it so hard to believe this tonic could regrow my missing limb?"

I think the only example of this approach I've seen, at least recently, is from The Owl House. The magic in this world can do incredible things, but it works in very specific and defined ways. Eda's curse (which can be viewed as an allegory for many disabilities and chronic illnesses) is seemingly an exception to this, and as such, nothing is able to cure it. Treat it, yes, but not cure it. Eda's mother doesn't accept this though, and seeks out a cure anyway and ends up falling for a scam who's "treatments" just make things worse.

In your own stories, you can either have these scams just not work, or kind of work, but in ways that are harmful and just not worth it, like worse versions of the examples in the previous point. Alternatively, like Eda, it's entirely reasonable that a character who's been the target of these scams before might just not want to bother anymore. Eda is a really good example of this approach handled in a way that doesn't make her sad and depressed about it either. She's tried her mum's methods, they didn't work, and now she's found her own way of dealing with it that she's happy with. She only gets upset when her boundaries are ignored by Luz and her mother.

Think about how the healing magic is actually working

If you have a magic system that leans more on the "hard magic" side of things, a great way to get around the issue of healing magic erasing disability is to stop and think about how your healing magic actually works.

My favourite way of doing this is to make healing magic work by accelerating the natural processes of your body. Your body will, given enough time (assuming it remains infection-free) close a slash from a sword and mend a broken bone, but it will never regrow it's own limbs. It will never heal damage to it's own spinal cord. It will never undo whatever causes autism or fix it's own irregularities. Not without help. Likewise, healing magic alone won't do any of these things either, it's just accelerating the existing process and usually, by extension making it safer, since a wound staying open for an hour before you get to a healer is much less likely to get infected than one that slowly and naturally heals over a few weeks. In one of my own works, I take this even further by making it that the healing magic is only accelerating cell growth and repair, but the healer has to direct it. In order to actually heal, the healer needs to know the anatomy of what they're fixing to the finest detail. A spell can reconnect a torn muscle to a bone, but if you don't understand the structures that allow that to happen in the first place, you're likely going to make things worse. For this reason, you won't really see people using this kind of magic to, say, regrow limbs, even though it technically is possible. A limb is a complicated thing. The healer needs to be able to perfectly envision all the bones, the cartilage, the tendons and ligaments, the muscles (including the little ones, like those found in your skin that make your hair stand on end and give you goose bumps), the fat and skin tissues, all the nerves, all the blood vessels, all the structures within the bone that create your blood. Everything, and they need to know how it all connects, how it is supposed to move and be able to keep that clearly in their mind simultaneously while casting. Their mental image also has to match with the patient's internal "map" of the body and the lost limb, or they'll continue to experience phantom limb sensation even if the healing is successful. It's technically possible, but the chances they'll mess something up is too high, and so it's just not worth the risk to most people, including my main character.

Put Restrictions on the magic

This is mostly just the same advice as above, but for softer magic systems. put limits and restrictions on your healing magic. These can be innate (so things the magic itself is just incapable of doing) or external (things like laws that put limitations on certain types of magic and spells).

An example of internal restriction can be seen in how some people interpret D&D's higher level healing spells like regenerate (a 7th level spell-something most characters won't have access to for quite some time). The rules as written specify that disabilities like lost limbs can be healed using this spell, but some players take this to mean that if a character was born with the disability in question, say, born without a limb, regenerate would only heal them back to their body's natural state, which for them, is still disabled.

An external restriction would be that your setting has outlawed healing magic, perhaps because healing magic carries a lot of risks for some reason, eithe to the caster or the person being healed, or maybe because the healing magic here works by selectively reviving and altering the function of cells, which makes it a form of necromancy, just on a smaller scale. Of course, you can also use the tried and true, "all magic is outlawed" approach too. In either case, it's something that will prevent some people from being able to access it, despite it being technically possible. Other external restrictions could look like not being illegal, per say, but culturally frowned upon or taboo where your character is from.

But what if I don't want to do any of this?

Well you don't have to. These are just suggestions to get you thinking about how to make a world where healing magic and disability exist, but they aren't the only ways. Just the ones I thought of.

