One thing that will always drive me crazy about the way people talk about Undertale and, more specifically, Frisk is the way that people will talk about Frisk like they are just… not there. Completely and entirely absent from the narrative itself, a placeholder for the player or, for fans that do pay closer attention to details but still disregard Frisk, a placeholder for Chara. I think a good chunk of the reason for this is the way people will go to any extent to dehumanize nonverbal characters and project a facade onto them. While Frisk is not, within the world, nonverbal, they come off this way to the player because there is no way of reading or hearing the things they say in spoken dialogue, including spoken dialogue that would in fact necessitate them having the ability to vocally communicate, i.e. phone calls. As a result, I find that the actual analysis of Frisk’s intent and feeling towards monsters is Vastly Undertalked About.
In the beginning of the game, the oppression dynamics of this world is made immediately clear, with humans being the class that holds systematic privilege and power. Genocide WAS something that monsters had already experienced and had been subjected to before being driven underground. Because of this, the Genocide Route reflects a light onto Frisk in a way that underlined the oppressor role of humans—Frisk *eagerly* wipes monsters off the face of the planet and never expresses caution in doing so. Even in the beginning, when the file is at a blank slate that can still be turned into a neutral run, Frisk never Resists the temptation to kill, necessarily. Killing monsters is a mundane task, a one that you can argue is defaulted to, even, which makes it easy for the player to continue killing monsters whenever an encounter occurs, even if you don’t grind and trigger the Genocide Route. In any other game, this is normal. Monsters are trying to kill you. If they aren’t trying to kill you, they still serve some kind of purpose in being killed, or occupy or represent some kind of threat. In Undertale, though? The game TELLS YOU IMMEDIATELY that monsters were chased underground after being driven to near extinction. There is no neutrality here. Frisk is not a neutral entity. Frisk is a political presence in the homes of monsters who have a reason to fear them. When you DO trigger the Genocide Route, Frisk’s default approach to killing monsters turns into an eager, incessant need to kill, communicated multiple times through dialogue but also implicitly stated by the fact that killing monsters only gets easier and easier as Frisk gets “stronger.” Frisk only gets “stronger” because “strength” in Undertale is defined by killing intent. People are so obsessed with possession theory and Chara as a marvel concept that they forget that Frisk comes from a system that enables Frisk to not see monsters as people. It benefits Frisk to act upon their biases, because a world where the oppressor hates the oppressed is a world where it is easier to oppress them, ergo a world where the oppressor stays in power. Genocide Route is Frisk leaning into their hatred of monsters based on biases that would have already existed in them prior to their fall, and because of this, Pacifist Route can easily be seen as Frisk unlearning this learned behavior. Even in the Pacifist Route, killing is still the default option. It’s the first button on the battle UI. It’s the option that Toriel teaches you to *not* do, because of the correct assumption that you would do it if you did not know there was another choice. Frisk only ever unlearns their violent tendencies and biases towards monsters if you listen to what the game is telling you, and it’s why you don’t get any benefits from the Genocide Route. Frisk is enacting the role of oppressor in all runs of the game, but how they choose to wrestle with this internally determines how the game will go, and end.
Hello everyone! Welcome to my critique series on BFDI and disability representation. This is Part 2, a nightmare that is twice as long and twice as critical of the BFDI fandom than the first. It isn't necessary per se to read the first half of this "duology" but I highly recommend you do so anyway. As I talk there about how BFDI handles and portrays disability decently well, you'll better understand why the misrepresentation and outright erasure of disability in the community is so egregious.
To recap, the first part of this series established and explored the meaning of disability within the confines of BFDI. Having armless characters participating alongside nondisabled peers, though probably coincidental at first, becomes an integral element of the characters and how they interact with one another. For the most part, disability is consistently present but never unreasonably emphasized as something that others the characters; for a series with themes of togetherness, isolation, and interpersonal conflict, it allows disability to be an intrinsic and complex part of BFDI without calling special attention to it. When disability is set aside as a point of contention like with the character One, the show purposefully poses interpersonal and societal ableism as the problem, not the disabled character herself. It makes for a thoughtful consideration of all the ways in which disability is simultaneously a mundane reality of someone's life and, in some societies more than others, a sore point at which social inequity can rear its head to tragic consequence.
With BFDI's open acceptance of disability in mind, let's now move towards understanding the fandom side of things. This will be a looser, more opinionated exploration into common trends in object show fanart, which often eschew the realities of living with limb difference in favour of aesthetic, or normalcy, or...both. How, exactly, do these depictions misrepresent disability? What do prostheses really look like? Why are robot arms everywhere in media? What makes us so afraid of residual limbs? How do people without arms hold a spoon? Is Golf Ball left-footed or right-footed? How can I be more thoughtful with my fanart of armless characters? All this answered and more.
Part 2: The Object Show Enthusiast's Guide to Limb Difference, Prosthetic Limbs, and Disability (Mis)representation
An important limitation to reiterate: this is a study and critique on media representation of limb difference, not a personal report. In this part, I turn the camera outward from BFDI and toward its fandom and the broader media it uses as inspiration. Describing the general realities of prostheses and limb difference should elucidate the ableism in these spaces, clarify how people assume incorrect things about limb differences, and address why breaking the cycle of poor representation should be an active goal for all of us. Without a limb difference myself, I cannot provide personal experiences in my critique. For this exact reason, many first-person experiences inform my conclusions throughout and as I share them with you through quotes and sources, I recommend you take their lead. Keep in mind that people within a disability group have diverse and varied thoughts on literally everything you can have an opinion on, including how they feel about their own disabilities. It should go without saying, but if you've listened to one disabled person, you've listened to one disabled person. By and large, though, I have listened to many people with disabilities, including limb difference, who advocate against the prominence of the medical model of disability, opting instead to imagine disability through the social model. The social model of disability provides space for different bodies to exist and be accommodated without being pathologized and forced into unwanted apparati of cure. I believe the social model is crucial to changing how the nondisabled world thinks about disability, but it's not the only perspective that exists, and there is nuance. Understand the limitations therein.
2.1 Okay, What's Going on in the Object Show Community?
If you've searched around the Internet, you'll see a lot of different people making a lot of different things for object shows, from fanart to cosplay to fanfiction, their very own object shows, merch, and really anything else you can photoshop Pencil into. As is the case with anything boasting a large, non-human cast, a common trend among fans of object shows is to draw these objects as humans. Translating the simplicity of the objects into a human person is fun because it exercises a creative muscle: what parts of a character and their design are most important? How do these traits carry over from an abstract or simplified shape into a human form? Fans take different approaches to humanization, some opting to be more fanciful, leaning into costume and cliché, exaggeration like performance art (this form of flashy cuteness is a trademark of gijinkas as a specific form of anthropomorphization). Another way of anthropomorphizing characters is to translate them in terms of realistic human people, using the constraints therein as another pivot point for creativity. Still others make them half-objects, or aliens, or science fiction or fantasy heroes, and so on. I've seen it all, and it's wonderful. One of the strengths of BFDI's fandom, in this regard, is its sheer creative breadth, and while I have my own preferences in creating humanized objects, I recognize that all of these forms of expression add value to the collective space. I love that about this fandom.
In short, there isn't really any overarching "wrong way" to create human designs, because the goal has always been fun. If not fun, then creative practice. Either way, it's a good thing! This doesn't mean, though, that biases don't crop up in these creative exercises, nor are these biases exempt from criticism. I love this fandom's creativity, and I want to see it continue to flourish. But I don't think it can actually grow without some understanding of how ableist tendencies surface in the human designs, intentionally or not.
Something that will make this argument a little more difficult is that I cannot, with good conscience, start putting specific examples of fanart trends into this essay, so you'll have to go off of my own examples, which are composites of various things I've seen. The reasons should be self-evident, such as, y'know, not lambasting anyone for something they probably did without really thinking about it, and more importantly, many of these artists are children and teens who simply do not know better. If you need to, it shouldn't be too hard to explore the fandom space yourself (tags on Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube etc.) to get an idea of what exactly I am critiquing.
I can pinpoint the exact point at which my frustration, once an annoying but tolerable side effect of perusing fanwork online, boiled over into a scathing wish to change the way this fandom thinks about limb difference. Months ago, I came across a piece of fanart here on Tumblr. It was a lovely, well-rendered piece of two humanized objects in water, like at a beach or pool, having a great time together. One of them was a nondisabled character nonchalantly standing beside an armless character. And wouldn't you know it, there this armless character was, in the water, in a swimsuit, with arms that were grey and bolted. While one of these arms was lifted weightlessly above the character's head in a natural wave towards friends on the shore, the other hung down...into the water.
It was and still is a perfect encapsulation of everything I have a problem with. It was lovely art, thoughtfully put together, until...it baffled me. What even are these prosthetics? Why are they shaped exactly like flesh and perfectly attached to the character's limbs, just painted grey and jabbed with screws and plates? How are they even staying on their body? Why does this character have both of them on in the water? How are they moving them exactly like their friend's flesh arms? Is the action of waving so necessary that this creative liberty has to be taken? It's possible this was just a heavily traced or referenced piece which, that's fine, I get it. That's good. You can't grow as an artist without reference. But...can you grow as an artist if you refuse to portray a character with a limb difference?
To stop beating around the bush, this is one example of a pervasive trend in the BFDI (and wider object show) fandom space: drawing armless objects with arms. Sometimes these are flesh and sometimes these are covered with floppy sleeves, but more often than not I see so-called "prosthetic arms" only identifiable through an inorganic colour that suggests metal or plastic. To illustrate, I see three options for translation here:
While I see a fair share of the left and centre, the popular example on the right is usually the thing indicating that the object originally was armless, as they are depicted using these robot arms identically to their fleshy-armed peers. For example, you're redrawing a scene from TPOT with your human designs, but while translating Golf Ball holding a wrench with her foot, you adapt it into a human version of her using one of these arms to hold it instead. It might be easier to draw this while using a reference image with nondisabled people, but this isn't really engaging with the character, is it? Golf Ball doesn't use prostheses, she uses her feet or mouth to do everything throughout the series. In this fandom, I've seen creativity of adapting scenes from object to human form in spades. Yet I am always seeing that this is where people draw the creative line, this is where people stop following the series' lead on disability, this is where people stop engaging with and learning about the things they are trying to represent in their artwork. I want to dig into why.
Some folks have a kneejerk reaction when I say that it is misrepresenting limb difference. Something like this: well, those are prosthetic arms, right? So that's not erasure. They're still armless, they just wear prosthetics.
I really want people to think about this. Yes, it is absolutely still erasure. It is making disabled characters nondisabled with the caveat of an aesthetic overlay. Reality is not considered. Disability is not considered. The characters themselves are not considered. And I'm very, very tired of seeing it. I've seen the incredible love that this fandom puts into their creations! So much life is put into the characters from their outfits to their hair to the quirks in their mannerisms. It just pains me to see that this same love is not extended into appreciating the character for the disabilities they have, which, as I've discussed in part one, is something BFDI itself manages to do decently well.
I know that people can (and surely want to) do better about representing disability, and robot arms just aren't cutting it. So...what does? That's what this part aims to help with. Let's get there together.
2.2: How Prostheses Actually Work
To understand why the common prostheses that pop up all the time in BFDI fanart are inaccurate to real disability, we need to understand how prostheses and mobility devices work in real life. The thick of the issue is in the ways arm prostheses are misunderstood, but before we tackle that, I want to go over some info on leg prostheses and wheelchairs too. It involves simpler misconceptions to crack, and it will provide a decent launching point for learning about upper limb prostheses.
2.2.1 How leg prostheses and wheelchairs work
Though not as numerous as their armless-but-legged peers, many objects in BFDI lack legs. For some characters that can fly (Lightning, Cloudy, and Puffball), lacking legs is of no consequence in the source material, while other legless characters like Stapy and 8-Ball get around differently from their peers, hopping and rolling respectively. Artists in the BFDI fandom, when considering their object-to-human adaptation, go one of two routes: some fans who keep fantastical elements also keep the flight intact, while others, adapting them more fully to real human life, give them an assistive mobility device, usually either prosthetic legs or a wheelchair to get around. One of my favourites is the way Cabby from Inanimate Insanity is often designed, which is simply depicting her as a wheelchair user, and this makes sense, given she literally has wheels as an object! The same goes for some of the altogether limbless characters, who I have seen in various wheelchairs, although usually they are given arms against their explicit design--more on that later. Prosthetic legs seem less common, but they do appear here and there. The general portrayal of these characters is often closer to reality than depictions of armless characters, but I've nevertheless seen decisions that come across as more "random guess" than "informed portrayal," so I want to provide some resources for that.
The main job of leg prostheses is to bear a person's weight and allow them to stand and walk. Often times this replaces a leg that was amputated during a person's life, which is the vast majority cause of leg absence, but leg prostheses are also sometimes used for leg differences that are congenital (present at birth). These prostheses fall under three main categories: below-the-knee (BK), above-the-knee (AK), and hip disarticulation (HD) prostheses. As the names imply, the former has to recreate the ankle joint when someone walks, while the latter involves the knee joint in addition to the ankle. Both types involve lengthy processes of customization and training (socket fitting, joints, acclimatizing to how it works, etc.) and do not replicate the movement or speed of a "fleshy" limb one-to-one, but we've been making leg prostheses for a long time and have gotten very good at making them comfortable and competent for daily use. Still, having to replace the function of weight distribution and joint movement makes a prosthesis heavier and more energy-demanding for the person to use than a flesh-and-blood leg, increasingly so with more that is being replaced. Regardless of what type of prosthetic someone has, it's never going to be as easy to use as slotting it onto someone's residual limb like a lego, nor are prosthetic leg users going to be wearing their prosthetic all the time, certainly not when they're at rest. In any case, leg prostheses can help people immensely, allowing them to move around more easily in a world designed for two legs. In short, a leg prosthesis can replicate the function of a leg much more effectively than an arm prosthesis can replicate the function of an arm.
So, beloved artist, how do you make sure you design a prosthetic leg correctly? There are many types of prosthetic legs, but generally you want something reliable to use in daily life. You want to make sure it is secure on the body and can properly bear the weight and balance of the person who is using it. One frequent issue in depicting leg prostheses is the tendency to give a character a blade (or other specialized sport) prosthetic while they're just hanging out with their friends. Compared to an "everyday" prosthetic like the one on the left, blade prostheses are a specific type used for sport, storing energy in a springy, flexible "blade" that propels runners forward:
Blade prostheses look funky, but they are very good at doing a specific thing and not much else. Your character, should they use it in place of a simpler prosthetic leg, will find it hard to balance, walk for extended periods of time, and stand. So by all means consider it for a sporty character when they're in the middle of running, but it's going to look out of place in any other scenario. It's a small design consideration that goes a long way.
