Discussion Friday

[geraineon]

Let's talk about disability and how it's portrayed in the cnovels you've read.

Have you encountered any that is better about it than others? Tell us what you liked about it.

Alternatively, what do you see as a common issue in the cnovels you've read.

(Feel free to talk about anything else on this topic/venture out of cnovels!

I'm on a trip with family, so replies will be slow)

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Copper Coins did a relatively good job imo, I found it inspiring as a disabled writer who sometimes feels like I put in "too many" disabled characters. Here's my review https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/856981.html

[geraineon]

Thanks for sharing that review! The number of people with various disabilities didn't even occur to me as "a lot" in copper coins. I'm glad it's inspiring to you that way!

[alias_sqbr]

It might partly be that I read it while I was angsting over a specific story I was working on, and thus was more aware of it!

[aurumcalendula]

Neat! I'll have to check out Copper Coins.

[alias_sqbr]

I forgot until I reread my review but content warning for somewhat unfortunate and very dark treatment of someone with intellectual disability.

[geraineon]

I remember liking Ge Tingting's writing in Evil as Humans. She didn't get magically healed and there are assistive tech/magic to help her communicate, and she gets her own shining moment!

I know the portrayal of disability in media in general can be a bit of a minefield, so I'm hoping there will be enough mentions of decent ones here to make a list.

[alias_sqbr]

Oh, I forgot that one but yes! I liked that too.

[alias_sqbr]

In terms of other books, hmm...

I remember being basically ok with the depiction of disability in books I've read with disabled main characters/love interests, off the top of my head: Married Thrice to a Salted Fish, After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, The Disabled Tyrants Pet Palm Fish, and The Reader and Protagonist Definitely Have to Be in True Love. It wasn't Good Realistic Representation but it felt like disability is just a thing people have to deal with sometimes that doesn't make you not a person/incapable of being a loveable partner etc. Though these aren't recs per se, I probably enjoyed The Disabled Tyrants Pet Palm Fish the most but I don't think I managed to finish any of them, my issues just weren't to do with depiction of disability.

The treatment of secondary disabled characters on the other hand is generally Not Good. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is Xuan Ji in TGCF, whose limping gait is portrayed as scary.

[geraineon]

I guess because secondary characters do not have the main character halo, they tend to get portrayed worse. I do hate it when disability is a sign of Evil or is something scary.

[alias_sqbr]

Same :(

[lee_bella]

Just off the top of my head, there's priest's Sha Po Lang (杀破狼), Cang Wu Bin Bai's Golden Terrace (黄金台) and Meng Xi Shi's Thousand Autumns (千秋). I thought the portrayal was pretty okay -- other than there being a lot of poison and magic cure going around in ancient time.

For something more realistic and set in modern time, there is Cyan Wings' The Seeing Eye Dog/Reborn as a Seeing Eye Dog (重生成导盲犬). Other than the part about the main character being reborn as an overly intelligent dog that knows how to invest and make money, it's a pretty realistic look at how someone deals with vision loss and makes a life for himself.

I feel that it's more likely to encounter stories where the characters were disabled in the past, but by the time the story begins, they are either cured or have transmigrated into a healthy body, like Nian Zhong's Happy Doomsday (末日快乐) and Feng Yu Nie's Mistakenly Saving the Villain (论救错反派的下场). Wang Ya's Thriller Trainee (惊悚练习生) is a special case where the MC is looking for a cure.

[ehyde]

Happy Doomsday set off some red flags for me re. the mc transmigrating into a healthy body at the beginning, but ultimately I felt that it handled it pretty well, in that he still wasn't neurotypical and his past physical disability remained important to his character development. The the way both the past and present world treated disability felt important to the plot (me learning more about his past: oh! you've ALWAYS lived in a dystopia!) and he wasn't the only disabled character, either. I think its weakest point on that front was the ending--generally I think Nian Zhong likes to tie things up almost too neatly in their endings which unfortunately includes "fixing" characters who throughout the novel didn't particularly need fixing.

[geraineon]

Mm, there are a lot of stories with characters who are cured/transmigrated, or very quickly it becomes a non-issue.

Thank you for sharing!

[duckprintspress]

I have read several of the ones mentioned above (Sha Po Lang, Golden Terrace, The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, Copper Coins, Thousand Autumns...) and in general I do like them, though sometimes I wish that the disability getting "fixed" wasn't so much a genre feature. Like, in Disabled Tyrant, there was truly no need for Mu Tianchi to not be mute. It didn't add anything, and imo it took away. And in Golden Terrace, when Fu Shen gets leg supports, he basically acts as if nothing is wrong any more. Things like that frustrate me. I thought Copper Coins was a relatively good example for "fixing" it but in a way that fit neatly into the plot, and I enjoyed how genuinely Xue Xian's disability, like. disabled him.

