Characters: Da-Jeong and Min-Seong
From: The Friendly Winter
Representation: Intellectual Disability, Dwarfism
Their Importance: The Friendly Winter is a manhwa webtoon about the friendship between Da-Jeong, a 19-year-old woman with a hormonal disorder that restricts her growth to the point where she resembles a child, and Min-Song an intellectually disabled and unusually large 17-year-old. Da-Jeong is a forceful personality who keeps her household running when her immature father is frequently unable to. Despite this, she struggles to find peers who won’t infantilise her. Then she finds Min-Seong, who admires her for her intelligence and her encouragement of him. For bonus points, there’s no scenes where her condition is used as an excuse to sexualise a very young-looking person which is horrifyingly common. Unlike the vast majority of intellectually disabled fictional characters Min-Seong plays an active role in the narrative and has a character arc. Instead of being a passive object he helps and emotionally supports his adoptive mother. With the encouragement of Da-Jeong he is motivated to lead a more independent life and in one dramatic chapter, rescues a child from an attacker by himself.
Issues: Aside from the melodramatic tone and lack of realism** there’s a lot of in-universe ableism aimed at our protagonists which is unfortunately an accurate reflection of the society the story was written in.
**In reality there aren’t any forms of dwarfism that make an adult look indistinguishable from a child and Min-Seong is frequently descried as having a “child’s mind”-the idea of intellectually disabled adults having younger “mental ages” is now widely rejected as over-simplified and infantilising.
Thanks to anon for the write-up!