#I dont want to imply that disability is 100% entirely made up- but it also isn't 100% entirely 'objective physical reality' or whatever.

[nothorses]

I saw your tags on the post about trick or treaters not speaking and I am v interested in hearing more of your thoughts on the concept of “developmental delays”! I‘ve seen the idea that disability is a construct, but I’m not as familiar with the idea that development is also a construct. You have really great takes as an educator and someone who like, actually GETS how kids work, so I am interested in your thoughts!

I also know that posting on this subject might be poking the bear, so it is 1000% cool if you would rather not comment 💜 Tysm!

Oh I'm happy to talk about it! I love talking about this stuff, thank you for asking me to 💙

This isn't exactly new ground; there's been plenty of research into and writing on the subject, and deconstructing "development" as a static concept was, ironically, a huge part of my most recent development class.

The idea is that our understanding of "benchmarks" of development, which informs the larger concept of development as a whole, is heavily rooted in the assumption that Western culture is The Standard. We prioritize walking, talking, reading, and writing, which means we cultivate these skills in our children from a young age, which means they develop those skills more quickly than they do others.

To use one of my favorite examples from Rogoff, 2003, Orienting Concepts and Ways of Understanding the Cultural Nature of Human Development:

Although U.S. middle-class adults often do not trust children below about age 5 with knives, among the Efe of the Democratic Republic of Congo, infants routinely use machetes safely (Wilkie, personal communication, 1989). Likewise, Fore (New Guinea) infants handle knives and fire safely by the time they are able to walk (Sorenson, 1979). Aka parents of Central Africa teach 8- to 10-month-old infants how to throw small spears and use small pointed digging sticks and miniature axes with sharp metal blades: "Training for autonomy begins in infancy. Infants are allowed to crawl or walk to whatever they want in camp and allowed to use knives, machetes, digging sticks, and clay pots around camp. Only if an infant begins to crawl into a fire or hits another child do parents or others interfere with the infant’s activity. It was not unusual, for instance, to see an eight month old with a six-inch knife chopping the branch frame of its family’s house. By three or four years of age children can cook themselves a meal on the fire, and by ten years of age Aka children know enough subsistence skills to live in the forest alone if need be. (Hewlett, 1991, p. 34)" (pg. 5)

In the US we would view "letting an 8-month-old handle a knife" as a sign of severe neglect, but the emphasis here is placed on the fact that these children are taught to do these things safely. They don't learn out of necessity, or stumble into knives when nobody is watching; they learn with care, support, and safety in mind, just like children here learn. It makes me wonder if Aka parents would view our children's lack of basic survival skills with the same concern and disdain as USAmerican parents would view their children's inability to read.

Do we disallow our children from handling knives because it is objectively, fundamentally unsafe for a child of that age to do so- because even teaching them is developmentally impossible- or is that just a cultural assumption?

What other cultural assumptions do we have about child development?

Which ties in neatly with various social-based models of disability, particularly learning and, of course, developmental disabilities. If your culture doesn't value the things you are good at, and you happen to struggle with the things it does value, what kinds of assumptions is it likely to make about you? How will it pathologize you? What happens to that culture if it understands those values to be arbitrary, in order to accommodate your unique existence?

[harmicist]

the torbcourse, version 2.0

around 2 weeks ago, i made a very long post about the amount of hate/types of hate being directed @ the character Torbjorn from overwatch.  I actually never expected it to gain much traction, given i only had about 100 followers at the time it was posted.  

thats the backstory.  it now has over 7,000 notes on it. if you never actually saw it going around on tumblr, here’s the permalink to it if you’re interested in what i said on it.  the tl;dr of it though, is that most of the hate has some root in ableism.  

Torbjorn has dwarfism.  i got too many people asking for the source on that, and so i’ll just say it up front. someone who medically has dwarfism is beneath the full grown height of 4′10.  Torbjorn is only 4′7.  regardless of any and all references and poking at world of warcraft “dwarves”, as dwarves dont exist in the real world this classifies him as the very first little person who is a playable character in a videogame, to my knowledge.

