on BOANE and disability
all the speeches on tachyons hiatuses are elephants in the room when it comes to boanes decision to interpret tachyons disability, but the one from dantsu always scared me the most:
what is she asking of tachyon here? for her to keep running, no matter what? implying that her retirement can only exist as an affront to her rivals, a selfish act of hers to not be available to them?
And heres the thing, one can say "lemmy thats very harsh, they don't know the extend of tachyons damage", and thats true! but how much of that lack of knowledge comes from their unwillingness to Connect the dots?
Don't get me wrong, tachyon is avoidant and would rather die than explain Anything About Her Ever, but why is it that they all just assume that her injury is Completely Fine, that "it doesnt look so bad that you cant walk" (a phrase ive heard spoken in the context of downplaying disabilty over and over again), so that clearly it must be Something else.
And tachyon ends up relishing in that interpretation, for sure, which drives their point more, but shes playing on a bias that they already had about her: that this is an act of malice of hers, that she could keep running but refuses to because she thinks shes better than them.
I'm not here interested in going these characters are #problematic, in fact im more interested on how the movie portrays this view of tachyons, and how after this she becomes a ghost in the narrative — we see her disability impact everyone else But her, the person whos Actually Disabled and gave up on her dreams because of it.
We get a scene of nabe san telling pokke how injuries like this affect the racers with a parallel to fuji, and then shes left behind anyway. We get glimpses of her isolation, but the full effect of this is seen on pokke, dantsu and cafe.
Tachyon only comes back at the end of the movie, to be inspired by pokkes decision to run ahead, which is something that ultimately bothers me too. Pokke and tachyon are not on even playing fields: pokke is suffering from inadequacy, being unable to beat the shadow of yourself, a mental stagnation. Tachyon has an active disability that weakens her legs and means she cant ever reach her full potential. These cannot have the same solution of "be inspired, be brave and keep going despite it all", because if tachyon does that she'll break even harder!!!
So the only way for this ending to work is one where her disability is downplayed back to Actually Being A Minor Setback All Along or that it was serious, but you can just solve it with #hopecore and #aura.
Tachyons disability is used as a crutch for the plot, to take her out and to haunt the narrative, but the movie refuses to actually touch on what that means for tachyon, and takes it away when it becomes inconvenient for a "good ending". it bothers me. this rant has no good ending either.
