I Hate "Teachable Moments": Disability and Fanfiction, or How Not to Fail at Disability in Comments

[attackfish]

Writing my current chapterfic, Children of Mars, is becoming a didactic exercise.  The writing itself is as much a pleasure as ever, and has even gained a sense of catharsis, but when it comes time to post, I want to just save it to my computer and never let one more idiot reader anywhere near it.  Now I know not all of you dear readers are idiots, and one of the things I like best about writing fanfiction is the social framework and critique of fandom (yeah, I write for the comments, such a bad girl) and I have never felt this way about posting a fic before.  Before I have always written about able-bodied characters.

My writing Snape with a disability along with werewolfism is part protest at the way characters with disabilities were portrayed in the books I read as a child and part personal expression of myself as a writer with disabilities.  We don’t have the same disability, in the story Snape uses crutches, whereas I’m oxygen dependent and have an immune disease, but we share a certain status as people with disabilities, or (good God) disabled people.  It’s wonderful, and freeing, and it makes me feel so much better after bad days.

But once I post, it seems like so many of the reviews I receive are “teachable moments” and that’s not so wonderful.

Some of you have been saying you can’t wrap your heads around Snape as disabled.  That isn’t because of anything inherent in either Snape as a character or disability, but in cultural narratives that paint people with disabilities as either weak, or more insidiously as plucky, happy symbols of Good, like the damsel in distress in action movies, not a character so much as an object.  Snape will never be a tragic, passive, stoic cripple (a word that I see a lot in reviews and makes me throw up a little in my mouth each time).  He will never be helpless.  He is and always will be a snarky git.  So many of the reviews talk about how horrible all of the other characters are to him.  Well, he’s horrible to them.  Besides which if anyone, even Lily, especially Lily, were suddenly to treat him like a helpless incompetent child who can’t protect himself or do a thing on his own, he would hex them all into oblivion.  When people do that to me, I wish I could.

When I was a kid, books about people with disabilities seemed to end one of two ways.  Either the pure, good, tragic cripple died, or the pure, good, tragic cripple was cured.  Okay, there were also villains whose disabilities were a symbolic sign of their inner corruption, but I’m not even going to touch that one.  Such endings are incredibly disheartening for me, growing up, because I didn’t want to die, and I was never going to be miraculously cured.  I had to carve out a happy ending of my own that included my disability.   For those of you who keep saying you want Snape’s leg repaired at the end, you are tapping into that same disenfranchising cultural narrative.  Stop it.  Stop it now.  Don’t make me get out my squirt bottle of wrathful smiting.  Whatever ending I write (and I will spoil this, if nothing else) Snape and his disability will be around at the end, along with their happy ending.

One thing I didn’t mention about the perfect tragic cripple trope is that they are always portrayed as lacking any sort of sexuality at all.  They neither have sexual feelings or are appropriate objects of desire for other characters.  What. The. Hell.  Okay, okay, there is one type of character with disabilities allowed to lust, the disabled villain.  Of course their sexuality is always portrayed as deviant, and threatening, and further sign of their evil.  Now, no one has sent me a comment with this bit of fail in it, as Snape hasn’t done any more than engage in some canon unrequited Lily love, but I’m waiting,  When the situation calls for them, I’ll get these too.  I have no doubt.

All of this makes me feel even more queasy as I write this, and I get no catharsis or enjoyment from it.  It shouldn’t be my job, but because I will continue writing characters with disabilities, not just in fic but in original works as well, I have put myself in the position of teaching by example, so for my own peace of mind, I must also teach directly.  I’m sure those characters will get similar sorts of reviews, sometimes, if I’m lucky, from reviewers and writers I respect.  When I send my stories out into the world, the knowledge that people will read my characters differently because of their disabilities will always be there.

Snape is not tragic.  He is not a poor crippled boy to be protected and treated nicely by the noble heroes.  He is the hero.  He will fight against and work with his disability, but ultimately, he will do it on his own, like all of us must do at the end of the day.

I’m sure I didn’t cover everything in this post, and a lot of you will be rolling your eyes going “yes, we know all this” and  this is really basic realize people with disabilities are people stuff, but I keep getting comments where I have to reiterate this.  All of you dear readers who do know all this, thank you, and no fear all, I’m still writing Children of Mars and other fanfics.

Comments

[green-blush.livejournal.com]

What a great post. I started reading "Children of Mars" only yesterday and now I'm halfway through... I'm almost relieved to know that you chose to leave Snape in this condition - for a number of reasons.

Hurt/comfort fics usually go like this: a guy #1 gets some health problem and his present/future lover/friend/whatever takes care of him. The author is always ready to describe the details of their misery. The guy #1 suffers because of his condition, the guy #2 suffers from seeing guy #1 suffering... The reader feels that if a cure isn't found soon, both of them are definitely going to depress themselves to death. And then there's a cure and everyone gets their fluff and snot in sugar.

I've always had these questions:
- And what if they didn't find a cure? The authors tend to describe only the "sad part" of being disabled. Happiness is always associated with "fixing" and not with learning to live with a certain condition. It's like "a guy can't use his legs - he's sad - he regains partial use of his legs - he's happier" but NEVER like "he learns how to use a wheelchair - he's happier". It especially angers me if the "hurt" character is supposed to have lots of willpower. Well then, dear author, why won't you show it to us? Anyone can be happy if magically cured, but you need guts to fight for happiness if you're disabled.
- If romance is involved, the attraction usually begins when the guy #1 is still disabled, but a full-blown romance starts only when he's cured. Doesn't it cheapen the idea of their (supposedly) true love? And, once again, what if they didn't find a cure?
- The cure itself. It's usually quick and simple. Why can't someone describe complicated and excruciatingly slow therapy which makes the guy wonder if it's even worth it, but his SuperWillPower makes itself known and he manages to overcome the obstacles?

