#mod faelan

[cripplecharacters]

How would I go about portraying an autistic character in a world where there wouldn’t be the terminology for that sort of thing? It’s a fantasy novel that mostly surrounds fairies, and I’m considering having her family think she’s a changeling (something I know has ableist roots and could be shown to be wrong as she’s just an autistic human)

Hello, thanks for your question!

Using pretty direct Autistic coding would be your best bet for making the character as obviously Autistic as possible without having the in-world terminology for it. This could include showing the character stimming, having distinct speech patterns from the rest of the cast, experiencing shutdowns or meltdowns when relevant, fixating on particular interests, keeping a regular routine (and getting upset when it's disrupted), and reacting more strongly to sensory input than the rest of the cast, among other things. Readers who are Autistic or otherwise familiar with Autism will probably clue in quite quickly if you depict these kinds of traits.

While the idea of changelings being equated with disabilities--and Autism in particular--has grown in popularity over the past decade, I would still advise a lot of caution in associating Autistic characters with changelings. While some Autistic people (especially those of us outside of Europe where changelings originated) do identify with changelings due to feeling othered by society, many of us don't because of the negative context of the original changeling stories. I feel that the real-world history behind the stories should be taken into serious consideration before drawing any direct parallels between disabled people and changelings.

Though it's absolutely plausible that the changeling stories did potentially originate as ways to explain the presence and development of disabilities in children as many theories argue, the changeling stories themselves don't frame changelings in a positive or even neutral light--changelings are creatures you absolutely do not want in your home or family and are seen as undeserving burdens on a family's hard-earned resources. There are documented historical instances of people--adults and children alike--being beaten, abused or murdered just on suspicion of having been changelings. I feel that this context is often lost outside of Europe, as we don't always realize that changelings were taken very seriously, especially in rural communities, and were not just harmless bedtime stories.

Because of this, I would suggest that, if you go the changeling route, you take the time and effort to portray it as a particularly dehumanizing and potentially dangerous form of ableism, and approach the subject with delicacy. Otherwise, if your portrayal of fairies in your story is not negative the way they tend to be when associated with creatures like changelings, you could keep the foundations of the changeling story--a human replaced by a fey creature--but tweak the perceptions your character's society might have around them, and perhaps change the name to something that doesn't evoke the same connotations as the changeling.

Other Autistic people are welcome to add their thoughts!

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

Hello!

I've been working on doing research for some of my physically disabled characters, and with regard to that, wondering what I should be focusing on so that I can maximize my efforts. Like I want to do my own research, but I'm not sure where to focus most of that energy. Do you have any lists of "questions you should have enough knowledge to answer if you're writing a character with x disability?" Like examples I can think of would be "what restrictions does x disability pose when real people with that disability are traversing the environment your character lives in, and how do they usually accomodate it?" or "what are several problematic tropes that real people with x disability don't appreciate, and why?"

Thank you so much!

Hello, thanks for your question!

It already sounds like you're on the right track with regards to your research, but off the top of my head here are some things I'd want an author to feel comfortable answering before writing a disabled character:

The character's disability/ies. Get as specific as possible–even if you don't explicitly identify it in the text, you as the author should know what your character's condition is or would be in the real world. You need to know what the disability is to understand how it affects the character's life. "Nebulous heart problem" doesn't really cut it when it comes to good representation. This is also important in order to know which particular tropes to avoid. If the character is multiply disabled, look into how those comorbidities might affect them in unique ways.

The character's medical treatment(s). Does the character have access to the right doctors and specialists to treat their condition? Do they take medication, and does it have side effects? Have they undergone surgeries and/or physical therapy? Have their experiences with the medical system (or equivalent, based on the setting) been positive or negative? When writing a modern setting, take particular care to consider how other axes of oppression, such as race and class, affect access to and experiences with medical care.

How long the character has been disabled. Is their disability congenital, or did it occur later in life? Was it the result of an injury or trauma? What kinds of memories and feelings does your character associate with the disability and/or the event that may have caused it? A newly disabled character is very different from a character who's been disabled for a long time/their entire life.

