i dont think you meant anything mean by it, but calling someone with a physical disability crippled is a bit outdated at best, offensive at worst. some people choose to reclaim it, but thats a person by person thing. no hard feelings, just an fyi
<In regards to THIS post>
Hi.
You are right that no offense was meant by it. "Marionette's Pavanne", which the post in question references (and which I realize now was privated by accident oops oops oops) is a deeply personal story to me. Magolor and his physical disability is deeply inspired by my father, who was also a genius who was wheelchair-bound following an accident. I do not use the term maliciously or in a targeted way.
MariPav is at least partly intended as a disability-based romance. Because it deals both with a character born with disabilities and a character who became disabled over the course of his life in his early adulthoood, Marx and Magolor's disabilities and their feelings about them express themselves in very different ways.
Marx is a person with a disability. (Although I will note there is additional nuance there in that Marx did not even know he was born with a disability till he was an adolescent and met others outside his immediate family group, at which point he also acquired several mental disabilities too in an unrelated incident...)
Magolor, however, is crippled.
He is crippled in his ambitions, he is crippled in his options, and he is crippled in body.
This never once stops him, mind you. Not to say Magolor is written as some kind of "model person with disabilities" cliche who ne~ver suffers visibly or inconveniences the people around him or even appears to be handicapped in any way due to the power of ~MAGIC~ or ~TECHNOLOGY~ allowing him to live exa~ctly the same as an able-bodied person just with Cool Scars (tm) or whatever bullshit have you.
He has bad back pain in addition to leg pain, various referred pain, and other medical side-effects from the amputation. He is moody. He gets angry (and it was not an easy thing to write when the confusing preponderance of "angry black man" in AAA works was a serious issue across media during the very specific period in which I wrote his story.) He hates to admit when he needs assistance, but he gets snappy when he does need it and can't get it. He grieves his loss both quietly and loudly and he has moments of helplessness as much as he has moments of triumphant joy.
He struggles with the fact that, by the rules of Halcandran culture, he is supposed to feel conditioned (guilted?) to just "accept" his disability as "...the fated path of his soul," despite the fact that he would have absolutely died following the accident that disabled him, where it not for a combination of quick thinking, immense determination, and extremely good luck. No "will of the stars" there. Just human will.
He also struggles (by way of desparetly turning his back on it whenever the idea comes up) the fact that where he born even a century earlier, he might have been able to receive adequate treatment for his injuries and might not have lost his legs at all.
Magolor the Wizard is someone with disabilities - and chronic pain and PTSD (he is working through that last one with his loving boyfriend and soulbonded partner.)
...But Magolor the Engineer is crippled.
Now, all that said, on the topic of being "outdated" well, yes. The truth of the matter is that I am old. I played Kirby's Dreamland on release in 1992.
I am 80% confident I am the oldest active participant in this fandom on Tumblr right now. At least, I have yet to met anyone older than myself, and I've been here for close to 5 years and joined several fandom discords.
I'm also someone with both physical and mental disabilities of my own. Of course, that does not make me immune from criticism nor from getting things horribly, horribly wrong. Life is a cycle of learning and teaching and learning and on without end.
This is why I do not reject people sending me asks like this. Because who knows! There could very well be something out there I'm truly out of the loop on!
But I like to think that what I have shared here is enough to at least guess that I am not the kind of person to point to someone on the street - or to hop into someone's post or comment box - and use such old-fashioned and hurtful language toward them.