I find basically all of them better than most rep I read, in their defense, I just am the child of someone with major chronic pain issues and married to an ambulatory wheel chair user, so while I'm not physically disabled myself, I tend to be a little grumpy when I see magic solutions, since my lived reality has been watching the people I love have their illnesses slowly get worse and they're never going to get magically better and it'd be nice to read books where sometimes that's the reality the characters live with.

[aurumcalendula]

Same, re: Mu Tianchi!

[duckprintspress]

glad I'm not alone in that reaction! I'll own, I was really disappointed in vol. 3 and vol. 4 of the Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, they were so not what I wanted or hoped for after the first two volumes. oh well...

[full_metal_ox]

Si Da Ming Bu (四大名捕; The Four Great Constables), by Woon Swee Oan, portrays the adventures of a quartet of elite Imperial investigators. One of the titular heroes, Wu Qing AKA “Emotionless”, was hamstrung by enemies as a child and uses a wheelchair; he never gets miraculously healed, but he uses strategy, martial arts, and an arsenal of handy-dandy assistive gadgetry to whoop 57 varieties of ass.

(The story has inspired numerous adaptations, including a manhua series by Tony Wong, a number of TV dramas, and a superhero-flavored film trilogy.)

[duckprintspress]

ooo that sounds right up my alley, I'll have to add it to my TBR! thank you!!!

[douqi]

I can't believe I was today years old when I learned that the author I only know as Wen Rui'an is Malaysian.

[geraineon]

+1 omg, me too

[douqi]

Ning Yuan's Ravenous has an important secondary character who is disabled. She DOESN'T get magically cured of this, even though her sister turns out to have mega healing abilities. I also really like the way her sister and her eventual girlfriend's attitude towards this in day to day life — quietly observant and considerate, and an advocate for her when they need to be, but in no way making a huge deal out of it. I talked about this a bit in my review here.

This sticks out in my mind because other depictions of disability I've encountered have been very unsatisfactory. Highlight for spoilers! *Listen, God has a section that's very ableist. It's a time loop novel where the characters are trying to prevent a murder, and in the course of one of the loops, the protagonist becomes paralysed from the waist down. Her girlfriend's response to this is to kill herself in order to trigger the reset ('because I want you to be healthy'), and subsequent events prove this to have been the 'correct' move. I don't think the author realised how ableist it was.*

[geraineon]

I'm glad to hear that about Ning Yuan's Ravenous!

Yeah, I have seen a lot of Not Great depictions of disability... *sigh*

[aurumcalendula]

Offhand, I've run across main characters with disabilies in Golden Terrace, The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, and Stars of Chaos

I think Golden Terrace and The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish did a decent job, although I was kinda disappointed that in the latter Highlight for spoilers! *Mu Tianchi's muteness ultimately ends up being cured.* I dropped Stars of Chaos after book 3, so I'm not sure how it handled stuff later on.

[duckprintspress]

imo SPL carried through decently well. They both remain various levels of chronically ill.

[full_metal_ox]

I’m fascinated in particular by the game of 5D Troll Chess Gu Yun plays by ostentatiously feigning disabilities that…he actually has.

[duckprintspress]

lmao I hadn't thought of it that way but you're right he absolutely does. It sure keeps everyone off balance. Even the people he likes and might not want to keep off balance. Except Shen Yi, who sees through all of his shit.

[geraineon]

Shen Yi is tired of all his shit XD

[duckprintspress]

and yet sticks with him and by his side through all of his shit!

[geraineon]

Thanks for sharing!

I think SPL carried through, at least in this aspect, so agreed with duckprintspress above.

[liliacs]

Hmmm, no novel is standing out to me rn as especially good about disability; I've read a few novels mentioned in this thread and generally thought they were fine and didn't bother me, but I don't know if any made me appreciative of the treatment of disability as I read them. I guess, thinking back, I like that Cui Buqu in Peerless is born sickly and never gets better or has any kind of martial arts, but he's still a competent person who'll join in the action. IIRC, some characters fuss over his health, but they respect him and don't stop him from doing his work.

But on negatives, one trope that I really don't like is the "idiot" who's missing a soul and thus not a real person, and a character taking over their body doesn't matter. It's usually a glossed over trope for the sake of transmigration, but I do not like the implications. The book I'm currently reading (No. 1 Pretty Boy of the Immortal Path) has that trope. Someone told me a spoiler that makes me feel better about the setup, at least.