The area of prosthetic legs gets more complicated when all of the leg is absent up to the hip and torso. Prostheses for these types of amputations are indeed made and used, but their use is difficult and energy-intensive. It stands to reason that for a person without any legs at all, especially those born without the musculature and the physiology conducive to prosthetic use, another means of transportation will be a lot easier to adopt. Some people with unilateral (one-sided) amputations up to the pelvis use forearm crutches, although they present their own issues if overused.
As an aside, you may have seen news articles about people with paralysis using "exoskeletons" to walk, sometimes showing them scaling stairs or talking to a nondisabled person at that person's eye level. Is this the future? These articles of spectacle suggest so. It gives the impression that the boundary between "broken" and "normal" can be broached if only we put disabled folks in full electronic body suits that mirror the nondisabled body, if only we pump enough money into making them more technologically advanced. But I ask: are they even a feasible thing? Are they a necessary thing? Usually researchers admit to the viewer that it's still slow, imperfect, uncomfortable, and expensive, some for kids costing $100,000. After this confession, they handwave; after suggesting it couldn't be perfect, they affirm that it is nevertheless the ideal. They say people have to walk. They say it should be what all disabled folks strive for: to have bodies that can scale stairs.
Is it that hard to install a ramp?
Anyways, as you can imagine, these are largely garbage articles made to be inspiration porn for nondisabled people, so please don't go the exoskeleton route. Wheelchairs exist. And for wheelchairs, it's best to use reference images to get an idea of what your human might want to use. There are so many types of wheelchairs that it can be overwhelming, but you can explore websites that offer wheelchairs to get a feel for the variations, as well as pick up some reference images for practice. Many (but not all) wheelchair users consider their chair an extension of their body, so it's important to put effort into giving them something that is comfortable and specific to their disability. In general, a manual wheelchair is propelled by the person using it, while a powerchair (also called a power wheelchair) has a motor controlled by the user. Hospital transfer chairs are different from everyday out-and-about chairs and those are different from sport chairs. You don't want to accidentally give Lightning a transfer chair while he's hanging out with his friends! For characters without legs, the amount of surface area that they sit on is smaller, and so pressure sores are going to be a problem without proper cushioning and support. Make sure they're also not about to fall out of their chair!
The wheelchair on the left is a lightweight, sporty custom chair. Note the lack of armrests, as the person who uses this manually controls their wheels, which could be hampered by having something in the way of the hand rims. Of course, some people do prefer armrests! It depends on the person. The powerchair on the right is a heavy-duty mid-wheel drive model. You'll note it has plenty of back and head support, and in front of the right armrest, you'll see a joystick controller that allows the person using the chair to control it. This is one of the most common control schemes, but is by no means the only one. (given that the divine right of kings power of capitalism seems inescapable, many of these sites will have weird corpospeak and will try to shove products down people's throats, so be wary of that. But they're still useful as a place to get an idea of what chairs look like.)
Both types of chairs require some effort to draw properly, but this can be a fun way to customize for a specific character. For manual wheelchairs, think about their needs. Would extra back support help them, or do they prefer a low back? Armrests or no armrests? How are their wheels configured? How do they decorate their chair? There isn't really a single right answer as long as you consider the character's needs and what they would be most comfortable with and interested in using. The same thing can go for powerchairs, which are helpful for either limbless characters or those who can't or don't want to roll a chair manually. Aside from choosing the chair design, you can decide how they control it. There are websites and shops online that you can use as a launching point, for example here, here, and here, but in short, you can learn how people without hand access move in real life and get inspiration for how you want to design your humans. Do they control their chair through head movements, switch buttons, a small joystick, or breathing (sip-and-puff)? Also consider if they'd feel more comfortable with a buckle, harness, or bucket to sit in to keep them secure in their powerchair. I rarely ever see any powerchair users in media, so I hope everyone considers adapting the limbless objects into limbless people, or otherwise people with disabilities (quadriplegia, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and so on) that inhibit arm movement. Even rarer in media are assistants and caretakers for those without limbs, which could be a whole new topic of discussion, but in short they deserve to be normalized too. It shouldn't be news to say this, but people without use of limbs exist and live meaningful and joyful lives. They deserve to be shown alongside friends and peers, not the least because they are also friends and peers themselves.
(If you're curious about the cost of everything I've mentioned thus far, here are some numbers. Crutches are often used because they're cheaper: compare a $200 USD price tag for forearm crutches to basic wheelchairs costing at least $400, custom wheelchairs easily entering the thousands, and powerchairs in the $4,000s. Prosthetic limbs are even more expensive, with USD$4,000 as the cheapest baseline, increasing with level of amputation and rocketing up to $50,000 for fancy electronic control. Price might not be the first thing on your mind when it comes to mobility devices for your designs, but it's just something to think about if you want to, and it would feel irresponsible if these realities weren't brought up at all in this discussion.)
As you can see, legless and limbless objects can be translated into human people without erasing their disability, and knowledge of how these devices work in real life only adds to their creative potential. People have a tendency to view the ideal form of "human locomotion" as walking on two legs, but this is a social construct. Like I discussed in the first part, the issue of a person using a wheelchair isn't that they're using a wheelchair to get around, it's that the building they want to enter has a moat of stairs around it, or garbage bins in their neighbourhood are left out for collection in the middle of the sidewalk. This is where you should concentrate your creative liberties. Imagine a world not where people with disabilities don't exist, but where people can access the world regardless of how they move.
In general, I see in the BFDI space that legless characters are more carefully interpreted into humans with disabilities than their armless counterparts, and I'm suspecting several things as to why: the function of legs is more easily replaced than the function of arms and hands, and leg differences are more commonly encountered in real life than arm differences. When comparing the purpose of these leg and arm prosthetics, one is meant to bear a person's weight and allow them to move in some way, while the other is meant to supplant the function of a highly complex and dexterous part of the body, one that also carries immense social significance. People might still give a legless character metallic overlays on top of typically-shaped legs, and I've explained why I think that's careless, but because of the (comparative) simplicity of lower-limb prostheses, this depiction is still closer to reality than that same depiction with upper limb prostheses.
So, now, on the other hand, we have arm prostheses. Buckle up, because we're about to get into the weeds.
2.2.2 How arm prostheses work
A much larger group of characters than their legless counterparts, the armless characters throughout BFDI have had a place alongside their armed peers right from BFDI 1a. Most of my first part was explicitly about the armless characters in BFDI, so I don't need to repeat myself here, but when it comes to people adapting these armless objects into human beings, this is where so many hurdles appear. More often than not, "armlessness" as it shows up in real people is completely ignored in favour of "perfect" prostheses, magic robot limbs that attach seamlessly to their body and move seamlessly with it. But how accurate are these depictions? Let's see.
Like lower-limb prostheses, most upper-limb prostheses can also be described in terms of where on the arm the limb is absent, either a shoulder disarticulation (SD), above-the-elbow (AE), and below-the-elbow (BE); like leg prostheses, an increasing amount of joints to replicate makes the former two more complicated to implement than the latter. If we're talking functional control schemes, arm prosthetics can further be described through two main control schemes: body-powered control and myoelectric control. Body-powered prostheses use the movement of the residual limb or torso to manipulate a prosthetic arm, allowing users to perform simple "elbow" or "shoulder" flexion. Often this is to flex a hook attached to the end of the prosthetic limb, although other terminal devices exist. This type includes a harness system strapped to the body that uses a lever and pulley system to move the prosthesis. In contrast, myoelectric prostheses use electrodes attached to muscles, which sense muscle contractions (myo = muscle) and cause a response in the prosthetic limb, like opening or closing the prosthetic hand. This is not the same thing as "linking up" directly with the nervous system, it's just reading muscle contractions and responding according to how the device is programmed. Another way of thinking about it is that these prosthetics use the musculature of the patient as a "middle-man" between brain and prosthetic. As a result, there's more control over what the arm and hand can actually do than with body-powered prostheses, but there is still only so much dexterity that these arms provide. If we combine these two types of control schemes, we get a hybrid system of control, which allows for slightly more movement and motion than either of the control methods alone, but it also makes for the heaviest and most energy-demanding of them all. Linking prostheses fully into the nervous system of a patient is a science fiction pipe dream, if it's even a desirable thing at all.
Remember the exoskeleton blurb? It's kind of the same with "bionic" arms: these are fancy spectacles that exist to excite and reassure the nondisabled viewer that disability can be "conquered". Check absolutely any children's human body book with a "future tech" section and they'll display a shiny bionic arm and a smiling person attached to it, the hand cupped around an apple or a ball. They present it as cutting edge technology while conveniently omitting any practical discussion of its weight, its practicality, the training, the effort involved in getting it to grasp, or the relative ease with which a one-handed person could hold that same apple with their other hand--or someone without arms could use their feet or a foot-powered grabber to hold it. None of that would acceptable, would it? None of that is affirming the norm of needing two arms to be "normal." The result is that kids (and of course the adults they grow up to be) don't ever have to look at disabled bodies; they understand inherently that to be disabled is to be broken and are quickly reaffirmed that the end goal of disability is a return (or for someone with a congenital disability, a translation) to the ideal human form. As writer and amputee Ashley Shew puts it in Against Technoableism, "disability is painted only as a tragedy and is used as a backdrop for stories of tech-driven intervention and subsequent redemption" (53). The result is a cultural reinforcement of arm difference as a problem to be "solved" with more and more technological progress.
A crucial thing is ignored in so many representations of prosthetic arms, both in fictional media and in cherry-picked "bionic arm" articles: prosthetic arms have considerable drawbacks. Body-powered prosthetics are the lightest, cheapest, and simplest to use, but they only perform simple motions and their harnesses can get uncomfortable. Myoelectric prostheses, often touted as these high-tech "bionic" arms, offer more actions, but they are heavy electronic devices that need to be charged regularly, programmed for the user, and repaired should anything with its computer or mechanical systems go awry. Britt H. Young, a writer living with a congenital limb difference, has written several pieces on her experience with "bionic" arms. Though she has an expensive and high-tech prosthetic, she finds it easier to live using her residual limb to help her with tasks. Here, she describes her new prosthetic arm as "heavy as hell" and "exhausting" to use as more than an occasional "party trick." Tumblr user submalevolentgrace describes her experience similarly, saying that "myo prostheses are a hassle to put on, often taking several attempts to get positioning right, it's hot and sweaty, there can be pressure sores, and it's real heavy in a way your shoulder never really gets used to." Similarly, hybrid prostheses, though adding further motion, are the largest burden to carry on the body, having both harnesses and heavy electronic components. For situations where the entire arm is missing, a harness must be used regardless of its type to keep it secured to the body. I should mention an up-and-coming type of socketing for prosthetic arms--osseointegration--that eliminates the need for harnesses. However, this procedure requires invasive bone implants that can get infected and commitment to keeping it in working order, and there are too many unknowns right now to assess its benefits long-term (Al-Tameemi et al., 2025). Regardless, for someone with a bilateral arm absence, prostheses would offer a setup that is extraordinarily heavy, uncomfortable, takes forever (and requires external help!) to put on and take off, and is, for someone who has learned how to take their time and use their feet to manipulate things, ultimately pointless.
All prostheses, regardless of type, also face issues of proprioception. The bulk of a prosthetic arm is a somewhat lesser problem for people who acquire a limb difference, as their brains are still technically wired for an arm or hand even if it no longer exists (which is why phantom pain is a problem for amputees). However, for people with congenital arm absence, there was never an arm to begin with and so a bulky prosthetic arm is not easily going to register as part of one's own body. Imagine strapping two clunky weights on both sides of your body and trying to navigate around your house. You're going to bump into things, you're going to feel unnecessarily weighed down, and the lack of dexterity, precision, and speed will make for more frustration in using them than satisfaction in what they can accomplish. You also have to pay full attention to what the prosthetic hand is doing, as you don't have the subtle proprioceptive and haptic feedback of flesh. All of these drawbacks considered, most people without an arm or two do not use prosthetic arms. Furthermore, many people who do end up getting prosthetics fitted ditch them. High-quality medical studies of upper-limb absence are scarce, but one claims that up to 50% of people with upper limb differences ditch their prostheses (Riccardo et al., 2025). Though limited in scope, another study finds that dissatisfaction with prostheses is even higher in people with more proximal (closer to the body) amputations (Resnik et al., 2024). This shouldn't be surprising: prosthetic arms are heavy and uncomfortable, they simply don't have the dexterity or speed that would make them useful, and this only compounds the more of an arm you try to replicate.
Just as leg prostheses are expensive, the complexity of arm prostheses makes them even more so. Many different numbers float around the web, but according to two websites, prostheses start around the low-thousands range for cosmetic (i.e. nonfunctional) prostheses and can reach up to $100,000 dollars (and beyond!) for myoelectric and hybrid ones. Insurance might help if you've got it, but these hefty price tags block access for the vast majority of people for whom these prostheses are advertised. Because consistent prosthetic usage also requires training, repairs, and replacements down the line, more and more money is needed to keep using them. If osseointegration has a heftier price tag too, imagine how expensive future tech with its bells-and-whistles and neural linkage would be too. This billion dollar industry and its pursuit for the golden egg of prosthetic technology might literally not be worth it. Who, at this point, are these devices actually helping?
These are the basics of how arm prostheses work. As you can see, the types of "robotic" arms that some folks tend to give their BFDI human designs do not exist and can really break the immersion of an otherwise solid character design. Prosthetic arms can be useful in very specific circumstances when used as very specific tools for specific limb configurations, but for the majority of people with upper-limb difference--those fully without arms especially--prosthetic arms just aren't necessary. They don't have a worthwhile benefit. At worst, they can be more disabling. And yet our obsession with giving fictional characters robot arms, let alone real prosthetic arms, doesn't reflect this reality at all.
Given the advice I provided in the section on lower-limb absence, you might now be expecting a flow into practical advice for how you could represent correct arm prostheses in your work. I will get into that in a bit, but...not yet. Instead, I want to dig a little deeper. I'll start by asking a question: if these bulky, frustrating devices are often ditched by their users or never used at all, why do we still see them touted as necessary for people with limb differences? In fact, why do we see these egregiously inaccurate "robo-arms" everywhere?
Asking ourselves what it means to be "missing" an arm will make the problem with "perfect" prostheses that much clearer.
2.2.3: When you see an arm, what do you see?
How we see prosthetic arms is deeply influenced both by the poor portrayals of limb difference in media and the misconceptions that manifest in the real world. Our assumptions that they are essential to someone with a limb difference, despite the reality of their use, come from media portrayals that assert a particular narrative.
