Said this before but it genuinely flummoxes me to never have seen a silent hill style survival horror with a wheelchair user as a central protagonist.
Like, the overwhelming majority of the mechanics of that genre would lend themselves absolutely perfectly to that. The tank controls early in the genre? character handling and turning their chair. The oft-joked part of you can't climb over knee-high obstacles? Well, yeah, even if the protagonist has enough mobility to stand and climb over, unless they can get their chair through with them they're out of luck. The often semi-cumbersome relationship with melee weaponry and use of firearms? A wheelchair user is someone who would have even more reasons to not want a demon from hell practically on top of them- both their body and their primary means of mobility is at risk.
Heck, Silent Hill even loves scattering wheelchairs around and using them as imagery anyway, just put the playable character in one.
Even the way these sort of games often herd and control the player character's movement through the setting, and how they have to solve puzzles to progress- that would have perfect intertextuality with someone who's not just lost in the middle of nowhere but also has to figure out how to, say, get up to a second floor of a space that doesn't have an elevator and they can't climb the stairs.
I know the game Endoparasitic has a protagonist with only one working limb as its central conceit but as-said it baffles me how few games feature mobility-limited protagonists when so many genres but especially survival horror feel like they'd lend themselves perfectly to that sort of thing.
Almost every survival horror concerns itself at least partially with navigating an environment that seems set against you and often having to specifically solve problems to get place to place in crumbling environs.
A more moody, introspective Silent Hill-style title could also make a lot of hay out of the vulnerability that visibly disabled people experience in our world, while a more bombastic Resident Evil-esque approach could have a lot of fun with the protagonist mad max-style customizing their wheelchair as well as the more pointed take of an """imperfect""" person's attitude towards all these clownlords who keep babbling about perfecting humanity by making bigger and worse beefcake monsters.
Nerdbros will use the argument that archery and other ranged weapons don’t REALLY require a user to be physical, to justify some thin and slender, petite girl as a fighter (even though archery 100% requires actual musculature in real life), but that argument is never used to justify like. More fat people fighting in combat roles, more fat people using ranged weaponry because it allegedly requires less physicality or whatever.
It’s almost as if there’s a double standard to impractical body types in fiction if they’re conventionally attractive… And this double standard is even MORE egregious when you remember that, hey, fat people CAN be pretty athletic and agile, actually- Look at Jack Black! Gee, it’s almost as if the argument was never really about realism, but instead about whatever seems aesthetically appealing…
So why can’t people who want to see more fat body types use that justification as well, even in a hypothetical scenario where fat people can’t ever be athletic? It’s even MORE egregious when people act like the Squishy Wizard trope can’t apply to fat people to make them powerful and dangerous, but it can totally apply to thin and conventionally attractive characters...
Personally I think Rule of Cool is all the justification one needs for anything in writing, even the silliest and most implausible things, so use it freely- And besides, some things may not be so implausible in real life, after all!
been thinking about the whole ordeal with writing disabilities respectfully, even if those disabilities are — to put it nicely — often unflattering and can frustrate the individual with said disability.
I know it's entirely possible to have a disability and still not write it well (apparently Fourth Wing poorly depicts EDS despite the author herself having the condition, partly because the MC's EDS is frequently ignored for the sake of the plot, partly other matters), but even if you write a faithful depiction of a disability while still being respectful about it, why does the bearer having negative opinions on their disability still feel like such a taboo?
like, I myself probably have ADHD (never formally diagnosed, but I've a strong suspicion). it constantly interferes with my life and makes it harder to get my tasks and goals accomplished. ignoring any external frustration (ie the people around me getting upset at the behaviors stemming from my executive dysfunction), I still get frustrated when I can't accomplish something I need to because I couldn't wrestle or hack my brain into doing it.
if I were to write a character with my exact outlook on my disability, I'd probably get raked over the coals for depicting disabilities in a negative light. when like. no shit, it's a disability. a thing I'm not able to do. I'd very much like to get my tasks done and my life sorted out three years ago, but my disability is making that much harder than it is for other people to do. are we not allowed to not like the fact we can't do something?
So here's my equally imperfect answer to your imperfect question, as someone who has mental disabilities but is physically abled.
