Hey, BFDI fans. Can we talk?
The forerunner of all online object shows, Battle for Dream Island stages a massive cast of anthropomorphic objects, many of which have consistent and deeply human traits for the narrative to play with. Given that the series has always focused on character above narrative restriction, it forces the objects to interact through equal parts forced proximity and isolation, competition and elimination; mixing cola and mentos, watching the geyser, and frolicking in the sticky aftermath. Fans of BFDI and other object shows view and discuss these characters and their messy relationships through many lenses, and there's much to say about a show with such a simple premise. This project introduces a lens, but it's also a little bit more than that. It actually stemmed from an observation of the show's fandom space: I noticed that limb difference, a diverse trait many characters have in BFDI, is often poorly adapted, if not entirely erased, in fanwork. Adapted into people, armless objects have arms. Legless objects have legs. It is baffling. But it tells me that people are not engaging with disability.
Why would this be? Physical disabilities such as these are a mundane but immutable fact of life for so many real human people, let alone characters in an animated series. Are fans seeing the disabilities in these characters as a problem to avoid? Or are they not seeing it at all? What does ignoring, rejecting, and eliminating physical disability in a simple work of fiction say about fans' understanding of disability in the real world? And how is it that these beliefs are ingrained in the fandom of a series that so passionately and openly celebrates physical difference?
I want to ask: what will it take to change this?
This will be a two-part essay series on the portrayal of physical disability in BFDI. It will be a critique in both the literary sense, examning the portrayal of limb difference in the first part, and in the colloquial sense, addressing the misconceptions of limb difference in so much of the object show community's fanwork. Beyond being a "cosmetic" quirk of the earliest BFDI cast designs, limb differences are important to recognize for the complexity they add to the show. While there are intentional portrayals of ableism that makes disabled readings of these characters nonnegotiable, BFDI's premise as an object show has allowed its disabled characters so much diversity and positivity, conceiving their limb differences as identities carried alongside rather than restricting their character development. That the fandom not only downplays the thematic weight of disability but erases it altogether reflects a cultural lean towards ableism, be it conscious or not, and this is what will be addressed by the end of this discussion. Solutions to the ableist tendencies of fandom require knowledge of disability and acceptance of disability, and that starts with exploring BFDI's diverse portrayal of its disabled characters. Of course, I cannot force you to change how you write, draw, or talk about BFDI, but I do hope this essay leads to more considerate and well-informed thought on disability in our favourite object show.
As One says, "let's...chat."
Part 1: What does it mean to be a disabled...object?
Before we get started here, I would like to be very clear that this is a literary discussion and not an essay informed by personal experience: I don't have a limb difference or mobility disability. Disability's abysmal portrayal in media, though, has been on my mind, in my writing, and on my bookshelf for years now. I've read personal memoirs, manifestos, stories, and critical theory from disabled folks, as well as literature on the representation of physical disability in media, so while I feel relatively well-informed about the theoretical aspects of disability (in)justice and representation, this secondary knowledge is the limit of my expertise. So, I suggest that you, if you are nondisabled especially, do the same: seek out the voices of disabled folks, however you might go about it. Your local library is a great start, and at the end of this series I'll provide recommendations that may help you as they helped me. While the voices of lived experience are critical in understanding disability (and the only ones to listen to with respect to policy change), I am writing this for two main reasons. Many disabilities portrayed poorly in media are rarer in real life than they may seem, making it incredibly difficult for people with those disabilities to counteract all the bigotry that's thrown their way. For example, upper limb differences, which are the focus of this discussion, are immensely rare, even moreso if they are congenital. As such, if abled folks do not play a supporting role in breaking down misconceptions and biases, it's so much harder to make a dent in society-wide, deeply entrenched ableism. It shouldn't be that way, of course, but hopefully that will change with progress. Furthermore, it shouldn't be the responsibility of disabled people to tell nondisabled people when we are being bad allies, nor should we expect them to act as our personal search engines or do our emotional labour. It's on everyone to think more carefully about the ideas we propagate and a big part of this is holding each other accountable for ableism whenever and wherever it props up.