Fictional depictions usually ignore the basic reality of arm prostheses as situational tools, instead assuming them to be complete replacements. As an example, Vriska Serket's prosthetic arm in Homestuck looks and acts exactly the same as the arm she lost, just with plates and a metallic hue. This is Homestuck, so expecting careful representation is like losing at chess to a dog, but it's just an example of the abundant low-effort prostheses you see here and there. Another more unanimously-adored example is Finn from Adventure Time, who has to contend with losing his arm several times. As promptly as he loses it, he receives either a magical or mechanical "replacement" that he can immediately manipulate with little issue. Homestuck and Adventure Time set a lower bar compared to a less cartoony, more "serious" show like Fullmetal Alchemist or a live-action portrayal like Star Wars, but funnily enough these examples also have the same general problem when it comes to prosthesis portrayal: Edward Elric and Luke Skywalker each have a "perfect" prosthetic arm. Yes, Edward's arm has to be repaired and phantom pain plagues him, but Edward is ultimately able to control this prosthetic arm with the dexterity of his amputated arm, indeed surpassing it outright in terms of strength. Because it has the exact same shape as a flesh-and-blood arm, he can also hide its metal appearance when he has his gloves on. Say what you want about the show itself being great, but this just isn't a prosthetic arm in any realistic sense.
When you allow these supernatural prostheses to flood the media, you create and reinforce a fantasy of what prostheses are, or should be like, in real life. It's fiction, yes, but it also isn't. It's never going to be that simple. Not only does it provide viewers inaccurate ideas of real prosthetics, it judges what should be desirable for the disabled body. It tells the disabled viewer that her body is broken and needs to be changed to fit a norm, simultaneously reassuring the nondisabled viewer that her body, the one that does not "need fixing," is that norm. By, say, concluding a series with the amputee character "earning" their flesh limb back, we implicitly accept the notion that at a societal level, if we could whisk away the problem of amputation and congenital limb difference altogether, we would do so without a second thought. Remember what Emily Leduc in Disfigured said about disability as a symbol of narrative consequence? How in stories as old as time, disability vanishes once the symbol has been vanquished and the lesson has been learned? Yeah, there it is again. Edward gets his arm back because the story is over. There is no room for disability anymore. Symbolic lack, an imperfection in character, or a transgression, has been corrected, the reward doled out. The fiction of perfect mechanical arms might seem like cool transhumanism on its surface, but if you peel back the robotic facade, you'll find flesh.
Even fully in reality, we take disability to be a curse. In some respects, this can be linked to the Christian/Western belief in humanity as a "designed" thing, something created by an upper power to be a certain way, meaning any aberration to that supposed blueprint is a defect that should be fixed. But I don't know, this is the same thinking in a white Western culture that assumes women to be lesser, people of colour to be lesser, gay folks to be lesser, and so on. This same sentiment flourishes today in systemic ableism. There is nuance to feeling "incomplete" in individuals who have to deal with traumatic loss of function, such as losing a limb, and I don't want to discredit that. It can be hard, and it involves so much adaptation and acceptance that things must be done differently. But the way people react to this life change is itself informed by what we internalize, from our social context, about becoming disabled: we internalize that becoming disabled is a loss of personhood. In Brilliant Imperfection, writer Eli Clare describes the ideology of "cure" as it pertains to the complexities of disability. Of this societal pursuit for cure, he says that "it grounds itself in an original state of being, relying on a belief that what existed before is superior to what exists currently...it seeks to return what is damaged to that former state of being" (15). In other words, the only way to restore personhood and wholeness in an acquired disabled life is to reverse time and recreate the old, rather than adapt into the new with the understanding that the body inevitably changes and grows over the course of a life. It reinforces that there is a single kind of body that is ideal, and all those that "fall short" of this ideal ought to pursue it if they want to be deemed complete human beings.
Turn to congenital limb difference, and the idea of being incomplete makes even less sense. Nondisabled folks tend to assume that people born without an arm or two are born immediately into a lesser life, "missing" something that they should have had, but is there anything really saying they should have been able-bodied other than socially constructed norms? It's literally the only life they've ever known. Clare, who has cerebral palsy, further elaborates on "cure" in context with people born with disabilities like himself. He notes that in this framework, an "original nondisabled state of being doesn't exist. How would I, or the medical-industrial complex, go about restoring my body-mind? The vision of me without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and coordination doesn't originate from my visceral history. Rather it arises from an imagination of what I should be like, from some definition of normal and natural" (Clare 15). Applying this rhetoric to arm difference, is a body that has never lived with an arm really even missing something? Is a person who has grown up and learned to live with one or no arms cursed to be forever incomplete? Or is it our notion of how people "should" live or what people "should" have that needs to be rejected? Indeed, I reject the notion that someone born without limbs is not a whole person with a whole body. It's their body. It's ludicrous. If a nondisabled human in our world were whisked away and raised in a society where humans are born with wings and can fly, an ableist social structure here will teach this person that they are defective and assume their life to be miserably limited--"look! They can't scale tall cliffsides, reach these top shelves, or glide off the mountaintop! How sad!" Where in one framework their body was "whole," in another framework it's suddenly incomplete, "missing" something. Their body has not changed; only the expectations of the society have.
This push of what constitutes a "whole" body leads to beliefs that these criteria of wholeness must be met at all costs. Even if they're nonfunctional and uncomfortable, some people that use prosthetic arms "report a preference for devices that resemble natural limbs, citing the goal of going unnoticed" (Andreia et al., 2026). These exact principles of defect and wholeness influence this pressure; to be visibly armless in public is to expose yourself as different, and in an ableist culture that devalues disability, onlookers reflexively squeeze your very personhood into an assumption made through that difference. I don't blame the people who wear cosmetic limbs--it can be brutally difficult to experience ostracization, because people want to feel that they belong. But again, my critique of prostheses isn't with a woman who is concerned about upsetting her boss by not wearing a prosthetic arm, I'm prodding the culture that makes her boss scared to see her body without it, and I want to ask what it might take to change that. Submalevolentgrace sums her experience in public with a prosthetic arm like this: "I am treated more like a human being while wearing a bulky robot claw with electrodes pressed into my skin, than when I dare to exist as I now naturally am" (post). What is reinforced, then, in our own depictions of disability? When people continue to portray armless people with prostheses as the "right" type of disabled, are we not just reinforcing that their natural state is defective and needs to be fixed? What happens when our derision forces people to cover who they are, keep their body away from sight? Is it more comforting to see prostheses because we don't have to question how people have different bodies and have different ways of doing things? Is it uncomfortable to be reminded that bodies can change throughout life? What if, instead of judging someone with a residual limb as broken, we see them as a person and move on with our lives, unbothered, accepting? Especially when we do not have limb differences ourselves, we have a responsibility to challenge the ableism underpinning our beliefs. Being more considerate in how we portray people without arms is a good start. We should not force people into a mould that is more comfortable for us; we need to meet people where they, and their bodies, are most comfortable.
As an aside, consider who benefits from the continual push for prosthetic and bionic arms as a cosmetic necessity rather than a tool. According to Britt Young in another article, "some prosthetic startups are pitching a subscription model, in which users continue to pay for access to repairs and support." This is obviously something to blame on nightmare capitalism more than prosthetic limbs (and make no mistake, this already happens with other medical technology) but it presents a troublesome conundrum: while many medical devices are useful for people, the industry in other respects is inseparable from its capital gains. If you, a person without arms, learn that it is wrong to find other ways to do things with your body--that you must learn how to use prosthetics regardless of the cost or your comfort--then you will buy into this technology that companies swear you need at all times, you will keep giving them your money to keep it from breaking, and there's no guarantee to what happens after that company inevitably goes under. The billions of dollars being pumped into this industry do not follow disabled activists, nor advocates for the social disability model, because it doesn't make money. Acceptance would mean flushing a lot of this capital away into obscurity, so if they can make money by telling people with limb differences they are either permanent customers or they're worthless in the eyes of the world, that's the narrative they're going to pursue.
Every person with a limb difference is going to have a unique body and relationship to said body, so I don't want to conclude that arm prostheses are wholly negative. They simply can't be. Task-specific prostheses can be useful for people, in particular those who have lost an arm during their life, and they provide the most help when they are understood as valuable tools for performing, again, these specific tasks--think rowing, cycling, or showering. This isn't a critique about personal choices to use a tool, it's a critique against societal biases that incorrectly see this tool as a replacement and a replacement as necessary. Shareholders who pour money into prosthetics might push back against this reality, insisting that to refuse prostheses is to fail, is to have a broken body, is to suffer. This couldn't be further from the truth. Things aren't always going to be sunshine living in a world that expects two functional hands, sure, but the worst suffering is not because of the body itself but a world that shuns and others the disabled body, restricts their participation, and compares them relentlessly to their own fictional ideals. People with limb differences do not suffer when they are allowed to learn about, adapt to, and love their own bodies. They do not suffer when the world gives space for them to do things the way that makes sense for them. They do not suffer when they are allowed to face the world with visibly disabled bodies, neither being diminished by expectations nor harassed as if performing a spectacle for the nondisabled gaze. They deserve nothing less than being met, with acceptance, support, and nonchalance, where they're at.
In short, prosthetic arms are not going to reach the dexterity and manipulation of fleshy arms, nor are they going to mimic the robot ones we see everywhere in fiction. That is okay. They're going to be bulky, annoying, and expensive the more they mimic the precision of fleshy arms. That is okay. Many people will find using their residual limbs or feet to finagle tasks is easier and connects them more closely to their own bodies, and if they cannot do something on their own, they have people they trust who can help them out. That is okay.
Robot arms may never exist. And you know what? That is okay. Arms aren't vital organs.
2.3 Returning to BFDI
Fandom rehashing of age-old ableism is almost never done intentionally, but when we operate in a system of oppression that surrounds everything we believe and everything we see in our media, poor portrayals are plentiful and, unless they remain unquestioned, will continue to be made. Between magic robot arms on heroes and inspiration porn news articles on TV, we internalize two assumptions about arm difference: a) that arm absence is, or will be, easily eliminated with advanced technology, and b) all arm difference should be eliminated, because living without an arm let alone two is, in this framework, to be "stuck" in a body that cannot live a full life. It should be clear now that neither of these assumptions are true, but there's a reason such a disability-positive show as BFDI nevertheless spawns a fandom with these implicit beliefs: it's culturally embedded in all of us. Let's focus back on the image we put a pin in earlier, the one illustrating how armless and limbless characters are often portrayed.
It should be clearer now why these "robo-arms" are a misguided attempt at trying to represent prosthetic arms: they're just not prosthetic arms. I don't believe this is ever portrayed to erase limb difference, and I recognize these are good-faith attempts at acknowledging the "armlessness" of these characters. But it doesn't mean it isn't still an ableist thing to do, representing prostheses incorrectly and reinforcing the norm of what people "should" look like, i.e. either being or appearing nondisabled. Additionally, we can take what we have learned here and assess the fandom depictions of one other character: One.
One's lack of arms is central to her overarching narrative. In-universe, the yoylelite grants her the ability to hold and lift things she couldn't or didn't know how to before, and this is important to consider in her relationship between herself, her disability, and the way she (mis)treats and is (mis)treated by the other algebraliens. Importantly, One is never shown conjuring phantom arms to perform this lifting and holding, she just uses her mind and occasionally forces things around with her foot. Yet just like the common depiction of objects with "robo-arms," I see a lot of One humanizations translating this telekinesis into "magic hands," usually one of two ways here:
Surely I can't blame people for adding her magic into their designs. It's fun magic, right? It's stylish. Mona, do you hate fun? No! But we've trodden this ground before, haven't we? The trend here still falls into a very specific shape of disability erasure in that it reinforces a certain attainable ideal: the nondisabled, two-armed body is the one that all disabled characters aim to replicate. Just as the objects are never shown using prostheses in the show itself, One is never shown forming arms out of ghost material to hold things. Yet in both of these circumstances, artists find it necessary to take these disabled characters and push them from having a body they (unconsciously or consciously) find unappealing and don't appreciate or respect into something they do: disabled to nondisabled, unsightly to endearing. "Magic" means you now have the capacity to get rid of a disability in any way possible, and, as I have explained by now, that reflex, the one that wants to snuff out seeing and accepting and portraying disability, is crystal-clear ableism. I know that a lot of the time it is unintentional and unconscious, but at the end of the day, these unconscious decisions are informed by the systemic devaluing and dismissal of disability and we need to actively work to uncover them.
Now, to be generous, I might consider it in-character for One to want to erase her own disability and give herself arms, given her internalized ableism. She has subconsciously accepted the social belief that her lack of arms means she is broken, or that she is inferior to the other algebraliens and cursed to be ostracized without mercy. It would make sense for her to give herself arms, then. But she doesn't. They would be annoying. Like I said before, her own interaction with the yoylelite power undermines her own belief in herself as inferior; she can still do powerful things that the others do with their own yoylelite power, she just uses her mind and her feet to do it, as that is what she has used all her life. In short, she doesn't use arms or make arms because they aren't useful to her. Whether she realizes it or not, she is doing what makes the most sense and is most familiar to her body.
BFDI explicitly recognizes that these armless characters are disabled. Understanding this and adapting these disabled characters into disabled humans is unquestionably the best way to celebrate this aspect of the show. And, knowing what we know now about arm prostheses, we can think more critically about our culture's "bionic arm" obsession and subvert these tired tropes to represent disability more truthfully. The most considerate way to adapt armless characters into human people, all of this considered, is to just...let them be armless.
But, well, look again up there at One's example, then the objects. Regardless of what happens in the show itself, regardless of whether or not magic arms exist, regardless of whether or not prosthetic arms are even helpful to real human beings, artists seem to go any length to draw explicitly armless characters with arms in one way or another, almost like it's harder not to. It's disheartening. This is a reflection of systemic ableism in the individual choices people make with their art, sure, but what does this actually mean? What exactly is stopping people from keeping an armless character armless, and how can we make it so the task of portraying accurate disability is less daunting?
I have some suspicions. Here are three things in particular that I assume stop people from ditching these representations.
1. The realistic portrayal of disability is not important because it's just a fictional/fantasy/sci-fi setting
I get the urge to reject realism for the sake of convenience, but by transforming every disabled object into either a fundamentally nondisabled human or functionally nondisabled human through "perfect prostheses", you are ignoring a major part of their character identity while simultaneously telling real people that their lived experiences do not matter. Again, I know it isn't intentional, but this is the systemic understanding of disability this reinforces. It asserts that the best case scenario for all people with limb differences is to have their disability removed altogether. It's not the most common disability, but plenty of people live with the limb differences you're assuming aren't important. You should consider it important to represent correctly, not just for those people but also for the wider disability community that wants people to see physically disabled lives, shown as they are, as valuable.
2. Drawing or seeing a person without arms makes people sad/uncomfortable/other negative emotion
This is a prejudiced way of thinking, but again, it's the kind of emotional response to disability we learn right from babyhood. You might feel uncomfortable seeing someone without arms or watching someone in a powerchair roll around in public, but ask yourself: what about this person is making me uncomfortable, and why? Do they make me sad? Am I just assuming their life is sad because they're disabled? Would I be making these same snap judgments to a nondisabled passerby? You cannot assume anything about a person's quality of life or happiness, struggles or misfortunes, just by looking at them. That's why part of the solution to fight ableist representation in media is normalizing disability. That can begin with you. Depict these disabilities in a wide variety of circumstances and show that they're a mundane part of a character's life. Disabilities can be neutral and flexible traits, sometimes annoying or painful, maybe, but sometimes joyful and positive too, especially when they have other folks with disabilities to interact with, which BFDI offers. It would be weird to assume anything about someone, good or bad, from a quick glance at their glasses (a disability aid!) or their curly hair or dimples, right? It should be the same here. I hope one day we can see disabilities like limb difference as things people just happen to deal with or have, just as they have freckles or brown eyes.
