Sorry if this has already been asked before but as a general statement do you feel like the trope of having mobility aids doubling up as weapons in a fantasy story is ok? I’m disabled myself so I have a lot of disabled characters in my story so there’s a wide variety of mobility aids. Since a lot of characters fight in the story because of the genre I was thinking of making mobility aids weapons (cane as a magic staff or like prosthetics with built in powers etc) but I’m not sure if it falls into the category of ‘character is disabled but it’s actually their superpower!!!’ because I want to avoid that trope at all costs. Hope this makes sense to you since communication isn’t a strong point of mine. Love your blog btw:)
Hello! I'm glad you enjoy the blog.
I really feel like it depends. It can be done well and respectfully, but in my experience it usually isn't.
If you're a mobility aid user writing about the aids that you're using, you can do whatever you want forever. For my deeper thoughts that are too long:
The main issue that I have with the "magic aids as weapons" is that often it feels like the author doesn't actually like the aid because it's "too boring" and thus wants to "improve" it by making a cane into a wizard staff that shoots fireballs or whatever. But I don't feel like that's a good way to go about it at all. Mobility aids are cool in itself. They allow use to be more mobile. Why do they need to be made into something else all the time?
The something else part is also what bothers me a lot around magic aids, aids as weapons, all that. Like the old "replacing a wheelchair with an animal" thing. Why not have a wheelchair? Why not a walking cane instead of a staff? It sometimes feels like the author tries to distance whatever they're writing about from disabled people and our actual experiences because they're "too boring to fit their fantasy story". It could be done effectively, but it usually really isn't.
To finally get to the combat part of the question, it again depends (...sorry). If the character with a cane has to fight using it, then I do find it weird, I guess. "Doing cool explosive stuff" shouldn't be a requirement for a disabled character to be included, especially because a lot of disabled people can't do the things that writers want them to do. Sometimes we are weak and unsteady and fragile. Fighting isn't for everyone, and I feel like that's where some of the annoying fantasy tropes appear.
"Hm, my blind character can't fight because they're blind... oh, they have a superpower that lets them 'see'! Solved!",
"Hmm, I don't know how to include a wheelchair user… I'll give them a Magic Mecha Exoskeleton that lets them 'walk'! Solved!",
"Hm, real life prosthetics seem inconvenient. I'll just make them Magical so they're just like meat limbs but with a gun! Solved!"
...and all these kinds of "solutions" that make one wonder if the author even wants to have a disabled character. It's not even that the disability is a superpower, it's more that it's non-existent. Sometimes the better solution is to have us in other roles and not make us do things that our disabilities prevent us from doing, which fighting can fall under.
If the above isn't what's going on, then I think it comes down to how the whole thing is even supposed to work. Are the in-universe rules for magic centered around the idea that the Body makes magic? In this case, it could be interesting to have a character who uses a mobility aid and considers it a part of their body to be able to use it in a magical way. Because a lot of people do consider their cane or wheelchair an extension of them, so it could be actually interesting to see it validated by the magic system.
But if it's like, "anything could be used" and then every character with a mobility aid ends up using their aid for that, that's somewhat weird. It does feel like reducing the character to their disability if abled character 1 has a spell book, abled character 2 has a magic necklace, but the disabled character has their disability aid as their magic weapon. To use the example that you did, if the character's prosthetic is the only way they can use magic, I do think that's weird, because well. Why… it's both reductive and "disability as a superpower". But if they can use magic through, let's say, both of their legs, and one of them happens to be a prosthetic, then I think that's cool.
I also believe that it depends on what kind of weapon you are talking about at the end of the day—in real life, mobility aids are already treated as potential weapons. I'm under the impression that no one would assume that a walking cane could cast a spell, but people do very much think of a cane as a potential tool to fight with, of a prosthetic as a potential bomb, of a wheelchair as a potential way to smuggle something illegal. I have very much seen and heard of situations where a disabled person wasn't allowed to enter somewhere because their aid was seen as a threat—you don't want to make more people think that this is a reasonable conclusion to come to. If you want to go for it without doing any kind of retrospect on that, I would keep it as a fantasy thing.
I hope this helps. Apologies for the answer length.