Anyways, this is all to make sure you know that this is a media study. Let's start from the basics, though. I promise you'll see the objects soon.
There are solid resources available to learn about what "disability" means, because it's important to ask who is defining it and what is the purpose of defining it in such a way. In short, there's no single definition that covers the whole complexity of disability. To oversimplify, though, there are two major models of disability. According to Tobin Siebers in Disability Theory, the medical model describes disability (rather crudely) as "an individual defect lodged in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being." More recently, the social model of disability changes the perspective of disability as "the product of social injustice, one that requires not the cure or elimination of the defective person but significant changes in the social and built environment" (3). As an example, someone using a wheelchair may not be able to enter a school because there are stairs leading up to its entrance, and in the medical model alone, the person with the disability is the limiting factor here -- their body's inability to walk hinders their participation in school -- and so the "solution" is to get them to scale the stairs through modification of their body's function, or, in other words, to "cure" their disability at all costs. In contrast, the more recent social model says that the means by which the entrance is accessed is at fault, not the person trying to enter, and the "solution" would be a ramp that the person can then use to access the building using their wheelchair. While there is some utility in the medical model, for example addressing chronic pain, the social model has been an important shift in disability justice over the past few decades, reframing the existence of disability from an inherent disadvantage to a contextually dependent social identity. None of these models comprehensively cover all experiences of disability, but they are a good place to start how we see the role of limb difference in BFDI. In fact, I argue that BFDI is surprisingly open to showcasing the social model.
To understand why the fandom's erasure of disability is so irresponsible, then, we must learn about how BFDI portrays disability, why it's a valuable aspect of the characters and the narrative, and how its presence in the show should lead to positive reflections on disability in the fandom (and in life itself!) more broadly.
To start, how about we look at some of the cast?
Look at all those happy faces! Two things immediately become clear:
These characters are based off objects, and objects have various bodies with different strengths, skills, difficulties, etc. They perform different functions for us in the real world, so it makes sense their bodies are diverse!
They also have faces and limbs. The amount of limbs that they have varies between objects, though the majority has all four.
1.1 What Does Disability Look Like in BFDI?
While this essay will primarily focus on characters that are armless, there are other notable ways objects are disabled. Some are "object-specific" disabilities: Bubble, Bottle, and Ice Cube are fragile and die in situations their peers would escape unscathed, and Barf Bag uniquely requires vomit inside of her to function and is at risk of it spilling out or depleting. Many have speech patterns considered disabilities in our world: Saw develops a verbal tic, Pin has a form of scanning speech, Marker has some form of verbal apraxia, Teardrop is mute, and Woody might have an intellectual disability that impacts speech and anxious behaviour. Even without direct parallels to human disability, the connection between these objects and how they approach and navigate the world reinforces that they are disabled in some definition or another. BFDI uses these quirks for humour, but it rarely uses disability to discredit their value as competitors, and all of these characters grow more complex alongside the rest of the cast. Sixteen years after we first see her pop on-screen, Bubble battles against cactus monsters in TPOT 21, successfully escaping unscathed and subverting our assumption that she'll pop. Our expectation flattens her into worrying about her fragility, but by subverting that view, the narrative forces the viewer to question their own assumptions about Bubble's character growth. Her courage here does not negate the fact that she's still extremely fragile, of course, but it emphasizes that she's had plenty of time and experience to learn how to manage her anxieties and her body. In this way, the innate diversity of the objects in BFDI--and the way they grow as characters--is interwoven with the disabilities they possess.
