Happy Disability Pride Month! Disabled Character #5 is Jake Peralta, from Brooklyn 99!
Jake Peralta works for the ninety ninth precinct in Brooklyn, New York. He solves crimes and has fun with all his coworkers, including Amy Santiago, whom he eventually marries.
Jake has ADHD. Here is the proof that AdmirableDetective37 on Reddit has complied.
Happy Disability Pride Month to Jake Peralta who has ADHD!!
Happy Disability Pride Month! Disabled Character #2 is Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds.
It’s not confirmed canon but Spencer clearly has autism. He may even be a savant. He has a genius intellect (187 IQ) and has an eidetic memory, meaning he remembers every single thing he’s ever read. He can speed read and on one occasion even watched a security feed on 2x speed while processing everything. He has PHDs in Chemistry, Mathematics, and Engineering. He has additional BAs in Psychology and Sociology. He worked in the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) in seasons 1-15 of Criminal Minds. At the end of season 15, he states that he wants to take a break from the team and turn to teaching. He is absent from seasons 16-18 (Criminal Minds Evolution) and is stated to be on sabbatical, and then special assignment, but makes a special appearance in season 18 at the funeral of co-worker and best friend Jennifer Jareau’s husband, Will Lamontagne Jr.
For Spencer, I will go through the seasons and list all his traumas, because he has a lot!
Season One
We learn his mother has schizophrenia, and he is held hostage / at gunpoint a total of 4 times
Season Two
He is kidnapped and tortured by a biblical-obsessed unsub named Tobias Hankel who had DID. He held him for two days and forcibly gave him drugs. After this trauma, he develops an addiction to dilaudid which follows him throughout the seasons.
Season Three
A teenaged unsub gets murdered in front of him after he fails to talk down the other unsub.
Season Four
He is held hostage in a dangerous cult. He is exposed to anthrax and almost dies.
Season Five
He is shot in the knee and has to talk down an unsub immediately after being shot.
Season Six
Has terrible migraines and can’t find a cause. His best friend ‘dies.’
Season Seven
Barely any trauma. Our poor boy gets a break.
Season Eight
He gets a girlfriend but never meets in person because she has a stalker. The stalker ends up kidnapping his girlfriend and Spencer gives himself up and tries to trade himself for her. In the end, he has to watch her get murdered right in front of him while he is forced to watch and can do nothing.
Season Nine
He gets shot in the neck and has a surgery. While in the hospital, someone comes to kill him, but he is saved by his other best friend. His other other best friend also leaves the team.
Season Ten
His mentor gets murdered and he has to solve said murder.
Season Eleven
His mother develops Alzheimer’s. He is held at gun point by a deadly assassin.
Season Twelve
He gets arrested for something he has no memory of doing. He gets beat on in jail multiple times. A gang kills his friend in front of him. An Unsub kidnaps his mother and threatens to kill her.
Season Thirteen
He attempts to reintegrate into the team while dealing with his intelligence which seems to be faltering. At the end of the season, he is forced to choose between shooting a dangerous unsub who is part of a cult and saving his best friend’s life. The episode ends there.
Season Fourteen
Reid discovers that this cult is the same one he was held hostage by in season four and wants revenge for the killing of their leader. He is held hostage and beaten on multiple times. His life is in danger many times. He is strapped down and almost ‘sacrificed’ for the cult but is saved at the literal last second by his team. Later in the season he is held hostage by an unstable unsub and is almost shot multiple times.
Season Fifteen
He is manipulated for an entire episode by the unsub who framed him and got him thrown in prison. He later develops a brain bleed after being in an explosion and goes through all his trauma within his own brain. He’s fine in the end TG.
Happy Disability Pride Month to Spencer Reid, autistic savant!
Happy Disability Pride Month! Disabled character #4, is Elena ‘yoyo’ Rodriguez from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.!
Yoyo is an inhuman turned S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent. Her inhuman power is that she has super speed, but she always shoots back to the place she started, which is how she got the nickname ‘Yoyo’. She is Colombian and speaks Spanish for the first few episodes she appears in before learning English. Her Spanish does show up on other occasions, like when she wants to talk to another Spanish speaker privately. She first appears in Season 3, Episode 11, Bouncing Back. She becomes romantically involved with Alphonso ‘Mack’ Mackenzie. She was eventually added to the main cast in Season Five.
In this post, I’ll be going through Elena’s journey after becoming a double amputee and her struggles with loosing her arms.
In season five, while trying to save Mack, Ruby Hale cuts off both her arms.
She goes through a major physical recovery and has a hard time accepting this trauma.
