I’ve dipped my toes into the zine world only a teeny handful of times, and certainly hadn’t considered making one of my own. But with a newsletter, an ongoing blog, and the twitterverse, it was easy for Gideon Marcus to convince me to do so. All it needed was a name, and that too was something they easily convinced me of.
“You could call it ‘The Stumbling Block’” he said, and while I’m not sure he was being completely serious about it, I honestly can’t think of a better name. I want to point out stumbling blocks in fantasy, both in published works and pre-published drafts. I want this to both create stumbling blocks in authors, and show them how to clear away those blocks. Without further ado, let’s create some discomfort.
We are writers. We live with vast imaginations. Yet in worlds where we imagine FTL engines or dragons, science-as-magic or magic-as-science, it seems we cannot imagine disabled or chronically ill people existing alongside it. Disability affects 15% of the world population, yet certainly does not appear among 15% of the characters we write about.
I maintain that writing is not a comfortable act. We delve into hard parts of ourselves and our societies to drive not just plots, but social change. We give fictional commentaries on past events to give hope for the future, regardless of how we veil the events we steal from. Even if all you write are cozy stories, you can’t write something cozy without knowing what you’re shielding the reader from. And that always bleeds through.
I spoke with a fellow writer who stated, “Well, there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of disabled characters in an action book.” Yes, there is.
Ableism. Often internalized.
There is a good chance that you, or someone you know, wear glasses. Visual impairments and their accommodations have become normalized, if not fashionable, in North American society. It doesn’t appear strange to go to work wearing glasses. Nor is it odd for your protagonist to wear them, if time period appropriate. It’s time to do the same for other assistive devices (self-propelled wheelchairs were invented in 1655, so no excuses for fantasy writers), as well as the disabilities that go with them.
Good Versus Evil: Scars, Disfigurements, and Moral JudgEments
Evil often comes in two forms: the hideously ugly and disfigured (consider characters like The Hound from A Song of Ice and Fire, or the entire race of orcs from The Lord of the Rings), or hauntingly beautiful (The Empress in The Poppy War, or Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty). Most protagonists, even if they state how plain they are (Bella from Twilight), they rarely actually are anything less than whole and hale, often still classically pretty or handsome. They are rarely ugly. After all, reading is escapism. It’s easy to enjoy a book where the reader is in the perspective of a beautiful character healthy in both mind and body. We can feel good when they do good, uncomfortable when they’re mistreated, and heroic when they defeat injustices. It’s easier to focus on the plot when we use the shorthand of ‘wholeness’ and ‘able bodied’ in our character creation. It’s uncomfortable to have a protagonist that forces us to examine our biases on abilities while they’re on their quest to destroy the evil corporation/empire/dragon. It takes more creativity to solve the solution of ‘How does an ambulatory wheelchair-user slay the dragon?’ than ‘How does my able-bodied character do it?’
Examination of what makes us uncomfortable breeds introspection and empathy in the reader. It’s our subconscious biases through social conditioning that lead to issues of entire races being coded as evil. Consider that while we may expect beauty to betray us (Melkor in the Silmarillion), it’s a far greater surprise for hideousness to be heroic (I don’t imagine we’ll see the first good orc in Rings of Power, for example). When our biases are deeply ingrained in our tropes and societies, how do we avoid them while still authentically telling the story we wish to tell? After all, I’m not here to tell you that you can’t write certain stories. But we can broaden our horizons to minimize real harm, and create those warm fuzzies of being seen.
Disability is the one minority group you can join at any point in your life, and likely will the older you get. That fact should be kept in mind with your world-building and character creation, and will help you divest disability from moral judgments. It’s fine to have a villain with facial scarring–only if they’re not the only character with a facial deformity. How your protagonists react to these deformities is huge. Statements like ‘now their internal and external match’ regarding a villain’s new deformity is harmful and that harm can be called out through your author voice. If the plot armor is too thick around your protagonists but not your antagonists, if disabling issues are quickly healed away for your heroes, and traumas leave no psychological impact, then you run the risk of placing moral judgments on the injuries and long lasting disabilities granted to the villains.