If the disability was acquired later in life, what did they gain and what did they lose when they became disabled? The chances of nothing changing in the character's life if they acquired their disability–especially as an established adult–are slim.

The symptoms of their disability. This sounds like an obvious one, but surprisingly often I see authors make assumptions about what a character would experience that are quite inconsistent with the experiences of people who actually have that disability. For example, not every traumatic brain injury will cause memory loss, but people often make that assumption. Not every time of chronic pain feels the same. You should be able to differentiate between popular myths about the disability you're portraying and the actual facts about said disability.

How the disability is affected by the character's environment and social context. You should have a pretty good idea of which factors the character will need to accommodate in the setting. This can include anything from which mobility aids they might use and in which situations, how their home or workspace has been modified to accommodate their disability, how they handle the climate or weather, how people react to seeing them on the street, etc.

How prevalent the disability is in the setting. Just like in real life, different visible disabilities will get different reactions from people, and this will vary a lot from place to place. Consider if this is a disability that is widely known and accommodated in the setting and which supports would be available for it.

The character's support system. This is both a social and practical question. If the character requires a caretaker, who is it and what is their relationship? If they don't, who do they go to when they need help with something related to their disability? Do they know anyone else who shares their disability, or have any connections to a disabled community?

I hope these offer a decent starting point in terms of directing research. There are likely some points I've missed, so I'll leave this post open for replies and comments from other disabled people who would like to offer suggestions.

Best of luck writing!

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

Hi! Do you have any advice specifically about writing a disabled character that wasn't born with their disability but that was critically injured? Like the first few months. The mindset of going from being abled to disabled and figuring stuff out. (I don't necessarily plan on writing from their pov because I can't speak on it but they're still a main character and having more knowledge about it would be helpful while writing!)

Hi there, thanks for your ask!

Keep in mind that the way you write this character will likely vary depending on what the injury is, and what the resulting disability is.

I'm going to answer this as someone who became physically disabled with fibromyalgia in adulthood due to a serious injury (spontaneous pneumothorax/lung collapse with long-term healing complications).

Here are some of the things I experienced that a newly physically disabled person might feel in the first months after their injury:

Some degree of confusion or denial. They might still wonder why they haven't fully healed from their injury and can't live their life the same way, because they've internalized their sense of ability so deeply.

They'll likely push themselves too hard multiple times, trying to test out how far they can push themselves without consequences.

They might initially refuse or be too afraid to ask for help when they need it and instead try to push through.

Experimenting with available treatments, like medications, physiotherapy, etc. These might vary depending on your setting.

They'll have a hard time letting go of anything that was important to them that they can no longer do the same way and search for alternative ways to do them where possible.

Reliance on their support system more than ever before. There will be good days and bad days. They might ask for reassurance more often.

They might feel frustrated and lash out when people try to push them past their limits, make insensitive comments about their disability, or draw comparisons between who they are now and who they were before their injury. Comments like, "Once you get better...," or "Stay positive, you never know what might happen," will make it harder for them to go through their natural grieving process.

They will notice ableism far more than they ever did before, especially if they now have mobility issues. If your story is set in the real world, this will feel overwhelming, depressing and infuriating to them, because ableism is everywhere.

They might re-organize their living space to be more accessible to them, and become more comfortable doing things in an unorthodox or unusual way if it works for them.

Re-evaluating their goals, values and desires. They'll start to let go of things they didn't actually want all that much, and focus more on the things they genuinely love.

Seeking connection with other physically disabled people! This will help them accept the changes in their life more than almost anything else.

Keep in mind that these are all personal, subjective, and dependent on a person's circumstances when they sustain debilitating injury. For example, it's easier to cope with acquiring a physical disability if you're financially well-off and can afford specialized medical care, compared to someone who can't.