Mack destroys a robot and brings her it’s hands to use as prosthetics.
After she gets better and goes on a mission, she uses her super speed, but her robotic prosthetics malfunction, causing her immense pain. Fitz eventually fixes the problem.
She is set apart from the rest of the team because she believes that saving one life does not come before saving the rest of the world. She shows this by killing Ruby when she grows out of control.
She also believes that they should let Coulson die because otherwise, the world will be destroyed.
In season six, she has separated from Mack because of his duties as director of S.H.I.E.L.D. She has another boyfriend but she is forced to kill him after an attack by alien birds called Shrike.
Later in the season, she is kidnapped along with Mack by the alien Izel and brought to a temple in the Yucatán.
Yoyo become infected by a shrike, but is saved when Melinda May kills Izel. She is given a breathing apparatus by Jemma Simmons, and brought aboard the Zephyr, a time traveling ship.
Jemma gifts Yoyo with realistic prosthetic arms that connect to her brain, giving her the ability to feel again.
After the shrike attack, Yoyo has a mental block where she can no longer use her powers. Yoyo eventually realizes that she has been holding herself back this entire time and breaks through her mental block. She uses her powers to the fullest extent, no longer having to shoot back to where she began.
At the conclusion of the series, Mack states that Yoyo is one of the top agents in S.H.I.E.L.D. We see her last as she zooms off to complete another mission.
Happy Disability Pride Month to Elena ‘Yoyo’ Rodriguez, double amputee!
Happy Disability Pride Month! Disabled Character #3 is Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins!
Katniss looses hearing in one of her ears during the Seventy Fourth Hunger Games and has it fixed by the capitol. She also has severe PTSD from being in the Hunger Games.
For this post, I’ll be explaining Katniss’s story in the first book because it deserves to be told. If you haven’t read the Hunger Games, it’s a great series and definitely worth the read!
Katniss was born in District Twelve, one of twelve districts in Panem. They all serve the needs of the Capitol, with Twelve being the coal mining district.
Katniss’s father was killed in a mining accident five years before the story takes place, and her mother was severely depressed after this tragedy. Katniss became the sole breadwinner of her small family and hunted game illegally in the forest and sold it on the black market.
When she was sixteen, her younger sister Prim was chosen to compete in that year’s Hunger Games, a cruel tournament in which children fought to be the last one alive. She volunteered in her sister’s place, the first District Twelve Volunteer in history.
The male tribute was Peeta Mellark, the bakers son. Katniss remembers when he purposely burnt bread so he could give it to her when she was starving, incurring the wrath of his abusive mother.
During the opening ceremonies, Katniss’s stylist creates a look that has her and Peeta literally on fire. She becomes known as ‘Katniss Everdeen, the Girl on Fire.’
During the Tribute Interviews, Peeta admits on live television that he is in love with Katniss. Katniss is infuriated by this, but her mentor Haymitch calms her down and explains that it makes her look good in the eyes on the Capitol.
During the Games, she stays away from him and allies with a young girl named Rue. They plot to blow up the supplies that the ‘Careers’ (children from richer districts who have trained for the games) have stockpiled. In this explosion, Katniss loses hearing in her ear.
Rue is then killed by another tribute.
Katniss continues on her own until there is an announcement that two tributes from the same district could win together. She runs to find Peeta, gravely injured. She nurses him back to health and gets him medicine at great personal risk.
After the last tribute is killed, the Gamemakers revoke the ‘two tributes’ announcement. They want them to kill each other as a grand finale. Katniss gives Peeta poisoned berries and they decide to kill themselves together.
The announcers stop them before they can and Katniss and Peeta are the official winners of the Seventy Fourth Annual Hunger Games.
I won’t continue with the second and third books but the story ends well. She eventually marries Peeta and has two children with him. Until then, her PTSD plays a major role in the third book.
Happy Disability Pride Month to Katniss Everdeen, the Girl on Fire, who is partially deaf and has PTSD!
I have decided that in honor of Disability Pride Month, I will be making one post daily about my favorite disabled characters.
Starting today with one of my favorites, Philip J. Coulson AKA Phil AKA Coulson from the MCU. I will chronicle his journey until his disability (only until because it’s a looooong journey. Watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for more) and then how he deals with it after.