This diversity includes disability in the quirk of the character design itself: many of the objects have different limb configurations. Some have two arms and two legs. Many have no arms and only legs, some have arms but no legs, and some don't have any limbs at all*. As the largest minority, the armless characters provide the broadest lens into BFDI's portrayal of disability. While armlessness is not isolated as a significant impairment, at least in relation to humans (more on this in part two), not having arms is nevertheless a consistent influence on how these objects interface with the world, both in the objective sense of just not having arms, and that they experience some ableism from their surroundings and their peers. As such, it is for the objects, as with humans, a disability. For these objects, neither this objective absence nor the discrimination they face exclusively define who they are as individuals, but we're nevertheless looking at more than a cosmetic artifact of an old design choice. As we'll see, BFDI strikes a balance here: understanding these characters as multifaceted--and often quite capable--doesn't erase the reality of their limb difference, nor should it. It is, rather realistically, a fact of life that the characters carry alongside them; not the whole, but an intrinsic part, of who they are.
1.2 The Problem of Goikian Ableism
To address how armlessness is portrayed by BFDI, it is important to recognize that ableism against the armless is explored in a handful of scenes, and it is portrayed as an injustice through both structural and personally-directed discrimination. In BFDI, there are several challenges that either do not accommodate the competitors without arms or explicitly "disqualify" them from participating. Another Name fails BFDI 10's "handstand challenge" (6:18) in part due to Tennis Ball, Golf Ball, and Rocky immediately landing on their heads, and BFDI 12's "ladder contest" (3:18) is inaccessible for the armless contestants without help from vomit magic (Rocky) or another contestant (Leafy helping Ice Cube). The only other armless contestant at this point, Tennis Ball, stands helplessly at the bottom of the ladders. This is meant to be ridiculous: the Announcer excluding armless competitors from easily participating jabs at his absurd logic and reminds us that the contests have never had any integrity in their "fairness" to begin with. That said, when considered from the perspective of Tennis Ball himself, it is still harsh. A boy who has just lost his dearest friend--one who shares his disability--now faces an absurd task alone and cannot complete the challenge. Being derided afterwards for not arriving at the expectations unfairly placed on him is going to make him feel worse about his own disability, especially if he is still a child! But why should it? Tennis Ball has shown himself to be immensely capable in other contests, ones where he is still armless, and yet his relationship to his disability is being defined through the systemic ableism he is facing. This, by the way, is the core of the social model of disability. Even though his armlessness is part of who he is throughout the competition, its impact on his participation in these contests is dictated by how society itself accommodates, or fails to accommodate, people with bodies like his.
Objects without arms face ableism from some of their peers, too. Ice Cube has been treated poorly across the series, and her armlessness plays no small part in her mistreatment. In BFDI 15, Pencil and Bubble try to play catch with Ice Cube, but their ball flies over her head and drops, given her lack of arms in comparison to recently-eliminated Match. Pencil is dismayed. "It's no fun without Match," she says longingly, and then tells her, "Icy, compared to Match, you're garbage" (0:06). Having further locked Icy in her trunk in BFDIA 6 (rather than solve Icy's "headphone dilemma" together), Pencil holds an insultingly low view of Ice Cube, believing that she is a burden to minimize rather than a teammate to work alongside. Only when Ice Cube saves the team in the BFDIA 6's conclusion does Pencil begin to question this belief, but hasn't the damage already been done? Snowball is another clear example, treating Ice Cube as a disposable tool to chill water and battle sea monsters in TPOT 13 without for a moment thinking about her agency or the pain she's experiencing. Actually, Snowball is notoriously ableist beyond Ice Cube, and he's serially responsible for disregarding, hurting, and insulting his disabled peers: he pops Bubble constantly, he violently smashes Fanny against the ground in BFB 11 and throws her away like garbage, and he berates his armless peers, not wanting to be on their team and assuming they'll cause him to lose. In other words, Snowball, though rude to most, specifically targets disabled contestants for his abuse. To be sure, Snowball's temperament by no means stems from the beliefs of the writers themselves, because Snowball's ridiculous claims ground his archetype as the "bully" of the bunch; when an older Snowball still calls armless contestants "weak" in BFB, his bigotry is not hence a byproduct of a sincerely held belief but an intentional portrayal of an inane bias. His violent treatment certainly does not define the narrative presence of the characters he bullies, but his refusal to treat them with respect has the same effect as Tennis Ball's exclusion: the way their social circumstances fail them is much more disabling than the fact that these characters are armless. They are not broken; these elements of society are.
