What’s a good example of a depiction of a person with a disability in combat? The moderator asked at one point.
Last year I went to a panel on combat and disability in fantasy — it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.
The moderator, an older white man, tried unsuccessfully to keep order while the panelists, on zoom, adjusted camera angles to demonstrate poses, wrote out elaborate body models, and drew diagrams.
What’s a good example of a depiction of a person with a disability in combat? The moderator asked at one point.
For a second all of the panelists stopped, thinking.
It’s really just Toph, one person said, from Avatar. That’s it.
Everyone else on the panel nodded.
The moderator was sort of stunned — this group had been talking nonstop the entire rest of the session, usually talking over each other.
OK. He said. Are there any other characters besides Toph?
There was silence.
Then one panelist said Nope. that’s… Pretty much it. The other panelists nodded.
It struck me, as a person without a physical disability, that there was literally only one physically disabled character ever that all four of these wildly different panelists could even think of that didn’t suck.
I’m telling this story because it reminds me of a dilemma I struggle with a lot, particularly in the weird world of “ whatever the hell we’re all doing to try to make the world suck less under the umbrella of a variety of informal and/or legal entities. “
In so many projects that we work on, very rarely does anyone have a checklist of straightforward unambiguous tasks.
The movement might be big, but whatever specific puzzle piece of movement you’re trying to grapple with?
There just may not be that many people in the world who have done it exactly in the way that you’re going to do it.
There’s no roadmap.
You’re building it as you go along.
It struck me that every single one of the panelists were certain that there was no other mainstream fighting character with a physical disability in fantasy and science-fiction in the United States.
They were all definitive.
Why?
Because they had probably spent hours and hours and hours and hours of their lives looking for characters that did.
Becauee if there was another character as well written as Toph…
…Well, these nerds wouldn’t have been able to stop talking about her.
But there wasn’t. There isn’t.
And that’s why they’re all writers.
So: whatever you want to do?
You already have what you need in order to do it.
You already want it to exist.
You know exactly what you want to read, exactly the thing that you want to see in the world.
And you’re probably pissed, or even just sad, that it doesn’t already exist.
So… get writing.
Originally published at https://notesonfeednet.substack.com.