Phil’s first appearance was in Iron Man (2008), where he repeatedly tried to talk to Tony Stark about his Iron Man suit and eventually attempted to help Pepper Potts in arresting Obadiah Stane. He also helped create an alibi for Tony Stark for a press conference (which Tony completely ignored)
but we see him in flashbacks even earlier in Captain Marvel (2019) working alongside Agent Nick Fury (soon to be head of S.H.I.E.L.D.), as he tries to track down a mysterious alien woman who crashed through a Block Buster. He also lies about seeing Agent Fury in the stairwell and allows Fury and Captain Marvel to get away from the agents chasing them.
His next appearance is in Iron Man 2, where he supervises a drunk Tony Stark and gives him the means to create a new element to save Tony’s own life. He then leaves after a call about an 084 (object of unknown origin) in New Mexico.
In the Marvel One Shot, ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer’, he saves a young cashier in a truck stop from a bunch of robbers using a bag of flour.
He then appears in Thor (2011) as the S.H.I.E.L.D. officer in charge of Thor’s Hammer. He seizes Jane Foster’s equipment, but later gives it back after Thor destroys the Destroyer with the Hammer. Thor calls him ‘Son of Coul’.
In the Marvel On Shot, ‘The Asset’, Coulson conspires with Jasper Sitwell to make sure that General Ross doesn’t allow the Abomination to join the Avengers by sending Tony Stark to annoy him.
He then appears in The Avengers (2012) in the fight against Loki, but Loki stabs him and he dies of his wounds (or does he). His ‘death’ inspires the Avengers to band together and defeat Loki (with some manipulation from Fury of course).
His journey then continues in the show ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2020). The show was originally created to satisfy fans who wanted more MCU between movies, but quickly because an entity of its own. (The show was also created in response to fans refusing to accept Coulson’s death in The Avengers.)
As explained in Agents of Shield (season one), Nick Fury was unable to handle Coulson’s death, so he used Project T.A.H.I.T.I., which was to be used in the event of a fallen Avenger. In a later conversation, Fury explained the Coulson was an Avenger, which is why he was put through the process. T.A.H.I.T.I. brought Coulson back to life, but erased his memory because the trauma of being brought back would’ve driven him insane.
He was then given his own team:
Two Specialists; Agent Grant Ward
and Agent Melinda May.
A Doctor, Agent Jemma Simmons
and a Technician, Agent Leopold Fitz.
They later picked up Skye, a computer hacker who worked for the Rising Tide (a rebel organization) but soon decided to stay with the team.
They go on missions and fight evil until the events of Captain America and the Winter Soldier (2014) where it is revealed that Grant Ward is a Hydra double agent.
The team (sans Ward) erases their identities and continues S.H.I.E.L.D. at Nick Fury’s orders, with Coulson as Director.
In season two of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Coulson has to deal with a lot. There is another faction of S.H.I.E.L.D. going by the moniker ‘The real S.H.I.E.L.D.’ led by Robert Gonzolez. A few of Coulson’s trusted team members ended up being a part of this faction. After much fighting and drama, they eventually reconcile and create a new S.H.I.E.L.D. together.
He also has to deal with a new ‘threat’ called inhumans. Inhumans are born as regular people but are then put through ‘Terrigenesis’ and gain unique abilities. Terrigenesis is a process which includes Terrigen crystals, a type of crystal that is fatal to human touch, but when broken, creates a mist that turns anyone who touches it into a stone statue. If the person is human, they die immediately, but if they are inhuman, they then gain their unique power.
At the end of season two, the team ends up on ‘The Real S.H.I.E.L.D.’s base which is a boat. The inhumans plan to unleash the Terrigen mist into the air ducts, effectively killing every human on board. They end up in the room where there is access to the entire ventilation system. They kill the inhuman trying to put the plot into action but in doing so, he drops the Terrigen crystal he is holding. Coulson, in a heroic move, leaps to catch it before it can turn to mist and kill everyone. However, since he is human, his arm starts to turn to stone. He is effectively dying. Agent Alphonso ‘Mack’ Mackenzie says ‘nope not today’ and amputates his arm on the spot with an axe.
Coulson is obviously disappointed about this, but Leo Fitz designs a state of the art prosthetic hand for him.
He later gets a more realistic prosthetic after leaving his old one on an alien planet after killing his mortal enemy, Grant Ward with it.
It has all kinds of cool updates, and functions like a computer.
It also has a shield, as Coulson puts it ‘I thought the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. should have a shield.’ He saves Melinda May with said shield twice, sharing a kiss with her the second time.
It’s stated that Coulson has several different prosthetics throughout the show, including a ‘civvy arm’ for everyday use with no bells nor whistles.
Phil Coulson deals with a lot more in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., including androids, aliens, and time travel. Go watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for more!
Happy Disability Pride Month to Phil Coulson, arm amputee!
