#amputee awareness
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Fizz is disabled, like his original limbs were severely damaged due to fire cause of this his current limbs are bionic prosthetics which replaced his original limbs.
#disabled characters#helluva boss#helluvaverse#hellaverse#fizzarolli#helluva boss fizzarolli#fizzarolli helluva boss#fizz#tw amputee#tw amputation#prosthetics#disabled#disability#disability awareness#disabilties
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if your story has an amputee character and you're meant to be taking their disability seriously, ask yourself: would this story be changed in any way if the missing limb were just replaced by a birthmark the character is embarrassed about?
if the answer is no, you're not taking the disability seriously.
#Rjalker reads The University of Sorcery#disabled characters#amputee characters#writing tips#writing advice#writing disability#this man may as well just have an embarassing birthmark on his leg for how little him literally#lacking a leg affects him in any way.#despite the authors going out of their way to immediately assure us they're not gonna do magical cures#like.#okay. maybe you're not literally doing a magical cure but.#are you aware that what you are doing is indistinguishable??????????
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Fic title : It's Worse When I Wake
@newwwwprompts Chronic Pain Awareness Month 2023 prompt : A morning with chronic pain
Rating : Teen & Up Audiences
Fandom : Helluva Boss
Pairing : Fizz/Asmodeus
Additional tags : Fluff, Chronic Pain, Pain, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Amputee Character, Phantom Pain, Good Significant Other Asmodeus | Ozzie, Soft Asmodeus | Ozzie, Wholesome, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Consent, Scars, Cuddling & Snuggling, Affection, Insecure FizzaRolli (Helluva Boss)
Word count : 470
#fanfiction#fanfic#fanfic challenge#fanfic prompts#chronic pain awareness month#chronic pain#disability#amputee#helluva boss#asmodeus x fizzarolli#fizzmodeus#fizzarozzie#fizz x ozzie#ozzie x fizz#fizzarolli x asmodeus#cute#fluff#interabled relationship
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I created an alter- ego at age 10 ego to protect my inner child, to protect myself. .here I am.. grown to up and realizing i was me runjing from me.
Im part demon, part human, part divine.
its finally safe to start letting myself come out and play .
You've been warned
Sorry, not sorry. She's been locked up too long
This IS me. And no, I'm not for everyone .
Tread lightly because you don't want this smoke 😘
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#the US is complicit in genocide and war crimes#there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people#not in my name#genocide joe#joe bye done#propaganda kills#stop funding genocide#stop funding israel#stop arming israel#war crimes#icc war crimes tribunal#apartheid#save palestine#israel is an apartheid state#ethnic cleansing#free palestine 🇵🇸#genocide#spread awareness#repost#this was never about hamas!#the US snd Israel lies while Palestine dies#child amputees#starvation#famine#history will remember#gaza is a graveyard for children#un security council#permanent ceasefire now!#netanyahu is a war criminal#israel must be stopped
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It is Disability Pride Month!
I would suggest using the opportunity to learn more about all the different disabilities and how they impact the lives of people with them, and how that struggle is made worse by ablism in our society.
Take the chance to learn from actual disabled people, talk to us and hear our stories, listen to us when we tell you how to help us and make our society more functional and accessible.
Learn about disabled history, about the crimes and injustices done to disabled people. Look up disabilty holocaust and you will get a bunch of articles on what the nazis did to disabled people. It's depressing, but important to learn.
Disability isn't a bad word, it's an accurate description unlike calling someone differently abled. They aren't the same. Disability = not abled, like not able to walk because you are a leg amputee, not being able to do things like everyone else because you have no executive function capabilities. Differently abled = something like left handed, you are still fully abled, you just do it differently but you do it without any aid or tools.
My friend @poeticallydisgraced gave that example when our school put up a sign about recognizing differently abled students. And I think that fits the situation very well.
If you're curious, I've given a bit of a description of my experience under the cut.
Happy disability pride month!
I am nuerodivergent, Audhd, I have autism and Adhd. I also have chronic health issues with severe allergies and I get some bad migraines. I have hearing issues too but wouldn't call myself hard of hearing, it's more of a disconnect between what's said and what I hear. Makes for some entertaining conversations.