3. People have a difficult time understanding how one could do things without arms
This is, I think, the epicentre. This is what I imagine is the number one thing stopping people from drawing armless humanizations, and I can see why: it's not easy to figure this out if you've grown up using your arms and seeing others use their arms to do things, but you also can't really figure it out without learning from folks with arm differences. The very short answer is that lots of things can be done without arms or hands. Given the support and opportunity to do so, people without arms figure it out just fine. Take it from real human people.
Most people of course are just regular folks without Wikipedia articles, but here is a short list of some public figures who do things without arms. There are two paralympic archers, Sheetal Devi and Matt Stutzman, who were born without arms and are proficient archers; Stutzman also participates professionally in motorsports. There are swimmers, runners, actors, pro-life religious guys, mountain climbers, makeup influencers who are also transgender women you love to see it, pianists, pilots that are also black belts, random Canadian radio guys, you name it, people are people. Mark Goffeney, Felix Klieser, and Pascal Kleiman, a guitarist, horn player, and DJ, respectively, use their feet to play their instruments. Painters both hundreds of years ago and alive today have painted with either their feet or their mouth. Alison Lapper, a British artist, uses her mouth to paint professionally and has raised a son against the belittling and demeaning objection of family and health professionals. She tragically lost her son to an accidental overdose in 2019, but she continues to make art as a way of healing from that grief. She says this about being raised in an institution and forced into prosthetic arms, which especially back then felt stifling:
I started working with colour and pens and pencils at the age of about three, and there is some film footage of me on a cine camera with me with pens in my feet and they were trying desperately hard to put the pens in my artificial limbs that I was wearing and I didn't want to.
I think the other thing that sticks in my mind as well, when I had these arms on and I was sitting on the floor I picked up the doll exactly the same way as 35 years later I picked up my own baby.
I find that really quite phenomenal because they were trying to change the way that I did things, so that it fitted society. (link to transcript for the video; emphasis mine)
The point in detailing all these folks who live with limb difference isn't to treat them as spectacle, it's to emphasize that people with these disabilities are not hypothetical but real, complex human beings living complex human lives. When Golf Ball writes and draws with her feet and holds a key in her mouth, it's literally the sort of thing armless people do in real life. BFDI never treats these actions as special because they're done with feet; they aren't special at all, they're just what Golf Ball does when she wants to write or draw or unlock a door. It's not like the person without arms is painting with her foot to prove a point or pose for a camera, she's painting with her foot because she likes to paint. Goffeney didn't play guitar with his feet to be special, he played guitar because he loved to make music and shred some chords in the process. The way people with limb differences live their lives doesn't exist for nondisabled people to judge against the nondisabled majority, it should be theirs alone to create. We ought to respect that and meet them where they are.
When considered at large, nondisabled people usually divide their conception of people with limb difference into poles: either claiming that they can do everything nondisabled folks can do, or they can't. It should be obvious that it's more complicated than that. To be sure, many armless folks can't do everything that people with two functional arms can, but so many actions requiring two are either unnecessary or can be adapted to better fit how one's body works. One of the most absurd things I've come across in my research is an example of an activity of daily living (ADL) that amputees and people with arm differences cannot do, cited in reference to quality of life. The example? Amputees can't pass "a 20-pound turkey or ham" around the dinner table (Andreas et al. 2026). Big whoop? Seriously, you can't even do that if you have wrist issues. I know this is an example of a more generic ability (being able to hold something heavy), but it exemplifies the ableism that medicine upholds when these ADLs are treated as inflexible measures of quality of life. Instead of accepting alternative ways of doing things, getting someone else's help with little things here and there, or really asking if a certain task is necessary at all, medicine insists that disabled folks must replicate the exact nondisabled ideal. To them, what matters most is that you use prosthetic arms to hold a turkey on a big plate, exactly as a nondisabled person might. There is no room for, say, going to the store to get a rotisserie chicken, putting smaller cuts in the oven on a sheet that you can manipulate more easily with your feet, or even just getting assistance from someone who knows your limitations. Once again, the disabled body is judged against what it cannot do and blamed for falling short of the nondisabled standard, even when there are so many ways these "problems" can be solved or sidestepped. Personally, I think you and your family will survive just fine if you're not heaving entire beasts around the kitchen table every day.
It should matter to you to keep disabled object show characters as disabled, because it shows that limb difference is not something to obfuscate for the sake of an audience that gets "uncomfortable" when they see a character without arms. Limb differences exist, and it's just normal life for so many people. Sure, people have to do things differently or get extra help, but that shouldn't influence any value placed on their lives. BFDI itself understands this so well: it doesn't whittle characters down to their disabilities nor erases them altogether, and it refuses to construct character arcs around "cure" of disability as is so brutally common in media. This perspective is helped by the open-ended nature of the show, but it's also an active choice for the writers to continue to portray these disabled characters as equal participants alongside their nondisabled peers. It's even rarer to see characters with limb difference exist without a need or longing for prostheses, either, and I want to reiterate that BFDI handles this with surprising realism. Remember what I said about Golf Ball in the first part? Golf Ball has moments of understandable frustration grumbles, especially when her needs aren't being met, but if she wanted to "fix" herself, she would have done so by now with the robot arms she has already created. She hasn't; she doesn't need to and she shouldn't need to. She is a whole person, and all her fellow limb-different contestants are as well. Nobody really needs them in a world where their bodies are accepted and considered, and funnily enough, I think in between bouts of cartoony murder and chaos, BFDI offers in this framework a glimpse into a kinder world.
So, where does all of this leave us as artists and creators? I have a proposition: because so many object characters have absent limbs that can translate to real human limb absence, this fandom space is uniquely equipped to combat these exact biases pushed in other media by following the lead of our inspiration.
So...no more robot arms. Let yourself find creativity and joy in representing disabled characters as they are.
2.4 Putting Knowledge into Practice
Before I finally talk about how prosthetic arms can be portrayed in object show community fanart, I want to reiterate that we should prioritize getting more comfortable with seeing limb difference as it is and stop expecting people with limb differences to conform their bodies to what nondisabled folks perceive as normal. I'm relieved if I can help people add realistic prostheses to their human designs, but I also hope it's evident that no prostheses at all is the best option for your characters. If you find you still hesitate to ditch the prostheses and feel more comfortable seeing armless objects as human characters with arms, I implore you to ask why. Why default to prosthetics? Is it easier to adapt reference images, which rarely show disabled bodies? Is it just more comfortable to see someone with a "normal" body? Whose comfort is worth more: your character, or you? You should be representing upper limb difference in your BFDI human designs, and it's important to do it right, even if it means uprooting some subconscious ableism along the way.
Regardless of whether you decide to show them or not, arm prostheses will be uncommon, because while many people don't use prostheses at all, the people that do never wear them all the time. It'd be like holding a wrench in your hands at all times: might be great for loosening a nut, but you're otherwise simply lugging around a tool you don't need. Remember that the more of the arm you want to "replace" with a prosthesis, the heavier and more involved wearing it will be. Though there are now myoelectric prosthetic arms that attach all the way up to the shoulder that require fewer harness straps, they're still going to be heavy and their dexterity and speed don't parallel that of a fleshy arm. The most important thing to remember, though, is that proprioception will hamper usability no matter what type of prosthetic it is. For people without arms, especially from birth who are used to having nothing there, adding large attachments onto your body to then have to manage without knowing where they are is exhausting. People tend to draw prostheses as though they are literal extensions of the human body/nervous system, and while this would be helpful, that's just not at all how they work. In many cases, they feel heavy and get in the way so much that the minor benefits don't outweigh the plethora of problems that most folks experience.
Here's an example of a character with a prosthetic. My human take on Price Tag has no left arm and a transradial (below-the-elbow) limb absence on their right arm. Now, If I were to think of a "full" prosthetic setup for Taggy, it would look something like this:
Their right arm here is a very expensive myoelectric arm with electrodes attached to their residual limb, meaning they would be able to grip and move their robotic hand. Their left prosthetic arm is a cheaper body powered prosthetic with simple dexterity. While this setup technically fulfills the "two arms" ideal, this doesn't exactly look that comfortable, does it? Because their left arm is completely absent, a full shoulder prosthetic is going to be very uncomfortable and relatively pointless. As a matter of personal preference, I think Taggy likes using a prosthetic on their right arm when they're out and about and want to do things with their hook, so when they're using this prosthetic arm they're wearing it like this:
Now, when it comes to a more "magical" character like One, you really don't have to give her magic phantom arms at all. In fact, she's probably the easiest for people to translate into a human, because it's the exact same thing: it's literally just telekinesis.
You can ultimately adapt the objects and numbers into humans how you want, of course. I'm not your mom, or a cop, or whatever, nor are my examples prescriptive. I'm just concerned about people burying their faces in their own biases against people appearing disabled, and I think it's easy for people to hide their discomfort behind aesthetic. Magic arms might seem like a prettier aesthetic for a magical character, but I really want people to ask themselves if they're giving her arms subconsciously to suggest some form of ability and "correction" to a body with a limb difference. Same goes for objects. Is it more "aesthetic" to be nondisabled? Or can you challenge yourself to change the way you see aesthetic? Can you adapt your aesthetic vision with their disability still accepted as a part of who they are? Again, I've seen the creative brilliance of this fandom. I know that you can.
(Also, just to get this out of the way, I really wish people would stop being so weird about feet and people using their feet to do things. I get that there's a lot of cultural baggage with how we understand feet as unclean things that people think are gross, but hands deal with their own share of disgusting stuff and we trust that people wash them when they should. This is a can of worms, so I'd rather not get into it, but I will say this: at some point you have to acknowledge that feet are just limbs some people use in various ways to do what they want to do. That's all they are. You don't need to call attention to them to represent people accurately, but you can't be acting, in the same vein, like drawing them or seeing them in any capacity is obscene. It's offensive and annoying.)
Anyway, here's where I stand with translating objects into humans--again, not prescriptive, but an example of what you can do to implement disability into your creative work. Personally, I take a pretty literal approach to human designs. If they're armless objects, they're armless humans; limbless objects, limbless humans. Further, my humans have either never used prostheses to begin with, only use them for certain tasks, or have ditched them altogether for an easier way of doing things. Especially in a community like the one the objects have in BFDI, not having arms is something many characters can relate to one another about, and I'm sure they share ways of doing things and commiserate when something's annoying them. If I'm showing these characters doing something as humans, they're just going to do stuff with their feet or their mouth.
Another layer: I consider the kind of object they are and translate that into a human form, considering what their body type is like. You may have guessed this already, but I adapted Price Tag's string, which acts as a simplified limb, into their right arm. Considering that their string resembles the kind of hooks that appear as terminal devices on body-powered prostheses, I imagine they often use a BE body-powered prosthesis because they simply like using the hooks for their hobbies. I also see them wanting to try a myoelectric prosthesis down the road, maybe saving up for the hefty price tag on those too! With other objects, I explore a lot of other ways congenital limb difference occurs. Clock has phocomelia, which is the congenital absence of arms but the presence of the hands attached against the shoulder. Gaty has two little fingers on her right side to represent her hinges; vestigial fingers occur in a lot of congenital arm absences in real life. Foldy has the top of her humerus on both sides, giving her short residual limbs, Clapboard has one arm that stops after his elbow like Price Tag, and Cloudy has a small part of his left and right arm that allows him to pilot a powerchair with a joystick. Puffball doesn't have use of her limbs or voice due to a genetic disorder, and as I mentioned before, Stapy has one leg (his right leg) and uses crutches and a wheelchair depending on mood and what he's doing that day. There is a lot of variety in how limb difference occurs in real life, so I'm happy to reflect that with the objects as inspiration.
Everyone else? They have absent limbs, depending on if that's legs, or arms, or both. Wheelchairs and power chairs help immensely as a means of mobility for the few characters without legs; Lightning uses a lightweight, sporty custom chair while out, though at home he usually just gets around on his arms. There's really no reason to give the armless characters prosthetic arms as, like I have thoroughly discussed, they would be immensely annoying to use. Among such a large community of disabled characters, too, I imagine there's less pressure to cover or try to diminish being openly disabled, and I like to imagine a world where "cosmetics" that really just benefit nondisabled people do not have to exist. Seriously, I cannot overstate how important their community, having so many people with a shared disability, would be for their capacity to exist as visibly and openly disabled. So community is a major theme of BFDI, so it is a major theme in how I see them living as humans too. Community is everything.
Given she's been in several examples throughout this essay, you might be curious about my take on Golf Ball, known inventor of machines and gadgets. I sincerely doubt that Golf Ball would use prosthetic arms for anything. She just wouldn't. Remember what I said about proprioception? That's the key, there's not going to be proprioception in any prosthetic across the board, and she is the type who especially values precision and control when building her inventions. Why would she choose clunky things of metal or plastic over the feet she already has, which she easily knows the location of given they're part of her body? I'm sure after some intense bout of frustration, she might try and make arm prostheses for herself, but her frustration wouldn't get better. She'd immediately find them cumbersome, impractical, and in any case inadequate. She's proficient with her feet! She can write, she can draw, she can use a power drill, she can do so much already, and she and Tennis Ball share a common disability that allows them to synergize and understand one another so profoundly. To assume that she must nevertheless try to change herself to be more like her able-bodied peers is to neglect that she is not like them, and not being like them is not a bad thing. If she can do these things her way, why change that for some perceived norm, even if it isn't the norm for her? (and all this goes for many of these characters, Tennis Ball and Basketball included!)
If you're still stuck wondering how people live without arms, here are some resources and ideas for consideration. Always remember that residual limbs if present, and feet and mouths, are probably the answer for a lot of your questions, as this is how many people with bilateral amelia go about doing things. It's easy to forget that feet are basically just less flexible hands, and if you've been using them to manipulate things since you were toddling around, you're going to have a level of flexion and dexterity in both your toes and your legs that nondisabled people won't have. There is an organization in the United States, Enhancing Skills for Life, that advocates for people with bilateral upper limb difference. Their YouTube channel has videos answering questions and holding discussions on their shared disability, and I've found it to be a very valuable resource here. If you want some short-content quickref answering questions like "how do you do x or y?" then I also suggest browsing this YouTuber's shorts. She has a ton answering these exact questions.
Here are some specific things that you can show human versions of the objects doing without hands. Seriously, the show itself is your best guide for so many of these examples! Holding and using a pencil, for example, can be learned, as can writing and drawing.
So can using a spoon, fork, chopsticks, a toothbrush, a screwdriver, and many other tools; If you can grip it, you can use it. Sometimes, though, you need to consider how your humans hold some of the objects without the cartoony creative liberty objecthood affords them.