I think I'm going to look for more data about H/C fics and try to analyse this matter. I can't believe I've never thought about how cheap and unrealistic they are.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The thing about disability H/C is almost all of it's written by able-bodied people who have been steeping in an ablist culture their whole lives, and since it's part of the cultural fabric of their lives, they don't even notice it. H/C doesn't have to be ablist. I'm writing a fic that among other things is H/C and while it doesn't deal with physical disability, I do my best to deal respectfully with trauma, PTSD, and assorted other issues. It's not that hard. You just have to realize the people suffering are supposed to act like human beings.

I need to get back to writing Children of Mars. *Sigh* Avatar: the Last Airbender ate my mind a bout a year back.

[green-blush.livejournal.com]

H/C doesn't have to be ablist.
Before now, I managed to find only one non-ablist H/C fic. It was about Snape and Hermione: Snape loses his sight because of torture and Hermione wants to help him. It follows the regular H/C plot with Hermione doing her best to find a cure even when healers said there were no such thing, but she doesn't succeed. Still, Snape and Hermione lived happily ever after. The ending was much more optimistic than that of any ablist H/C.

By the way, I'm kind of an alter ego of the person who translated "Blurring" into Russian. Would you mind if I put my greedy hands on "Pawprints" and "Between"? ^^

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I'd ask for a link if I could stand cross-generational pairings.


No problem! I'm actually writing a sequel to "Blurring" (it also has a companion, "Spectacles") and I hope to top the series off at seven one shots. I'm also playing around with a companion to "Between" after all this time swearing to reviewers I didn't have one in me, and if you want to, you have permission to translate those when I crank them out.

[milleniumrex.livejournal.com]

This is a great post. I spent a lot of time working on a 15K fic about disability recently, and I tried to do a good deal of research into things like this before I started, to make sure I didn't fail. The H/C tropes, and how to avert them were heavily on my mind.

The character I worked with was Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl. In the story, she was training on a planet where she doesn't have powers (as they do in the comics sometimes), went swimming, and injured her neck diving into shallow water. The accident left her with a C4 spinal cord injury, and she was paralyzed from the shoulders down.

I actually wound up writing a lot of the same things into the story that you talk about here. There was a romantic/pairing element to the story (with Wonder Girl), but they were in a romantic relationship before the accident and they stay together, working out issues with their relationship and figuring out the physical part (although not anything beyond PG-13). It's a sci-fi fandom, obviously, so I did include a lot of stuff about Superman trying to develop a "miracle cure" for her. They just didn't work, and Kara was forced to slowly adapt to her disability, such as learning to drive a wheelchair via sip-and-puff. I ended the fic with acknowledging that Superman was still trying to come up with the cure, but by then Kara had adjusted and was going to be okay either way, despite that she still had no movement below her shoulders. There was even some action stuff where she got to play the hero using her mind.

There was some ableist language in the fic by the disabled character, just because it felt right during those early periods of intense anger that are pretty common in situations like this. But overall, I'm really glad I tried to read a lot of meta on disability fic before tackling it. I didn't get too many reviews, but those I did seemed to think I did a good job with those elements.

So in conclusion, thanks for writing this - both the commenter and the OP. There are those "disability fic" writers out there who really try to do a good, respectful job, and we appreciate it immensely.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Every day, I'm glad to see when a writer gets it right. It does happen! And the fact that it can be done is the reason I write meta like this! A disabled character with ablist attitudes in a fic is no bad thing, especially one who has recently gained his disability. Snape in my fic has tons of ablist hangups, and wallows in his misery. Gen, from the Queen's Thief books lets his feelings of uselessness following the gaining of a disability make him actually become useless, hiding in his room for several months. It's his coming to terms with his disability and becoming incredibly useful again that marks his coming of age. The journey to accepting one's disability is a freaking awesome narrative as far as I'm concerned.

[milleniumrex.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is how I feel as well. And those examples are pretty interesting. The more I thought about it, it's hard to think of a character less suited to adapting to a disability at first. Supergirl is young, slightly immature at times, and used to literally being able to do anything she wants in a matter of seconds. The adjustment period was pretty hard to write about, but I think I did a competent job. And I'm glad I did the reading beforehand. I'm currently doing similar research for blindness, to write about another character.

And now you've made me want to read your fic. It sounds really, really good. :)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The adjustment must be so much harder for someone who's so physical. I probably wouldn't be even if I weren't disabled. Now, if I were suddenly dyslexic...

Lol, *blush* It's really really not done, and it's on hold while I finish up other projects.

[milleniumrex.livejournal.com]

Another obsessive reader, I take it. I feel you. ;)

I find the idea of exploring disability in a fantasy/sci-fi world to be really fascinating. The adjustment is hard enough for someone with normal human abilities - what would it be like for someone who can fly to suddenly not be able to move?

Well, I'll check out what you have, anyway. :)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, disability's almost never touched in scifi/fantasy, except when a miraculous cure is offered.