I think we (collectively) have a very bad habit of holding diverse media to higher standards than bog-standard mundane stuff. This is by no means saying people cannot critique things, but rather,
I think it's important to separate constructive critique with "simply do not ever depict this disability" critique.
This is something I'm coming at from a somewhat personal emotional lens because I recently asked around reddit (I know, probably my first mistake) about tips for depicting a character with Downs Syndrome. As someone who really likes and wants to write disabled people in my stories, especially as major characters and movers-and-shakers, I thought it would be interesting to depict a sort of 'good king' character as someone with intellectual disability- something I have avoided writing before and thus thought was important to tackle.
FWIW I got some really good feedback and advice including links to a visual design tutorial I followed, but among those, I also got several people basically telling me it was awful of me to project this because I'm not ID and I don't have a friend with downs syndrome IRL to reference from.
(I found this a bit disagreeable as a suggestion because I cannot imagine taking it positively if I met someone who sought me out as a Real Autistic Person to essentially study me like a zoo animal for their book and I arrogantly presume most people with Down Syndrome similarly do not want to be befriended for weird pretenses like that)
I don't think those people meant badly at all. They clearly at least framed their arguments in terms of wanting to protect people with Down Syndrome. But that's just it- this idea of protecting people in abstract for....... what?
Socially privileged people are also afforded the social privilege of having absolutely garbage stories about them. A bad movie is just a bad movie. Robert Pattinson was not personally victimized by being part of Twilight. But in our desire to stand against harmful depictions, we can end up really shooting ourselves in the foot.
This gets even harder because it's hard to even say problematic depictions shouldn't exist. That may sound insane, but bear with me. I'm a trans man.
One of my favorite characters in One Piece is Mr. 2, Bon Clay. Who is pretty much a rancid transphobic caricature. He's also a major badass who goes from serious antagonist to pretty commendable ally later on in the series. I cannot even remotely call him positive trans rep.
He also just... rocks? I think a lot of stories with bad optics about queer characters do this. Characters who are introduced as the weirdo queer man (or trans woman, or ambiguous middle ground between, which is its own can of worms) because that's the "joke" but then the "joke" gets repeated over and over again until you just have a guy in a dress consistently part of the main cast and framed as hypercompetent in a positive sense. The floor of the joke has failed out. You just have positive, sort-of, representation. kind of.
There's no objective geiger counter for what is a Correct Depiction. I don't have a perfect answer and I'm not gonna pretend I don't actively worry about it. But what I've settled on is that I would much rather fill my stories with imperfect depictions of diverse people, where I can potentially take criticism and do better, than to never have a take that can be criticized by never depicting the characters at all, or depicting them only in pre-approved sanitized ways.
This didn't directly address what you're saying about frustration and disappointment, (to which I'll say: I ABSOLUTELY get it. I really do not know who I would be without my mental disorders and the notion of a cure is pure horror to me, but I'm also not going to pretend my brain has always behaved. Even imperfectly, we diagnose disorders because they create, y'know, problems) but my point is more, I don't want to bop you on the head with the fairy godmother wand of "I have decided this is a Correct Disability Rep" because first, I'm no authority, and second, the whole kind of point of this is it's hard.
So I'm about to date myself- I'm a 90s kid (whichever Gen that is, Z I think) and I had the fun experience of being a preteen sprout on the internet at exactly the time when "MARY SUE" was a huge accusation you could find just about everywhere.
And my childhood OCs were based on things like Sailor Moon. They were vibrant, they were colorful, they had eight million accessories and wings and sparkles and cat ears, because I loved all those things.
Personality wise they were dynamic and colorful and zany and had their fingers in every possible pie of 'cool' I could contrive, because I was an insecure little weirdo who looked at the world with wide, begging eyes, "PLEASE like me, find me interesting, I'll be anything you want!"
But obviously, people didn't want mary sues. Mary sues were 'crappy', bad writing, bad art. So I did what a lot of people did, and I suspect continue to do- as I refined my art and writing, I also started ruthlessly chopping traits off my characters. That's too much color, that's too many traits. Be less, be less, be LESS!