Another thing I don't like, and this is very subjective so I'm sure some people will disagree with me: naming characters' condition. Now, I don't think that's inherently bad or anything, but authors often don't bother doing research about the condition so it makes me cringe if I do know stuff about it. It's easier to shrug off for me if they have some unnamed, vague illness. The first example I think of for a book which did name conditions is Huai Dao by Priest, which had an insane depiction of OCD and basically said the gong is too strong to have PTSD.

[duckprintspress]

oh yeah I've run into that trope in a couple transmigration manhuas I've read and it's really obnoxious.

and oh priest. why would you do that. siiiiigh.

[liliacs]

Yeah, reading that book made me pretty judgmental of the treatment of mental illness. But I wonder if she realized the problem with her portrayal, since Mo Du avoids naming real conditions for the most part. I remember a few mentions, like Highlight for spoilers!*Luo Wenzhou asking Fei Du if he has PTSD,* but these were rare and that mention was at least a sympathetic one.

[lee_bella]

I agree. The portrayal in Huai Dao is not great. I feel like she applied what she had learnt from writing Huai Dao and wrote Mo Du, which is a better novel within the same genre.

[geraineon]

I did enjoy Cui Buqu too. And yeah, naming the character's condition, I think, really does take away the believability when the reader knows about the condition. Maybe we should have more mysterious wuxia nonsense diseases... I have definitely yelled at books before for getting a condition wrong.

re: the "idiot" missing a soul trope

Hm, I've not encountered that much but yeah the implications is not great.

[full_metal_ox]

Maybe we should have more mysterious wuxia nonsense diseases...

It only makes worldbuilding sense. Better mousetraps build smarter mice, and a Wuxia nonsense universe will create Wuxia nonsense evolutionary and political arms races—-not to mention the opportunities cultivation offers to develop diseases hitherto unheard of. (In our world, I don’t seem to recall anyone suffering radiation poisoning before about 1900.)

And fantastic abilities can come with fantastic prices: consider the Nie Sect in MDZS, and how their cultivation path not only drives them to instability and early death but turns their remains into spiritual hazardous waste (requiring human sacrifices in turn to contain.)

I have definitely yelled at books before for getting a condition wrong.

SyFy Channel’s Alphas had me hooting and (metaphorically) flinging poop at the screen: no, no, no, no, no! What Rachel has is not synaesthesia—-her condition might best be described as selective sensory hyperfocus (she can amplify any single sense to superhuman acuity by suppressing the other four, and of course it’s the classical five.)

[ehyde]

Nirvana in Fire being so spot-on in its portrayal of chronic illness that my husband had to stop watching and we still haven't finished :sob:

(mentioning this even though it's a drama because the novel handled it equally well, imo)

[duckprintspress]

ooo I didn't even think of NiF. It really is. Mei Changsu my beloved...

[geraineon]

I remember you mentioning that before! Ah... the ending will be extra rough, I assume. =(

[douqi]

Just thought a couple more disabled main characters from wuxia. Highlight for spoilers! *Yang Guo from Return of the Condor Heroes loses his right arm mid-novel. From memory it doesn't really impede him much.* There's also Fu Hongxue from Gu Long's Bordertown Wanderer and its sequel, who has a disabled right leg and epilepsy. The novel is generally sympathetic towards him but is quite realistic about how these affect him in combat situations.

[lee_bella]

I completely forgot about Bordertown Wanderer, and I was just rereading part of it the other day.

[full_metal_ox]

Then you have traits (often of fantastic origin) that can be either superpower or disability, depending upon the situation; in DMBJ, for example, I’m thinking of Hei Xiazi’s Riddickesque dark-adaptation and converse ultra-photosensitivity(1), or the hyperacute hearing that allows Liu Sang to navigate tombs with batlike precision and makes noise a distracting torment.

(1) And sir, if you’re so photosensitive that your naked eyes are Classified Information—-especially since a fair amount of your business takes you to places like the desert, the tropics, and the mountains—-what you need to be wearing are full wraparounds like these:



(Image description: a pair of Solar Shield Fits-Over SS Polycarbonate II Smoke Sunglasses, thick, boxy, and somewhat Terminatoresque, designed to fit over prescription glasses; often used by seniors, cataract patients, and following eye dilation at the ophthalmologist’s.)

[geraineon]

XDD The Hei Xiazi call out.

Now I'm gonna be staring at his sunglasses a little too hard (wasn't the glasses in Ultimate Note full wraparounds or did I retcon that in my brain?)