Of course, if you'd still rather make a setting where all disability is cured because magic and you just don't want to think about it any deeper, I can't stop you. I do however, want to ask you to at least consider where you are going to draw the line. Disability, in essence, is what happens when the body stops (or never started) functioning "normally". Sometimes that happens because of an injury, sometimes it's just bad luck, but the boundary between disabled and not disabled is not as solid as I think a lot of people expect it to be, and we as a society have a lot of weird ideas about what is and isn't a disability that just, quite plainly and simply, aren't consistent. You have to remember, a magic system won't pick and choose the way we humans do, it will apply universally, regardless of our societal hang-ups about disability.

What do I mean about this?

Well, consider for a moment, what causes aging? it's the result of our body not being able to repair itself as effectively as it used to. It's the body not being able to perform that function "normally". So in a setting where all disability is cured, there would be no aging. No elderly people. No death from old age. If you erase disability, you also erase natural processes like aging. magic won't pick and choose like that, not if you want it to be consistent.

Ok, ok, maybe that's too much of a stretch, so instead, let's look at our stereotypical buff hero covered in scars because he's a badass warrior. but in a world where you can heal anything, why would anything scar? Even if it did, could another healing spell not correct that too? Scars are part of the body's natural healing process, but if no natural healing occurred, why would a scar form? Scars are also considered disabling in and of themselves too, especially large ones, since they aren't as flexible or durable as normal skin and can even restrict growth and movement.

Even common things like needing glasses are, using this definition of disability at least, a disability. glasses are a socially accepted disability aid used to correct your eyes when they do not function "normally".

Now to be fair, in reality, there are several definitions of disability, most of which include something about the impact of society. For example, in Australia (according to the Disability Royal Commission), we define disability as "An evolving concept that results from the interaction between a person with impairment(s) and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others." - or in laymen's terms, the interaction between a person's impairment and societal barriers like people not making things accessible or holding misinformed beliefs about your impairment (e.g. people in wheelchairs are weaker than people who walk). Under a definition like this, things like scars and needing glasses aren't necessarily disabilities (most of the time) but that's because of how our modern society sees them. The problem with using a definition like this though to guide what your magic system will get rid of, is that something like a magic system won't differentiate between an "impairment" that has social impacts that and one that doesn't. It will still probably get rid of anything that is technically an example of your body functioning imperfectly, which all three of these things are. The society in your setting might apply these criteria indirectly, but really, why would they? Very few people like the side effects of aging on the body (and most people typically don't want to die), the issues that come with scars or glasses are annoying (speaking as someone with both) and I can see a lot of people getting rid of them when possible too. If they don't then it's just using the "not everyone wants it approach" I mentioned earlier. If there's some law or some kind of external pressure to push people away from fixing these more normalised issues, then it's using the "restrictions" method I mentioned earlier too.

Once again, you can do whatever you like with your fantasy setting, but it's something I think that would be worth thinking about at least.

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cy-cyborg · 5 days

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Hey just a heads up for my Aussie disabled people (or anyone on centrelink) I just got a fake notification from someone claiming to be MyGov saying there was an issue with my dsp. Be careful and check the app if you get a text, don't click the links they send you.

This one was pretty obviously fake, the sender was "MyOv" instead of MyGov and called my DSP an allowance - also it wasnt that definitive MyGov brand of ominously vague lol, but I get the scam messages a lot anyway and they usually get better with time. Be cautious and make sure your less tech-savy relatives/friends know about it!

#fucking assholes picking on people who are already broke enough to be on centrelink lol #disability #disabled #Australia #aussie #centrelink #dsp #disability support pension #scam alert #scammers #disabled aussie #disability pension

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cy-cyborg · 5 days

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This is Pedri, one of the side characters from my comic Voidstar. He's a long-time friend of Wev's, an expert spaceship mechanic and pilot. Originally, he showed up late in the first arc of the story, but in the last batch of rewrites his introduction got pushed back to late in the second arc. Despite taking a bit longer to appear, I am planning for him to play a major roll in the story!

I actually drew him on my first art stream on twitch today! It was pretty fun and I think I am going to keep doing regular streams!