Writing a newly disabled character can be very difficult as your instinct might be to write self-loathing, depressed characters. I'd advise to steer clear of this, and instead try to write characters exploring new lifestyles and learning new things about themselves in the process. Don't shy away from writing grieving characters, but that shouldn't be the only thing you depict the character feeling! Sure, my life might have been easier on the surface if I hadn't sustained that injury, but it's taught me a lot and I appreciate the emotional growth it fostered in me and the relationships I've built and strengthened in the process.

Overall, remember that a newly disabled character is struggling first and foremost with losing access to things that are designed to be inaccessible to disabled people. The problem the character is facing shouldn't be that they feel bad about being disabled, it should be the fact that they're now reckoning with societal inaccessibility and ableism in a way that they never had to before.

As always, this ask is open for input from anyone who's acquired a disability after an injury!

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

Hi, I have a question.

Can somebody identify as disabled even if their medical condition can fully heal in time? For context: a character from my book suffers from Post-Concussion Syndrome after a head injury he got during a fight. He gets terrible migraines multiple times per week and has trouble with balance and remembering things. He also gets even more sensitive to sensory input. This prevents him from doing his job and hobbies and will be something he struggles with for multiple books. The thing is that Post-Concussion syndrome can last from three months to a year or even longer, and he was already prone to migraines before, so I suppose he might never fully heal, but it could happen as the syndrome is treatable. Can he identify as disabled?

Hi, thanks for your question!

Short answer: Yes, people can identify as disabled even if the disabling condition is temporary.

Long answer: Virtually everyone, at some point in their life, will experience some kind of temporary disability. That doesn't make those experiences not disabling just because they're ostensibly more common/frequent than permanent or congenital disabilities. Even if they become able-bodied again, people incapacitated by injury or illness, for example, are still functionally disabled for as long as those conditions last.

While temporarily disabled people are not legally considered disabled in many places and thereby not typically entitled to disability benefits, this is a policy failure that is not indicative of disabled people's own perspectives on disability. Temporarily disabled people are absolutely welcome in the disabled community and encouraged to identify themselves as disabled if they so choose.

In the case of your specific character, I would note that while Post-Concussion Syndrome is definitely a temporary disability in and of itself, a character who is prone to migraines is already disabled before sustaining additional injuries. Migraines are a chronic neurological condition and are considered a dynamic disability, which refers to a condition whose severity fluctuates over time and/or day to day. So while your character could certainly identify as disabled, it's not just because of the Post-Concussion Syndrome!

As always, disabled folks are welcome to add their thoughts.

Best of luck writing!

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

Hi! A little while ago you made a post where you mentioned a character who suffers from migraines would be considered disabled. I have had periodic migraines since I was a kid (varying in frequency and intensity, and now tend to get them associated with changes in the weather/seasons), and have never heard them described as a disability before. Is there a certain threshold for migraines to be considered a disability? Apologies if this sounds insensitive - I promise it is made in good faith.

Hello, thanks for your question! I love these kinds of identity-related questions, so apologies in advance for the slight ramble.

(The post referenced in this ask can be found here for anyone interested.)

This may be an unsatisfying answer, but it really depends on the person and whether they're personally comfortable identifying as disabled. This is true not only for people with migraines, but people who experience any kind of dynamic disability whose severity fluctuates over time or from day to day -- and especially so for people who may experience both extremes of being functionally able-bodied one day and fully debilitated the next.

My personal experience has taught me that people will often think their good days somehow cancel out the bad, and this gives them a kind of imposter syndrome when it comes to engaging with disabled community. My aim isn't to force people to identify as disabled (and I hope it didn't come across that way!) but rather to emphasize that there is no "correct" way to be disabled, that it's okay to find solidarity in disabled community even if you have more good days than bad, and to encourage us to think about why some conditions "count" in popular imagination as disability and others don't, no matter how debilitating they may be.

Some people who experience dynamic conditions like migraines (as just one example of many) might genuinely not consider their condition a disability and won't necessarily benefit from identifying that way, and that's completely okay. My mother gets a couple migraines per year that last about a day, and doesn't consider this a disability in itself because she just doesn't really feel they impact her life in a meaningful way. But a good friend of mine gets them much more frequently and isn't able to live normally/needs specific accommodation for days or weeks at a time, and does consider this a disability because it has a profound impact on their comfort and lifestyle. It just depends on what resonates with people and what they feel speaks most authentically to their experiences.