I tend to get over stimulated in social settings, too much noise and too many people really mess with me, light and sound trigger my migraines which can last for days, which is never fun.
I have no social awareness, and can't tell the difference between teasing and bullying, the line is super blurred/non existent for me.
This causes a lot of problems, because when people make those jokes and tease me, I don't get it, and to me it's rude and mean, but it also goes the other way cause when I joke I cross a line I can't see, and then everyone gets mad at me even though I'm doing the same thing as them.
I technically have a minor hearing loss in my left ear from a surgery as a child, but I had started having those hearing issues during the phase of development where you learn to speak, so my understanding of language is a bit skewed and I frequently hear things wrong, or don't hear the words said and have to ask for people to repeat it.
My family is starting to get annoyed and won't repeat anything but it's not like I'm choosing to do it, and it is very frustrating when they refuse to repeat it.
All these things leave me feeling a little isolated from my family and people around me.
I am expected to change and be someone else that is more acceptable to nuerotypical society, I jump through hoops and put on an act to appear less different, I've always been singled out as weird and other, and while no one has bullied me, at least that I was aware of, I got left behind by my peers.
The constant masking and acting like something I am not is exhausting, after a week of school I am fully drained of my energy and ability to put on that act.
My mom has gotten upset that I don't act the way I do at school at home, but I shouldn't have to act like a different person with my family.
I am not ashamed to be nuerodiverse and disabled, no one should be shamed or looked down on for something they can't control. A lot still needs to be done to make our society accessible to everyone, the current disability protection and aid laws are insufficient and full of loopholes that allow for disabled people to be ignored.
Have fun learning!
Happy disability pride month!
#disabilities#disabled people#disability#deaf#deaf culture#deafness#blindness#hard of hearing#sign language#visual impairment#leg amputee#arm amputee#Amputee#Mobile disability#wheelchair#wheelchair user#disability awareness#chronic pain#chronic illness#chronic condition#chronic health issues#chronic health problems#migraine#nuerodivergent#nuerodiversity#autism#autistic#audhd#Adhd#Disability Pride Month
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https://rdbl.co/47gppMi Rebubble
https://bit.ly/3uBt9JG Teepublic
#wheelchair#disabled#disability#handicap#humor#amputee#wheelchair humor#paralyzed#handicapable#accessible van#spinal cord injury0#Wheelchair#Disability#disability shirt#cerebral palsy#spoonie#leg amputee#special needs#accessibility#invisible illness#funny wheelchair#disability awareness#disabled shirt#wheelchair shirt#Disabled#Birthday#Handicap#handicap shirt#wheelchair user#handicapped shirt
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okay so the picture i post where you can’t see my prosthetic and i look like shit gets more notes than my cute fit that shows my prosthetic fuck u fuck u fuck u 🥰
#metal speaks#this is#literally why i don’t talk about being an amputee#during limb loss awareness month ?????
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just had the weirdest dream..... thats been happening a lot recently wtf
#henry cavill just fucking. DIED in the middle of making a movie. like his leg was somehow fully ripped off and he bled to death#but then i like. slowly came to awareness that that was a dream. but like. the way my brain dealt with that#was by going oh you woke up! that thing that just happened was a dream silly. here's henry cavill and his leg DID get mangled on set#but he's just an amputee now he's not dead.#and i was like phew! thats a relief. it sucks when people die. it sounds like a struggle but im sure he'll figure it out#and he(suddenly there becuz Dream) was like yeah thank you for your support in this trying time#lots of other crazy shit happened but then i woke up and i was like. hold on. he's not dead..... AND he has both legs....#the world was so confusing for like 15 seconds as i got my bearings
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Limb Loss AWAREness...?
It's now also the month for that, apparently. 🤔
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@isthereanechoinhere96
Thoughts on Echo as amputee/disability representation
First and foremost, I am not disabled or an amputee and I don’t claim to speak for those communities. What little I do know mostly comes from this youtube channel (@oakwyrm), this post, and other research I’ve done for my writing (and like one amputee I kinda knew in passing). By all means correct me and add to the conversation, I just have some thoughts I want to share because I haven’t really seen this discussed anywhere
Overview
So Echo is interesting. He is a triple amputee which is pretty rare in media. His disabilities come from extremely traumatic circumstances: injured in a near-death experience, imprisoned and dehumanized as an experiment with no autonomy over what happened to his body.