[ID: An illustration of a bipedal, 4 armed, blue alien with a long snout, 4 eyes and 6 rabbit-like ears. There is webbing between the aliens' arms and torso, creating a pair of wing-like appendages. He is wearing loose clothing with an opening over his stomach, showing a pouch on his stomach with a mask hanging around his neck, holding a spanner. /End ID]

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cy-cyborg · 6 days

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[ID: a screenshot of a hashtag. It says "is..is the slim dragon sticker on the tablet the equivalent of a pin-up sticker? /end id]

That wasn't the intention 😅, its just an actual sticker I have on my real ipad of one of my other characters, I usually use her to test printed stuff because of all her colours lol

I've been wanting to give streaming another go lately, and spent today and yesterday making a PNG-tuber and some new overlays. I'm really happy with how they look!

With everything up and working now, I'm planning to do my first stream tomorrow at 4:30 Australian Eastern Standard Time for a few hours on Twitch. I'm going to be working on some concept art for my comic, so come by and chat or just hang out if you'd like! If all goes well, I'd like to stream weekly, but we'll see how the first one goes.

[ID 1: An image of Nix, a purple anthropomorphic dragon wearing a blue shirt, sitting slouched on a brown couch in front of a backdrop of a purple-tinted starry sky. They are holding an Ipad in one hand, drawing with the other, and their mouth is open as though they are talking. /End ID 1]

[ID 2: A screenshot of a purple and yellow space-themed stream overlay. The background is a purple gradient sky with tiny yellow stars. In the foreground is a number of boxes, all with borders that are dark purple at the top, and an orange-gold at the bottom. In the top left are boxes that show the current viewer count and what song is playing. Under that is a large box with the "Cy Cyborg, Pronouns Xe/They" written at the bottom, where the main screen of the stream will go. Beside that is a box with the same image as above, but Nix's mouth is closed. Under that is another box that is darker inside the frame for the chat. /End ID 2]

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cy-cyborg · 6 days

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Oh I forgot to add, while the stream is going to be mostly focused on art stuff, if you have any disability representation questions, you're welcome to drop in and ask while I'm live!

I've been wanting to give streaming another go lately, and spent today and yesterday making a PNG-tuber and some new overlays. I'm really happy with how they look!

#cy cyborg draws #my art #disabled artist #queer artist #digital art #sfw furry #furry #furry streamer #streaming #twitch streamer #overlays #twitch #pngtuber #livestream #dragon #Australian streamer #Aussie Streamer

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cy-cyborg · 6 days

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Well it being black history month is reminding me how I wanted to doodle something like this down for a while. Since it’s been a lil detail I always take notice of in drawings. These are very simple depictions but I hope it’s enough to give the general idea! Feel free to reblog

#other people's art #good advice #art advice #disability #disabled #scars #scarring

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cy-cyborg · 7 days

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I have read that it is best to avoid giving a disabled character a super power that "makes up" for their disability. I was wondering about that. Is it more like, powers that "circumvent" the character's disability that should be avoided? Like "oh I'm deaf, but I have telepathy so no need for asl haha" (sarcasm). Basically is giving a disabled character powers okay so long as you're not using the powers to pretty much "erase" their disability?

Hi!

You got it right! There's not an inherent issue with giving a disabled character magic or superpowers.

The example you gave is a great one of what you should avoid. So anything that's like;

Deaf character using telepathy

giving a blind character echolocation

making someone's facial difference disappear

character who can't walk gets a sci-fi exosuit to walk

would be bad and honestly just boring. It also feels very othering when abled characters get super-speed or summoning lightning, but the best a disabled person can hope for is... being abled? The whole message that it sends is just awful in my opinion.

Remember that disabilities are diverse and the tropes/problems that exist often only apply to a specific disability. I don't think there's any problem with making a burn survivor communicate with their mind or for someone with spinal muscular atrophy to have super-hearing. Keep that in mind and you should be fine!

I hope this helps! :-)

mod Sasza

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cy-cyborg · 7 days

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A more serious one here

ID in Alt Text

#other people's art #art #original art #queer #disabled rights #disabled #disability #accessibility #id in alt text #disability pride

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cy-cyborg · 8 days

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I love being a digital artist but sometimes I hate it. I thought that I might try giving art streaming a go, sounds like it could be fun! Im on an ipad which makes things a bit harder but surely not by much. My partner has streamed games before so we had things like a capture card that wasn't being used so why not?