1.3 The Nightmare of Algebralien Ableism
Most examples of ableism in BFDI are resolved by the narrative siding with the disabled characters over the ridiculous claims against them, and the problems that the armless objects face are treated as present but insubstantial to the narrative tension: it is more often world-ending goo, for example, pressing the objects to act one way or another, than it is the boil-over of unchallenged ableism. This makes One's introduction in TPOT a turning point for the portrayal of disability in the series, concentrating the existing theme of social marginalization into an explicit theme of ableism as an insidious and damaging trauma. Immediately separated visually from her peers in TPOT 20 ("Alone"), One stands out as the only armless algebralien in a group of numbers that play catch, build stacks of cards, strum guitars, blow bubble wands, give high fives, and fix skateboards with each other. Even when One makes an effort to insert herself in their activities, they are dismissive and avoidant, like when Two interrupts and denies her request for company and runs away to high-five Eight instead (3:24). This action, as well as the scene moments later of Three and Five playing catch (3:27), places her crushing isolation against the happy, paired-off numbers specifically doing something without her. The common denominator in all of these interactions, in fact, is that the algebralien world is filled to the brim with activities that she cannot do or has not learned to do, not at least without accommodation that the algebraliens seem uninterested in providing. None of them seem intentionally dismissive towards her, sure, but most ableism rarely is deliberate; most ableism is, indeed, born of ignorance and neglect. The consequence? Being the only algebralien without arms, One has no reference point of living with her disability other than her own loneliness, and so she cannot see the neglect of her peers as avoidable; she has only ever understood herself as the broken one. The responsibility to change has never been on the nondisabled algebraliens, it has only ever seemed to be on her. All that follows One's storyline hereon, from her powers to her imprisonment to her treatment of the objects, can be traced back to her internalizing these ableist social biases as truth.
It gets worse for One, though not at first glance. When One finds the yoylelite meteor, gains its power, and realizes she can hold things telekinetically, the gulf in her mind between her nondisabled peers and her disabled self recedes: unreasonable though they may have been, she can suddenly--literally magically!--meet the social expectations placed on her. She fantasizes about winning over the other algebraliens, participating in their games, and no longer being ignored because of her body. This moment of "equalizing" explains why One is so defensive of the yoylelite when Three approaches it. When Three defensively asks One, "Where's the fun if it's just you doing that...y'know, throwing thing?" (10:48), it's dramatic irony: she does not realize that it has always been everyone but One doing the "throwing thing," and that this power made One see herself, for the first time and for better or worse, on their level. One's fears of being excluded are realized when the next day, Three leads the other algebraliens to the meteor and they together gain the yoylelite's power. One watches as that power concentrates in their hands as they practice their newfound abilities. The gulf returns. As Three even says when One confronts them later, nothing has actually changed, and all One sees from that point on is an eternity where she is sidelined. Her anger becomes understandable. Not justifiable, but not not justifiable: she has had to live without anyone or anything to live for; the arm-waving, ball-throwing algebraliens have not. She has lived without anything or anyone to see her for her passionate, adventurous self, and so in a brief moment of power in a life with so little, she lets herself feel everything she has been keeping inside of her. After Four traps her alone in the Moon for this fatal mistake, her fear of ignorance becomes a reality of banishment with only herself and her self-hatred to keep her company. What has happened to her by the time the moon cracks open would have shattered anyone.
