#fantasy disability

[zaltynn-alt2]

[i had the pleasure of commissionning clownboo_art over on twitter, and asked em to draw overload!sans and papyrus :D]

[they did amazing, i absolutely love this so much, their expressions are perfect, and i adore the sketches i got to peek at during the process. the colouring is delicious i could eat this oml]

[maaan, i wanna comm more artists!! its so fun!! (im always open for art trades, btw)]

[shirecorn]

At first I had thought that Rudolph was strapped in to the front of the sleigh, but then I noticed his hind legs were being supported. It's a mobility aid! So clever!

That's right! This is rudolph's self contained unit that allows him to move around on the snow. When he visits sunny climates, he switches the sled out for wheels.

The front part of the harness and the wooden sled shape is based on traditional sami sled gear, with the supports carefully based off goat wheelchairs.

Here's a breakdown of how it works engineering-wise. The goal was to make something that he could get in and out of on his own, like most people who use wheelchairs. The only hand-wave is to give his mouth magic knot-tying abilities that typical cartoon animals tend to have.

While most goat chairs use dog harnesses (including a connection between collar and cinch like a horse breastcollar) reindeer's main point of pulling is the collar. There are two straps on either side of a somewhat stiff collar that serves the same purpose as a yoke for draft animals. They can push forward with their shoulders into the collar and drag their burden without putting weight on their trachea, nor pulling too much with the cinch.

Rudolph simply slips into the collar and buckles his cinch around his ribs, then he is ready for the chair.

Here's what the sled looks like without Rudolph in it. He puts his legs through the two leg support straps, and rests his hocks on the padded bar. His belly is supported by a wide, soft strap that bears the weight of his back end. There is an optional seatbelt that goes over his rump if he knows he's going to be going at high speeds. For short walks, he can leave it off. This makes getting in and out of his sleigh easier.

Here's all the pieces assembled together! I'll probably add some crossbeams under his back legs for stability. It was really challenging to blend modern animal wheelchairs with traditional sleigh construction (including rope ties rather than buckles) but in the end we have a cute, believable mobility aid for the most famous reindeer of all.

Here's Little Ru, ready for a casual walk in the snow.

Don't get sunburned!

[dragonturtle2]

[the-mountain-flower]

Spoiler warning for the webcomic Aurora

So I've had this theory for a while (since somewhere during early/mid Daybreak page releases) abt Erin's tattoos in relation to how he uses magic that was more of a headcanon than an actual theory, until in a reread I noticed smn. (Bear with me, it's a little long bc I tend to over-explain to avoid misunderstandings 🫠 and also I got excited)

So Erin usually touches his tattoos when using magic, right? Which can range from grabbing his arm to just with the fingertips for a second before casting.

This makes sense in the context of another theory I've seen going around- that I agree with so far- that Erin's tattoos are a sort of disability aid. That they're there to assist with something like malformed or incomplete magical links.

So it was strange to me when I noticed that Erin did the same thing when using Void magic. This isn't something that is applicable in the same way his tattoos are, as his void-connection is something done to him as opposed to something he was born with, and there doesn't seem to be any indication of disability in that particular aspect.

This makes sense from a characterization standpoint, since he's used to doing it and it makes sense he'd resort to that habit, especially for a type of magic he's never used before. But it got me thinking.

While we haven't seen many examples of mages using tattoos outside of Erin, it doesn't look like touching them is required for casting the same way he does. It's also interesting when you consider that we've seen rune tattoos on the forearm, wrists, and hands as opposed to a specific area. That, in combination with how it looks like magic links work, makes me think that the placement either doesn't play a role in how the tattoo channels magic OR that it does so differently depending on where. Adding to that, why would touching the tattoo be necessary when it's already there on the skin?

Furthermore, it's established (mainly here, also implied here and here) that Erin touching his tattoos is necessary for his spellcasting.

Now the detail that got me thinking about this while rereading: when the Void Dragon is possessing Erin, he doesn't touch the tattoos before casting. And while it's possible that he does and we just don't see it onscreen, it seems odd that throughout both sequences where VD is using Erin's magic, we don't see him do this, or even any indication of it. Which is interesting when you consider that he's directly influencing Erin's actions through his soul, and when casting, through his magic links.