A week later I'm sitting here pulling my hair out, my ipad video is all green for some reason and I'm trying to figure out what the fuck a LUT is (I went to film school, surely I should know this?) and why that will apparently fix the issue according to Reddit. Do you know what actually fixed it? My cat pulled one of the cords loose but not entirely out, so I just wiggled it and it was fine. 😭

#technology is fun #art #artist struggles

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cy-cyborg · 8 days

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Adding some more I'm aware of:

Wheelchair fencing

Wheelchair soccer (played using power chairs)

Adaptive Taekwondo (while a lot of martial arts teachers will gladly take on disabled students, but there are also dedicated groups for Taekwondo specifically for disabled people, and it recently became a paralypic sport - alternatively I've also had a lot of luck with Hap Ki Do and Judo as an amputee, though there's no formal disability groups for them to my knowledge. There's also a martial art style that is specifically designed for cane users, but I don't know its name).

Amputee soccer (usually played without prosthetics)

Wheelchair racing (done in specialised wheelchairs with 3 wheels and a long frame)

Para Powerlifting

Wheelchair AFL (similar to wheelchair rugby, but uses Australian football league rules. Also a bit less physical contact that regular wheelchair rugby).

Frame running (I actually didn't know this existed until I went to double check something else, but it's similar to wheelchair racing, but runners use a bike-like standing frame to help support themselves. Apparently it's specifically designed for people with cerebral palsy but open to anyone with a disability that can use the frame)

ALSO if there's a sport you want to try, but you are worried about cost (because those specialised sports chairs/frames/prosthetics etc cost a fortune) see if there is a wheelchair/adaptive sport organisation in your region. In Australia, most of our states have a wheelchair sports organisation that, despite the name, also helps with other adaptive sports. That's how I got into wheelchair basketball and adaptove swimming. The one in NSW even has a chair rental program and come and try days where you can go and see if the sport you're interested in is for you, and many of the local clubs/groups will also just let you borrow a chair if they have them available.

Adaptive / Para sports that aren't wheelchair basketball!

Wheelchair rugby: very physical, wheelchairs look like battel bots, very rough and very cool I don't know much about the rules of regular rugby either. Tried it once was not for me but very epic to watch

Adaptive curling: played with a stick that attaches to the curling rock so you can play from a seated or standing position, good for those who can't bend over or who require mobility aids

Wheelchair tenis: played just like normal tennis in a sports wheelchair rackets have shorter handles to be easier to push while holding, difference to the rules being that the ball can bounce twice

Adaptive archery: so many different adaptions from shooting in a wheelchair, using prosthetics, mouth release triggers for those without use or with lim differences in arms

Adaptive skiing/snowboarding: good for those with lower lim differences and mobility issues. Adaptions include using one leg with outriggers to balance and stear (both ski and snowboard) sit ski, where your entire lower body is basically in a ski boot, can be used for blind people as well or those with upper body limitations with an assistant controlling the sit ski. Independent sit ski use outriggers for stearing (think like ski poles with little skis on them)

Adaptive rowing: good for all ability levels as well as blind and visually impaired. So many different adaptions for loading into boats, seating supports, adaptive paddles and auditory cues

Adaptive swiming: this has so many different options, swimming is amazing for you it let's you use you body in different ways then weight bearing and there are a lot of options, different flotation devices that can attach to legs or arms, having someone move your lims for you, having a tap signal when you get close to the edge of the pool, visual cues for time, pool lifts just so many different options for everyone

Biking: standing bikes, two seated bikes so people with vision problems can have someone stearing, electric bikes, electric assist with pedaling, strap in pedals, anti tips, tricycles, hand cycles, different levels of seating support, walking bikes, you can ride behind someone in a bike, lots of university's will have indoor bike tracks so that you can ride on flat low resistance ground

Para hockey: this is my sport, I play competitively so I know a lot more about it. Para hockey (also know as sledge hockey) is played sitting down in something called a sledge. You have two sticks with spikes on the ends in order to propel yourself on the ice. There are a bunch of modifications possible for sleds with high back support with straps for those without core control, for those with upper body limitations there are pushers who attach a push handle to the back of your sled in order to move you around the ice, if you have no grip strength you can tape or otherwise secure you sticks to your arms/prosthetic. Rules for para hockey are the same as for stand up hockey with the exceptions being, periodes are 15 minutes and there is an additional type of penalty called Teeing for purposful front of sled contact to another persons sled without angling. Rules wise in grassroots (basic introductory sledge) anyone can play no matter their ability so abled family and friends can join you. Above the intermediate competitive level however, all players must have an impairment that affects their lower body in a way that means they do not have the capacity to play stand up hockey even at a lower level.