On its own, One's arc is a horror story of ableism at its most potent, a force born of ignorance rather than malice that can, when unchallenged, fester into a living hell. Now, if One were isolated in a larger narrative without any other armless characters, her story would cut too close to the "disabled and jealous/vengeful" trope, in which disability is only represented through trauma, reinforcing the idea that to be disabled is to either experience a broken body or suffer at the hands of social prejudice. There's an argument to be made that perhaps it still is this tired trope, though we don't know how her arc ends, so it's still up in the air. But BFDI largely avoids condemning the fate of its disabled characters solely to misery, because One's story is the exception, not the norm. There exists in One's midst another society where armless people are largely treated as a normal part of the social fabric. Placing One's history against the objects we already know and love makes the narrative that much more meaningful, because we know that it did not have to be this way for One. Ableism does not have to be inevitable. Damage and heartache does not have to be inevitable. Yet to someone who has internalized her society's ableism as deeply as One has, suffering seems sourced from her body. This belief controls and clashes with all of her interactions hereon, being challenged and undermined by the objects to solidify her trauma as an unjust anomaly. Between the several suspiciously hand-shaped pillars in the backdrop of her dimension to the fixation on limbs in her dealmaking, arms eat at her mind. In TPOT 17, When Donut asks One why he would sign her contract, it strikes a nerve, and she screams at him immediately: "FOR YOUR ARMS, DONUT. KINDA IMPORTANT, HUH?" (25:52). While Donut agrees that he wants them back after she points it out, it hasn't consumed his concern in the same way One's lack of arms consumes her mind. This is because Donut has a reference as to what it is like to live a comfortable life without arms. She doesn't, and it's infuriating to her. When he tries to escape, it pushes her over the edge and she rips Donut's legs off, further disabling him. A facile reading of this scene would conclude that this is a clear, universally unwanted punishment, but remember that this is One. It's thematically relevant. Disability is punishment in her mind; she could only ever attribute her torment to her limb difference. What we see in these dealmaking sessions is, in some respects, the medical model clashing with the social, the blaming of the disabled body clashing against the reality that society, not the self, might just be the source of One's unimaginable pain. It doesn't make sense to her, though. The grip of ableism reaches deep.
"Internalized ableism," writer Melissa Blake explains, "occurs when disabled people absorb ableist messages from society and project those prejudices and stereotypes onto themselves and others" (60). She describes her own experience with it, highlighting its harm: it is "one insidious monster, and it creeps in slowly, little by little, until it's suddenly all-consuming and deeply rooted in your psyche" (61). In real life, there is a misconception that disabled folks lash out after experiencing ableism or otherwise create a destructive force for others around them, so One's storyline is a little unrealistic insofar as it edges closely to the "bitter" trope. But like I said before, context makes her actions an exception rather than the rule: so many of the armless objects are content, valued as they are, and bonded closely with their friends, and it is this normalcy that both positions One's perception of disability as skewed and challenges that perception outright. Consider why so many of her signees are armless women: Bell, Fanny, Ice Cube, Gaty, and Basketball. Having the latter two erased from existence altogether seems an intentional choice, given they each have close relationships the likes of which One never had with her own peers. In fact, Basketball's disappearance is a special case: in TPOT 19, even after Barf Bag's erasure compels Donut to concede and give up his share of Two's power, One still disappears Basketball. Donut already said he'd do it, so why? Donut has hardly even interacted with Basketball! Why her, One? Like One herself said in their deal, she and Basketball are a lot alike, being curious and inventive yet temperamental when things go wrong. A difference, of course, is that Basketball has people who depend on her and value her as an equal. Better to have her out of sight altogether than face a constant reminder of how unjust life has been. Between Gaty and Basketball, One simultaneously envies the objects and looks down on them, considers them disposable and manipulable, and refuses to conceive of a world where armlessness can be an intrinsic part of positive and constructive lives. It's vicious, but it points to immeasurable and uncontainable grief in One's heart. Maybe facing that things could be better would be more pain than she can handle. She could have been one of these objects. She could've played soccer with Three or learned to use a hammer with her feet to fix Nine's skateboard. She could have sat with Two and talked about life.
All this could have been her. It was not. Why was it not?
"Alone" and One's narrative is about ableism. Originally I was going to say that it's a narrative about disability, which is true insofar as One herself is disabled. But I think specificity matters here. It is about being disabled in a world that does not want to acknowledge it at all. It is about being neglected and marginalized, ignored and disregarded at every point. It is never that One herself is defective, but that society treats her as defective and she internalizes it into a destructive force for herself and everyone around her. Arguments could be made about whether it is perhaps too severe, and that I cannot weigh in definitively. But it remains that "Alone" is the most unforgiving storyline of BFDI. It is brutal and it is heartbreaking.