I should clarify before I begin with v. 2.0, as i should have then, that im not referring to how he’s annoying in game to play against.  the amount of responses i got that “i only dislike him because i dont like playing against him” is overwhelming.  I’m referring to comments about how he’s unshippable, the complete and utter lack of him in fanart and fanwork, to calling him ugly or claiming that he’s undeserving of any of the things has has, from his family to his wife to his friends.  those things are entirely unrelated to gameplay, and entirely related to how people producing and consuming overwatch fandom content perceive him.

I am gonna put the rest under a “read more” bc mom, holy fuck, this is a long, long read, but i tried to be as concise and answer the various rebuttals i’ve gotten over time that weren’t total nonsense.  Additionally, if you could spread this that would be nice, because, damn.  If i leave one good thing on this fandom without a doubt I do want it to be a reevaluation of how we treat certain characters.  

i think that deflection is actually a good bouncing point to start off with.  So many people say that “I only hate him because of gameplay” and i just want to say that is very much patently wrong. The most hated character to play against in overwatch, to my knowledge, is Mei.  Symmetra is quickly coming in as a close second because of how overpowered she’s become after the massive buff blizzard gave her.  And yet, you see tons of fandom content with both mei and symmetra.  Yes, originally, torbjorn was a very hard character to counter because of hero stacking, but after both nerfs hit and there was the elimination of hero stacking, he’s become far more manageable to play against and has been entirely eliminated from the meta.  The same is true of bastion- who also is included in overwatch fanworks frequently.

I cant say for lower ranking players at all how that works, but as i am a diamond player the meta is pretty close to what i actually play.  Frustrating? sure, but no more so than bastion, who is also difficult to play against in the short turn but if you counter correctly isn't much of a hassle.  Its actually to the point both bastion and torb need a bit of a nerf to bring back onto the player map.

However, there is an unprecedented amount of hate directed at him considering all of these factors, essentially I’m saying he’s actually less frustrating than other characters who receive more content than him and another character hated for the same reason also doesn't get the same treatment as torbjorn.  the reason im saying that is, is unconscious ableism.  I’m not saying you’re consciously thinking “he’s ugly, im going to add more hate onto an issue because of that,” im saying that there is a complex process where your anger and frustration towards his playstyle is aggravated by an unconscious bias against disabled people.  

Think of it in a different context- you are in a checkout line at the grocery store.  The cashier is going slow, because they are moving slow because, say, they have downs syndrome or are perhaps are an amputee.   the issue is yes, they’re being slow and you, in a humans inherently selfish manner, care about your time as well.  there’s that disconnect in your mind because you dont want to call someone the r-slur or point out that they are having trouble bagging because they dont have full use of motion.  (though some might not share your unwillingness, lord knows i’ve heard grocery store employees get harassed before).  But you are still irritated with them in a way they are undeserving of receiving.  Even if you keep it quiet while interacting, sometimes as I’ll hear my mother say after she leaves, “I understand they’re trying to be inclusive, but does it have to get in my way like that?”  Rather than being irritated at being slow, it transforms into irritation that they are disabled and therefore getting in your way.  

the tl;dr of that is that yes, even though you’re not necessarily angered/made upset by the disability it can become an aggravating factor in response to another irritant.

Moving on- the “creepy” trope as applied to torbjorn.  I would personally like to thank @necromin for this comment, even though I cannot tag you in this?  

It is true!  There is a massive trope and history surrounding the idea of dwarfs/little people as being depraved or perverse, or imp-like.  Our willingness to apply how some people use torbjorn to the character itself is not a thing that just happens in a void.  How fandom interprets the intent of his voice lines also does not occur in a void.  

Another commonly said thing in the tags was that oh, i only hate him because he hates omnics!!! and as many, many other people pointed out, that in itself is a fallacy, because plenty of characters in overwatch dislike omnics.  From Zarya (who outright threatens both Zenyatta and Bastion), to Junkrat (Also makes threatening lines towards the Shambali monastery), to Reaper (tin cans, a dime a dozen), there is a long history of hating omnics for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, he’s not even so much a “violent racist” as some would have him made out to be.  His line to bastion (I hate working with those talking tin cans!) actually does make some sense, because he did have to fight against them in the war, and can you blame him for not wanting to go into the Shambali monastery or Numbani after seeing what large numbers of omnics grouped together can do?  Far more violent omnic “racist” lines are Junkrats- (If these bots want to go into the light, I'd be more than happy to help), and (So we're delivering a bomb to scrap some bots and I'm getting paid for it. My kind of job!)