And none of this addressed the actual qualities at the core of it. Which is... people love colorful characters. Where do you think every 'mary sue' creator learned it from? They saw characters who were the scientist wizard princess of space covered in glitter and frills with eight lovers and seventy hobbies. People have joked, 'batman is a mary sue', and I'll say, sure, but rather than the takeaway being 'batman is a man' (I have seen PLENTY of Accursed, Derided Mary Sues that are men), it's that batman has been written well. (and badly, but he's batman, he can take it on the chin)
At the core of it, mary sues exist as a reflection of vulnerability and of amateur writing, in some mix. Every single character is a bid for our attention and guess what? That's not a bad thing! In fact, I think the most egregiously frustrating characters are ones that aren't conscious of this- that take up so much space but are very afraid to actively make a bid for why they deserve it. Main characters that are passive to a fault, traitless voids that nonetheless the whole plot pours into. Is misogyny inevitably part of this tangle? Yes, and so is just about every other form of bigotry under the sun- any socially oppressed trait is going to be one where people perceive that person as "deserving less".
At the end of the day though, you have to write characters that matter. If you write them passive, if you write them inconsequential, you have to narratively sell that those traits matter, carry some weight. Every single character is a bid for attention. A 'mary sue' is just what we call a bid for attention that doesn't reach us- which can be petty and subjective just as often as it is evidence of character work.
You don't have to cut the sparkles off Mary, and you might be left with a worse character if you do. If 'well written characters' (and THAT is a descriptor we'll never be able to objectively qualify for so many reasons) tend to have less going on, it's usually because you're doubling down and focusing harder on a few traits, which crowd out the others a bit. The point isn't the less, the point is to fit all of it into a piece. Pop the hood of the last character you enjoyed and odds are good there's more than you think in there- it just won't seem as 'cluttered' and that's just a matter of mechanical refinement in writing, art, and conceptualization.
And if you feel in despair that you've committed the cardinal sin of writing a mary sue... doctor jupiter's diagnosis is that you've done what countless people have done since the dawn of time and will keep doing:
Something I've talked about before with friends but don't think I've ever posted about here re: characters and writing is what I call the Velcro Theory of characterization. This works for solo projects, but I developed it specifically from a formative background of a lot of time doing forum RPs in my childhood and adolescence, and it's served me fairly well.
Generally when making a character for roleplay, people don't have a hard time with trying to make a character interesting or exciting. Every now and then you'll run into an antisue- a character who has no interesting traits or refuses to give them up under any circumstances- but those tend to be created by people who have experienced or are afraid of harsh rejections or punishment and that's its own problem.
By default, if you're roleplaying, you care about your characters even just as a vessel for yourself and your own feelings. The most cliched, terrible 'teleports behind you with a katana' is embarrassing because it's full of raw sincere emotion. I want to be powerful! I want to be important! These things come off jarring or frustrating because they are unsuccessful bids at delivering the payload of your feelings and character to other people.
So, assuming you already have a character that's got a compelling core, (I can make another post about that if people are interested), how to avoid being that cool guy in the tavern corner that nobody talks to? This is where the velcro comes in.
Velcro, by its nature, is a reusable adhesive. You can stick and unstick any compatible thing to its counterpart. It works this way because it has a series of hooks and loops, and when a hook meets a loop, it fits in together. A good long-term character is like that, too- they can fit into a lot of different places and situations. And in roleplay, it's extra important that one character does not dominate over others.
The ticket is the hooks and the loops. You need an equal number of both for your velcro to be sticky.
Hooks tend to be easy to come by. These are aspects of your character that stick out- they can be as simple as a flashy visual design, or being an obvious sore thumb to the environment they're in. They can be inherent traits the character has- physical, mental, or narrative- or they can be temporary, situational qualities. In case of situational, this is something you might do if you're writing an RP opener or a start for another player.
Hooks, basically, are pretenses to interact. Reasons why someone would want to talk to you, or take interest in what you're doing. They're the 'interest' that your character radiates- and the most important thing to note is not all hooks are created equal.
For example, say I'm roleplaying my character Alphie with someone else's character Bea. I might start off Alphie as busking in a public park- playing music. This means that Alphie is geographically accessible (there could be any of a large number of reasons for Bea to be there) and also doing something to generate interest (the music!) This isn't just a hook specifically for Bea, it is also a hook that could snag a bunch of other details- a cop could approach Alphie and ask if he has a permit, or a heckler could criticize Alphie's technique, or a raccoon could steal Alphie's accumulated tips.