1.4 Rejecting Symbolic Disability
There is only so much of One's storyline I can point out before it becomes simultaneously shallow and unbearable. These forms of ableism exist, but not only do they not include most of the experiences of the disabled characters in BFDI, their exclusive focus would flatten this discussion of disability into a trauma, as is so commonly the case in media. This would present disability as some kind of symbolic punishment or narrative tension that, like in the medical model, is propped up to be "fixed" for the betterment of the character. BFDI competently avoids this, instead offering a big cast of objects that are consistently but never defined by their disability. Oft-frustrated Fanny doesn't seem to care that she doesn't have arms, nor does Gaty, or Naily, or Foldy, and so on. None of these characters without arms are disabled for any sweeping narrative "reason". While at first this may seem obvious and natural--and it is, given that the series itself is open-ended!--this manner of seeing disability is actually not very common in media.
Stories as old as stories themselves, from fairy tales to modern television, have often been moralistic, and in many cases function to explain why some people are disabled and others are not. In her book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, disabled author Amanda Leduc says that stories "turn disability into a symbol because it has been socialized to be not useful...If disability is not a disability so much as a symbol of something else, then once that symbol is realized, the disability can go away" (215). She adds, in contrast, that "disability isn't visited on us in response to a grand, overarching narrative plan, but rather is a lived, complex reality that reimagines the very nature of how we move through and occupy space" (216). What is so refreshing about BFDI is that its characters reflect the latter more than the former. Its characters can be tangibly disabled and have it mean various things to their lived experience (or in BFDI's case, participation in the contests) without either flattening it into a problem of misfortune or giving it some metaphorical, deeper symbolic meaning. The tendency, I think, to misunderstand these disabilities as "not important" has to do with the framework of disability as something symbolic; when it isn't symbolic, people don't know what to do with it. But doesn't BFDI then offer us a new vantage point? Must these armless characters be armless for a reason, to telegraph that they are "other" and symbolize some greater narrative challenge that must be "fixed" for their happiness? Or...do they just happen to be disabled? This is where BFDI shines. Just as an object might be small, round, or dimpled, an object might just not have arms.
As a 2010 veteran and self-described main character, Golf Ball stands out as one of the most complexly disabled characters in the show because though her occasional struggle against ableism impacts how she views herself, the series doesn't limit its focus on her character, her abilities, her flaws, or her armlessness to these negative experiences. On the outside, Golf Ball is a high-strung, highly confident contestant that touts her ability to lead her team to victory. This is for good reason on her part: her plans are often sound, and usually they fall apart when others fail to listen to her, which is often the case. Yet it feels, even in her moments of leadership, that she is always trying to prove herself to somebody, because it is a fragile sense of confidence that erodes when things go awry. Consider BFB 6: in an attempt to escape the Twinkle of Contagion, Golf Ball escapes to the moon yet gets it immediately after leaving her rocketship. Frustrated by this, she catastrophizes: "Why do my plans NEVER work?!" (7:32). This frustration is frequent with her, as Golf Ball is subtextually autistic and particular about things going as she expects. But surely someone who is delusionally confident in her own ability would deny that the failure is her own fault, right? Of course. She's not delusionally confident. Her confidence was never about her proving to Blocky or Snowball or whoever else that she was a capable team member as they are; it was to prove to herself that she is on level ground with her peers, an internalized voice insisting she has to work harder to be an equal. She faces a social current that has never been conducive to her participation. This is explicitly tied to her physical disability. She has to be smarter than everyone else to get through challenges not made for her, she has to deal with Snowball treating her like she is useless simply because she is armless, and if all else fails, she has to face against her own hopes that she cannot do some things the same way as her peers. When she gets frustrated at herself, enough to feel she is inept, we should see her as a disabled woman realistically reacting to the discrimination she has faced for years. It is natural, then, that there are moments where Golf Ball wishes, if momentarily, that she were not disabled. It happens.
