This is why I hung onto NCIS as long as I did. Oh Cote de Pablo, come home with me and we'll make sweet sweet love.
Me too. I have visual processing issues from my seizures, but we joke that the linguistic centers of my brain just took over. I remember everything I hear and most of what I read, but pictures and graphs? Oh why! And escalators hate me, and if I can't remember your face, I'm sorry, deal. I also speak English, Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian, and I understand Swedish and Dutch (though why most English speakers don't always throws me). And (utterly unrelated) I have a child's ability to hear very high pitched noises, like dog whistles, the antibarking things, tvs that have been left on with the cable box turned off... Mostly useless and occasionally really painful. This gets made into a disability superpower all the time, usually for blindness. At the same time, what gets me about that trope is that the superpower almost always makes up for the disability, I.E. a blind person uses their other super strong senses, so we don't have to show what it's really like being blind! This is part of the reason I wrote my blind Zuko AU. Since the only thing he can sense with his bending is fire, he has to deal with his blindness with a cane and spatial memorization. And then when he joins the Gaang, they make comparisons... The interesting thing about Toph, though, is that they frequently put her in situations where she can't see with her bending, and she's at a much larger disadvantage than other blind people, because she didn't learn other coping strategies. This means that in certain situations, Zuko gets to have the advantage.
I've actually been planning to do an essay on this topic for a while. Things just keep getting away from me. Right now though, I'm more likely to go on a long rant about the "no death or permanent injury" tag to h/c fics. Oh, they're equivalent now? Can't have our happy ending if someone has a disability at the end, can we? Bullshit.
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branchandroot
Re: Clear out of the blue...
Date: 2011-09-29 01:45 pm (UTC)Me too. I have visual processing issues from my seizures, but we joke that the linguistic centers of my brain just took over. I remember everything I hear and most of what I read, but pictures and graphs? Oh why! And escalators hate me, and if I can't remember your face, I'm sorry, deal. I also speak English, Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian, and I understand Swedish and Dutch (though why most English speakers don't always throws me). And (utterly unrelated) I have a child's ability to hear very high pitched noises, like dog whistles, the antibarking things, tvs that have been left on with the cable box turned off... Mostly useless and occasionally really painful. This gets made into a disability superpower all the time, usually for blindness. At the same time, what gets me about that trope is that the superpower almost always makes up for the disability, I.E. a blind person uses their other super strong senses, so we don't have to show what it's really like being blind! This is part of the reason I wrote my blind Zuko AU. Since the only thing he can sense with his bending is fire, he has to deal with his blindness with a cane and spatial memorization. And then when he joins the Gaang, they make comparisons... The interesting thing about Toph, though, is that they frequently put her in situations where she can't see with her bending, and she's at a much larger disadvantage than other blind people, because she didn't learn other coping strategies. This means that in certain situations, Zuko gets to have the advantage.
I've actually been planning to do an essay on this topic for a while. Things just keep getting away from me. Right now though, I'm more likely to go on a long rant about the "no death or permanent injury" tag to h/c fics. Oh, they're equivalent now? Can't have our happy ending if someone has a disability at the end, can we? Bullshit.