This sounds all good on its own, right? But we haven't talked about Bea. Bea might be a shy character, or a vampire who only comes out at night. If I'm knowingly, specifically playing with Bea, I am going to want to manipulate the situation to cast hooks that specifically will appeal to Bea. Something that might normally be a safe hook could actually be a repellent factor depending on the other player.
A great example of this is the thing I mentioned earlier- the classic, 'mysterious guy in a tavern'. Him sitting there being suspicious is just fine to hook a character who's extroverted or nosy- but imagine someone who's wary or paranoid themselves. They're not gonna approach that guy- which is a downright shame, because a cautious, wary individual is exactly the guy who is going to have very interesting interactions with a mysterious shady benefactor!
It can help to have a variety of hooks, but obviously, not every character is going to cast every kind of hook. To go back to Alphie the minstrel, I wouldn't suddenly make this sociable and extroverted individual cold and shady to lure in a different type of co-star- he does have a fixed personality. Hooks are going to be limited to what traits your character actually has- but fear not! This doesn't mean you can't work with them.
That's where the loops come in!
If hooks are a bid to get other aspects of the setting or characters to interact with a particular character, loops are the opposite- they are spaces or openings left in a character that other hooks can act on. Aforementioned mysterious tavern guy has a short-range but potent hook- as long as you're brave enough to approach him, he is very interesting.
Curiosity, sociability, or bravery in social situations are fairly straightforward loops. In roleplay, I like to pick at least one of those to attach to my characters- an example of this is my current pathfinder character, Fern the alchemist. Fern is a very sardonic and somewhat callous individual who keeps to herself a lot... which could be very boring to play with as her strength of will and stubbornness means she could very well just ignore all the other players. No fun.
But Fern is also very intelligent- and I decided that because she's vindictive and a bit petty, she's also a gossip hound who loves drama and reads penny dreadful type fiction for fun. Thus I have a nice, versatile loop I can guarantee will pull the standoffish Fern into innumerate different situations- if anything starts happening, odds are decent Fern will want to at least eavesdrop.
I think this is the real thing that dooms a lot of katana edgelords- without realizing it they've neglected their loops so they don't have good inroads to the place where the plot is happening. Friendly, eager to please socialites are basically the easiest to roleplay- give them any situation and they'll trundle towards it with a bright smile and an outstretched hand.
Aloof jerks can be tremendous fun to play- but they require you to manage hooks and loops way more diligently. A friendly guy could have relatively weak hooks, but since he's already where the plot is going on, there's a lot of room for him to open up (though, stronger hooks absolutely couldn't hurt to invest in as time goes on!) Meanwhile, your average edgelord is slopping over with interesting hooks... but might never get to a position where those hooks are picked up on, or the hooks themselves aren't rewarding because people get fed up with their personality.
Because hooks aren't just for characters- they are also for the audience. A prickly jerk can be a prickly jerk through and through, but the audience needs some incentive to care about them. Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender is a great example of this- and, also, given mixed fandom reception, you can see how not every hook appeals to not every person. But generally speaking Zuko is constructed in such a way that our attention stays with him even when he's acting poorly or belligerently.
This can also be said of much more straightforward villainous characters- hooks don't have to mean you 'like the character' in a conventional sense, as much as they're interest points. A villain who's unpleasant and uninteresting is the nadir of bad character design. Someone can be a rancid ass and still very enjoyable to watch onscreen.
The nice thing about velcro theory is, as I've said, the hooks and loops can apply to everything, including inanimate objects or setting details. Say you're DMing a tabletop campaign and you really, really want the audience to pick up an object that's definitely a bad idea. If you have a character who has the loop "easily distracted by shiny things" or "greedy" you can simply make it very, very valuable looking. But most people will pick up something that seems really interesting. If you've got a bit of a hellion, making it look dangerous might even be an appeal- but it also might chase away more complicated players.
Investing in hooks and loops in everything- thinking about how it interconnects- takes the pressure off each individual node to be the most appealing thing ever. One character might be a grumpy closed off type who opens up to precious few... but they have an extremely close bond with someone else who's a lot more open. This means even if grumpy character doesn't hook onto most situations, they'll end up in them regardless because of being towed by their strong connection.