There are a few moments in the shows where Echo is treated… questionably. Like this bit where Rex uses him as an example of the Separatists' evils to convince the locals to fight back:
To be fair, yeah Echo’s treatment does prove that the Techno Union is not neutral like they claim. The modifications that everyone is gasping in horror at here obviously weren’t made with comfort and accessibility in mind, nor with Echo’s consent. But you still just want to be sure that “They took away his freedom, his humanity, they tried to turn him into a machine” is about using him as a living computer, not the fact that he is missing limbs.
The Batch is also pretty insensitive toward him and his trauma imo, which is weird considering they've supposedly also faced discrimination for their mutations
Disabled people do have to deal with stuff like this in this day and age so I guess it can speak to those experiences. I think especially him being mistaken as a droid (and Hunter going along with it (bruh)) might resonate with some people.
Aside from that stuff, Echo isn't really treated any differently as a character/person which is really good (as low of a bar as that is).
We get this moment in CW where Echo contemplates that yeah things are gonna be different now
While also (imo at least) showing that he is still the same person regardless, evidenced by the fact that he just echoed Rex :,) I also think it's significant that he joins the Bad Batch on his own terms and we're given a really emotional scene to specifically show that he's not just like 'lumped in with the other misfits' but that it is his choice to go where he feels his place is.
A lot of people, myself included, are disappointed that TBB didn't have more time to explore Echo's PTSD, but I think the one panic attack scene we did get is really good. Even thought it's minor it at least is an appropriate reaction from a guy who was medically tortured (which is more than I've come to expect from Star Wars shows lol)
And it's really sweet to see Omega showing Echo some empathy and consideration.
It would have been nice to see more of his adjustment period, and other side effects like chronic pain and maintenance, but there’s a lot of daily life stuff the show never had time for (i.e. we don’t know if he removed his prosthetics to sleep, but we also never saw him sleep anyway). His disabilities might take on a background role (much like the character himself sadly) but for the most part they aren’t invisible or erased, nor do they define his character and arc.
Physical Appearance
Okay this one is bit dicey, bc on the one hand, yes complaints that Echo’s paleness (caused by burns from the explosion or chemical burns from the cryo-chamber) is whitewashing are totally valid. But I also think you can draw comparisons to real life conditions that affect pigmentation/complexion (like you know burns). So while I understand why a lot of fanart will depict him with his original skin tone and with hair, consider that there are real people who have to live with temporary or permanent changes to their appearance, and the idea of “fixing" him by making him look more like his old self can be problematic.
It's also interesting to note that Echo could act as a reversal of the 'disabled/disfigured = evil' trope. He's pale and bald and wears black and red, which is so often visually associated with villains, but we all know Echo is the bestest boy™
The Headpiece
Echo’s headpiece is interesting because within the show we don’t actually ever learn much about it (idk if there is more info in books or whatever bc i don’t have them so?). He didn’t have it in CW so we know it didn’t come from the Techno Union and therefore Echo probably had more choice with it. We don’t know its exact purpose but it’s most likely related to his scomping abilities. When he is hacking with his scomp in CW, before he has his headpiece, it’s clearly very mentally straining:
We don’t see him struggling like this in TBB once he does have it (though that could be bc he got more used to it over time). There doesn't seem to be much of an impact when he removes his headpiece in s3 ep14-15, except that he gets stuck in the ports every time he uses his scomp which is not something we’ve seen before:
There might not be an exact real-world equivalent, but the headpiece is some kind of accessibility aid. It means that someone specifically designed a device to help him adapt to the changes the Techno Union made, as well as a helmet that integrates it. It’s removable and visually very present, much like a cochlear implant would be. (A lot of people actually headcanon it to act partially as a hearing aid, since it makes sense that Echo’s hearing would have been damaged in the explosion, but there isn't really any indication of this in canon.) The headpiece is never really acknowledged in the show, but I think that's a good thing. It's something he needs/wants and it just exists, completely normalized, and that's pretty cool 👍
Legs
Sigh... So from the very first episode of TBB I was really disappointed that the animation team or whoever completely visually erased Echo’s prosthetic legs (I think we all were, honestly, if fanart is anything to go by). It’s one thing when he’s in armor because he would probably want to protect his prosthetics, but we literally see him in his blacks and there is no indication whatsoever that he lost his legs even though it was not left up for debate at all in CW:
Like ??????!?
