ok i had to split this from the ask i got just so things were a bit more clear for myself between canon analysis and my own headcanons, but i wanted to take this chance to ramble a little bit about tenna and his relationship to disability bc i dont see people talk about it a lot. this is a lil long and I hope it makes sense because it is like 4 in the morning for meeee. Anyways! Longer post under the cut.
Tenna is a character I consider as being canonically disabled. It's not something stated necessarily in plain text, but rather shown through his actions as well as what his dialogue and story imply. He is a character that is Shown to us to be severely impacted by the trauma he has from having an (unwilling) front row seat to the Dreemurr's messy, messy divorce and all of its fallout. He has disabling PTSD that has a rippling effect throughout his relationships and his world view as an aging object with all the problems an aging object would have.
And this has very little to do with him getting cleaved even (though getting his arms cut off doesn't exactly uh, help with him being any less disabled) - I mentioned it briefly in another post but i do firmly believe that Tenna was disabled long before he got his arms cut off, and far before chapter 3's dark fountain was actually opened. Likely truly began for him around the time his family begun to fall apart. Along with the stress from all of that no doubt contributing to everything he's got going on mentally, I believe he was unplugged not long after the dust settled on the Dreemurr family collapse.
He was unplugged for who knows how long, possibly months or years, and though we don't know exactly what that's like to him, it is very clearly something he is afraid of happening again when he's threatened with it in Sword Route (and would have presumably been threatened similarly while making his deal with Kris/The Knight). It's another trauma for him on top of what he already has from the Dreemurr divorce.
He is visibly Very mentally unwell. Literally one of the first things i see people tend to point out about him and joke about is just How Poorly he is doing mentally - "divorce so bad that even the TV is traumatized" - not an untrue statement mind you, but for as much as i see the joke i dont see many people exploring exactly that would impact his day to day life.
He also, in canon, appears to be in need of some amount of care via the Mikes literally being in a caregiving position towards him ("I do his therapy, his psychology, his analogies, his first aid, his last aid," etc), and even despite this his support network is rather flimsy:
The Dreemurrs don't know he exists and most of them are gone now, Spamton left, his employees are dicking around and generally dgaf and just wanna get their points paycheck, The Weather Duo are fair-weather friends (seems to stick around when times are good, but when they're bad...), Ramb is... Ramb. and well. I won't go in on the Mikes on this post but theres something to be said with them too because ohhh boy. Oh boy! theres a lot with them.
(Also this is not to say I personally dislike any TV world denizens I love them all to bits. They're just also all a fucking mess and aren't generally able to help Tenna in the way he actually needs)
UTDR has some really really clever multi-layered metaphor type characters who both Represent and are Part of a group (Mettaton and being trans, for example) which is really fucking sick it is an incredibly cool writing tool that i get SO excited finding out about new examples of.
Tenna, to me, can can possibly be read as an example of one of these as an allegory for an older disabled family member, one who can't leave the house - at least not by himself. One that the others in their family don't pay much mind to. He's caught in the middle of a situation he himself is unable to escape. He wants to care for people he sees as his family, but he physically Cannot. He wants to be seen as a person, but is not given the privilege because of something he cannot control.
He's allegorically a housebound disabled person, but he's also, literally, a housebound (stuck in the Dreemurr's house) disabled person (character with severely disabling PTSD (and whatever else he's got) that requires some kind of caregiver).
I didn't figure out til recently why theres been some Tenna fan works that don't land for me in quite the same way as others do and I realized its because theres a portion of them that kind of... skirt around Tenna being disabled in this way and im sad people dont explore it more bc its really fascinated me lately! It's something I can't seem to unsee for myself, so finding works where its absent usually leads to me going "hmm... theres something missing here."
Its something I feel is just about baked into his narrative - he is quite literally begging, pleading with us (and Kris, and his Family, and the gang) throughout ch3 to not see him as too old, too broken (read: disabled), to be of use. And when he IS too broken, IS too old, too worn out, losing his mind (read: disabled): when he doesn't have anything to offer by the end of chapter 3, all he can do is beg that you don't throw him away.
