No you know what. Right on the heels of that last post I reblogged I need to come out and say something that's been weighing on my mind recently.
So my dad and I were recently talking about the upcoming Zelda movie, and I mentioned my hope (which happens to be shared by a large majority of the fandom) that Link will be a silent role. And my dad made a joke about how, yes, he needs to be so they can have rEpReSeNtAtIoN, and this. Well, it made me really mad.
Because here's the thing. Yes. I do think disabled persons deserve to play a part in storytelling. I do think there should be stories about blind men, deaf women, amputees and paralytics and mutes and those with mental diseases and handicaps. But here's the deal. I think they should be treated like any able-bodied character-- and by that, I mean that, while their disability should be present, and talked about, and impacting the narrative, it should not be the focal point of their character.
I know it's a cliche to mention Toph Beifong at this point, but Avatar: The Last Airbender does this perfectly. Toph is blind. This is one of the first things we learn about her. It's a part of what makes her who she is. She's never miraculously healed from it. They talk about it, they joke about it, and Toph's blindness has an impact on the narrative-- but she's also treated just like any other member of the Gaang. She has a personality that exists outside of her blindness. While Toph's blindness is an inextricable part of her character, it is not the end-all be-all that her personality and story arc revolves around.
(It's not as good an example as Toph, especially because, if I'm being perfectly honest, the show loved to push him to the side and we barely saw anything substantial of him after the midpoint of S2, but this is also something I appreciated more than a little about Echo being an amputee in The Bad Batch. I wish they had talked about it more, especially because the commonality of cybernetics in science fiction media lends to the idea that cybernetics-using characters aren't actually disabled, but the fact that he was allowed to exist and just be as a perfectly capable and distinct member of CF99 while also missing three of his limbs and having cerebrospinal implants is another step in the right direction.)
TL;DR: Disabled characters should exist in media and should play impactive roles on the narrative. However, the minute their disability becomes their only purpose as a character is the minute the story they're playing in begins to suffer, because it's no longer a story, it's a propaganda piece.