This is just really strange to me! Idk what went on behind the scenes with this decision but I don’t really see why it would be that much harder to animate or anything since it’s 3D and they've done it before. We do see some pretty sophisticated cybernetic technology in Star Wars canon that mimics real limbs:
But Luke’s fancy hand is technically 20ish years from now, so Anakin and Maul are more of a representation of what level we could expect here
So yeah, for no apparent reason, his leg amputation is effectively, visually and narratively nonexistent. Which is not great 👎
Arm!
The scomp on the other hand (uh lol!) is the complete opposite and I kinda love it!
At first I, like many others, thought it was a bit odd that they didn’t give Echo a prosthetic arm. Losing hands is basically a Star Wars tradition at this point, so robotic arms/hands are well established within the worldbuilding:
We aren’t necessarily given a canon reason for why Echo doesn't get a cybernetic arm (again unless it's in some lore book I haven’t read, sorry). General fanon explanations I’ve seen are that he either couldn’t because the Techno Union wired the scomp too far into his nervous system, and/or the resources to give him one were deemed too expensive for a clone (what about his legs tho?), or that he chose not to, usually because he thought the scomping was useful.
Regardless, I actually really love this choice (and it's the whole reason I made this post), because here's the thing: There’s a lot of problematic tropes out there that either erase/cure disabilities or compensate them with perks (like how pretty much any blind character is actually not blind by some sort of magic power). With amputees that is done with robotic arms. The character is still an amputee or course, and there is still value in that representation, if this story from Mark Hamill that makes me tear up is anything to go by:
but for the most part these characters function like anyone else, just with a limb that looks a little different. It’s no more than a video game skin, an able-bodied actor with a green screen glove. It “cures” the disability, or it actually makes the character even stronger than usual:
It usually makes sense within the world of the story, but the reason it’s not so great in my opinion is that in the real world we just do not have technology anywhere close to that yet. Prosthetics can more or less replace any mobility from lost legs, but not for all the complexities of a hand (and even if they could the average person wouldn’t be able to afford it).
So
I think it's actually really super cool that Echo’s scomp bypasses the canonically-established amputee erasure and functions much like a stump would irl. He integrates it into his movements and everyday life and it’s (as far as I know) a lot closer to an everyday amputee’s experience.
It doesn’t define his character, it doesn’t hold him back, he lives a full life, the other’s don’t treat him any differently, and he’s still a total karking badass
The only additional thing is that he sometimes uses it as a weapon (which given his story, I think it’s cool to see him taking back autonomy in a way, and we only see that like twice)
And also the scomping, which could be seen as the 'added/compensating superpower' trope. But narratively it's no different than if he was plugging in with a hacking gadget of some kind (he didn't necessarily "need" to lose his arm for it) and it’s not like Echo is completely defined by this skill. Personally, I think it's well worth the positives of him actually having a visible and realistically impactful amputation.
I see a lot of posts or comments out there that say stuff like “how come Echo doesn’t get a hand?” or fanworks that do give him one and I just think it’s a bit of a shame. If he did get a robotic hand, it just would have disappeared the same way his legs and Anakin’s arm did (aside from that one time he got yoinked by a magnet). When Echo did “get a hand” in the last two episodes there were comments like “yay he finally got a hand! but it doesn’t even work” but I was actually so relieved that it didn’t! Bc for one thing that wouldn’t make any sense, he grabbed it off a droid, it wasn’t designed to implement with his scomp, that would be really complicated. But more importantly because it again refused to erase/cure his disability! It functioned like a real-world cosmetic prosthetic (useless beyond appearance) which is exactly what he needed it for, so that he could blend in better with his disguise.
And he continually took it off throughout the episode and ditched it at the end. He only used it for the necessity of a stealth mission, he doesn’t feel the need to visually “fit in” in his daily life.