Now, if the action of touching the tattoos is what enables Erin to do magic, how come VD can do it through the same channels without doing that?

My theory: it's not physically necessary for using magic, but mentally necessary. It's possible that Erin uses the action as a sort of grounding technique, which makes perfect sense if these are something that is directly linked to maintaining or stabilizing his magic. The tattoos make it possible, while the action of added contact while spellcasting makes it easier. It's something that he has associated with doing magic, and without it it takes longer or significantly more effort to make it work.

Any thoughts?

[klm-zoflorr]

Well shit so this got me thinking. Ghosts (as in dead humans that were previously alive) accomodations in the modern world. Is this anything? Like, ghosts are immaterial. Can't touch, move any objects. That's a pretty significant disability I would say. So would a modern society need carers for ghosts, the eventual children they have?

And not like in regards to food sleep washing you know because, they're dead. But I was thinking what if a ghost wants to watch tv? Can't press buttons. You'd need a voice activated tv or a motion activated one (...assuming ghosts appear on cameras). What if they want to read a book? They can't. Would have to have someone hold it and turn the pages for them or like a kindle that scroll automatically or with voice. Shit, they can't wear earphones. Or hold a phone to their ear. I think it'd be simpler for whatever job they have to leave the phone calls to someone else? Also I was thinking what if they want to get on the bus? They wouldn't really need to since i guess they can "walk" (float?) indefinitely without tiring, but also a moving vehicle would probably leave them behind since they go through walls and don't have anything to hold on to. But like, paying for stuff. They can have a bank account, they can earn money (i mean theyd be pretty darn great lookouts. Scouts. Explorers), they have to pay for entertainement and a house if they want to have their space. But how do they, like, pay with a card? They can't carry around a card. Can't enter the digits? Facial recognition??

[blumineck]

Huge respect to all the disabled archers out there- this is HARD!

Please check out Patreon to support these videos- I have art references in the shop!

[daily-dragon-drawing]

Disability pride dragon for disability pride month?

#129 - 身心障礙 (shēnxīn zhàng'ài / disability) - Happy disability pride month!!! ❤️

[sparrowlucero]

Reading comprehension site. As far as I understand it, your point is moreso that often stories set in a world without homophobia, transportation, etc. Are treated as morally better. Meanwhile stories which are parallel to real world queerness, identity, and oppression are often viewed negatively. Mostly because there's a standing idea of "you could have made it better by simply not including the homophobia and transphobia".

In my mind, both are morally equivalent, and both are examining themes which may be interesting in the context of queer experiences and liberation.

yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about... I'm basically just arguing against that more extreme mindset you sometimes see around queernorm stuff and pointing out that maybe it's not great to implicitly lump stuff like, say, steven universe, queer as folk, and i saw the tv glow together as the 'lesser' or "more harmful" type of work we should seek to avoid because they focus on queer struggles, or otherwise downplaying the value of themes that aren't like, escapist enough in some way.

Honestly I think at some point the discussion around depictions of homophobia- specifically, criticism aimed at the thought that (often quite fetishistic) homophobia (or sexism, racism, etc) needed to exist in fantasy for the sake of "historical realism", and of bury your gays-type stuff - sort of got telephone game'd into "it's weird to depict bigotry or gay characters suffering/dying when you could just not do that; no one wants to see that" and then in turn "the best, most valuable and desired way to depict queerness (race, disability, gender, etc) is to make it normal and as downplayed as possible" and i think it's worth pointing out that that's often not great advice/a good metric for judging queer fiction overall.

[tallysgreatestfan]

I actually saw this exact powerset written as a disability before, in Scott Westerfelds Space Opera The Risen Empire, and there it worked fairly well. (I am an autistic woman with bipolar disorder for the record).

One of the books main characters is left-wing politician Nara Oxham, powerful enough to directly go against the undead Emperor - but her telepathic powers not just help her in her political scheming, more often than not the overwhelm her.