But if being armless really were something Golf Ball wanted to fix about herself, surely she would have done so by now. She is a prolific inventor! BFDIA 25 shows her reversal of Pin's limb loss and in the same scene shows she has already built a pair of mechanical arms! But she has not grown her own limbs, nor is she ever shown using inventions in this way. Why would she? Even through brief pains of frustration, her disability has never been something she actually wishes to change about herself. She is sufficiently capable of doing everything she loves to do. Her feet are her hands! But it's not a big deal, either. Consider everything we've seen of her, irrespective of how she does it: she loves to draw, research, brainstorm, sketch, invent, and write papers, and she can drive, hammer, fix, experiment, hold, type, push, pull, and drill. She is one of the smartest contestants and she is almost always doing things for the success of her team rather than herself alone. In TPOT 13--a single episode--she builds a full drill-equipped van from blueprint to construction and nobody really bats an eye. It's tempting for someone with arms to see her disability as a challenge that she continually has to overcome, but is it, really? It's all she has ever known and all she's ever had to work with, and she seems just fine. Her capacity for adaptation is not anything special, it's just who Golf Ball is and what Golf Ball does. Her lack of arms is a physical difference from the status quo, sure, and sometimes that causes tension in her own self-conception, but it is more often an aspect of her that she works with, that is her, facing an environment not made for her. It is not, no matter what Snowball tells her, a shortcoming innate to her body. She knows that her body is not "missing" anything. She does not need arms, and BFDI has always asserted that clearly without ever erasing her disability.
To reiterate, in comparison to One, the armless objects benefit from living in a better, more communal social context that sees their disability as a present but unremarkable part of their identity--a mundane reality that has been absent from disability representation for so long. Without any support, the feelings of ostracization that ensnared One could only ever bounce around and amplify in her own head. Not so for the armless objects, as many of them not only have allies with similar disabilities to themselves but are treated as unremarkable by their nondisabled allies. To continue with our favourite dimpled lady, Golf Ball's disability is certainly a large part of her profound relationship with Tennis Ball, both being massive nerds. And what a team Tennis Ball and Golf Ball make! She and Tennis Ball match each other both in scientific fervour and physical ability, writing and building the same way, sharing "low-fives", and commiserating with each other's limits, however few there may be. Strong relationships do not occur solely between armless objects, either: Saw and Gaty are very close, Fanny is a highly valued member of Death P.A.C.T., Bomby helps Bell navigate without her string in the algebralien dimensions, and Book remains one of the few who treat Ice Cube like a person, respecting her autonomy enough to give her the distance she needs in TPOT. There's also humour in these relationships, especially when the armless objects have the advantage: when Two whips a wooden board at Donut in TPOT 9's Cake at Stake, Gaty playfully quips, "Gotta learn to catch with your legs, Donut!" (3:55). Having lived with her disability for as long as we have known her, Gaty makes fun of Donut because she knows that he can learn to live with it--indeed, Donut gets considerably better at using his feet by TPOT 17, though here gets his arms back. BFDI may not be flawless in portraying disability as mundane, but the many small moments like these provide something so rarely given to disabled characters: belonging and acceptance. There is nothing for armless characters to prove, nor are they shunned and othered by their nondisabled peers for not having arms. A major overarching theme of BFDI is togetherness and isolation, the push and pull between belonging and ostracization. Having disability be a part of it all, weaved in as just another aspect of the characters, can be, if not revolutionary, then at the very least refreshing.