Got on a bit of a spin thinking about why it is that fantasy, and horror is my wheelhouse, and what I landed on was thinking about how it's kind of all metaphor.
Not in the sense of "the elves are actually about racism", but a little more basal.
This got kicked off by my boyfriend showing me a post about necromancers by @prokopetz and it set me off on, "yeah, it kind of all is that way" because bluntly spoken, a necromancer isn't real. Even in terms of rigidly factual history, the kind of people who have claimed to be necromancers or even what the word "necromancer" meant has a thousand different variations and those things bleed into pop culture because pop culture is just the newest form of us telling stories which we've been doing since we were even marginally recognizable as humans.
Every monster, every wizard, every kind of magic, ultimately comes from within our imagination. What makes a rude or disrespectful person? Is evil personal, or abstract? These things are autobiographical- not that you can read them easily from without, as it's all mulched and digested darn dense before someone starts playing around with their imagination and said play takes place firmly in the realm of conscious decision where they can choose to say anything they want.
But I can't separate, say, my fascination in medicine, from being a child and the adults that introduced me to the concept of care and needing and vulnerability. Doctor tools were presented as something very cool or at least wielded sympathetically by people who wanted to help me. That's shaped so much of how I view healers and depict them in fiction. When we are understandably scared of pain and decay, they are also mundane and ordinary parts of our lives that everyone must manage to some degree, and that some people make an entire calling out of managing.
So to bring this back to necromancers, there's this whole angle to me that a bad guy necromancer is similar to an evil doctor- a character that is first and foremost betraying what their field 'ought' to stand for and that's what makes them extra bad. This is different from a lot of common assumptions that the only reason a guy would be fooling with dead bodies would be bad ones. Like clowns, they are "traditionally villainous" so not everyone is going to view them as a betrayal, but when you think about it, "good clown" is the default state actually- they're entertainers! And similarly, the kind of people who handle the dead in our society can be quite heroic- I recall a youtube interview with a mortician stating that a big motivation for his job was that he was in a unique position to help people through what is inevitably a rough patch.
And this is just the emotional side of things, rather than, say, epidemiology and medical studies or even just the base sense of sanitation and propriety that means any living society has to handle its dead.
And all of this, while profound to me, is in fact optional! Necromancers aren't real. What that word means is going to be different to anyone- just like "vampire", or "dragon" or "hero", these things are little bits of pH tester paper we can stick in our subconscious to see what connections we've made in there.
Okay the human fruit-identifying schema that makes us want to shove brightly colored and/or shiny objects into our mouth is hilarious and all but now I want to say consider the possibility of aliens with other dietary needs who don’t get this reflex but not because they don’t have it but because they have this impulse towards different things, so like, two bored coworkers walking around together, one of them points towards a shiny wall lamp,
“is this fruit gummy?”
“-nah, I mean. maybe? maybe if it was clean? it’s not doing it for me.”
“alright I think I’m getting it now.”
the human nods, and points at a bundle of wires, “that’s forbidden lunch though right”
the alien, gravely, “there’s enough voltage in those wires to absolutely kill me and I want to lick it so badly.”
nods. “Forbidden lunch.”
A third coworker who is neither of the first two’s species, “I hate both of you and I hate that you have to have this conversation in the generator.”
pause. “Cranky you can’t eat the uranium rods aren’t you”
“DON’T PULL ME INTO THIS. I PHOTOSYNTHESIZE, LIKE A REASONABLE PERSON.”
Without fail I think one of the funniest things ever is that literally saying a character or groups have an advantage because they have the power of friendship immediately makes the story sound like its target audience is five year olds, but it’s also objectively true and extremely efficient: groups that have a strong rapport built between them will have an observable tactical advantage since they’ll be able to shuffle formations or react unpredictably / cover each others’ weak points more efficiently and even if they’re infighting, will still have enough of a relationship to set that aside for the most part.
Friendship is a literal pragmatic asset and every time I think about this my brain spits out “that’s the REAL superpower of TEAMWORK” from Sonic Heroes, and I laugh harder.
