#disfigurement

[this-is-deformimisia]

i think the whole way we treat people whose 'fault' it is that theyre deformed/disfigured is very horrible

for example, people who had botched cosmetic surgery are CONSTANTLY made fun of, as if it probably isnt horrible enough to have been so insecure to have GOTTEN surgery and then to have it botched (possibly leaving them permanently disabled)

another example is scars/injuries from sh or suicide attempts, like (AGAIN) permanent disability due to an attempt or sh

i find it so strange the way others are so empathetic to people who are visibly disfigured until they learn it was 'their fault'

This is disfiguremisia. Yeah, it's always made me upset when people turn plastic surgeries that didn't quite go as planned as some kind of joke. Its not "funny" that a person didn't get what they wanted, and are now being made fun of for something they didn't ask for.

[halacska-fins]

Finally got outlast trials

[baudouinette]

The skin of a leper ✨

The “mosaic” comparison might come across as confusing or even difficult to interpret? This one of the ways/things I, and my OC Lluna compare his face and markings to.

Mosaics are made of broken up pieces, and unless measured to the millimeter when you want everything to fall mathematically and geometrically precise, they can be mismatched or unequal (Lluna thinks of the older mosaics she has seen around, which are a little broken or missing pieces, for example). BUT together, whether broken or old or not, they create something uniquely beautiful. He is beautiful 🩵💛💜

as promised, dedicated to @bathroom-mold who reminded me with a comment on another post that I had tried to draw this last year, but left it on hiatus because the attempt just wasn’t working. And now my Apple Pencil nib broke so I can’t continue digital art until I get replacements :( . But I am super happy with how the lower panel turned out now! Especially the mask!! Not so happy with Lluna, but I do like some details about it. I pointed out on discord that the oil lamp I added was just floating. @naleii jokingly suggested that Safiyyah might be holding it on her head lolllll I loved that so I decided to draw the ears 😭💕 @aurianavaloria suggested the curtains for the background to make my life easier than adding a bunch of details like architecture and furniture instead xD but without leaving it a bland background either!

The hanging things are a flame lamp and an incense dispenser, based on Moroccan ones I have in my home. There is Tamasheq writing on Lluna’s tagelmust which will be explained in the following chapter, out soon I hope.

I don’t currently have tumblr and some other apps installed due to storage limitations in my phone. So I am inactive for that and other reasons uwu

[commissions open: 3/3 slots available]

[weirdo458]

Sorry I’m late - crazy week 🤣

For: @drarrymicrofic

Prompt: Spell

Word count: 487

Harry's skin buzzed beneath the glamour. He never took it off anymore. Not that it mattered. Wandless magic was like breathing, now. And besides, he preferred the glamour. The underneath was rotting.

That was what the healer had said, inspecting his scar. That Voldemort's soul was rotting. One last ‘fuck you’ from Tom, so it seemed.

His scar used to be hidden by his fringe easily enough. Now? Lighting struck right through his eyebrow, his cheek. Even his eye - the healers had to use runes to keep him from going blind.

The glamour was just supposed to keep the Prophet from catching on. At first, that’s all it was.

When he was little, Harry hated his appearance. The scar was the only part he liked. Thought it made him look cool. Then he became the boy who lived, and... well, he soon hated that, too. His eyes were his favourite, then. A piece of his mother in the mirror. He wore the glamour to see her in every reflection.

Ron and Hermione never said it aloud, but he saw the flinch, the way their gazes snagged on the ruin of his face. How they tensed, slightly, when he picked up his wand.

Ah, yes. Another thing. His magic was effectively fucked. The constant glamour steadied it, a bit. Kept it from spiking. Made it manageable. Without it, every Lumos caught fire, every Wingardium Leviosa shot things into the air like fireworks.

As much as it hurt, he understood their fear. He did. But he couldn’t bring himself to show Draco. Something about his opinion mattered more than the others.

They'd been colleagues for years; curse-breakers, before Harry's magic became dangerous. Draco still stuck around, after he was forced to retire. He saw him more than Ron and Hermione, nowadays.

They would talk a lot. Sometimes about the war, or their friends, and sometimes about nothing at all.

"Show me" he said one day, sitting cross-legged on Harry's sofa.

Harry stilled, anxious and guarded. "Show you what?"

Draco turned to look at him, gaze firm. "You know what, Harry"

And Harry did. Of course he did. "I can't - you - you don't know what you're asking."

Draco blinked at him with those long, dark lashes, "Please?" As if Harry could say no. He braced as he let the glamour fall away.

Draco stared. Bored. "You look the same"

Harry barked a laugh, something nasty in his tone, "I don’t"

"Same stupid hair… same nose… what is it I’m looking at, exactly?"

"You’re lying-"

"You’re still you" Draco said, with finality.

Harry shook his head but Draco kept going before he could argue.

"Still annoying"

"I can’t-"

"Still unbearable"

"Draco-"

"Still beautiful."

Harry gaped breathlessly, voice strangled with shock and confusion, "I'm not"

"I love you" Draco said, like it was nothing.