She needs to take medication several times every day so it does not get too overwhelming, especially in cities. If she wouldn't she would have violent meltdowns, and this actually made her end up in a psych ward for most of her teenage years. And even like this she needs time away from people from time to time to decompress.

The narrative goes deeply into how exhausting and overwhelming this is.

Another interesting detail is that her opponents are actually ableist about that, treating it like a neurodivergency. She is called "the mad senator" by pretty much the entire right wing, which was harrowing to read but also added more realism to her portrayal of telepathy as disability.

Not quite sure how exactly it works so well, other than deliberately drawing parallels to real life neurodivergence - I feel very seen as an autistic person in her - and exploring both positive and negative impacts on her life in detail.

I have a character who has the power to read minds, but sometimes cannot control when she reads minds, and has frequent migraines even if she doesn't use her powers. I wanted to ask if the uncontrollable mind reading would count as a disability since she'd need to avoid crowded spaces or risk being overwhelmed, and if this falls under the "disability as punishment" trope, even if she still gets migraines without actively using her powers

Hello,

So, to answer your second question first, her powers are a migraine trigger, among other possible triggers? No, that sounds fine and pretty realistic. If people had super powers in real life and also had migraines, it's realistic that using super powers could be a migraine trigger because there are so many different ways to trigger migraines. She's not being given a disability to punish her for her actions, she simply has a migraine trigger that happens to be kind of hard to avoid. That's fine.

As for whether or not uncontrollable mind reading would be a disability, that depends on whether it's seen as such in the work or not. It's not a disability in the real world, but if it's disabling for her, it is kind of a disability. That would be a kind of fantasy disability if her powers alone (not including the migraines, which are real-world symptoms) have disabling effects. It's kind of like sensory processing disorder, only a fantasy version. Fantasy disabilities are a bit tricky on this blog. So yes, she is disabled with both a fantasy disability and a real-world disability.

Mod Aaron

[audhdnight]

Petition to add more disabled magical creatures in fantasy

Like picture a mermaid. When they have to be on land their tail turns to legs, but because their body is used to lower gravity their joints tire easily and are chronically in pain.

Also depending on how deep in the ocean they live, it’s likely they have circulation problems because their body is used to the water pressure holding everything where it needs to be and now their blood is always fucking pooling in their legs and they have to wear compression socks everywhere.

Wheelchair user mermaids. Partially/fully blind mermaids because who needs to see when there’s no light at the bottom of the ocean?

Mermaids with sensory issues who have to wear headphones all the time because sound is so much louder up here on land and they are constantly overstimulated. And also the sun is simply Too Bright™.

Mermaids who have POTS because in the water postural changes make no difference and their bodies don’t know how to stabilize with so much gravity.

I’m really fixated on the mermaids rn but PLEASE feel more than welcome to add more!!!! I wanna hear about disabled dragons

[zaltynn-alt2]

[i love it when paps carries sans :3c]

[fun fact, this is actually a re-draw from years ago]

[omg how much my style has changed,,,]

[despite everything, it's still you!]

[anim-ttrpgs]

something I don’t get about the disability metaphor is that for eureka monsters obviously it harms another person to eat them. the help a disabled person needs doesn’t actively harm or kill another person. Maybe it’s a difference in perspectives that cannot be resolved

(What I’m about to write could potentially sound very fucked up at first so I’m going to need to trust everyone to read the whole thing before forming an opinion.)

Also this message and response references these two posts.

Eureka’s stance on disabled people is that they (including myself writing this) are, or at least can often be, burdens.

Disabled people often require more resources to live than they are able to “give back,” which, in our capitalist and artificial-scarcity-based economy, is just about the worst thing a person can do.

Anti-ableism sentiment often focuses on the idea that “disabled people aren’t burdens, that they’re just as good and capable as everyone else,” but if they were, they wouldn’t be “disabled” would they? When you say stuff like that, you’re conceding that a person’s worth is determined by how capable they are at doing work, and then having to bend over backwards to justify thinking that a person without arms is just as valuable as a person with arms. Eureka is asking you to decouple a person’s value from how much net resources they can produce.

