Disabled Beauty Portrait of Teresa Grams #DisabledArtist
[ID: A portrait of a small woman with tan skin and brown hair that fades to blonde. She is wearing a denim shirt and black paints and sitting in a black and pink power chair. The background is pink with a ring of assorted, colorful flowers.]
We Can Be Heroes Has Good Disabled Representation.
We Can Be Heroes is a movie that’s set in the same universe as Shark Boy and Lavagirl a few decades ahead. It’s got the kids of heroes and is about them taking over when the adult heroes fell. It has GOOD disabled representaion. (Minor Spoilers ahead)
This movie has incredibly representation.
I can’t speak for people of colour, but several heroes are people of colour. A fair few of the main characters are people of colour, but it’s not my place to talk about whether it’s good representation.
But it is my place to talk about the disability representation. (If any people if colour want to talk about it please @ me, I’d love to hear you’re thoughts.)
What I’m talking about is Wheels.
He’s a disabled kid in a wheelchair. He’s the child of the first we see on screen, Miracle Man.
During the introduction he says, “You may think that I’m in the chair because my muscles are weak. It’s the opposite. My muscles are too strong for my bones.”
That’s an incredibly good explanation that not only completely normalizes being in a wheelchair for reasons other than paralysis, but also ties into powers(/being a hero) =/= able-bodied.
He has a cool sports wheelchair with thick tires. It was designed with actual real-world wheelchairs in mind. He wasn’t just tossed in a hospital chair and they called it a day. They gave him a sports chair with thick tires. He’s shown right from the beginning to be able to move at incredible speeds due to the strength in his upper-body. He’s also introduced as a smart character right from the beginning, saying that his muscles in his brain are also stronger.
Wheels is shown as being capable and amazing and cool and disabled.
Wheels isn’t the main character, but he--like all the kids in the movie--plays an important role. I’m not going to spoil the movie, but he’s the one who manages to hack into the alien’s system.
There was also a scene in the movie where he uses his wheelchair as a weapon. He asked one of the kids--Noodle--to create a chin-up bar for him. He grabbed onto it and lifted himself out of his chair, which he sent slamming into his foes. It returned and he went back to fighting while in his chair.
He wasn’t fixed.
Throughout the whole movie I was holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to be revealed that--at last!--he can walk.
But then we see the final scene.
Where they’re all standing dramatically on some rocky surface, backlit by the sun. And he’s there too, in his wheelchair, right along side them. In fact, one small detail I really appreciate about it is how that scene played out.
There’s one character who’s a small child who stands smaller than his head when in his chair. When panning across the heroes faces, they cut down to her and then across to him. This is really small, but it just avoids it cutting downwards to him and making him seem smaller and lesser than the others. And his placement in the line is second to last. He’s not tacked on in the end as an after-thought. One of the other characters, Slow-Mo, is standing on the other side to him.
Not only did he not get fixed, but he was addressed completely normally. There was only a brief mention at the beginning where he said ‘yes, the nickname’s from the wheelchair, a bit on the nose but I like it because it’s cool’. It was shown that being in a wheelchair is cool and not a bad thing. Wheels was never spit at him derogatorily, it wasn’t reducing him to anything. All the kids had names based off of their notable features, their powers, what made them them. And his was Wheels. And it was said in a ‘it’s a good thing’ way. And the response his explanation got was was just ‘okay’. Because it’s okay and it’s normal.
There was no sort of inspiration porn. There wasn’t any instances of him being oh so helpless. He was a valued member of their team as he is, and he is disabled.
Most disabled representation is for abled people.
I think he was made for us.
He was made for disabled kids.
He was made for me.
All that AND Tech-No, a minor character who’s a grown-up hero, the parent of Wildcard, is asthmatic! It’s incredibly brief, but right after handing something off to Miracle Man, he takes out his inhaler and uses it. It lasts maybe two seconds, it isn’t commented on, but that normalizes it. Like everything could have been the exact same without it but it WASN’T and they included it!
Just some slightly negatuve notes: Wheels is missing from like their ‘training scene’ which is an inaccessible scene, which sorta sucks but Oh Well. And I think his actor might have been able bodied which is very :/. And there’s a character who seems non-verbal but ends up talking, so don’t get overly attached to that.
But yeah!
It’s a really, really cool movie, go check it out!
Nothing stops Aaron Fotheringham, he's been backed by the nitro circus crew and he certainly deserves it!
Check out the mini documentary about him inside!
Aaron 'Wheelz' Fotheringham - Wheelchair Action Sports from Unit Clothing on Vimeo.