That was all it took for Harry to break. Draco held him tight as he cried.

[kickabel]

In Backrooms disability is explicitly acknowledged in a scene (that's right, everyone clap)!!! Arguably the entire backrooms concept is disability-centric given its focus on the degradation and fallibility of memory. There's also a good ol' tried-and-true "the monster is trauma" trope thing going on- and madness, mental illness, PTSD is disability! Surprisingly, though, the aloud mention of disability in this movie has nothing to do with dementia or PTSD (unless I missed some dialogue which is possible), nor the therapy scenes. It is when Clark mentions a man in a wheelchair who just looks slightly off.

When we see aforementioned wheelchair using king he has exagerrated asymmetrical eyes. As Clark explains that the people in the backrooms are slightly off, misremembered, and left squarely in the uncanny valley there is an implication that this wheelchair user is not scary because of his chair/disability, but because of his facial difference making him off-human. It's an attempt at an almost anti-ableist message, or at least masquerading as one. "This guy is scary but not because of the wheelchair!" But it's hypocrisy. And that stood out to me.

People with facial differences and disfigurements exist. There are people with genetic conditions that result in asymmetrical eyes (for a topical example). Because these conditions are fairly rare (and often result in other impairments considered more significant, the appearance an afterthought) and many disfigurements are the result of tragic accidents, facial differences are often overlooked in disability circles and discussions. This oversight is pretty common but bullshit nonetheless. Perhaps these are not disabilities if we are talking about the medical model, but they certainly are under the social model of disability.

The writers attempted to affirm one disabled group while punching down on another and it just so happens this lines up perfectly with the hierarchy of disability. This is a concept in disability studies circles in which some disabilities are more or less stigmatized than others, with physical disabilities usually at the top of the hierarchy, disabilities such as deafblindness in the middle tier, and more profound intellectual disabilities at the bottom. I'd argue that facial differences and disfigurements are in the middle tier of the hierarchy, and this movie scene is a great demonstration of that. The wheelchair is normalized whereas the facial difference is othered and stigmatized.

Or the writers didn't have any intentions with disability at all and that man was in a wheelchair for shits and giggles. Who knows?

Anyway. This film brings up the concept of the "uncanny valley", the area of proximity to (and I cannot stress this qualifier enough) normative ideas of humanity that rests in the creepy space between one of us and a perceived other. The uncanny valley is one of the psycho-sociological roots of ableism and I'd love to explore their fraught relationship more. Ableism, I believe, is more than just a socially learned bigotry like racism- there unfortunately are biological roots for it as part of our survival. Ableism is a vestigial survival tactic that is now completely obsolete as we have the science and know-how to prevent contagion and disease. I'll have to write a whole essay on this later.

[cruxiu]

🚨HORRIBLE: A mass grave was dug in central Gaza Strip, for 54 unidentified victims killed by Israel during the genocide after being abducted from Gaza.

All efforts by civil defense and families of the missing failed to identify them due to the severe mutilation and disfigurement of the bodies.

The remains were handed over by the Israeli army as part of the exchange deal.

[catantennae]

Fun fact: you can criticize Botox and other similar procedures without crying about how people's faces not moving freaks you out and is unnatural and ugly and horrible. 😃 Sincerely, someone born with can't move his face properly disease

[roachliquid]

It's really fascinating to see how many people, when drawing Wilbur Whateley, see Lovecraft's description of the character as an excuse to let their disfigurmisia and/or antisemitism hang out. They revel in the task of giving him a face that they would consider "ugly", and the results, unsurprisingly and conveniently, line up perfectly with white Anglo-Saxon beauty standards. The hideous Other that lurks in the back of everyone's minds is, it turns out, Just A Guy. Often one whose features are maliciously exaggerated by the artist's imagination, but A Guy nonetheless.

An unsurprising number of people are just flat out drawing an unflattering caricature of a Jewish or Middle Eastern person, despite the fact that this is not remotely what Lovecraft described in the story. And often, the ones who draw and/or circulate these images are the same people who gleefully point out and mock Lovecraft's own bigotry! It's like the severity of his antisemitism and racism makes him the embodiment of these prejudices in their eyes, and they think that by denouncing him they are washing their hands of the issue altogether, despite having done nothing to examine their own bigoted ideas.

(Nor does it help, as a white gentile, to simply go "Oh well, Lovecraft was a huge bigot, so I don't care about his work at all!" I mean, you do you, it's not mandatory to enjoy his work or its derivatives, but refusing to examine it doesn't mean you're immune to being affected by the problems it contains.)

The issue isn't limited to Wilbur Whateley, of course. It's just an example of the problem that's relatively small and easy to explain; I could just as easily bring up how his Deep Ones stemmed from the fear of his own changing features in his 30s, or the sheer number of Horror Hybrids that are obvious stand-ins for his eugenicist terror of race/ethnicity mixing. Lovecraft is famed for his vivid, evocative descriptions - but many of those descriptions were just gross exaggerations fueled by hatred and harsh judgment, and you cannot divorce them from that context without further examination, or you're just replicating his bigotry whether you want to or not.