okay re: ocean ableism. the whole social darwinism thing is self-evidently bad in such a way that i see no point trying to explain it but there is another aspect that i guess is less self-explanatory.
i sometimes see people in the fandom taking specific Ocean Ableism Moments - moments where she infantilizes ricky, especially the "he'll never learn to read" line in WTWN - and completely writing them off as jokes. jokes where the infantilization is "explained" as being something silly and harmless that isn't related to him being disabled. when these moments aren't written off as meaningless jokes, they're just ignored. i get the impression that people assume ocean doesn't really believe ricky can't read, or see him as a young child - maybe out of context it seems like too absurd a thing to believe.
when ocean says ricky will never learn to read she is being ableist toward intellectually disabled people - who often have a reading level significantly below typical for their age, including an inability to read at all. there's nothing in the musical to suggest that ricky is intellectually disabled. however, there are a lot of stereotypes around intellectual disability, neuromuscular disorders, and nonverbal people being treated as one homogenous group - with nonverbal people and people with neuromuscular disorders often assumed to be intellectually disabled regardless of whether they are.
what i'm saying is that the subtext of the musical is that ocean, based on ricky's neuromuscular disorder and his inability to talk, has wrongly assumed he is intellectually disabled. she might not have thought it out consciously in those exact words but that is where the "he'll never learn to read" idea comes from. it also adds some context to the way she calls ricky "sweetie", the way she sees him as "innocent" and insists he shouldnt be aware of or exposed to sex, the way she takes it upon herself to decide what helps him - infantilization is a huge issue faced by intellectually disabled people!
again i think people dont take these lines very seriously because from our perspective in the audience, there's nothing to suggest ricky is intellectually disabled. and from an outside perspective, thinking someone can't read when their disability doesn't even affect their reading might seem like an absurd misconception to have about your own classmate!
but in the context of the musical - ocean never listened to ricky pre-cyclone. so how would she have heard any proof that her immediate assumption was false? sometimes the details in this musical can feel a little extreme, but the truth is that real-world ableism also is also extreme and involves extremely wrong misconceptions. this is a real thing that people wrongly think about disabled people they know! in real life!
I don't like when people's takeaway from Ocean's ableism is just "she's wrong because ricky CAN read, lmao why would she even think otherwise". and i don't like when people try to find funny, harmless, non-disability-related reasons for her to say that as though there's no way she could really believe it in an ableist way. It ignores that there are real thought processes behind those lines that relate to real-world ableism, and more importantly, it ignores that even if she was technically right about the details of how ricky is disabled it would still be wrong to be ableist. we do not need to be throwing other disabled people under the bus here
dededos
areudirty
vaporwave
romaincrisis
titsay
germansingergirl
snowghoul
blakekathryn