Blind hockey: Blind hockey is played pretty much the same as regular hockey, all players have a severe visual impairment/blindness and it is played with a large hollow puck that jingles so players know where it is

Anyone feel free to add more! There are so many different ways to have fun and be active as a disabled person the first step is just learning that they exist!

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cy-cyborg · 8 days

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Wev's headphones

In my comic Voidstar, Wev (the character depicted here) is autistic, and I knew from pretty early on that one of the things she was going to struggle with was sound sensitivity (something I struggle with as an autistic person as well). there's a few scenes in the first arc where she is wearing headphones, including in her introduction while she's at work and I realised pretty early on the normal over-ear headphones wouldn't work for her, so I got to work sketching up some alternatives.

Her species has 6 ears, though the ethnicity she belongs to only has two with a big, outer structure, the other 4 are more similar to the ear holes you see on birds. And so it took me a while to figure out something that would work for her. The earbuds for her primary ears needed to be able to stay in place, even when the ear itself is moving around. For the ears that didn't have the big, movable structure, I figured they still might need something to stabilise them, considering they are located on the side of the jaw, and there's not really anything for a normal ear-bud to hang onto, so for those, I went with something that had some kind of reusable adhesive to keep it in place (which would also help to block sound further).

I felt the designs though, when put all together looked a little too... mechanical and didn't really match the vibe I was going for with her character. To be fair though, a lot of disability aids can look like that even irl, but a lot of disabled people decorate them. Wev already has a lot of plant-themed jewellery, so I figured she might have decorated her noise-cancelling earbuds with fake flowers to add some personal flair.

[ID: A page of sketches depicting a set of earbuds for Wev, an alien character. Down the bottom are two sketches of her. She is a red alien with a yellow underbelly. She has a long snout, four eyes (two of which are purple, two are golden), two large, rabbit-like ears and two long antennae. She also has 4 smaller ear holes near the back of her jaw, though they are covered in both sketches. The sketch on the bottom left shows her wearing "earbuds" designed for her species. In her bigger ears, she has a bud lodged in the folds of her ear, attached to a gold ring at the ear's base with purple string. On her two smaller ears are large flat buds that cover her ear openings entirely. They too are tied to the ring with the same purple string. This image is labelled undecorated. To the right is a similar drawing, bud the buds on her smaller ears are covered in pink flowers. This image is labelled decorated. Above these images are very rough sketches showing what each of the earbuds look like in more detail with text to give more information. The sketches labelled "primary ear bud" show the buds hidden in the other sketch by the folds of Wev's ear. It shows the bud is long in shape. arrows point to the tip and a ring about halfway down from a label that reads "silicone to help stabilise the earbud when ears move/keep noise out". A sketch beside it shows that the ring at the base of the ear comes apart, labelled "ring unlocks for easy removal". Next is two sketches of the secondary ear buds for the smaller ears. One shows a close up of the outside of the bud. The bud itself is shaped like half a sphere, and is surrounded by a brim at it's edge. String is tied to the back of the spherical bud, with an arrow pointing to it saying "The buds are wireless, but Wev ties them together in case one falls off." The last sketch shows the underside, showing that under the brim is a speaker. There is an arrow pointing to the brim that says "Silicone rims coated with a mild adhesive keeps the secondary buds in place and blocks sound." /End ID]

#voidstar #cy cyborg draws #coloured sketch #scifi worldbuilding #scifiart #science fiction #alien #alien oc #my art #disabled artist #queer artist #digital art #sfw furry #furry oc #furry #autism #actually autistic #autistic artist

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cy-cyborg · 10 days

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When you reorganise your living room but you have a cat

[ID 1: a photo of a tall snake enclosure next to a TV cabinet with a piece of cardboard taped to the top of the enclosure to act as a divider. There is also a squishmellow wedged between the TV and cabinet. /end ID 1]

[ID 2: a more zoomed out image showing a calico cat investigating the cardboard boundary and looking down at the TV from the top of the cabinet. /end ID 2]