However, much like how characters who are also “annoying” to play again dont receive the same amount of flack, there is a hypocrisy in that a lot of the people who claim not to like torbjorn because of this, love and produce content of other characters like reaper, or zarya, or junkrat.  and so the question that lies therein, is “why does torbjorn get hated for this reason more than those other characters?”  the answer is back at the end of the second paragraph.  

And a lot of people call it “omnic racism”, but as a poc blogger who can state it far more elegantly than i can, racism is a very inadequate, if not inappropriate word to describe the relations between omnic and human in the overwatch world because of why omnics are hated.  they started a worldwide war that threatened the very existence of humanity, caused total chaos for an undetermined amount of time.  Racism is an inappropriate word because this implies that racism as we know it has a cause that is justifiable,  since “omnic racism” is rooted in a very much justifiable history. and thats just not true.  The same can be said of x-men being used as an allegory for racism, because there is a fear that is understandable, when in irl racism it is very much not.

but that is just a sidenote, and not really the focus of this.  

a lot of people also asked if this was a joke.  or treated it like a joke.  I am very much serious about this, and a lot of people agree with me that it got very much out of hand, and some people who were guilty of falling into the ableist route of mocking torbjorn for being ugly/unshippable apologized for it or admitted this opened their eyes some to their own internal biases.  Others still insist that hating him is just a meme.  Then, Lets move onto what i am talking about that i count as hate, but is a bit less obvious to see unless you’re looking for it- which is, the erasure of torbjorn’s character in fanworks.  first i’ll start with the math of it, and then i’ll go into other things of note.

If it is just a meme- than riddle me this-why can you quantitatively conclude that he has significantly less content of him than practically any other character in the game? 

The overwatch archive of our own has over 10,000 fanworks on it now.  The two most common pairings on it are mchanzo and reaper76, each steadily on their way to 2,000 works apiece. The 3 most-tagged characters are all original members of overwatch- McCree, Reaper, and Mercy.  8 of the 10 most tagged characters if you include Amelie and Fareeha, had some major relation to the original overwatch or were members.  9 if you include hanzo, being genji’s brother.  Each of them have over 1,000 fics apiece where they are tagged, and really more like 1,500-2,000+ fics apiece where they are tagged.  (Jesse with almost a whopping 4,000 fics where he’s tagged)

Torbjorn only has 437 fics where he’s been tagged.  Of those fics, he’s not in any of the top 10 most tagged relationships.  Compared to any of the other 5 founding members of overwatch that we know of, that is very strangely low.  Reinhardt is tagged in roughly 1,100 fics, Ana, 1,200 fics, 76, over 2,000, and reaper with over 3,400 fics tagged.  

As a side note, the only character with less fics than him is Bastion, who only has about 240 fics where they are a tagged character.  But this isnt necessarily not understandable- they have no spoken lines whatsoever that arent some sort of robotic onomatopoeia, or omnicmatopea, as i might call it.  Even sombra has more fics than him by a slim margin, but it strange considering she’s the new character, and he was one of the very first ones to be released.

The other interesting thing of note is the dramatic drop off in fics after Winston, who also has a relatively small number of fanfics compared to his role as one of the main characters of the series.  of the 7 characters who have less than 1000 fics to their name, 4 of them are women, 3 are woc, and 2 have confirmed disabilities that are unconventional in video games on top of being amputees.  

but please, tell me again that people aren’t interested in torbjorn because he’s a white man.  say it to my face while we both can see the enormous amount of content for Junkrat, Reinhardt, and 76.  

