My girlfriend is writing a story that, after meeting me and hearing my experiences, she realized was about a (fantastical) disability and she decided to intentionally lean into that. As someone with a (real) disability, I have been a sort of beta reader to make sure that she is using her work to amplify stories rather than talk over them - she's been doing a great job on her own, largely in part because she's been asking me the right questions before writing scenes.
However, yesterday she made a post asking for help with the event that caused this fantastical disability, because the most logical cause is something big and flashy, while she wanted it to be something kinda mundane. In her own words, "most disabilities don't have flashy origin stories, they come from everyday things."
In reading the replies to this post, it came to my attention that people who have inorganic internal parts - pacemakers, replacement hips, etc. - would not survive the flashpoint. This felt wrong to me, but not because of how gruesome the image was, but because the overwhelming majority of people who have such parts are disabled. Everyone affected by the event is disabled thereafter, but a large swath of what I've been referring to her as "pre-disabilities" just wouldn't exist.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't necessarily find this to be a bad thing per se. It's background details and the actual story is going to take place almost two decades later. It's worldbuilding that might not even see print, depending on how important that detail is to the story.
My issue is that, as she is writing a story intended to help talk about disability, it feels problematic to kill off a significant portion of pre-disabled characters in the background. I've brought this up to her and she does agree it sucks, the issue she has is that scientifically, it is more realistic.
I bring this question to you guys because the two of us are unsure how exactly to proceed. Do we just ignore internal inorganics entirely and let those with them survive even if it's not realistic? Is it okay to let them die for the story? Is there some middle-ground option that isn't coming to either of us?
(I can provide more detail if need be about the story.)
Basically, you have to be willing to use some Hail Mary complete and utter random caveat that you add in after the fact to keep a bunch of people from dying.
I don't know exactly how this "flashpoint" works but let's say it deactivates technology. Maybe things like a pacemaker, which is embedded inside of a human, can't be affected because the flashpoint couldn't affect it through the layer of biological matter. Maybe you make this a futuristic where all internal implants are made using biochemical engineering because, I don't know, maybe that gives them a longer life in the human body. Maybe the flashpoint is basically a giant magic put hey, lucky us, internal disability devices aren't made of magnetic metals, or maybe, again, they're made of modified biological tissue.
Basically, you need to completely bs it. It doesn't matter how realistic it is, the flashpoint is fake but disabled readers are real. You can do anything, it's your story, so if you want the disabled people to live, you can create a caveat that would let them live. And no one can say "that wouldn't work" because yeah, it would, because you said it would work in a world that you have complete and utter control of.
Don't be afraid to grasp at straws.
Thank you for your ask! Please don’t have people killed for having a specific disability! It’s hard to give more information without knowing what the ‘flashpoint’ is, but you could have the event target metals that aren’t used in humans if that’s the issue. You could also make the event something that wouldn’t target a specific group of people, you don’t have to change the whole story, just the side effects of the event. As mod Aaron said above, it’s your story and anything can go, so please don’t put an unnecessary mass extinction event.
I’d also say killing off a specific minority group for a story, whether or not the story is about that group, is a bad thing. People with implants should be allowed to see themselves in fantastical stories and not be told that they’d just be dead so don’t bother. As you said this happens in the background, this side effect isn’t integral to the story, so why add it? The readers are already suspending disbelief that this event happened in the book, so why not let them suspend disbelief that people with implants won’t be killed in this story?
