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shadowscabaret · 8 hours ago

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you know, in general i am the #1 defender of ricky potts as disability rep (before the erasure rewrites) especially when it comes to his pre-cyclone backstory. but occasionally i do remember the details about ricky's parents, specifically, how stupid it is. i spend most of my time in this fandom internally screaming "stop haphazardly changing rickys backstory, youre erasing the parts that made him special to me" but this part is one of few things in the whole musical that i actually do want changed. because if you take it at face value it makes no sense at all.

direct quote from the script:

"when Richard lost his power of speech, the Potts family took a vow of silence; usually communicating in a series of strange gestures that only they understood. The only time they interacted with one another was when they read comics, or fed the cats… they had fourteen cats."

there is so much weird shit going on here.

first of all. vow of silence? i have never in my life heard of that being someone's response to having a nonspeaking child. i am not nonverbal myself but based on what ive heard from people who are, i understand that not being able to just talk out loud for ease of communication, it complicates every interaction... so why would ricky's parents, presumably non-disabled (the term "vow of silence" definitely implies a choice and not like, selective mutism or anything), do that voluntarily?

no seriously. why. the script makes no attempt to explain their reasoning behind this or how ricky feels about it. why did they do this. is it a symbolic gesture? an attempt to better understand what their son is going through? i can't see it helping ricky in any tangible way. in fact, not being able to have his parents stand up for him (especially as a disabled person who is chronically ignored, especially as a child) would probably make his life harder.

i'm going to guess that the reasoning behind this out-of-universe, the general concept the writers were trying to communicate, was something like "one of the problems with how society treats disabled people is that sometimes they get too much support, and people make really drastic life changes to give them help that they don't even need"...

...and on top of directly contradicting the rest of ricky's backstory ("the most appalling cruelty humanity can muster: complete indifference", anyone?), this is just not true! the idea that disabled people are given/offered "too much" help is a myth and a stereotype. the vast majority of disabled people in real life have less than what they need, and have to struggle to get by. every organisation that is supposed to help disabled people, at every level, is biased toward giving the bare minimum or less - not to giving people more than they need.

to my knowledge, the whole "my son cant speak so im taking a vow of silence" thing, this has just... never happened in real life. not only would it Not Even Help it's just... not an idea that occurs to most parents of nonspeaking children. because why would it? it's ridiculous! the potts family "vow of silence" is just a ridiculous overexaggeration of the concept of "parents of disabled children make sacrifices for their children", and i dont like it.

now, if you want you can handwave all this away with "yeah this would be insane and ultimately unhelpful, but the musical never says that it is helpful, so for all we know ricky doesnt like it and it isnt good and his parents are just insane for doing that". and if that was the case, it would kind of fit with a recurring theme in the musical of performative efforts to "help" ricky that actually just make him more miserable. although i would say that a literal vow of silence is waaaay too big of a life commitment for parents to realistically do performatively. but then again, ricky's parents are clearly already odd people, with the 14 cats and the "strange gestures", so maybe it's just their characterisation...

and that reminds me. why the hell are they communicating with "strange gestures that only they understand".

i think most of the fandom interprets this as referencing ASL. but based on the description that's not what ASL is. sign languages are languages, with their own complex grammar, vocabulary, etc. they are not "strange gestures". this is like if noel's lament ended with our Objective Omniscient Narrator Karnak saying "monique and the priest communicated with a series of strange sounds that only they understood" and then they just spoke regular ass french.

but of course the script never says they're using ASL, and to my knowledge no production has ever actually done ASL for the "gestures", that part is really just fanon.

if you interpret the "strange gestures that only they understood" wording more literally - there is such a thing as home sign! home sign is a communication system made of gestures, generally not considered a complete language, that develops in households where communicating in language (either spoken language or sign language) is not an option. primarily, this is something that happens to linguistically isolated deaf children. if a child cannot hear well enough to learn & communicate with spoken language, and their parents don't give them an opportunity to learn sign language, they develop their own communication methods.

even this isn't quite what's happening in the musical if you take it literally, though, because home sign is developed by the child, by the child who doesn't have access to language. ricky could be d/Deaf or hard of hearing, which would impact his ability to hear and thus learn spoken language, but there's nothing in the musical to really point to this and so i dont think its what the writers were going for. the phrasing of the "vow of silence" thing implies that it was ricky's parents' choice to develop their own communication method consisting of gestures, rather than just an existing language including the language they presumably all already knew and communicated with prior to the "vow of silence".