1.5 Conclusion - Disability, the social core of BFDI, and why this matters
A series built on character diversity, BFDI endears its audience because it has a plethora of objects to cheer on throughout many absurd contests. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the cast welcomes its many armless characters as another variation of the object form, making it a consistent quirk of the character design while firmly appreciating it as normal. Though there is honesty in BFDI with the challenges of being physically disabled in an inaccessible world, and One's arc tackles this problem explicitly, her juxtaposition against all of these similarly disabled objects allows BFDI to acknowledges a much broader and brighter lived experience of disability that frames the series' love of this diversity at its best. Having a limb difference can mean something to how some objects exist in the world, but this does not mean it has to be negative all, or even most, of the time. There is so much space for armless and disabled objects to find common ground and acceptance, even celebration, amongst themselves and their nondisabled peers. To so many of these characters, their disability is not exclusively who they are, but it is not irrelevant, either; it can indeed be a part of the joy they can share with one another. Characters stay disabled no matter what challenges, triumphs, or mere routine they face at any given moment. To perceive otherwise is to reduce disability, to flatten it and disregard its existence in our own world, but it also shutters off the chance to learn that experiences that differ from one's own need not be inherently worse.
I hope it's clear why disability is a nonnegotiable aspect of BFDI as a whole. When you want to carry on the love that BFDI has for its characters into the fanwork you create for it, I implore you to remember that BFDI itself does not forget disability. It does not forget how many characters have limb differences, and it does not forget that disability is normal. Disability is normal. Your creativity cannot afford to forget what the series embraces. Your creativity can and should include disabled characters. If you wouldn't draw a Golf Ball without dimples, why would you draw her with arms?
While the second part of this series will critique the portrayals of characters in fandom spaces, I don't intend to lambast any portrayals unfairly, nor do I want to posture it as intentional on the part of fan creators. Because BFDI and its fandom has such a broad age appeal, I know that many artists are children and don't really...know what disability looks like, or maybe disability seems too daunting to address and so is a lot easier to adapt into the dreaded "magic prosthetic arms" that plague the character tags. I am not here to be upset at children, and I am not here to say they should know better, because that's unkind and unrealistic. That being said, even if it isn't intentional, ableism is still ableism. I will elaborate much more in the second part, but I will say this explicitly now: giving human characters "prosthetic" metal arms to suggest that their object selves don't have arms is not engaging with disability in any meaningful way. It is obscuring it behind assumptions and ideas of disability that are meaningless if not blatantly incorrect.
(And if you still aren't convinced, please read this post and this post and this post when you have a minute. Thanks!)
This part comes first because an honest discussion of disability portrayal needs a framework and backing, which itself requires consideration of the source material's engagement with disability. At the end of the day, though, I want this to be an opportunity to learn. It is important to understand that even as I critique the ableism of a wider community, I do it because I know people can do better about disability representation. I trust that people want to do good things. But I also know that if these shortcomings remain unchallenged, there is not going to be change or growth, just a stagnant, tired, and boring rehashing of the same tropes, the same misunderstandings, and the same biases.
Erasing disability from fanwork is a disservice to the characters and, more importantly, a disservice to disabled folks who already do not see themselves ever represented in media. It should be important to everyone that we recognize and accept real human people, let alone silly cartoon objects, as they are. Accept bodies that look different. BFDI is all about the differences that pull its characters apart and pushes them together, so let's celebrate it for what it does best.
If you've read this far, thank you. I hope this could spur some thoughts about disability rep, whatever they may be. I also humbly request something from you, if possible: this has been a lot of work, and I am an adult with a job and not that much time to spare for silly things like this. Because it's taken up more time than I'd expected, please consider reblogging this post, sharing this to anyone you know in this fandom space, and talking to them about it. I really want people to think about this. If not reblog or repost directly, by all means still have these conversations. Please just get the word out about disability and start a discussion on how we portray it in our culture, both in BFDI and beyond. Cultural shifts can start in the smallest places, but they take effort. I hope it's clear the effort is worth it.
Works Cited
Blake, Melissa. Beautiful People: My Thirteen Truths about Disability. Hachette Go, 2024.
Leduc, Amanda. Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. Coach House Books, 2020.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/disabilitytheory0000sieb.
and a buuuuunch of bfdi episodes lollll jnj
(Also a huge shoutout to this short but excellent post from @cosmovain that points out some of the same problems within the sphere of osc fanwork (plus some very cute art!). It helped inspire me to write this project at all and has a lot of the same critiques I will elaborate on in part two, so consider it a kind of preview. Thanks and stay tuned!)