And, last but very much not least, he made a dad joke and from my intel that is very accurate representation!
TLDR: Echo’s scomp is actually really cool from an amputee representation perspective, especially within Star Wars, and I think that deserves some appreciation
#EchoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo#tbb echo#tbb#disability#disability awareness#like whats up with that?#echo's scomp appreciation#representation matters#disabled lives are worth living#disability representation#amputee#disability tropes#robotic limbs#ableism#star wars#clone wars#the bad batch#sw tcw#arc trooper echo#tbb season 3#unwhitewashtbb
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Fic title : The Downside to Cutting Your Arm Off
@newwwwprompts Chronic Pain Awareness Month 2023 prompt : Character with chronic pain has a flare-up
Rating : Teen & Up Audiences
Fandom : Tales from the Borderlands
Pairing : Rhys/Vaughn
Additional tags : Amputation, Pain, Chronic Pain, Painkillers, Canon Amputee Character, Cybernetics, Rhys Has Chronic Pain (Borderlands), Good Friend Vaughn (Borderlands), Lidocaine, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Swearing
Word count : 321
#fanfiction#fanfic#fanfic challenge#fanfic prompts#chronic pain awareness month#chronic pain#amputee#borderlands#tales from the borderlands#tftbl#rhys x vaughn#vaughn x rhys
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Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?
[large text: Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?]
(TLDR: no. literally no.)
A frequent topic that shows up around facial differences is the self-hatred, self-disgust, self-insert-negative-emotion that we must surely experience. I want to ask* writers without FDs - why? Why do you feel about us in such a way that that's the most common way of depicting us?
*- rhetorical question. I promise I know the answers, but I'm not sure if writers do.
It's frankly worrying to me. Is it really that common to assume that disabled people have this internal, never-ending hatred for themselves? The overwhelming majority of us don't. We hate inaccessibility, when people stare, or some symptoms when they get in the way, or how expensive being disabled is, but I find the concept of us being so completely disturbed by our own disabilities extremely strange. It’s “tragedy porn” intersecting “most basic ableism”.
“But trauma!”
[large text: “But trauma!”]
Trauma of what! People with facial differences don't have some sort of default trauma that we come with like it’s a factory setting. We are a group of people with tens of thousands of stories and experiences!
“Trauma of experiencing ableism/disfiguremisia” - that's better, at least this means something. If you're writing a story about this, please get a sensitivity reader with a facial difference. You can assume how we feel all you want, but in my experience these assumptions are often bizarre and unrealistic. Or just end up writing the same “disability so sad” sob story that everyone has seen a billion times. If you want to write about disfiguremisia, you need to understand the nuance and have more than just the basic level knowledge (which 99% of people don’t have either). If you can’t do that, don’t write about it. Simple as that.
“Trauma of the accident” - thankfully, the accident is an event and a facial difference is a disability. If you want to connect these two like they're one and the same, you're almost surely going to demonize disability. People with traumatic spinal cord injuries, acquired amputees, people with TBI, people with acquired facial differences - we participate in our communities, we have hobbies, we date, we play with our dogs. Disability isn't a death sentence. Media who make it feel like it is certainly don't help people who do suddenly become disabled, don't you think?
Here's a post by @blindbeta about blind characters becoming blind through trauma that’s better made than anything I could hope to write here. I heavily recommend giving it a read.
And, I can't stress this enough - most of us didn't have “the accident”, most of us are born like this! "Traumatic scars" isn't the only facial difference that exists, far from it, it's only one of thousands. It's 99% of our representation and "representation". If you want to make a character with FD - please consider that we aren't a monolith. Just like not all physical disabilities are "wheelchair user with paralysis", not all facial differences are "traumatic scar with somehow no nerve damage".
The overrepresentation of it is incredibly telling, and sometimes - or very frequently - feels like the writer doesn’t actually even want to deal with us. They want to use our disability as a way to cheap drama, moral metaphors, tragic backstories. Not to represent us as living people who are much more similar to you than you apparently think.
Now, I do have enough awareness to know that that's a big part of the appeal. “Horrific Thing #2456 happens” and boom, instant drama! Of course, it's a reasonable response that they would hide their disability for years, avoid talking about it in any way, and magically change their personality to be mean and reclusive, or at least be constantly soooo sad about how much it sucks to be disabled, right?