For Ice Cube holding this mixing spoon, for example, she might be able to grip it with her toes, but if it's too wide, she could use a strap against her foot or an attachable handle that allows her to hold it.
Gaty might have a little trouble as a human holding this cup in this exact way, given that knees don't just become elbows like they do with the objects, but remember that many people without arms have legs flexible enough to do things others find impossible. Still, you could make it less of a nuisance for her, giving her a straw or another type of cup altogether, like a tumbler, or setting it on a table to let her sip from it. There are many solutions!
For other little things about living without arms, some creativity and thinking outside the box can make things easier for your characters. For one, slip-on shoes make sure your feet available when you need them. If you want to create a home that's more accessible, you can get low cabinets and drawers to open with your feet, and you can sit on stools to use your feet when you're at the sink in the kitchen or bathroom. Adaptive handles for things like cups, mugs, and kitchen knives help with food prep, and putting carts, laundry baskets etc. on wheels with switchable brakes would get rid of the need to lug tables and laundry baskets around. Adaptive computer mice and keyboards already exist, though some people also opt to use generic keyboards/laptops either out of convenience or preference. You can also wear a lanyard for cards, for example having a bus pass or ID card that you can easily tap without needing any limbs available. There are so many more solutions, and though there are a lot of resources out there, you can also dream up a better, more accommodating environment for your humans and have fun doing so. Even if your character ultimately can't do something their armed peers can, that's just how it is sometimes, and that's okay, too.
Funnily enough, adaptive tools like these probably aren't new to you, either, if you watch several object shows. Inanimate Insanity has shown an adaptive tool! In season two, episode 14, Baseball is shown using a hammer that straps to his foot:
This is the exact sort of thing you can easily adapt into human life. It might not be fancy, but it works, doesn't it? I've also considered that this is where Golf Ball expresses a lot of her creativity--not changing her own body, but changing how her environment works for her and using little tools here and there to help her with things she can't change. For example, why not have her build a prosthetic device but foot- or leg-powered rather than body-powered? It would be a lot easier to control this way, and it could be used when, for example, she's trying to open a heavy jar and needs the grip. A wearable velcro band on her foot could help her move laundry, and something that uses suction cups that can attach and detach can grab annoying round things that are otherwise hard for toes to grasp. Keyrings can help with small zippers, longer handles can help with reach, mounts can hold things like hairdryers against walls, and mouth sticks can help people without any limbs use touch screens and other devices. The point here is that inventiveness can go far beyond trying to replicate the "norm" of things designed specifically for functional hands. Of course I say all this is Golf Ball's genius, but a lot of these tools also come from the real-world "Hands-Free" catalogue that Enhancing Skills for Life have put out to help real people with real limb difference. I truly can't recommend their resources enough.
I have a few other notes about representing limb difference to keep in mind before we wrap up. In media, people without an arm are often shown with a sleeve either tied or pinned so as to close off the sleeve against the residual limb. While this might be done to warm up a cold residual limb, tying up sleeves isn't commonly the way to do this, and as this post also observes, it frankly reads as just another way people sidestep having to see or show a residual limb. For those without a residual limb, people usually let the sleeve droop down without issue; if that sort of thing really bothers them, they can get it tailored or stuff it inside-out in a pinch. Specifically for those with a residual limb that they will use to manipulate things, a really long sleeve would get in the way, but knotting the sleeve and blocking the limb altogether would only be more annoying. The aesthetic of the knotted sleeve, though common in fictional depictions, just isn't founded in real experience.
Gestures are another important consideration, and I think this might be another reason people give their armless humans magic prostheses. I get it, because hands have immense social significance: we gesture with them when we talk or when we need to say something from afar, and the way we move them when we talk says a lot about how we're feeling. I get wanting to preserve that reflexive sense of communication in the art you create, because it comes naturally to a society where most people have functional arms. But, again, the reality is that "most" is not "all", and some people just don't have arms. These gestures are also simply unnecessary! If you want to make your character wave, don't! It's fine! Why not just give them a smile instead, or a knowing look? It accomplishes the same thing but will appear so much more natural to these characters. Plus, it isn't like you only gesture with your arms, right? Gesturing with a foot or nose is another option, if for example you really need to point someone in the right direction. Designing and illustrating gestures for people without arms isn't an impossible task, it just takes some thinking, and it's okay if your character doesn't ultimately gesture in a way your other characters might.
I should finally acknowledge that even though flexibility is key for using your feet to do things, amputees have to be careful about overusing their bodies. People who use their feet are at risk of messing up their backs if they aren't careful and mindful of the way they go about doing things, and given that their lower limbs are working double time for pretty much everything, the risk and consequence of overusing their legs is something they're going to need to avoid. This might mean that even if someone can still technically use a tool or lift something with their foot, they might still decide it isn't worth the risk and let someone else help them out, or do it in a slower but less intensive way. Regardless, you can acknowledge body overuse without treating it as a uniquely terrible or inevitable part of having a limb difference; showing characters working at their own pace, stretching, and staying aware of their limits helps a lot. Not to mention messing up your body is something everyone can do with enough bodily neglect--just ask any artist shrimping over her drawing tablet. :)
If you're still unsure about anything else that I don't touch on, you can explore the resources I've offered throughout this essay, and you can also ask me and I might be able to find an answer. Please do not start using real people with real limb difference as personal search engines. It's one thing if they explicitly have asked people to send them questions, but follow their lead--don't just start rattling off invasive questions in random comment sections. Wanting to learn is great, but be tactful and respectful as you're doing so.
2.5 Conclusion and a Recap
Wow! We've covered everything that I wanted to cover: the BFDI fandom's tendencies to misrepresent or outright ignore limb difference, the reality of prosthetics, the misconceptions from media that influence how we represent limb difference, and, ultimately, what we can do to more thoughtfully and actively include these disabilities in our art. I didn't expect this part to be twice as long as my first, but it kept growing from a simple informational guide to a bigger interrogation into how we perceive limb difference. Combine the nuances and diversity of lived experience with the misconceptions about limb difference that people internalize from a young age, and trying to disentangle everything into something coherent, or at least considerate of reality, becomes a mammoth task. Regardless, I hope that this essay pushes people to think even a little more about what they're doing when they create art. I know not everything is going to sink in on a first or second read, but I'm not worried about people getting or taking in all of it all at once. Instead, I hope this essay can act as a resource that folks can turn to when they need it.
To wrap it up in a bow, here are some quick reasons to keep armless objects armless as humans:
most people with upper limb differences do not use prosthetic arms, and fully armless folks either cannot use them at all or do not benefit from their use
showing this disability and normalizing it rejects the systemic ableism we internalize over the course of our lives to be true, for example the idea that there is an "incomplete" or "broken" type of body that needs to be fixed with robotics or technology
media that contains arm amputees who do not use prostheses is exceedingly rare if not completely nonexistent, so you are doing something that is both more accurate to reality and subverts tired tropes bogging down other franchises
you will learn a lot about your own internalized beliefs about disability and you will learn a lot more about disability from real disabled people instead of tech bros selling their "bionic" arms
having some characters disabled and some nondisabled requires more thought into how to build and adapt the world, but this also means your work will be so much more engaging and interesting.
It's also so important that those of us without limb differences reject cosmetics as a necessary thing outright. Residual or nonexistent arms shouldn't have to be hidden with cosmetic prostheses. People should be allowed to exist as their body naturally is without pressure to fold themselves and live uncomfortably for an ideal they never agreed to.
In an ableist society like ours, we are all going to do things that are ableist. I've done it, you've done it, we've all said and done and thought things that devalue disabled lives in one way or another, and in many cases we don't realize it. This essay is not meant to inspire shame in people for conveying these biases, it's not meant to shoot down their ideas, and it's not meant to paint anyone as a bad actor. It is, however, meant to be a launching point to reflect on the decisions you make as an artist. It's so you start to ask yourself, "hey, wait, why do I tend to give all these characters robot arms? Why do I want to give them arms?" When I say that drawing "perfect" prosthetics and "magic" arms reflects ableism, I don't mean that the people creating this art are consciously asserting their own negative beliefs about disability. Indeed, I believe that in the vast majority of cases, people are doing things in good faith. People want to be fair. People want to be good. But that's the thing! Good people can still perpetuate ableist ideas. Right from birth, we understand there to be "good" bodies and "bad" bodies and we internalize that into a system of understanding human people. When we then go into creative projects, we design things a certain way based on that foundation, and all the biases and stereotypes and personal feelings that have built our understanding of the world will manifest in the lines we draw. When we, for example, feel sad after seeing someone in a wheelchair, have trouble entertaining the idea of a life without arms, or assume that nobody ultimately wants to live life disabled, these things seep through into the ideas we propagate. It is our responsibility to realize, think about them, and challenge these assumptions moving forward.
I want to dispel the idea that creative corners must be cut when it comes to disability. Disability should be a welcome part of everything, including your art style or the aesthetic you want to put into your artwork. When it comes to BFDI and its object show descendants, human character designs should acknowledge and understand the disabilities they have in the show. I want to see more armless human designs around, not hidden away or denied altogether but fully and actively acknowledged. I know that fandom is the most micro of microcosms and activism cannot begin or end with online space, but it should matter that we stop ignoring and erasing disabilities in these smallest of places. When we accept disability in our art--when we allow disabled characters to be disabled-- we become more mindful of how we see disability in reality, too. But that's dreaming something bigger than any of this. All I can hope, after this essay, is that I see more object-to-human designs that reflect lived realities; I see Golf Balls and Basketballs, Nickels and Ice Cubes living, struggling, succeeding, crying, and laughing alongside their friends and foes, their lives without arms a normal part of that greater whole.
Thank you again for reading. I hope you've taken something important from this essay, whatever it might be--information, inspiration, advice, whatever. Like I said in my first part, it would mean a great deal if you could share this, spread the word or even just talk about it with your friends. No matter how this gets to people, I want us to have a conversation about how we portray limb difference in the object show community. I want us to reflect on what kind of systemic (and personal!) beliefs these portrayals reinforce or subvert. It's important to making the object show community more thoughtful and inclusive, and pushes us to be kinder and more considerate in the real world too.
Works Cited & Book Recommendations
There are so many books I could add to this list but I'm keeping it simple. These are books I have either quoted or think would make for good introductions to disability from a social perspective.
Blake, Melissa. Beautiful People: My Thirteen Truths about Disability. Hachette Go, 2024.
I quoted this one in my first part! I really enjoyed this quick read. It's a half-memoir half-treatise from a writer with various physical and mobility disabilities. This one is more of a "beginner's" disability advocacy, having simpler points to make and easy language to understand, but it is a valuable book written with a lot of love.
Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke University Press, 2017.
This is a spectacular collection of essays (and poems!) on the concept of "cure" in disability, written by a disabled transmasc author. It takes the nuance of cure and its plethora meanings for disabled people, weaving his thoughts also into his walks in the more-than-human world: ecosystem destruction and revitalization. A little more academic than the others on this list, but it is so, so rich.
Gies, Kate. It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: a Memoir of My Body. Scribner Canada, 2025
This is a memoir by a Canadian writer and educator that was born without a part of her ear. Doctors constantly tried to build and recreate an ear for her so that she would look like the "normal" kids, but the pain and discomfort it caused made Gies question the purpose of it: was it ever really for her, or was it pushed onto her to conform her to what is "normal" and what would make her body "finished"?
Ladau, Emily. Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be An Ally. Ten Speed Press, 2021.
An accessible and concise primer on disability. Explains a lot of terminology, the nuance of identity and the history of disability (limited to the United States), types of ableism people face, what we can do about it, and more resources for further learning.
Lapper, Alison. "Beauty Unseen, Unsung." Excerpt from My Life in My Hands. The Guardian, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/sep/03/art1.
Content warning for ableism and sexual abuse. This article is an excerpt from Lapper's memoir, recounting her experiences growing up, going to school, dating, and having her son. Not only invaluable but also peppered with snarky Britishisms that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Leduc, Amanda. Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. Coach House Books, 2020.
Another one that I quoted in the first part, this is genuinely one of my favourite nonfiction books I've ever read. It combines two of my interests, literature and disability studies, into a very important assessment of fairy tales, both old and modern (read: Disney), as reinforcers of ableism.
Lee, Matt. The Backwards Hand. Northwestern University Press, 2024.
Another memoir! Matt Lee was born with a congenital limb difference where his wrists do not rotate. This memoir is not solely focused on Lee's own disability, but he does a great job of mixing his personal experiences with observations of how disabilities are represented in horror movies (i.e. badly).
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.
This one requires prior knowledge of Disability Justice as a movement to fully appreciate, but I wanted to add it to this list because it is so important. The author, a queer artist of colour, addresses the nuanced and often difficult realities of living disabled within an ableist social fabric, but it simultaneously "dreams" up a future of collective care and community action where disabled folks (especially queer and trans folks) are at the forefront of each other's lives. This isn't really a primer for the nondisabled passerby in the way most of these other books are, but it should be read by everyone with sincere interest in understanding disability as it intersects with other social identities. I also reaaaaally want to read her other book, The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs.
Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.
This book covers a variety of disability issues in specific reference, as you might imagine, to technology. The author is a lower-limb amputee and so she brings a lot of personal and professional knowledge to the section on prostheses. I found it a very important read that digs deeper into the prosthetics industry and media's immortal obsession with superhero-inspired bionic arms. This infatuation with science-fiction and erasing disability, trampling the tangible preferences of people with disabilities, is indeed the mammoth problem at the core of this essay.
Wong, Alice, editor. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. Vintage Books, 2020.
Another absolutely essential read for everyone reading this. It contains a wide variety of personal essays about different disabilities, with queer and racialized voices at the forefront. It was put together by the late Alice Wong, a disabled Asian-American activist who was (and still is in her legacy) a prominent figure in the Disability Justice movement. Actually, if I asked you to read a single thing from this short list, it would be this collection.