Just a sidenote as some people may not know this, but it's also exceedingly rare for a doctor to just come out and tell you that your diagnosis makes you disabled. In my experience, they'll hardly ever even use the word "disabled" at all. I've known people to go years living with a diagnosis the community practically unanimously sees as a disability, yet fully identifying as able-bodied without even thinking to connect with us for support, just because they expected a medical professional to tell them the moment they became disabled.

Ultimately, there are no hard and fast rules for who is "allowed" to identify as disabled. My own personal stance is that if people find comfort and solidarity in recognizing themselves as disabled and benefit from connecting with disabled community, I have no interest in interrogating them to figure out how affected they are by their condition or deciding whether I think they're disabled "enough" to call themselves that. I believe them to know their experiences best.

Even if someone lives with a dynamic condition and decides intentionally not to identify as disabled, I do think we all ultimately benefit from introspection about our own sense of ability and way of inhabiting the world, and from asking ourselves why so many people allow themselves to live in any manner of pain and discomfort before they'll let the word "disabled" even cross their mind.

I hope this helps explain my answer to that particular ask a bit more! While not necessarily writing related, per se, I do think these conversations are important, and I hope that at least one person comes away from these types of asks with something new to think about.

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

Hey so I saw that it’s problematic to have a character overcoming a disability. Would this extend to physical therapy that changes a characters level of mobility? Are temporary disabilities fine if I make it clear it’s temporary from the beginning and the reason it’s temporary has nothing to do with any cures

Hi, anon! There are multiple distinctions between the fabricated narrative of overcoming one’s disability and a person naturally experiencing different levels of disability, including temporary disabilities. 

Firstly, in fiction, characters ‘overcoming’ their disability often includes an unrealistic cure-- either it simply does not exist in our world, it’s prohibitively expensive, or a character is able to make an 100% recovery when in reality that would not be expected. Another aspect of the cure trope is the implication that a character can only be happy once they are cured of their disability, or that they need to be cured/recover to be important to the story, to have positive emotions and relationships, or as the only possible conclusion to their story. 

Temporary disabilities are absolutely fine to write, as is a character regaining mobility and strength via physical therapy.

And finally, the single-story narrative of the cure trope is an overdone story, real disabled people deciding to be ‘cured’ of their disabilities is rarely possible, and when it is, it’s not an objectively bad thing.

-Mod Teeth

Hi there! This is a really good question and I'm glad you asked!

As Mod Teeth said, these are completely separate things and should be approached in distinct ways.

A lot of disabled people's reticence towards the idea of "overcoming" our disabilities comes from the notion that our disabilities are inherently bad things that we should seek to get rid of at all costs. Abled people love to tell stories where disabled people become "normal" in their eyes, because they think it's what we want and can't fathom that we might actually be happy as we are.

Stories in which disabled characters become abled--whether through unrealistic effort, by spontaneous miracle, or by magical cure--just serve to reinforce this and are very damaging to the public perception of disability. Firstly, it gives our abled loved ones unrealistic expectations towards our prognosis--that we'll always make a miraculous recovery if we just tried harder or did things differently because they can't differentiate between ableist fiction and reality, which can be incredibly frustrating for those of us with permanent or degenerative conditions. Lots of previously abled people in real life who become disabled at some point--either naturally or due to an injury or illness--feel like their lives are over because of stories like this that tell us we're only valuable and can only be happy when we're abled. It's just not true!

That isn't to say that you can't write disabled characters doing what they can to make their lives easier and improving somewhat over time (for example, by taking medications, getting physiotherapy, seeing new doctors and specialists, etc.). Just keep it realistic (i.e., know that we aren't typically seeing wild improvement overnight, and that some people just won't improve no matter what we do), and recognize that seeking to manage our symptoms as well as possible isn't the same thing as wanting to be cured. Yes, some disabled people in real life would choose to cure their disabilities if they could--this is their prerogative and they can tell these stories if they wish, but understand that they require incredible nuance and are generally not appropriate stories for abled people to tell on principle.