Its harder to quantify this, but when you read as much overwatch fanfiction as I do, you start to pick up on a few trends that are subtle but important to denote nonetheless.  First off, is that when in fics where the “original” members of overwatch are a friend group, Torbjorn is oddly left out.  Second, in the fics that take place prior to overwatch’s fall and there is some sort of science/ engineering/ mechanical fix involved, the role usually is given to Winston- even if it doesnt make sense timeline wise to have Winston even be there, in Overwatch.  

as another side note, an easy benchmark is this- in your overwatch fanwork, if Fareeha Amari is under the age of 18, then Tracer, winston, and genji aren’t yet members of overwatch.  Tracer and winston are both younger than Fareeha by a handful of years (tracer by 6 years, winston by 3) and Genji joined after he turned 25 (if Fareeha is 18, then genji is only 21)

Ok, but if Winston isnt a member, then who would be the one to do the fixes and technological stuff in Overwatch?  that should be easy, given that Torbjorn is both an original member of overwatch and a world class, genius engineer who is stated in canon to be the designer behind a great deal of Overwatch’s technology.  So why do i see time and time again that he’s just not present in these fanworks?  (See the end of paragraph 2).

The same is true in fanart.  He is mostly not included in comics where it would make complete and utter sense for him to be there.  If its a comic about the golden 7- dont exclude Torbjorn from it. (the golden 7 being, gabriel, jack, ana, reinhardt, mercy, mccree, and torbjorn).  As another person pointed out, he’s likely considered practically family to people like Mercy or Reinhardt or Pharah and Ana.  If I see a comic with 6/7 of them in it, and I dont see torbjorn, i do wind up very, very suspicious.  Not of the artist purposefully saying “I dont want to draw torbjorn because he’s ugly / disabled”, but of unconsciously devaluing his character and place in the series because of those aforementioned biases and so erasing him from the fanwork altogether.  

The same thing with him being “shipped” in fanwork.  I referenced this anecdote in the original post, and the numbers confirm that essentially no one is producing content with him in a relationship in fanwork.  It is not always so overt as people saying he’s disabled and therefore unattractive, but rather people finding him unattractive because he’s short, because he’s disabled.  

and lastly, returning to the point of him being a WOW dwarf and him being an uninteresting character for the special kind of ignorant-

“they just dont care about him so they dont bother reading about him, believe me, most people who make fun of torbjorn think hes a fantasy kind of dwarf rather than a character with dwarfism lol

im not saying that fandoms have not disliked a character purely because of their disability before but seriously, its kind of blizzard’s fault for making a character with dwarfism look literally a stereotypical fantasy kind of dwarf without a very interesting backstory or personality.”

Im not tagging this person, im not interested in “callouts”, but this person had both the accusation that people who dont like him because they dont care about him, and so they dont bother reading about him and then say explicitly they just dont care about torbjorn because they believe he’s without a interesting backstory or personality.

From literally everything about his character, how on earth can you conclude he’s not an interesting character with a good personality/backstory?  He was one of the 6 founding members of overwatch, of the 6 he was the only one with any sort of background in causing the crisis, even though he voiced disapproval of intelligent AI to businessmen who were looking to make profits over the safety of others.  In his profile, it says that his worst fears were confirmed when the omnic crisis began.  How come there arent a ton of fics about him seeing his worst fears come to light when that clearly would be a very interesting topic of fanwork- and a very common theme in Overwatch canon and fanon.  (Ie, mercy fanfics and addressing her resurrecting Gabriel, Hanzo’s regret about listening to orders and murdering genji.)  Thematically, the idea of your past coming back to haunt you places torbjorn in with the other characters very well. Similarly, in recall fics, torbjorn seeks out even now, post-fall of overwatch to right the wrongs he made in his youth with the creation of the omnics that are huge.  Storywise, torbjorn is actually both incredibly important and intriguing.  Thematically, his character also fits right in with the various themes established in the lore amongst the older characters.  

Overall, though, this person is correct, because yeah.  People dont read about him because people dont care about him.  But the question is why don’t people care about him enough to know that he’s actually a character who fits right in with everyone else?

And the answer to that question, is on some level, undoubtedly, ableism, due to his disability making him “unattractive” and therefore “unshippable” and therefore unworthy of most attention in fanworks, or his disability making him “unattractive” and “unworthy of friendships” and therefore not included in platonic works with the characters.  

Anyways.  I’m still tired.  Hopefully I communicated calmly what I meant + more people will be receptive to understanding what I’m trying to get across- that regardless of intent or the original reason of why they hated torbjorn, his physical disability is worsening insults and magnifying dislike of him, and causing him to be erased altogether in both fanart and fanfic.