this truly just boggles the mind. how did this happen? was there a point where mr potts sat down with the family and said "okay, so when we all take a vow of silence, this gesture will be how we ask each other when the cats food bowl was last fulled"? i will give canon the benefit of the doubt on one thing - while it isnt specified in the script, based on how degenerative (neuromuscular) disorders work in real life, it's likely ricky losing his speech would have been a gradual process rather than an overnight thing, and therefore i suppose the parents could have had enough warning time to develop the basics of a signed conlang. but they could have also used that time to learn an existing sign language, which im sure would have been easier for everyone. or they could have used that time to say "considering english exists in forms that dont require talking out loud (AAC), it would probably be easier to learn that rather than a new language, and also why are we taking a vow of silence anyway, how does that help our kid".

of course we dont know exactly how this language of "strange gestures" came to be. because canon, rather than elaborating on any of this, simply dropped the out-of-context claim on our feet. but depending on exactly how it went down, if you take it seriously, i think it could range from "bizarre form of child abuse/neglect that would have a severe impact on rickys communication and social life for years to come" to "technically harmless but really weird and convoluted".

and while we're on the subject of potential neglect. may i remind you, the last part of the section on ricky's parents:

"The only time they interacted with one another was when they read comics, or fed the cats… they had fourteen cats."

This is, frankly, maddening. it seems to imply that ricky's family ignored him a lot due to his disability which, while depressing, is definitely consistent with the rest of his backstory - being ignored at school/in uranium in general, retreating into his own imagination to cope. and i've said time and time again that the ableism ricky faces, being constantly ignored and condescended to and having to literally die and have his disability be magicked away in the afterlife before anyone actually listens to him, this is the most realistic part of the whole musical.

with that being said uhhh. that ending line might be consistent with the rest of rickys backstory but its NOT consistent with everything else karnak said about rickys parents, as recently as thirty seconds ago! are you telling me these parents took a vow of silence in some sort of weird symbolic solidarity with their kid, went as far as creating their own gestural communication system (/signed conlang) to facilitate communicating through this vow of silence... and then barely interacted with the kid they had sacrificed so much for?

if i take karnak completely at his word here, the only explanation i can come up with is that ricky was the subject of some linguistic experiment that his parents came up with. and frankly im not convinced the experiment is scientifically or ethically sound.

okay, in all seriousness,

i know the potts family is not conducting an unethical linguistic experiment. or at least, i know that is not the intended subtext of the musical. it's possible to come up with contrived situations in which these bizarre decisions would be realistic in-universe, but we all know that ride the cyclone is a work of fiction. and when things are this contrived... the most reasonable explanation is simply "the writers never thought that hard about it".

and that's disappointing! this blatantly nonsensical detail stayed in the musical for years, and apparently nobody thought to be like "hey, does this make sense? should we fact-check this?". this part of rickys backstory stayed the same until his entire backstory was overhauled to remove his disability in 2022 and, tbh, i dont think that was actually that anyone realised this part didnt make sense and tried to fix it, more likely that it just happened to get thrown out while they were doing disability erasure.

everything about this short paragraph indicates the writers being unwilling to research. which is bad writing practice in general and particularly bad when you're writing about disabilities!

i find this particularly disappointing because, as ive said, most of ricky's backstory was very realistic in the old scripts, and surprisingly well done; this is one of the aspects of disability rep where they just, completely dropped the ball. unfortunately, that was years ago, and now rtc has so thoroughly gone off the deep end in terms of disability ""representation"" that it's hardly worth it to nitpick the worst details in the best versions of the script...

but, still, i wanted to share my thoughts on this. it's surprisingly under-discussed in the fandom. i see a lot of people attempting to explain how rtc's disability rep was always flawed, some better than others... and i thought it would be good to go through and actually nitpick what rtc did wrong in the first place so we can all try to do better.

anyway, to the half-dozen people still reading this. fic writers. if you are a stickler for Canon Compliance then please understand that the canon here is nuts. i'm not saying don't put it in your fics, personally i sometimes love to write fics that i call Canon Malicious Compliant, which is when you stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what the author probably meant to say and instead explore the fucked-up explanations of what the author literally did say. i would love to see some fics that explore how ricky would actually feel about the "vow of silence" thing, and how it would impact him & his relationship with his parents, rather than just having it as a background info that isn't acknowledged as the weird thing it clearly is.

alternatively, to the large section of the fandom that is willing to say "I recognize the canon has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it" - can i suggest CODA!Ricky, as in Child Of Dead Adults, as an alternative headcanon that stays close to the canon while actually making sense? this would explain why his parents use a sign language at home way better than the "their kid cant speak so naturally they took a vow of silence" nonsense. obviously, headcanon what you want, this is the one part of canon that is really so nonsensical you might as well ignore it and treat it as a blank space in which to write whatever hcs you want, i just wanted to suggest one possible (more reasonable) explanation

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