#cats #my cat #cat #cats causing trouble

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cy-cyborg · 11 days

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The Untrustworthy Fake: Disability Tropes

[ID: A screenshot of Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as he limps towards a crowd using a cane. In the picture, he has a brown top hat in his hand, and he's wearing a suit with a purple jacket, multicoloured bow tie and cream coloured pants. Beside him is text that reads: "Disability Tropes, The untrustworthy Fake" /End ID]

Tell me if this sounds familiar: A new character is introduced into a story with some kind of disability - usually visible but not always. Maybe they're a seemingly harmless person in a wheelchair, maybe they're a one-legged beggar on the street, or maybe they're an elderly person with a cane and a slow, heavy limp. But at some point, it's revealed it's all a ruse! The old man with a cane "falls" forward and does a flawless summersault before energetically springing back up to his feet, the wheelchair user gets to their feet as soon as they think the other character's backs are turned, the one legged beggar's crutch is knocked out of his hand, only to have his other leg pop out of his loose-fitting tunic to catch him.

All of these are real examples. Maya and The Three introduces one of it's main protagonists, Ricco, by having him pretend to be missing a leg in order to con people (something that works on the protagonist, at least at first), Buffy The Vampire Slayer had the character Spike, pretend to be in a wheelchair, until the other characters leave and he gets up, revealing it's all a ruse and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory introduces Wonka by having him slowly limp out into the courtyard of the factory, only for his cane to get stuck, causing him to "fall" and jump back up, revealing that he's actually perfectly fine. Virtually every single major crime show in the past few decades has used this trope too, from CSI to The Mentalist, Castle, Law and Order and Monk all having at least one episode featuring it in some way. Even the kids media I grew up with isn't free from it; The Suite Life of Zack & Cody sees Zach faking being dyslexic after meeting someone who actually has the condition in the episode Smarter and Smarter and the SpongeBob SquarePants episode Krabs vs Plankton has Plankton fake needing a wheelchair (among other injuries) after falling in the Krusty Krab as a ploy to sue Mr Krabs and trick the court into giving him the Kraby Patty Formula.

No matter the genre or target audience though, one thing is consistent: this trope is used as a way to show someone is dishonest and not to be trusted. When the trope is used later in the story, it's often meant to be a big reveal, to shock the audience and make them mad that they've been duped, to show the characters and us what this person (usually a villain) is willing to stoop to. Revealing the ruse early on though is very often used to establish how sleazy or even how dangerous a character is and to tell the audience that they shouldn't trust them from the get go. Gene Wilde (The actor who first played Willy Wonka) even said in several interviews that this was his intent for Wonka's character. He even went so far as to tell the director of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that he wouldn't do the film without that scene because of how strongly he felt this trope was needed to lay the foundations for Wonka's questionable intentions and motivations. His exact words are: "...but I wouldn't have done the film if they didn't let me come out walking as a cripple and then getting my cane stuck into a cobble stone, doing a forward somersault and then bouncing up... the director said, well what do you want to do that for? and I said because from that point on, no one will know whether I'm telling the truth or lying."

There's... a lot of problems with this trope, but that quote encapsulates one of the biggest ones. whether intentionally or not, this trope ends up framing a lot of actual disabled people as deceitful, dishonest liars. Now I can already hear you all typing, What?! Cy that's ridiculous! No one is saying real disabled people are untrustworthy or lying about their disabilities, just people who are faking!