Often times also, the resources that real disabled people consume are human resources, and those human resources are very much capable of suffering for it. Nurses are overworked, around-the-clock care is absolutely physically and mentally exhausting, people who have to care for their elderly or otherwise disabled relatives on top of their regular jobs don’t get to have social lives or hobbies, etc.

To this end, we wrote the monsters in Eureka to be unquestionably people who “cause damage” to society by literally eating up human resources, because they have to to live, they have no other choice unless they want to just die. Your friend is gone from your life because he has to spend all his free time caring for his comatose wife after a freak car accident. Your friend is gone from your life because a vampire randomly ate him. Providing a metaphor isn't all the monsters are doing, they just work well through that lens.

And then Eureka forces you to look at these people as people, and make up your mind as to whether they have value and a right to prologue their own existence. We can’t force you to agree that they do, but if you think they don’t, then you’ll have to make that argument looking at an intelligent person with a life rather than a pure hypothetical or statistics on a chart.

There are some monsters in Eureka where, if the economy or societal structures were changed, they would stop being such severe drains on resources and could exist harmlessly within society, and there are some monsters where no imaginable amount of societal change would solve the problems they cause. This is true of disabled people IRL as well. Some of them would require no further assistance with living if certain things about society changed, and others would still require a massive amount of human resources.

And even when it’s not necessarily human resources, the extra resources that disabled people need also cause huge energy expenditure and create huge amounts of plastic waste, which are things that contribute to global warming and pollution, which do have significant harmful effects on everyone’s lives. Despite this, they are still “worth it” to keep around.

As for actively causing harm, that happens too. I randomly scrolled past this post after we got this message and saved it so I could link it here.

This person and their family had to cause a big stink in a restaurant just to get an accommodation that they needed, and to us reading it from their perspective, we’re obviously on their side, but I can assure you that the overworked staff at that restaurant didn’t see it that way. They saw the disabled person as an aggressive Karen whom they would never in a million years want to have to provide customer service to. The disabled person & family had to get aggressive, and ruin the staff’s day, to get what they needed. That’s actively causing harm - harm we all agreed was justified to cause - but harm nonetheless.

Plastic straws aren’t that big of a deal for global pollution, but even if they were, the point is that this person still would have needed a straw. It doesn’t line up one-to-one, because metaphors rarely do, but a vampire asking if they can drink someone’s blood, and being told No, may find themselves in much the same position. (And if you bring up that some people find vampires really sexy, you’re missing the point. “I would give them a straw if they had sex with me.” is not actually a great thing to announce about yourself.)

I can also come up with an example from my own life. I personally am very sensitive to noise and noise pollution. If there’s music playing at a public space, I usually can’t handle it. (Earplugs don’t work for other reasons I won’t get into - plus, if I just deafen myself to all sound, how can I socialize with anyone in this public space?)

If I want to exist in this space, I will have to actively cause harm to everyone there, or else stop existing in that space. I will have to go up to whoever is responsible and ask them to turn off the music, actively taking it away from everyone else who was enjoying it. I have to take action to ruin their good time if I want to exist in that space at all, and they might, very understandably, be pissed off at me for doing that. Because, like I said in this other post, the people that monsters eat do have a right to prevent themselves from being eaten by monsters. We aren't proposing that the solution is everyone has to line up to be mauled to death by monsters or else they're a bad person.

Who has a greater right to enjoy themselves in that space? That’s the kind of question that Eureka poses, and makes you consider both sides as human being rather than denoting one as just an ontologically evil villain to be destroyed.

We actually don't know of perfect solutions to all the problems presented by the existance of monsters in Eureka, we just know that "exterminate all people who are parasites and burdens to society" ain't it.

[gayaest]

[ Description in Alt-Text ] 🌈✨🪽🐬🌸

Re-Design of Kandi, I wanted to make her design a bit more cohesive and complete color. 🦼

[natjennie]

the injustice of the rat grinders technically playing by the rules and getting lauded for it because they have discipline and are generally Good at School vs the bad kids literally saving the world every other day and having to play catch-up to be acknowledged for it. the way that public school only caters to people who are good at "playing the game" of the education system and anyone that can't function how the school deems you should under its strict policies and conditions is tossed aside and called a failure. how are we feeling, american public school survivors?

