For those of you awesome people incorporating Clint’s hearing impairment into fic...
Here are a few things that you should ABSOLUTELY NOT INCLUDE (and not do to hard of hearing people in general).
Characters responding to Clint asking them to repeat something with “Never mind” or “It’s not important”
This is frustrating because it essentially cuts the hearing impaired person off from knowing A LOT OF INFORMATION, and is important never to do no matter how inane the comment was
Characters making statements like “What are you, deaf?” in response to anyone not hearing something
First of all, this kind of joke is rude and not funny because among other things it implies that there is something inherently wrong with deafness
Secondly, these statements are essentially guilting the person who didn’t hear for not hearing something, which is RUDE AND NOT FUNNY
Having absolutely everyone switch to American Sign Language with no problem because they all know it already
This one just denies the sheer frustrating difficulty of the relative dearth of people who know ASL and fails to acknowledge the fact that it is a whole other language
Portraying Clint losing his hearing as the worst thing that could happen to anyone ever
Many hearing impaired people do not consider hearing loss a disability, because of the uniqueness of deaf culture
Even those who do consider it a disability can do pretty much everything with their lives that fully hearing people can do and therefore most certainly don’t consider their lives to be over once their hearing is damaged/gone
Characters mocking Clint for speaking too loudly
This is literally the equivalent of mocking a paraplegic person for not walking properly and is rude and awful and is not a thing that should ever be written without at least eight other characters giving the character who does it a serious side-eye
In short, please do a tiny bit of research (or just stop and think) when deciding how to bring Clint’s hearing impairment into fan fiction. Thank you!