Temporary disabilities and subsequent recovery processes are a completely natural part of life and totally okay to write about! It's not problematic to depict conditions that can be recovered from just because some of us won't recover from ours. Temporarily disabled people deserve more good representation too; in fact, some of the staunchest advocates for permanently disabled people in real life are people who've been temporarily disabled, and vice versa.

Thanks for your question, and happy writing!

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

My MC uses a cane and experiences chronic pain. I was thinking about making the cause of this chronic pain stem from them being a magic user. In my story, magic users often have chronic pain or need to use mobility aids due to the idea that magic is unable to be contained within organic material (ie a human/animal's body) for a prolonged period of time. Not every magic user has chronic pain and when they do it would impact them in very different ways but I was wondering if this is in anyway ableist? Im not intending to make it seem like disability is a punishment for using magic or anything but I wanted to make sure that this idea wouldn't be offensive or stereotypical towards the disabled community. I'm open to suggestions on how to fix/rewrite this if it is.

Hey there, thanks for your question!

My biggest concern with this premise, as you've expressed, would be the framing of disability as a punishment for something--in this case, being a magic user--as well as a potential association with "otherness" depending on how magic users are treated within your setting, especially if they are oppressed or mistreated in any way.

I do want to point out that the fantasy genre in particular has a tendency to depict disability in ways that are fundamentally divorced from the real world, like being acquired in exchange for something like special powers or being a condition of some kind of mystical ability/bloodline/whatever. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, per se, but its predominance makes it--in my personal opinion--a bit of a tired trope.

That said, while these types of premises aren't my favourite for the above reasons, I don't inherently dislike this idea so long as you take care to make sure that their disabilities are not seen as or intended to be punishments. You can avoid this in part by:

Not having the characters resent their disabilities or wish that they weren't magic users.

Not treating magic users poorly in your setting (I don't know if they are, because it isn't included in the ask, but since it's a common fantasy trope I'll add it anyway).

Depicting what kinds of accommodations would reasonably exist in a setting where magic use is tied with disability would also go a long way, especially if magic users make up a large portion of the population. This would help the disabilities not seem like a fun flavour thrown in for drama while not actually being realistically thought through.

Finally, I also strongly recommend including disabled characters who are not magic users in your story. Disability in speculative fiction is rarely shown just... existing the same way it does in real life. Disabled people exist all around you, not just as a quirk to serve in fantasy worldbuilding, and I certainly encourage all fantasy authors in particular to remember this.

Other disabled people are welcome to add their thoughts as always!

-Mod Faelan

[cripplecharacters]

Is there a word for autistic people / characters who just talk way less than the average person? or just don't feel like talking a lot of the time? i know there's selective mutism for when its related to stress, but i'm thinking about characters who just don't want to talk out loud sometimes. i know this is something NT people do but i'm thinking about characters who do this a lot, and/or won't force themselves to talk when they don't want to.

Hi, thanks for your question!

I don't think there's a specific word for this--or at least not one that I've personally encountered before.

There is, of course, a distinction between being unable to speak versus simply preferring not to speak, as you've highlighted in your ark. I would just chalk it up to some people being generally less talkative than others for any variety of reasons, be it personality, comfort level, environmental factors, etc. There is the same natural variance among Autistic people and other disabled people that you'd find anywhere else, including just general chattiness!

Some people who are less talkative than average--myself included--are less inclined than a neurotypical person to force ourselves to speak if we don't want to. This is, in my opinion, more where Autism plays a part (i.e. not feeling as beholden to social rules that don't serve us) than the degree of talkativeness itself, if that makes sense.

It's entirely possible that there's a word out there for this that I just haven't heard, so folks are welcome to mention in the replies if they know of something suitable!

But, personally, based on the explanation you've provided, I'm inclined to think you're looking at more of a natural personality trait than a clinical symptom necessarily related to Autism or other disabilities.

-Mod Faelan