[lgbtqforeverything]

everything about lydia finally being able to rest and not rage anymore (and even how the bad kids and specifically kristen approached her this season!) feels like a disability metaphor to me. the feeling of getting to rest after years of rage and how it can so easily be read as finding the right medication or accommodation. the way kristen immediately tries to get the gem out and how obvious lydia’s relief (and disbelief tbh) is at her immediate trying like how finding a doctor that actually wants to work with you is like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders.

[ill-kidnap-all-the-stars]

Sokka

[ image description: digital drawing of Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender in my style. He is a dark-skinned man walking towards the camera but looking to the right/his left. He has blue eyes and his head is mostly shaved, with the top portion long and tied back into a ponytail. He is wearing a blue changshan with silver frog closures, silver moons on the collar and silver lion embroidery on his shoulders. He is wearing pale blue trousers and blue shoes with silver embroidery, and holding his space sword behind him. He is standing in front of a brown Water Tribe symbol ]

prints ✨ commissions

Continuing to repost older art, I have just decided that I am going to inflict upon you this entire project because it's cool as balls :) once again, the original influences and cultural exploration is under the cut (and once again noting that there is just so much nuance missing from these, since it's impossible to condense thousands of years and miles worth of culture into a few Instagram slides):

A Bit of Background:

The Water Tribes' culture is based primarily on those of Arctic and Siberian peoples. The Northern Tribe has more influence from Siberian peoples (for example, the Yakut, the Buryat, and the Evenk), while the Southern Tribe has more influence from Arctic peoples (such as the Inuit, the Sireniki, and the Yupik). Since the Southern Tribe was founded by ancient immigrants from the Northern Tribe, this reflects the real world relationship between Arctic and Siberian peoples. However, the Water Tribes also draw from other Indigenous peoples, such as Native American, Aboriginal Australian, and Polynesian cultures. And, like all cultures in the ATLA world, the Water Tribes also have extensive Chinese influence.

Some examples include: the igloos used by the Southern Tribe, which resemble those used by the Inuit; the Water Tribes' reliance on hunting and fishing, similar to the Inuit; Water Tribe warriors wear face paint into battle, a practice associated with Native Americans, as well as African and Southeast Asian tribes; Water Tribe boats are based on Polynesian catamarans; Water Tribe boomerangs are based on the “returning boomerangs” used by Aboriginal Australian tribes.

Standard Water Tribe Clothing:

Water Tribe clothing typically resembles the clothing of Arctic peoples. For example, the large, pullover coats are drawn from Inuit anoraks (also called parkas, although they are strictly speaking not the same). Anoraks are typically made from reindeer or seal skin and lined with fur.

Water Tribe shoes are influenced by the mukluks worn by Arctic peoples. These shoes are also made from reindeer or seal skin and are often worn with an inner liner and protective overshoe.

‘Hair loopies’ are also based on an Inuit hairstyle. While braided hairstyles are found in cultures all over the world, ‘hair loopies’ are based on a uniquely Canadian Inuit hairstyle and are called qilliqti in Inuktitut.

My Design:

Katara's warm-weather clothes are inspired by the Chinese cheongsam (Cantonese: 長衫; literally 'long shirt/dress'). It is typically a long, form-fitting, one-piece garment with a standing (mandarin) collar, an asymmetrical, left-over-right closure (右衽; youren), two side slits, and Chinese frog closures (盤扣; pankou).

However, Sokka's warm-weather clothing doesn't have a similar parallel, or even a less-clear influence. For this reason, I decided to draw Sokka in the closest male equivalent to the cheongsam, the changshan (Mandarin: 長衫; literally 'long shirt').

I embellished Sokka's changshan with embroidery of lions, which are a symbol of military prowess in Chinese culture — perfect for Sokka's smart strategies, don't you think? His shoes also have irises on them, which can represent insight, communication and conviction. Finally, I added two crescent moons on his collar because, while his sister of course has a connection to the moon, I also believe Sokka has one as well through Yue