Do I really need to say that having your character becoming disabled be the worst thing ever is ableism 101? We have been talking about this for so long at this point. Writing about the process of adapting to a specific disability is better left to people who have actual experience in it.
To give an example that will hopefully resonate more with Tumblr users, I will use the fact that I'm also gay. It's not perfect by any means but probably much more familiar territory.
Imagine, let's say, a character. He's gay. The story he's in is supposedly progressive, certainly not trying to be homophobic. The character has experienced an incident, maybe an act of aggression or a hate crime, that happened because he’s gay, which was traumatic. Happens IRL, sure. So of course the character starts hating being gay. He talks about how gross and disgusting it is, he never lets anyone know that he could be “one of them”, certainly not take a stance against homophobia. You can't mention him without mentioning the accident, they're seemingly fused together. No gay love, joy, even basic happiness, he would actually choose to be straight in a heartbeat if given the option to and complains that he can't. This is shown as a neutral, obvious thing that a gay man would do, no one comments on it. He stays like this the whole time, unless there’s a plot twist in the last 10 pages where the world is now magically perfect ("we fixed discrimination, yay!"). This is the only LGBT character in the story.
Keep in mind that there are people similar to this in real life, living with extreme internalized homophobia.
Is this, in your opinion, realistic and thoughtful representation? How does it feel when written by a cishet writer, versus a gay writer who is recalling his experiences? Do you think that it's reasonable for the majority of media representation to be like this, or very close to it? How would it affect younger gay people who might already be uncomfortable with being queer? Are gay men the target audience, or are they not even considered as a group of people who read books? Is this helping or damaging the general public's idea of how it is to be gay? Why or why not?
The Masterpiece
[large text: The Masterpiece]
From 13 to 19 of May, we are celebrating Face Equality week (what a coincidence!). It’s important to me in general - and I wish it was more important to abled people, but I digress - especially its theme for this year.
“My Face is a Masterpiece”
Great statement, it represents the community well, I do enjoy how bold it is. Very cool stuff, I love the work our advocates are doing!
But why do I bring this up?
Well, to very non-subtly show that we aren’t a self-hating group of people. We are a community, a community saying “our faces are beautiful, look!”, we are saying “treat us equally, and do it now!”. Our activism isn’t about self-disgust. It’s about fighting your-disgust.
Why can’t writers keep up? Why are you still stuck decades behind?
Is this the only reason I bring it up?
The Call to Celebration
[large text: The Call to Celebration]
FEI, the org behind organizing it, asks a very simple question (emphasis mine):
“Why do we so often see stories about facial difference as a ‘tragedy’, when they should be about triumph?” “Calling all artists, allies, creatives, galleries. You can rewrite the story to bring about #FaceEquality and celebrate the unique artistry found in every face. Your participation this #FaceEqualityWeek will help to tell the real story, that there is a masterpiece in every face.”
Here. We are calling for you to stop. Directly from the biggest international advocacy alliance group that's out there. If you create, this is for you.
The last argument to not have your character with a facial difference hate themselves? Because we don’t want this. We are tired and frustrated. For me personally, I’m also offended by this kind of assumption. We aren’t tragedies or cheap entertainment for abled people to pity or be horrified by. We are people, and if you can’t internalize that, you have no reason to write about us.
For once, celebrate us. Happy Face Equality Week!
mod Sasza
#mod sasza#face difference#ableism#disfiguremisia#face equality week#my face is a masterpiece#writing guide#writing help#writeblr#writing resources#writing advice#writing tips#writing characters#how to write#writing disabled characters#writing disability
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Tips for Writing and Drawing Amputees: Bandaged Stumps
When writing and drawing amputee characters, unless your character only just lost their limb, they don't need to wear a bandage over their stumps.
to be clear, eda's depiction in the show was fine, since she'd only just lost her arm and went (presumably) without any medical attention, but because the show didn't have much time to show her afterwards, I've noticed a tendency of the fandom to draw her wearing the bandage permanently, so that's why I'm picking on her for my example lol.