Research papers consulted (APA citations)
Al-Tameemi, R., Hashem, M., Chiad, J. S., & Mahdi, S. (2025). Analysis of performance of bone-anchored implants for amputation limb prostheses. Applied Mechanics, 6(4), 77. https://doi.org/10.3390/applmech6040077
Andreia, C., Matos Demétrio, de, E. A., & Nuno, M. (2026). Redefining prosthetic needs: Insights from individuals with upper limb Loss—A systematic review. Sensors, 26(2), 734. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26020734
Diers, M., Schredl, M., Flor, H., & Bekrater-Bodmann, R. (2025). Body representation in dreams of congenital and early-life amputees. Scientific Reports (Nature Publisher Group), 15(1), 9919. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83000-7
Resnik, L. J., Borgia, M., Graczyk, E. L., Barth, J., & Ni, P. (2024). Prosthesis usability experience is associated with extent of upper limb prosthesis adoption: A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. PLoS One, 19(6). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299155
Riccardo, C., Elena, F., Verdiana, M., Cinzia, S., & Massimo, B. (2025). The technological and psychological aspects of upper limb prostheses abandonment: A narrative review. Prosthesis, 7(6), 167. https://doi.org/10.3390/prosthesis7060167
I’m a black mixed disabled queer who lives with its grandparents, and I don’t have any way to make money on my own. Please think of commissioning me! Here I have some of my art but I also take commissions for video edits and character references, of which you can see on my Neocities. You can find more information over there! https://grimoirecat.neocities.org
The forerunner of all online object shows, Battle for Dream Island stages a massive cast of anthropomorphic objects, many of which have consistent and deeply human traits for the narrative to play with. Given that the series has always focused on character above narrative restriction, it forces the objects to interact through equal parts forced proximity and isolation, competition and elimination; mixing cola and mentos, watching the geyser, and frolicking in the sticky aftermath. Fans of BFDI and other object shows view and discuss these characters and their messy relationships through many lenses, and there's much to say about a show with such a simple premise. This project introduces a lens, but it's also a little bit more than that. It actually stemmed from an observation of the show's fandom space: I noticed that limb difference, a diverse trait many characters have in BFDI, is often poorly adapted, if not entirely erased, in fanwork. Adapted into people, armless objects have arms. Legless objects have legs. It is baffling. But it tells me that people are not engaging with disability.
Why would this be? Physical disabilities such as these are a mundane but immutable fact of life for so many real human people, let alone characters in an animated series. Are fans seeing the disabilities in these characters as a problem to avoid? Or are they not seeing it at all? What does ignoring, rejecting, and eliminating physical disability in a simple work of fiction say about fans' understanding of disability in the real world? And how is it that these beliefs are ingrained in the fandom of a series that so passionately and openly celebrates physical difference?
I want to ask: what will it take to change this?
This will be a two-part essay series on the portrayal of physical disability in BFDI. It will be a critique in both the literary sense, examning the portrayal of limb difference in the first part, and in the colloquial sense, addressing the misconceptions of limb difference in so much of the object show community's fanwork. Beyond being a "cosmetic" quirk of the earliest BFDI cast designs, limb differences are important to recognize for the complexity they add to the show. While there are intentional portrayals of ableism that makes disabled readings of these characters nonnegotiable, BFDI's premise as an object show has allowed its disabled characters so much diversity and positivity, conceiving their limb differences as identities carried alongside rather than restricting their character development. That the fandom not only downplays the thematic weight of disability but erases it altogether reflects a cultural lean towards ableism, be it conscious or not, and this is what will be addressed by the end of this discussion. Solutions to the ableist tendencies of fandom require knowledge of disability and acceptance of disability, and that starts with exploring BFDI's diverse portrayal of its disabled characters. Of course, I cannot force you to change how you write, draw, or talk about BFDI, but I do hope this essay leads to more considerate and well-informed thought on disability in our favourite object show.
As One says, "let's...chat."
Part 1: What does it mean to be a disabled...object?
Before we get started here, I would like to be very clear that this is a literary discussion and not an essay informed by personal experience: I don't have a limb difference or mobility disability. Disability's abysmal portrayal in media, though, has been on my mind, in my writing, and on my bookshelf for years now. I've read personal memoirs, manifestos, stories, and critical theory from disabled folks, as well as literature on the representation of physical disability in media, so while I feel relatively well-informed about the theoretical aspects of disability (in)justice and representation, this secondary knowledge is the limit of my expertise. So, I suggest that you, if you are nondisabled especially, do the same: seek out the voices of disabled folks, however you might go about it. Your local library is a great start, and at the end of this series I'll provide recommendations that may help you as they helped me. While the voices of lived experience are critical in understanding disability (and the only ones to listen to with respect to policy change), I am writing this for two main reasons. Many disabilities portrayed poorly in media are rarer in real life than they may seem, making it incredibly difficult for people with those disabilities to counteract all the bigotry that's thrown their way. For example, upper limb differences, which are the focus of this discussion, are immensely rare, even moreso if they are congenital. As such, if abled folks do not play a supporting role in breaking down misconceptions and biases, it's so much harder to make a dent in society-wide, deeply entrenched ableism. It shouldn't be that way, of course, but hopefully that will change with progress. Furthermore, it shouldn't be the responsibility of disabled people to tell nondisabled people when we are being bad allies, nor should we expect them to act as our personal search engines or do our emotional labour. It's on everyone to think more carefully about the ideas we propagate and a big part of this is holding each other accountable for ableism whenever and wherever it props up.
Anyways, this is all to make sure you know that this is a media study. Let's start from the basics, though. I promise you'll see the objects soon.
There are solid resources available to learn about what "disability" means, because it's important to ask who is defining it and what is the purpose of defining it in such a way. In short, there's no single definition that covers the whole complexity of disability. To oversimplify, though, there are two major models of disability. According to Tobin Siebers in Disability Theory, the medical model describes disability (rather crudely) as "an individual defect lodged in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being." More recently, the social model of disability changes the perspective of disability as "the product of social injustice, one that requires not the cure or elimination of the defective person but significant changes in the social and built environment" (3). As an example, someone using a wheelchair may not be able to enter a school because there are stairs leading up to its entrance, and in the medical model alone, the person with the disability is the limiting factor here -- their body's inability to walk hinders their participation in school -- and so the "solution" is to get them to scale the stairs through modification of their body's function, or, in other words, to "cure" their disability at all costs. In contrast, the more recent social model says that the means by which the entrance is accessed is at fault, not the person trying to enter, and the "solution" would be a ramp that the person can then use to access the building using their wheelchair. While there is some utility in the medical model, for example addressing chronic pain, the social model has been an important shift in disability justice over the past few decades, reframing the existence of disability from an inherent disadvantage to a contextually dependent social identity. None of these models comprehensively cover all experiences of disability, but they are a good place to start how we see the role of limb difference in BFDI. In fact, I argue that BFDI is surprisingly open to showcasing the social model.
To understand why the fandom's erasure of disability is so irresponsible, then, we must learn about how BFDI portrays disability, why it's a valuable aspect of the characters and the narrative, and how its presence in the show should lead to positive reflections on disability in the fandom (and in life itself!) more broadly.
To start, how about we look at some of the cast?
Look at all those happy faces! Two things immediately become clear:
These characters are based off objects, and objects have various bodies with different strengths, skills, difficulties, etc. They perform different functions for us in the real world, so it makes sense their bodies are diverse!
They also have faces and limbs. The amount of limbs that they have varies between objects, though the majority has all four.
1.1 What Does Disability Look Like in BFDI?
While this essay will primarily focus on characters that are armless, there are other notable ways objects are disabled. Some are "object-specific" disabilities: Bubble, Bottle, and Ice Cube are fragile and die in situations their peers would escape unscathed, and Barf Bag uniquely requires vomit inside of her to function and is at risk of it spilling out or depleting. Many have speech patterns considered disabilities in our world: Saw develops a verbal tic, Pin has a form of scanning speech, Marker has some form of verbal apraxia, Teardrop is mute, and Woody might have an intellectual disability that impacts speech and anxious behaviour. Even without direct parallels to human disability, the connection between these objects and how they approach and navigate the world reinforces that they are disabled in some definition or another. BFDI uses these quirks for humour, but it rarely uses disability to discredit their value as competitors, and all of these characters grow more complex alongside the rest of the cast. Sixteen years after we first see her pop on-screen, Bubble battles against cactus monsters in TPOT 21, successfully escaping unscathed and subverting our assumption that she'll pop. Our expectation flattens her into worrying about her fragility, but by subverting that view, the narrative forces the viewer to question their own assumptions about Bubble's character growth. Her courage here does not negate the fact that she's still extremely fragile, of course, but it emphasizes that she's had plenty of time and experience to learn how to manage her anxieties and her body. In this way, the innate diversity of the objects in BFDI--and the way they grow as characters--is interwoven with the disabilities they possess.
This diversity includes disability in the quirk of the character design itself: many of the objects have different limb configurations. Some have two arms and two legs. Many have no arms and only legs, some have arms but no legs, and some don't have any limbs at all*. As the largest minority, the armless characters provide the broadest lens into BFDI's portrayal of disability. While armlessness is not isolated as a significant impairment, at least in relation to humans (more on this in part two), not having arms is nevertheless a consistent influence on how these objects interface with the world, both in the objective sense of just not having arms, and that they experience some ableism from their surroundings and their peers. As such, it is for the objects, as with humans, a disability. For these objects, neither this objective absence nor the discrimination they face exclusively define who they are as individuals, but we're nevertheless looking at more than a cosmetic artifact of an old design choice. As we'll see, BFDI strikes a balance here: understanding these characters as multifaceted--and often quite capable--doesn't erase the reality of their limb difference, nor should it. It is, rather realistically, a fact of life that the characters carry alongside them; not the whole, but an intrinsic part, of who they are.
1.2 The Problem of Goikian Ableism
To address how armlessness is portrayed by BFDI, it is important to recognize that ableism against the armless is explored in a handful of scenes, and it is portrayed as an injustice through both structural and personally-directed discrimination. In BFDI, there are several challenges that either do not accommodate the competitors without arms or explicitly "disqualify" them from participating. Another Name fails BFDI 10's "handstand challenge" (6:18) in part due to Tennis Ball, Golf Ball, and Rocky immediately landing on their heads, and BFDI 12's "ladder contest" (3:18) is inaccessible for the armless contestants without help from vomit magic (Rocky) or another contestant (Leafy helping Ice Cube). The only other armless contestant at this point, Tennis Ball, stands helplessly at the bottom of the ladders. This is meant to be ridiculous: the Announcer excluding armless competitors from easily participating jabs at his absurd logic and reminds us that the contests have never had any integrity in their "fairness" to begin with. That said, when considered from the perspective of Tennis Ball himself, it is still harsh. A boy who has just lost his dearest friend--one who shares his disability--now faces an absurd task alone and cannot complete the challenge. Being derided afterwards for not arriving at the expectations unfairly placed on him is going to make him feel worse about his own disability, especially if he is still a child! But why should it? Tennis Ball has shown himself to be immensely capable in other contests, ones where he is still armless, and yet his relationship to his disability is being defined through the systemic ableism he is facing. This, by the way, is the core of the social model of disability. Even though his armlessness is part of who he is throughout the competition, its impact on his participation in these contests is dictated by how society itself accommodates, or fails to accommodate, people with bodies like his.
Objects without arms face ableism from some of their peers, too. Ice Cube has been treated poorly across the series, and her armlessness plays no small part in her mistreatment. In BFDI 15, Pencil and Bubble try to play catch with Ice Cube, but their ball flies over her head and drops, given her lack of arms in comparison to recently-eliminated Match. Pencil is dismayed. "It's no fun without Match," she says longingly, and then tells her, "Icy, compared to Match, you're garbage" (0:06). Having further locked Icy in her trunk in BFDIA 6 (rather than solve Icy's "headphone dilemma" together), Pencil holds an insultingly low view of Ice Cube, believing that she is a burden to minimize rather than a teammate to work alongside. Only when Ice Cube saves the team in the BFDIA 6's conclusion does Pencil begin to question this belief, but hasn't the damage already been done? Snowball is another clear example, treating Ice Cube as a disposable tool to chill water and battle sea monsters in TPOT 13 without for a moment thinking about her agency or the pain she's experiencing. Actually, Snowball is notoriously ableist beyond Ice Cube, and he's serially responsible for disregarding, hurting, and insulting his disabled peers: he pops Bubble constantly, he violently smashes Fanny against the ground in BFB 11 and throws her away like garbage, and he berates his armless peers, not wanting to be on their team and assuming they'll cause him to lose. In other words, Snowball, though rude to most, specifically targets disabled contestants for his abuse. To be sure, Snowball's temperament by no means stems from the beliefs of the writers themselves, because Snowball's ridiculous claims ground his archetype as the "bully" of the bunch; when an older Snowball still calls armless contestants "weak" in BFB, his bigotry is not hence a byproduct of a sincerely held belief but an intentional portrayal of an inane bias. His violent treatment certainly does not define the narrative presence of the characters he bullies, but his refusal to treat them with respect has the same effect as Tennis Ball's exclusion: the way their social circumstances fail them is much more disabling than the fact that these characters are armless. They are not broken; these elements of society are.
1.3 The Nightmare of Algebralien Ableism
Most examples of ableism in BFDI are resolved by the narrative siding with the disabled characters over the ridiculous claims against them, and the problems that the armless objects face are treated as present but insubstantial to the narrative tension: it is more often world-ending goo, for example, pressing the objects to act one way or another, than it is the boil-over of unchallenged ableism. This makes One's introduction in TPOT a turning point for the portrayal of disability in the series, concentrating the existing theme of social marginalization into an explicit theme of ableism as an insidious and damaging trauma. Immediately separated visually from her peers in TPOT 20 ("Alone"), One stands out as the only armless algebralien in a group of numbers that play catch, build stacks of cards, strum guitars, blow bubble wands, give high fives, and fix skateboards with each other. Even when One makes an effort to insert herself in their activities, they are dismissive and avoidant, like when Two interrupts and denies her request for company and runs away to high-five Eight instead (3:24). This action, as well as the scene moments later of Three and Five playing catch (3:27), places her crushing isolation against the happy, paired-off numbers specifically doing something without her. The common denominator in all of these interactions, in fact, is that the algebralien world is filled to the brim with activities that she cannot do or has not learned to do, not at least without accommodation that the algebraliens seem uninterested in providing. None of them seem intentionally dismissive towards her, sure, but most ableism rarely is deliberate; most ableism is, indeed, born of ignorance and neglect. The consequence? Being the only algebralien without arms, One has no reference point of living with her disability other than her own loneliness, and so she cannot see the neglect of her peers as avoidable; she has only ever understood herself as the broken one. The responsibility to change has never been on the nondisabled algebraliens, it has only ever seemed to be on her. All that follows One's storyline hereon, from her powers to her imprisonment to her treatment of the objects, can be traced back to her internalizing these ableist social biases as truth.
It gets worse for One, though not at first glance. When One finds the yoylelite meteor, gains its power, and realizes she can hold things telekinetically, the gulf in her mind between her nondisabled peers and her disabled self recedes: unreasonable though they may have been, she can suddenly--literally magically!--meet the social expectations placed on her. She fantasizes about winning over the other algebraliens, participating in their games, and no longer being ignored because of her body. This moment of "equalizing" explains why One is so defensive of the yoylelite when Three approaches it. When Three defensively asks One, "Where's the fun if it's just you doing that...y'know, throwing thing?" (10:48), it's dramatic irony: she does not realize that it has always been everyone but One doing the "throwing thing," and that this power made One see herself, for the first time and for better or worse, on their level. One's fears of being excluded are realized when the next day, Three leads the other algebraliens to the meteor and they together gain the yoylelite's power. One watches as that power concentrates in their hands as they practice their newfound abilities. The gulf returns. As Three even says when One confronts them later, nothing has actually changed, and all One sees from that point on is an eternity where she is sidelined. Her anger becomes understandable. Not justifiable, but not not justifiable: she has had to live without anyone or anything to live for; the arm-waving, ball-throwing algebraliens have not. She has lived without anything or anyone to see her for her passionate, adventurous self, and so in a brief moment of power in a life with so little, she lets herself feel everything she has been keeping inside of her. After Four traps her alone in the Moon for this fatal mistake, her fear of ignorance becomes a reality of banishment with only herself and her self-hatred to keep her company. What has happened to her by the time the moon cracks open would have shattered anyone.