but the thing is, the things often used in this trope as "evidence" of someone faking a disability are things real disabled people do. A person standing up from their wheelchair or having scuff-marks on their shoes, like in the episode Miss Red from The Mentalist isn't a sign they're faking, a lot of wheelchair users can stand and even walk! They're called ambulatory wheelchair users, and they might use a wheelchair because they can't walk far, they might not feel safe walking on all terrains, they might have unstable joints that makes standing for too long risky, they might have a heart condition like POTS that has a bigger impact when they stand up or any number of other reasons. Also even non-ambulatory wheelchair users will still have scuff marks from things like transferring and bumping into things (rather hilariously, even TV Tropes calls this episode out as being "BS" in it's listing for this trope, which it refers to as Obfuscating Disability). A blind beggar flinching or getting scared when you pull a gun on them isn't a sign they're faking their blindness like it is in Red Dead Redemption 2. Plenty of blind people can still see a little bit, it might only be a general sense of light and darkness, it might be exceptionally blurry or just the fuzzy outlines of shapes, or they might only be able to see something directly in front of them, all of which might still be enough to cue the person into what's happening in a situation like that. Even if it's not, the sound of you pulling your gun out or other people nearby freaking out and making noise probably would tip them off. A person needing a cane or similar mobility aid sometimes, but being able to go without briefly or do even "big movements" like Wonka's rolling somersault, doesn't mean they don't need it at all. Just like with wheelchairs, there's a lot of disabilities that require canes and similar aids some days, and not others. Some disabilities even allow people those big, often straining movements on occasion, or allow them to move without the aid for short periods of time, but not for long. Some people's disability's might even require a mobility aid like a cane as a backup, just in case something goes wrong, but that still means you need to carry it around with you, and unless it can fold down, it's easier to just use it.

Disability is a spectrum, and a lot of disabilities vary in severity and what is required of the people who have them day to day. This trope, however, helps to perpetuate the idea that someone who does any of these things (and many others) is faking, which can actively make the lives of disabled people harder and can even put them in very real danger, physically, mentally and even financially.

Just ask any ambulatory wheelchair user about how many times they've been yelled at for using accommodations they need, like disabled toilets or parking spaces. How many times they've been accused of faking and even filmed without their consent because they stood up in public, even if it was to do something like get their wheelchair unstuck or as simple as them standing to briefly reach something on a high shelf. I've caught multiple people filming me before, so have my friends and family, and it's honestly scary not knowing where those images have ended up. This doesn't just impact the person either, a friend of mine was filmed while standing up to get his daughter (who was about 4 at the time) out of the car. He was lucky to have stumbled across the video a few days later on facebook and contacted the group admins where it was posted to get it taken down, but had he not stumbled across it by chance, pictures with his home address and his car's number plate, his child's face and his face all visible would have just been floating around, all because a woman saw him stand briefly to pick up his daughter.

Many people don't stop at just saying a nasty comment or taking a photo though, a lot of people, when they suspect people are faking, will get violent. I have many friends who have been pushed, slapped in the face, spat on or had their mobility devices kicked out from under them. I've even been in a few situations myself where, had I not had people with me, I think the situation would have turned violent.

There's even been cases where those photos and videos I've mentioned before have been used against real disabled people and they've been reported to their country's welfare system as committing disability fraud. While cases like this are usually resolved *relatively* quickly, in many parts of the world, their payment will be halted while the investigation is in process, meaning they may be without any income at all because of someone else's ignorance. If you're already struggling to make ends meet (which, if you're only living off one of those payments, you probably will be), a few weeks without pay can mean the difference between having a home and being on the streets.

Not to mention that when there's so many stories about people faking a disability in the media, especially when the character is doing it to get some kind of "advantage", such as getting accommodations or some kind of disability benefit, it perpetuates the idea that people are rorting the systems put in place to help disabled people. If this idea becomes prevalent enough, the people in charge start making it harder for the people who need them to access those systems, which more often than not results in disabled people not even being able to access the very systems that are supposed to be helping them. A very, very common example of this is in education where accommodations for things like learning disabilities require you to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops, especially at higher levels, only to have some teachers and professors refuse to adhere to the adaptations anyway because they're convinced the student (and usually disabled students as a whole) is faking.

Yes, the "untrustworthy faker" is a fictional trope, and yes, it does occasionally happen in real life, but not as often as media (including things like news outlets) would have you believe. However, when the media we consume is priming people to look for signs that a disabled person is faking, it has a real impact on real disabled people's lives. "Fake-claiming" is a massive problem for people in pretty much all parts of the disabled community, and it ranges from being just annoying (e.g. such as people spamming and fake-claiming blind people online with "if you were really blind, how do you see the screen" comments) to the more serious cases I mentioned above. It's for this reason a lot of folks in the disabled community ask that people leave this trope out of their works.

#Writing disability with Cy Cyborg #Long Post #Disability #Disabled #Disability Representation #Writing Disability #Writing #Writeblr #Authors #Creators #Writing Advice #Disabled Characters #On Writing #Disability in Media #Tropes #Disability Tropes #faking disability trope

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