Hello! Iām writing a story where a character in the main cast completely loses his eyeballs forcefully. He goes through a tough time and struggles to get used to his work with his disability, and he does master it with a lot of help from friends and his own knowledge. However, my book has, aside from the blind character, a lot to do with a rose which is supposed to heal any illness. The lot of them go on an adventure to find the rose n everything, and in the end, somehow, he does get his eyes back.
I read that we should give them a lot more in heir personality than just the blindness part, and that is what I did! He is a fully fleshed out character without the blindness too, but I really wanted to portray blindness and play with the way description works from this point of view.
Would it be the cure-the-blindness trope if he gets it back? Because the group of misfits, in the end, will get the rose anyway, they arenāt looking for it solely (or even at all!) because of their blind friend.
It is in character from him to wish to see again, and he is miserable once he loses his eyeballs, but I canāt tell if it is offensive to cure what he has lost or not.
Bluntly, yes. It is absolutely curing his blindness if you, you know, cure his blindness. This is a very classic example of the trope. It does not matter if he specifically was not involved in searching for this Rose or that it was not sought out specifically for him, what matters is that you cured your disabled characterās disability.
My question for you would be why do you want to write a blind character if you plan to cure him in the end anyway? What is it about this blind character that you want in the story? Do you actually want to represent blindness because it deserves to be represented, because you want to include that perspective, because blind people like all other people are just a natural part of the world, or just because you think itās neat to play with whatever you think a blind personās version of descriptions would be in the narrative? And why exactly did you write him to be so miserable about his blindness and to be so desperate to get his vision back? We can say that something is in character, but at the end of the day you as the author are making choices about who he is and what he wants. Why do you want him to want his vision back and to be so unhappy while he is blind? And why do you want him to be cured?
Yes, this would be a very direct example of the cure trope and it would indeed be offensive. Most of us do not want to see some of the only representation we get to see of ourselves in stories taken away at the end, as if thatās a good thing, all part of the happily ever after and tying of loose ends of the story. That tells us that this version of happily ever after cannot include disability in it, disability canāt be part of the happy, that we as real disabled people arenāt considered good enough just as we are to be part of that celebration if we donāt get cured. It is very good that there are other elements to his character that do not revolve around his blindness, I wouldāve liked to hear more about them here, but it does not negate the harm of the cure trope.
I would much rather see this character remain disabled and not still be hoping so much to cure it in the end. I would like to see him eventually develop much less negative feelings about his blindness throughout the story instead of his blindness only being a blight on his life that he gets to get rid of at the end. And, while it is perfectly natural for any freshly disabled person to go through grief and difficulty in the early days after becoming disabled and to struggle to relearn how to do everything they used to know how to do all at once, I would also like to see him when he reaches that point of acceptance that many of us do once we do start mastering those alternative skills. It would also be nice if, instead of struggling through relearning how to do his job with only the help of his friends who presumably are not blind and his own trial and error, he instead eventually finds a blind mentor or perhaps a whole group of blind people who gather regularly who he learns from and gains perspective from. For most of us, the answer to acceptance didnāt come when we just brute forced our own way through it all on our own, it often came when we found community, other people like us living their lives and being happy. Just like being part of any other minority group, it is hard and lonely to be the only person like you you know. Just as finding queer community can be so powerful to many of us who are queer for the first time, finding disabled community can also be incredibly powerful for those of us who are disabled.
Maybe he decides he does not want to be cured. Maybe heās been blind for so many years now that it feels as much a part of him as any other characteristic and would feel wrong to get rid of. Maybe he feels that this was the path that his life was meant to take as some spiritual people do. Maybe he feels that he went through so much work to adapt to blindness that it would be like spitting in the face of all that work to take his vision back all of a sudden. Maybe he finds a place sharing the skills he has gained with other blind people in related lines of work and feels purpose in it. Maybe he has been blind for so long now that even if he did get his vision back, he would have to do just as much work to relearn how to see an interpret what he is looking at, and that sounds like more trouble than it is worth to him.
Or perhaps he would still be interested in a cure but it turns out not to be possible or advisable. Maybe this Rose can heal illness but cannot regrow things that are no longer there, cannot regenerate entire organs. Perhaps it can, but he has been blind for so many years that even if his eyes were regrown, his brain no longer has the ability to interpret visual input and it does not work. Or perhaps the rose is so mystical and mysterious that he does not trust it not to go wrong, does not wish to risk such a large undertaking as completely regrowing his eyes in case something else or to go wrong and it to make him sick in some other way. Perhaps he decides that being blind is not so bad that he is willing to undergo whatever risk or consequence may come with using the Rose after all.
Regardless, I would suggest really thinking about why you want to include this blind character in the first place and how you could include him in a more meaningful way that creates much better representation. Based on this description so far, I would not be particularly having a great time if I picked up this book and found a blind character in it who spent the whole time hating his blindness and then got cured at the end. That would make the story miserable for me and it would ruin my experience. I do not want to see every character like me going down this typical trope, but if you want to change that, thereās certainly a lot you could do to make his story more compelling and representative of real blind people. I would love to see a blind character in a high fantasy story like this that I could actually relate to and enjoy, who learns to accept himself and adapt to his life successfully and who no longer feels it is absolutely necessary to fix his disability.