Bad things don’t just happen to bad people. Life is, thankfully, not fair (after all, if it were it would mean you deserved anything terrible that happened to you, which isn’t true). Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Disability can happen to anyone, and adding disabilities to your characters and accommodations to your worlds only makes it richer. And perhaps it will leave both you and your readers with a greater empathy and understanding for the struggles disabled people face in the real world every day.
The Author Disability Checklist:
Am I afraid to put in disabled characters? Why?
Do only my antagonist characters have long lasting physical disabilities?
Are traumas that should leave long lasting chronic effects (such as chronic pain or PTSD) glossed over after they occur?
Are disabilities used for inspiration-porn (ie: I can overcome this issue and lead a comfortable life, so therefore anyone can with enough positive thinking and gumption)?
Do you think that disabilities will distract from your plot or make it harder to write?
If your answer was ‘yes’ to any of these, there is a good possibility that you have internalized, ableist biases that could benefit from a discussion with a disability advocate or sensitivity reader.
An important point to keep in mind: what is ‘disabling’ will change depending on your setting and cultures. A sci-fi novel set on a spaceship in zero gravity might mean that mobility issues are non-disabling. Sight in a society designed for the blind, or a physical inability to communicate (vocal communication in a society of only skin color changing communication, for example), would create new and different disabilities for you to tackle.
The Disabled Character Test
Inspired by the famous Bechdel Test (Does a movie have at least two women, who talk to each other, about something besides a man), I present The Disabled Character Test:
Is there a disabled character, and no moral judgment attached to their disability? Like the Bechdel test, the Disabled Character Test is simple on the surface, yet frustratingly few shows, books, or video games pass this low bar. Keep in mind that, like the Bechdel test, this isn’t a test to say whether or not a given piece of media is good. Simply whether or not there is representation.
For our inaugural edition, I present Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Is there a disabled character: Geordi LaForge, a blind engineer who uses a visor and optic implant combination to see a greater range than the regular human eye is able to.
Is there a moral judgment attached to his disability: No! Geordi is not presented as a better person (inspiration-porn) or disabled-as-punishment (bad things only happen to bad people).
Geordi’s visor is shown to be both a solution to problems as well as a discomfort. The visor and implants need to be maintained or else he has chronic migraines (something many people with glasses can empathize with). The visor technology can often be used to solve issues that the crew of the Enterprise encounters, but the visor isn’t the only valuable aspect of Geordi. It is part of him, but it’s not the most important part of him. It doesn’t define him. Instead, Geordi is a brilliant engineer, best friends with Data, has a terrible love life, and just happens to need accommodation for his disability. It is part of him, but it isn’t what solely defines him.
Geordi LaForge is the first character I remember recognizing as disabled. It felt normal that of course Geordi couldn’t see without his visor as my mother has glasses. It wasn’t strange for me that, in a future with spaceships and transporters, of course there was an upgrade for glasses. Visual issues wouldn’t simply cease to exist, there would just be cool new tech to deal with it! I was a kid watching TNG, and when I saw Geordi for the first time I didn’t know about issues like eugenics. Or that eugenics and gene editing were solutions many authors and screenwriters would choose to explain away disabled people in their creative works.
About the Author
L.J. Stanton grew up in Calgary, Alberta. She attended the University of Guelph and is a former horse trainer and riding instructor.
After immigrating to the U.S., Stanton was diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. With her husband, they started the media company SWORD & BOARD LLC. Stanton’s debut novel, THE DYING SUN, THE GODS CHRONICLE: BOOK 1, won the NYC Big Book Fan Favorite in Fantasy and was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award. Stanton is a founding member of SCRIBE’S JOURNEY Podcast and AFTER THE... talk show on Twitch.
Stanton now lives in Orange County, California.