On its own, One's arc is a horror story of ableism at its most potent, a force born of ignorance rather than malice that can, when unchallenged, fester into a living hell. Now, if One were isolated in a larger narrative without any other armless characters, her story would cut too close to the "disabled and jealous/vengeful" trope, in which disability is only represented through trauma, reinforcing the idea that to be disabled is to either experience a broken body or suffer at the hands of social prejudice. There's an argument to be made that perhaps it still is this tired trope, though we don't know how her arc ends, so it's still up in the air. But BFDI largely avoids condemning the fate of its disabled characters solely to misery, because One's story is the exception, not the norm. There exists in One's midst another society where armless people are largely treated as a normal part of the social fabric. Placing One's history against the objects we already know and love makes the narrative that much more meaningful, because we know that it did not have to be this way for One. Ableism does not have to be inevitable. Damage and heartache does not have to be inevitable. Yet to someone who has internalized her society's ableism as deeply as One has, suffering seems sourced from her body. This belief controls and clashes with all of her interactions hereon, being challenged and undermined by the objects to solidify her trauma as an unjust anomaly. Between the several suspiciously hand-shaped pillars in the backdrop of her dimension to the fixation on limbs in her dealmaking, arms eat at her mind. In TPOT 17, When Donut asks One why he would sign her contract, it strikes a nerve, and she screams at him immediately: "FOR YOUR ARMS, DONUT. KINDA IMPORTANT, HUH?" (25:52). While Donut agrees that he wants them back after she points it out, it hasn't consumed his concern in the same way One's lack of arms consumes her mind. This is because Donut has a reference as to what it is like to live a comfortable life without arms. She doesn't, and it's infuriating to her. When he tries to escape, it pushes her over the edge and she rips Donut's legs off, further disabling him. A facile reading of this scene would conclude that this is a clear, universally unwanted punishment, but remember that this is One. It's thematically relevant. Disability is punishment in her mind; she could only ever attribute her torment to her limb difference. What we see in these dealmaking sessions is, in some respects, the medical model clashing with the social, the blaming of the disabled body clashing against the reality that society, not the self, might just be the source of One's unimaginable pain. It doesn't make sense to her, though. The grip of ableism reaches deep.
"Internalized ableism," writer Melissa Blake explains, "occurs when disabled people absorb ableist messages from society and project those prejudices and stereotypes onto themselves and others" (60). She describes her own experience with it, highlighting its harm: it is "one insidious monster, and it creeps in slowly, little by little, until it's suddenly all-consuming and deeply rooted in your psyche" (61). In real life, there is a misconception that disabled folks lash out after experiencing ableism or otherwise create a destructive force for others around them, so One's storyline is a little unrealistic insofar as it edges closely to the "bitter" trope. But like I said before, context makes her actions an exception rather than the rule: so many of the armless objects are content, valued as they are, and bonded closely with their friends, and it is this normalcy that both positions One's perception of disability as skewed and challenges that perception outright. Consider why so many of her signees are armless women: Bell, Fanny, Ice Cube, Gaty, and Basketball. Having the latter two erased from existence altogether seems an intentional choice, given they each have close relationships the likes of which One never had with her own peers. In fact, Basketball's disappearance is a special case: in TPOT 19, even after Barf Bag's erasure compels Donut to concede and give up his share of Two's power, One still disappears Basketball. Donut already said he'd do it, so why? Donut has hardly even interacted with Basketball! Why her, One? Like One herself said in their deal, she and Basketball are a lot alike, being curious and inventive yet temperamental when things go wrong. A difference, of course, is that Basketball has people who depend on her and value her as an equal. Better to have her out of sight altogether than face a constant reminder of how unjust life has been. Between Gaty and Basketball, One simultaneously envies the objects and looks down on them, considers them disposable and manipulable, and refuses to conceive of a world where armlessness can be an intrinsic part of positive and constructive lives. It's vicious, but it points to immeasurable and uncontainable grief in One's heart. Maybe facing that things could be better would be more pain than she can handle. She could have been one of these objects. She could've played soccer with Three or learned to use a hammer with her feet to fix Nine's skateboard. She could have sat with Two and talked about life.
All this could have been her. It was not. Why was it not?
"Alone" and One's narrative is about ableism. Originally I was going to say that it's a narrative about disability, which is true insofar as One herself is disabled. But I think specificity matters here. It is about being disabled in a world that does not want to acknowledge it at all. It is about being neglected and marginalized, ignored and disregarded at every point. It is never that One herself is defective, but that society treats her as defective and she internalizes it into a destructive force for herself and everyone around her. Arguments could be made about whether it is perhaps too severe, and that I cannot weigh in definitively. But it remains that "Alone" is the most unforgiving storyline of BFDI. It is brutal and it is heartbreaking.
1.4 Rejecting Symbolic Disability
There is only so much of One's storyline I can point out before it becomes simultaneously shallow and unbearable. These forms of ableism exist, but not only do they not include most of the experiences of the disabled characters in BFDI, their exclusive focus would flatten this discussion of disability into a trauma, as is so commonly the case in media. This would present disability as some kind of symbolic punishment or narrative tension that, like in the medical model, is propped up to be "fixed" for the betterment of the character. BFDI competently avoids this, instead offering a big cast of objects that are consistently but never defined by their disability. Oft-frustrated Fanny doesn't seem to care that she doesn't have arms, nor does Gaty, or Naily, or Foldy, and so on. None of these characters without arms are disabled for any sweeping narrative "reason". While at first this may seem obvious and natural--and it is, given that the series itself is open-ended!--this manner of seeing disability is actually not very common in media.
Stories as old as stories themselves, from fairy tales to modern television, have often been moralistic, and in many cases function to explain why some people are disabled and others are not. In her book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, disabled author Amanda Leduc says that stories "turn disability into a symbol because it has been socialized to be not useful...If disability is not a disability so much as a symbol of something else, then once that symbol is realized, the disability can go away" (215). She adds, in contrast, that "disability isn't visited on us in response to a grand, overarching narrative plan, but rather is a lived, complex reality that reimagines the very nature of how we move through and occupy space" (216). What is so refreshing about BFDI is that its characters reflect the latter more than the former. Its characters can be tangibly disabled and have it mean various things to their lived experience (or in BFDI's case, participation in the contests) without either flattening it into a problem of misfortune or giving it some metaphorical, deeper symbolic meaning. The tendency, I think, to misunderstand these disabilities as "not important" has to do with the framework of disability as something symbolic; when it isn't symbolic, people don't know what to do with it. But doesn't BFDI then offer us a new vantage point? Must these armless characters be armless for a reason, to telegraph that they are "other" and symbolize some greater narrative challenge that must be "fixed" for their happiness? Or...do they just happen to be disabled? This is where BFDI shines. Just as an object might be small, round, or dimpled, an object might just not have arms.
As a 2010 veteran and self-described main character, Golf Ball stands out as one of the most complexly disabled characters in the show because though her occasional struggle against ableism impacts how she views herself, the series doesn't limit its focus on her character, her abilities, her flaws, or her armlessness to these negative experiences. On the outside, Golf Ball is a high-strung, highly confident contestant that touts her ability to lead her team to victory. This is for good reason on her part: her plans are often sound, and usually they fall apart when others fail to listen to her, which is often the case. Yet it feels, even in her moments of leadership, that she is always trying to prove herself to somebody, because it is a fragile sense of confidence that erodes when things go awry. Consider BFB 6: in an attempt to escape the Twinkle of Contagion, Golf Ball escapes to the moon yet gets it immediately after leaving her rocketship. Frustrated by this, she catastrophizes: "Why do my plans NEVER work?!" (7:32). This frustration is frequent with her, as Golf Ball is subtextually autistic and particular about things going as she expects. But surely someone who is delusionally confident in her own ability would deny that the failure is her own fault, right? Of course. She's not delusionally confident. Her confidence was never about her proving to Blocky or Snowball or whoever else that she was a capable team member as they are; it was to prove to herself that she is on level ground with her peers, an internalized voice insisting she has to work harder to be an equal. She faces a social current that has never been conducive to her participation. This is explicitly tied to her physical disability. She has to be smarter than everyone else to get through challenges not made for her, she has to deal with Snowball treating her like she is useless simply because she is armless, and if all else fails, she has to face against her own hopes that she cannot do some things the same way as her peers. When she gets frustrated at herself, enough to feel she is inept, we should see her as a disabled woman realistically reacting to the discrimination she has faced for years. It is natural, then, that there are moments where Golf Ball wishes, if momentarily, that she were not disabled. It happens.
But if being armless really were something Golf Ball wanted to fix about herself, surely she would have done so by now. She is a prolific inventor! BFDIA 25 shows her reversal of Pin's limb loss and in the same scene shows she has already built a pair of mechanical arms! But she has not grown her own limbs, nor is she ever shown using inventions in this way. Why would she? Even through brief pains of frustration, her disability has never been something she actually wishes to change about herself. She is sufficiently capable of doing everything she loves to do. Her feet are her hands! But it's not a big deal, either. Consider everything we've seen of her, irrespective of how she does it: she loves to draw, research, brainstorm, sketch, invent, and write papers, and she can drive, hammer, fix, experiment, hold, type, push, pull, and drill. She is one of the smartest contestants and she is almost always doing things for the success of her team rather than herself alone. In TPOT 13--a single episode--she builds a full drill-equipped van from blueprint to construction and nobody really bats an eye. It's tempting for someone with arms to see her disability as a challenge that she continually has to overcome, but is it, really? It's all she has ever known and all she's ever had to work with, and she seems just fine. Her capacity for adaptation is not anything special, it's just who Golf Ball is and what Golf Ball does. Her lack of arms is a physical difference from the status quo, sure, and sometimes that causes tension in her own self-conception, but it is more often an aspect of her that she works with, that is her, facing an environment not made for her. It is not, no matter what Snowball tells her, a shortcoming innate to her body. She knows that her body is not "missing" anything. She does not need arms, and BFDI has always asserted that clearly without ever erasing her disability.
To reiterate, in comparison to One, the armless objects benefit from living in a better, more communal social context that sees their disability as a present but unremarkable part of their identity--a mundane reality that has been absent from disability representation for so long. Without any support, the feelings of ostracization that ensnared One could only ever bounce around and amplify in her own head. Not so for the armless objects, as many of them not only have allies with similar disabilities to themselves but are treated as unremarkable by their nondisabled allies. To continue with our favourite dimpled lady, Golf Ball's disability is certainly a large part of her profound relationship with Tennis Ball, both being massive nerds. And what a team Tennis Ball and Golf Ball make! She and Tennis Ball match each other both in scientific fervour and physical ability, writing and building the same way, sharing "low-fives", and commiserating with each other's limits, however few there may be. Strong relationships do not occur solely between armless objects, either: Saw and Gaty are very close, Fanny is a highly valued member of Death P.A.C.T., Bomby helps Bell navigate without her string in the algebralien dimensions, and Book remains one of the few who treat Ice Cube like a person, respecting her autonomy enough to give her the distance she needs in TPOT. There's also humour in these relationships, especially when the armless objects have the advantage: when Two whips a wooden board at Donut in TPOT 9's Cake at Stake, Gaty playfully quips, "Gotta learn to catch with your legs, Donut!" (3:55). Having lived with her disability for as long as we have known her, Gaty makes fun of Donut because she knows that he can learn to live with it--indeed, Donut gets considerably better at using his feet by TPOT 17, though here gets his arms back. BFDI may not be flawless in portraying disability as mundane, but the many small moments like these provide something so rarely given to disabled characters: belonging and acceptance. There is nothing for armless characters to prove, nor are they shunned and othered by their nondisabled peers for not having arms. A major overarching theme of BFDI is togetherness and isolation, the push and pull between belonging and ostracization. Having disability be a part of it all, weaved in as just another aspect of the characters, can be, if not revolutionary, then at the very least refreshing.
1.5 Conclusion - Disability, the social core of BFDI, and why this matters
A series built on character diversity, BFDI endears its audience because it has a plethora of objects to cheer on throughout many absurd contests. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the cast welcomes its many armless characters as another variation of the object form, making it a consistent quirk of the character design while firmly appreciating it as normal. Though there is honesty in BFDI with the challenges of being physically disabled in an inaccessible world, and One's arc tackles this problem explicitly, her juxtaposition against all of these similarly disabled objects allows BFDI to acknowledges a much broader and brighter lived experience of disability that frames the series' love of this diversity at its best. Having a limb difference can mean something to how some objects exist in the world, but this does not mean it has to be negative all, or even most, of the time. There is so much space for armless and disabled objects to find common ground and acceptance, even celebration, amongst themselves and their nondisabled peers. To so many of these characters, their disability is not exclusively who they are, but it is not irrelevant, either; it can indeed be a part of the joy they can share with one another. Characters stay disabled no matter what challenges, triumphs, or mere routine they face at any given moment. To perceive otherwise is to reduce disability, to flatten it and disregard its existence in our own world, but it also shutters off the chance to learn that experiences that differ from one's own need not be inherently worse.
I hope it's clear why disability is a nonnegotiable aspect of BFDI as a whole. When you want to carry on the love that BFDI has for its characters into the fanwork you create for it, I implore you to remember that BFDI itself does not forget disability. It does not forget how many characters have limb differences, and it does not forget that disability is normal. Disability is normal. Your creativity cannot afford to forget what the series embraces. Your creativity can and should include disabled characters. If you wouldn't draw a Golf Ball without dimples, why would you draw her with arms?
While the second part of this series will critique the portrayals of characters in fandom spaces, I don't intend to lambast any portrayals unfairly, nor do I want to posture it as intentional on the part of fan creators. Because BFDI and its fandom has such a broad age appeal, I know that many artists are children and don't really...know what disability looks like, or maybe disability seems too daunting to address and so is a lot easier to adapt into the dreaded "magic prosthetic arms" that plague the character tags. I am not here to be upset at children, and I am not here to say they should know better, because that's unkind and unrealistic. That being said, even if it isn't intentional, ableism is still ableism. I will elaborate much more in the second part, but I will say this explicitly now: giving human characters "prosthetic" metal arms to suggest that their object selves don't have arms is not engaging with disability in any meaningful way. It is obscuring it behind assumptions and ideas of disability that are meaningless if not blatantly incorrect.
(And if you still aren't convinced, please read this post and this post and this post when you have a minute. Thanks!)