It's a bit of a trope at this point, and I think it comes from one of a few different places:
Amputees do wear bandages on their stumps, but usually only for the first 6-12 weeks post-amputation, sometimes longer if the amputation was a result of a burn. It's possible people saw this though and assumed it was permanent.
Most amputees wear a sock made of either cotton or silicone under their prosthetics to provide them with some extra padding. These socks, called liners, often stick out from the top of the prosthetic socket and could possibly be mistaken for a bandage from a distance.
Some amputees will wear compression garments for a few months to a few years after their amputations which could also be mistaken for a bandage from a distance. These garments are designed to stop swelling and reduce phantom pain, but they aren't bandages.
Stumps get cold easier because their circulation typically isn't as good as the rest of the body, so some amputees will wear socks over them even if they aren't wearing a prosthetic to keep warm, which again could be mistaken for a bandage from a distance.
This one is funny, but in my experience unfortunately, it's the most common: people think the end of an amputee's stump is just a perpetual open wound that never heals. Meaning to avoid "gore" it needs to be covered. I've met fully grown adults who believed this until I showed up to work/uni without my prosthetics or socks on.
People are uncomfortable with seeing an uncovered stump and so put bandages over it to avoid confronting their biases.
Some combination of these points.
But yeah, unless your amputee has only just lost their limb in the last few weeks, they don't need a bandage.
The ironic thing too, is that for most amputees, bandaging a stump is nearly impossible. I've been in and out of hospital since I was 1 year old and only ever met 3 nurses and no doctors/surgeons who could successfully bandage my stump in a way that the bandage would even stay on. This is because stumps are usually tapered in shape (meaning they are wider at the top, closer to the body, and thinner at the bottom), so gravity will pull the bandage off 9 times out of 10.
On a final note: it's ok to show your amputee's stump, it's not gore, there's no blood, it just looks like a regular limb that just stops early. In fact, if you are writing/creating anything for kids or that is likely to be seen by kids, I encourage you to show your amputee's stumps at least once. I used to work on a disability awareness program for kids, and I lost count of the amount of times kids were terrified of me, because they all expected my leg to be bloody and gory. For a lot of kids, I was their first real-life exposure to an amputee, meaning they'd never even heard of people like me, or they had seen an amputee on TV, but because the show went out of its way to avoid showing the person's stump, they assumed it must have been because there was "something scary at the end" that they weren't supposed to see (kids are surprisingly perceptive, they will pick up on stuff like that without you realising). And scared kids aren't good at articulating why they're scared, and would often say really mean or hurtful things to me. I knew not to take it personally and learned how to handle those situations, but not everyone is used to dealing with kids. For a new amputee (or anyone who's less confident in their disability), the kinds of things those kids would say could be absolutely confidence destroying. I never blame the kids, it's not their fault, but the whole situation could have been avoided if they had seen people like us before they had the chance to hear the wrong info. Good representation like this can be the difference between a kid crying, making throw-up sounds and calling an amputee "disgusting monsters" (all things I've had kids do/say) and them just being like "oh ok, cool."
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My grandfather had a hook for a hand. I can't recall ever being told the exact details or the whole truth of how exactly he lost his left hand, or when, but I know he wasn't just born without one - he was an amputee. What I do remember is being explained that when granddad talks about his fingers stinging or tingling, he's talking about the missing hand, and that this is called phantom pain. His brain still had receptor wires to the hand that isn't there anymore, and those nerves are telling him that his hand hurts.
He was the type of a man who is somehow much nicer to his grandchildren than he had been anyone else in his life, but if anyone had told him "you know that's all in your head, right?" he would probably have grabbed the nearest blunt object and beat you with it. Of course he knew that the hand isn't there anymore, and that there's no reason to feel pain. That's kind of how anxiety is for me.
The sources of my anxiety are gone from my life. There's nothing and nobody in my life that I would need to be scared of. I'm aware that there is no rational reason to be scared, there's nothing to be afraid of. I can live with the anxiety, I can function despite of it. I have no problem reminding myself that the anxiety is just anxiety and act normally despite of something telling me that something perfectly safe is dangerous. I would just like to not feel that way at all.
I don't want to just be functional and have the anxiety be manageable. I want to stop having it altogether.
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