This part comes first because an honest discussion of disability portrayal needs a framework and backing, which itself requires consideration of the source material's engagement with disability. At the end of the day, though, I want this to be an opportunity to learn. It is important to understand that even as I critique the ableism of a wider community, I do it because I know people can do better about disability representation. I trust that people want to do good things. But I also know that if these shortcomings remain unchallenged, there is not going to be change or growth, just a stagnant, tired, and boring rehashing of the same tropes, the same misunderstandings, and the same biases.
Erasing disability from fanwork is a disservice to the characters and, more importantly, a disservice to disabled folks who already do not see themselves ever represented in media. It should be important to everyone that we recognize and accept real human people, let alone silly cartoon objects, as they are. Accept bodies that look different. BFDI is all about the differences that pull its characters apart and pushes them together, so let's celebrate it for what it does best.
If you've read this far, thank you. I hope this could spur some thoughts about disability rep, whatever they may be. I also humbly request something from you, if possible: this has been a lot of work, and I am an adult with a job and not that much time to spare for silly things like this. Because it's taken up more time than I'd expected, please consider reblogging this post, sharing this to anyone you know in this fandom space, and talking to them about it. I really want people to think about this. If not reblog or repost directly, by all means still have these conversations. Please just get the word out about disability and start a discussion on how we portray it in our culture, both in BFDI and beyond. Cultural shifts can start in the smallest places, but they take effort. I hope it's clear the effort is worth it.
Works Cited
Blake, Melissa. Beautiful People: My Thirteen Truths about Disability. Hachette Go, 2024.
Leduc, Amanda. Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. Coach House Books, 2020.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/disabilitytheory0000sieb.
and a buuuuunch of bfdi episodes lollll jnj
(Also a huge shoutout to this short but excellent post from @cosmovain that points out some of the same problems within the sphere of osc fanwork (plus some very cute art!). It helped inspire me to write this project at all and has a lot of the same critiques I will elaborate on in part two, so consider it a kind of preview. Thanks and stay tuned!)
I’m currently experiencing a hyperfixation so intense it is making me question my reality and feel physically distressed and ill. And I feel even more isolated because I can’t talk about anything not related to it and it’s really bad.
if you dehumanize the caught abusers then the uncaught abusers will use their humanity as proof of innocence
if you dehumanize the hypothetical abusers you create incentives for false accusations as a means of dehumanization whenever dehumanization is desired for other reasons
I’m a black mixed disabled queer who lives with its grandparents, and I don’t have any way to make money on my own. Please think of commissioning me! Here I have some of my art but I also take commissions for video edits and character references, of which you can see on my Neocities. You can find more information over there! https://grimoirecat.neocities.org
every energy price shock hits disabled people hard. disabled people often need to use electricity for mobility aids, for fridges to keep medication cool, for heating devices for chronic pain, for air filters, for communication devices, and for feeding equipment. it isn't an optional extra that we can cut back on when prices get too high
but with every round of price hikes it's the same advice: turn the thermostat down, make your showers quicker, wear warmer clothes. just learn to accept lower living standards. many of us, disabled or not, already have to regularly choose between eating and heating, so when another imperialist war pushes energy prices up again, what are disabled people to do? unfortunately, for many the answer is to accept being more disabled and more suffering
for Europe, the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian civil war acted as a catalyst to reorganize Europe's energy supplies around US economic interests. the continent went from getting cheap and reliable pipeline gas from Russia to importing unreliable and more expensive LNG from the world market, and in large part from the US. while the West engaged in a proxy war against Russia, prices soared for European workers and businesses, and the US profited. now another imperialist war has pushed global prices up again, and once again the cost is being socialized onto the working and marginalized lower stratas of every society worldwide, while energy corporations profit. and once again, disabled people bear the sharpest levels of suffering outside of the warzone. once again, many will have to turn off or ration devices that help them move about, eat, or breathe comfortably
sometimes people ask communists: "what about the disabled people who will be harmed by a revolution?" nobody is going to leave those people without support. and now it's time to turn this question around. what about the disabled people who suffer endlessly, become isolated, or die as we're forced to accept the ever lowering living standards that will push even able bodied people past their breaking point and spark the revolution?
by the time revolution feels necessary to large swathes of the population, many of the most disabled amongst us will be suffering greatly, even though the government could prevent it. and those are the ones who manage to stay alive
The way the ukrainian government just exhumed the remains of a literal nazi buried in luxembourg and reburied him with state honours in ukraine and the president knelt at his new grave like it’s the hitler Kaaba and we’re all just supposed to pretend that’s normal😭 we’re just supposed to hate russia and the history of communism so much that we’re willing to pretend that that’s normal
I bet it feels good as fuck to be libbed out in leftwing spaces and know you’re contributing less than the value of your silence to a conversation and still bravely hitting ‘post’
I love everyone in the notes reading “we’re just supposed to hate russians so much that we’re willing to ignore the nazism” and going. Well obviously☝🏽 the answer is to pay lip service to acknowledging the nazism while still foaming at the mouth at the mere mention of Russia☝🏽We have to remember that during their offtime from genociding Muslim West Asians, NATO and the US state department said Russians are all evil and they would never lie☝🏽We must not forget that while ukrainian regime is full of nazis, russia is full of russians—which is worse and more pressing☝🏽
if you're going to make a ttrpg that emulates genre tropes- particularly if it advertises itself as 'creating [genre] stories'- it behooves you to have at least a passing familiarity with the most important entries in the genre
as in: if you make a magical girl ttrpg and you dont have the most influential work in the genre listed in your inspirations im not going to take your work very seriously
thats just the thing: this is about almost every single english language magical girl game i have ever encountered. this is about princess: the hopeful, this is about girl by moonlight, this is about starlight burnout, etc etc etc. just look at these inspiration lists:
there are seven listed inspirations here. of them, two are magical girl shows, in a game purporting to replicate the dynamics of the genre.
nine listed inspirations; two magical girl shows, one magical girl 'deconstruction' fic.
nine inspirations, three magical girl shows. noticing a pattern with which two shows get featured every time?
glitter hearts is the first to finally list a season of precure as an inspiration, so congratulations are i suppose in order. and no madoka, shockingly!
anyway, you see the pattern- its very hard to take these games' claims of genre emulation very seriously when the level of engagement with the genre is so shallow. its kind of impossible not to link this with a general contempt amongst a lot of western audiences for magical girls. there's a sort of arrogance at play here, an assumption that there's really nothing to investigate- what's to understand? they're just stupid girl shows (except, of course, madoka magica, which is a Real show). you can do it much better than they can. and of course, you can just fall back on your own favourite (often western) media to fill any gaps.
everyone wants what magical girls have, no one wants to watch magical girls!
A lot of people are wistfully nostalgic about Sailor Moon but allergic to touching any other mahou shoujo... especially works actually geared at young girls.
I totally get disliking PreCure, I don't like it either! Only the very first Futari wa Pretty Cure looks appealing to me. But, it's really not the only magical girl anime out there. You loved 90's Sailor Moon? The same cast went on to make the only shoujo demographic adaptation of Cutey Honey, Cutey Honey Flash! It's even in the same art style as Supers and Stars. (The original Cutey Honey of the 70's, while concieved as a girl's show to sell clothes-changing dolls, wound up only securing a late night time slot and was reworked into more of an ecchi show for older male viewers, although some young girls still enjoyed the stories! Go Nagai would later go on to make another mahou shoujo series, Majokko Tickle, for a shoujo demographic.)
You like idol anime and magical girls? Creamy Mami! Magical idol anime are their own genre too.
You mostly liked the filler expanding on the characters in the 90's? You liked the slice of life scenes best of all? You like bittersweet anime with elements that make you cry your heart out? Full Moon o Sagashite, about a 12 year old with terminal cancer who gets to be older with the help of the reapers tasked with claiming her soul in one year, which she learns in the very first episode... the manga a little more than the anime, as it goes more into depth into their lives and the soul reapers' past lives, but the anime expands on her idol career and has a different ending from the original author, so it feels true to the characters and satisfying.
You want to see a magical girl anime that's inspired by Sailor Moon, but Takeuchi Naoko also greatly enjoyed it and made fanart of it? Wedding Peach!
You want those early cute witch magical girls without any big enermies to face? Just dealing with everyday things? Marvelous Melmo (an orphaned girl gets the ability to change her age with the help of red and blue candies from Heaven given to her by her dead mother's spirit, but she also later learns she can shrink back into an undifferentiated zygote and turn into whatever creature she was thinking of beforehand! It's sex education for girls in the 70's, but with a lot of comedy and heart too), Sally the Witch (the original! .... I did not see this one, but it's inspired by the 60's show Bewitched!), Minky Momo (although, Minky Momo can get heavy sometimes, it's usually fun, about a princess from the land of dreams trying to bring her planet back in orbit because it's drifting away due to humans losing faith in their dreams... it's also the one where Shudo Takeshi, head writer of the Pokemon anime, famously gave a toy company that wanted to pull the plug on the successful anime that just wasn't selling toys, by having the first incarnation of Momo KILLED BY A TRUCK FULL OF TOYS... she revives in the same episode, but it sure was a loud and clear message... second Momo stars in her own season and is reborn as the biological daughter of the earth couple the first Momo brainwashed Chibiusa-style into believing they were her family.)
You like cute and colourful characters and care a lot about the environment and endangered animals? Tokyo Mew Mew! I didn't watch this one yet, but I really do wanna see the reboot and it was super popular back in the day. ^^ All the designs look so cute.
If you want more modern magical girl anime that are on the cute and chill side, but actually geared at girls and it's not just PreCure, Cocotama is full of magic and adventure, while being very cute... I caught some fun episodes with witches and dragons and quests, but also some Hamtaro-esque episodes where it's just the cute mascot characters navigating a much bigger world and interacting with each other, it's fun!
The sadly short Mewkledreamy (just two seasons, Mewkledreamy and Mewkledreamy Mix) from Sanrio is so sweet it'll give you cavities. A sleepy, kinda lazy, but good-hearted girl receives a sentient plush kitty from the land of dreams and must save people's dreams (so, in a way, kind of like Minky Momo!), while an equally adorable bunch of sentient plush kitties try to corrupt people's dreams and make them act more selfishly by exploiting their weaknesses (so, also kind of like Onegai My Melody--which is what Kuromi was created for!) The art is SO cute and this show seems popular with both male and female viewers, it has something for everyone! There is a magical boy too, later on. ;3;
The situation is so dire, I've bumped into multiple unconnected indie tabletop RPGs which purport to genre-blend magical girls with mecha whose authors had genuinely never heard of Magic Knight Rayearth.
the TTRPG space is just full of people trying to make TTRPGs that emulate genres they dont actually like or respect at all - especially if that genre is Oriental and its been that way for a few years. Magical girls get it the worst but Lancer is an example of something similar with mecha and Wuxia is going through a similar moment.
I think in the case of Lancer at least, they aren't really attempting to do Genre Emulation. It's a 4e style wargame trpg that wants to give you MechWarrior meets og Marathon
Every time I see this post, something about it grates on me.
I think it starts with the inclusion of Girl by Moonlight as the first example, which I think is a misrepresentation of how those touchstones are presented in the book. "Brink of the Abyss" etc are the playsets within the book, that's not a list of overall touchstones for the entire project. It's "if you are trying to play a game like this, use this playset", which is different from "these are the media I referenced when making the game". A subtle difference, I'll grant, but one that I think makes a difference. GbM doesn't have that overall list, so it is the closest we get, but that's still not interchangeable.
Beyond that, it feels a little gatekeeping to me, but I think framed more academic than usual. I don't really think you need a Complete Historical Education of a Genre to write about it. You just need to be excited and interested enough. You can learn genre conventions without consuming the entire genre.
It feels like the post makes a lot of assumptions about why things were or weren't included. I can't speak to the intents of the designers making these books, but I know that touchstones are usually selective. Half of the time, I feel like I end up including ones that I'm worried people will accuse me of cribbing from if I didn't call them out. The other half, I'm picking my favorites.
And I'm still always learning about media I simply had never heard about until after the book was written.
I'll admit to not knowing the Magical Girl Genre particularly well, but to my mind the prime example is Sailor Moon. It's likely the go-to for most people because that's what was available. Whether it's The Most example of the genre is pretty subjective, and the older shows were much harder to find.
I don't think that a lack of deep, esoteric knowledge hampers my ability to write about a subject. I'm one person with a limited amount of time. I can still write about things that excite and interest me without putting a full college Syllabus in the Appendix. I'll try to research what I can, but the world is a huge place and I've got only so much time. I'll do my best, and hopefully leave room for people to add what they like.
And I'll do it in the same way I can like a band from the '70s without knowing their discography in order off the top of my head.
I agree with you that the original perspective can be gatekeepy, but I feel it's not a problem of "You need to have watched the entirety of the genre to write about it", rather one of "You cannot realistically write about a genre when your only experiences about it are subversions of it or works which hold animosity towards the genre".
Going on with the Magical Girl Genre, I wouldn't even consider writing a game emulating it because the only shows I've watched about it are Madoka, Utena, She-Ra and DoReMi when I was a kid. These are excellent works, but they exist in conversation with previous works that I am woefully unaware of like those presented by previous posters. This does not mean I can't write about the genre, but I should be aware of my own shortcomings within that genre. That should at least make me ponder whether I am equipped to create a work within the genre.
Furthering deadgenerations' point about the subtle orientalism of this problem, this whole conversation changes drastically when you swap "genre" with "culture". We can all agree that orientalism has been a huge problem in the ttrpg hobby and it still is for the most part. It is extremely easy to see that it's not ok for a western person to write about samurai without having previously put at least some degree of effort towards understanding japanese culture. Because otherwise that hypothetical author risks falling in tropes and stereotypes that fail to properly represent the historical period they are trying to write about. Roughly paraphrasing Asians Represent discussion about this kind of behaviour, the problem is not the writing in itself, it is the lack of self-awareness about an author's own lack of knowledge paired with some type of audacity that makes them feel entitled enough to disregard that knowledge in the first place.
Genres, of course, hold less weight to most people than whole cultures. But that doesn't make genres simple or lacking their own structures, communities and expectations. And thus we should approach them at least with a minimum of respect and curiosity before asserting we are equipped enough to participate in it.
(Especially so when that genre is usually related or comes from a cultural minority of some sort as, again, deadgenerations very aptly puts it).
"I'll admit to not knowing the Magical Girl genre particularly well, but to my mind the prime example is Sailor Moon."
Yeah, of course you do. Because you don't know the genre, and you don't know what you're talking about. theinstagrahame makes the comparison, later in the post, about liking a band without being able to list their discography. Buddy, that's not even comparable. These game designers want to make magical girl RPGs without knowing Precure. That's like being a black-and-white filmmaker who makes suspense thrillers and never having watched a Hitchcock movie.
I love how "if you write about a genre you should be familiar enough with it that you can list a dozen or so inspirations that are part of its canon" got turned into "you must know Every Example Ever" because it makes it abundantly clear they were just upset about being told they shouldn't write uninformed stereotype slop, and to make themselves seem reasonable they had to willfully misrepresent the argument.
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