#cure fantasy

[tomatoteddy]

Finished drafting her design today so lemme introduce y’all to a new fanseries of mine called DREAMCATCHERS!! Pretty Cure

This is a rewrite/redesign of an old Precure fanseries I made back in 2019. Anyways, this is the new lead cure of the team, Cure Fantasy! She is the daughter of the rulers of the Dreamland Kingdom, and was sent to Earth to find the Legendary Pretty Cure to stop the Nightmare Realm from taking over! Her name is Princess Celestia (no relation to the horse) but goes as Celeste while on Earth and she is a white/rainbow cure!

The main themes of this series revolve around dreams, both the ones you have when you sleep and your aspirations. The rest of the cures are all childhood friends who ended up falling out later in life, and Celestia finding a way to bring them all back together.

[peculiarmarsu]

Those hazardous spinning animations of some White Mage casts.

Unaffected.

[cripplecharacters]

Futuristic Settings and the Erasure of Disabilities

The common theme in a lot of futuristic, sci-fi or not, settings, is the abundance of cure tropes that are thrown in there. Disabled people either don't exist, or aren't actually disabled - they get a magical device that undoes their injury, or get a mech suit that basically does the same thing.

Often the setting is treated like an excuse that can't be rebutted in any way: “but my story is set in the future where medicine is better!”

So: is that true? Does better medicine actually mean less disabled people?

Historical Accuracy

[large text: Historical Accuracy]

In 1900, the life expectancy of a person born with Down syndrome was 9 years. Try putting yourself there and imagining that 2024 is the Future - better medicine, basically sci-fi in comparison to what they had back there. In that future, what is true?

a) There's no people with Down syndrome.

b) People with Down syndrome live to be 60 years old on average.

Answer? B. The only countries with fewer people with Down syndromes are the ones engaging in widespread eugenics, which is a topic I will not be getting into in this post, but I'm mentioning because the only places without disabled people are eugenicist.

The “better medicine” of the future didn't make Down syndrome curable, it made people with it survive longer. 50% of people born with it today will live to be over 60 years old. In the future, there will be retirees with Down syndrome. In the past, 50% of them wouldn't have made it into their teens.

Why does that matter?

[large text: Why does that matter?]

Future medicine won't make disabilities disappear. It will make them more manageable. Less deadly. Easier to survive.

If you base your knowledge and perception of disability throughout the times on sci-fi novels by able-bodied writers, you're going to hate how it actually works in real life.

Have we magically- technologically gotten rid of diabetes? No, 11% of Americans have it. 103 years ago, diabetes were lethal. There aren't fewer diabetics compared to the past. They live longer. You probably know or heard of someone who has diabetes.

You need to expand your understanding on how disability and medicine work, because “future = no disability” is genuine nonsense. It doesn't work like that, and it really frustrates me how writers dead-set on “logic” in their setting fail to see this.

Are paralyzed people walking around in various mechs, or are they using better wheelchairs than those from 100 years ago? Wheelchairs that make it easier to be independent? That help with symptoms of their disabilities by preventing pressure sores, or providing alternative methods of maneuvering?

In the future, why would there suddenly be those futuristic transplant* spines instead of wheelchairs that can be used with one's brain or eyes, for those who can't move their hands, mouth, or head? Why wouldn't there be wheelbeds for those who are currently bed-bound because they can't manage being upright in any way?

*Also, how are all of these magic disability-fixing transplants never actual transplants? Receiving a transplant basically always ends up in being immunocompromised because of the very way the body works. If you're writing about humans, this isn't going to change?

Things like sign language or wheelchairs have been used for thousands of years, they're not going away anytime soon or not-so-soon.

Future = More Disabled People?

[large text: Future = More Disabled People?]

We already discussed that there are presently common disabilities that used to be lethal a century ago or even less. If we use this fact for a futuristic setting, you suddenly have a myriad of new possibilities.

There's vastly better medicine? A lot of people deal with post-rabies syndrome because it's finally survivable, but it leaves people with the effects of the meningitis that rabies cause. There's way more quadriplegic people because the survival rates are much higher. Cancer survivors are more common because people live longer. Physical therapy for people who had prion diseases because they aren't fatal anymore but cause severe disability. Head trauma is more treatable, so there's more people with TBIs and less people dying in vehicular accidents.

The technology is super advanced? People with locked-in syndrome can operate an AAC device with their eyes, fully customize its voice to their liking, and not have to worry about battery life of their powerchair because it has sonar panels. Canes that can fold themselves with the click of a button so that they can fit in one's pocket.

There could be so many more adapted sports! Tools and technology that can adapt a house exactly to one's needs! Wheelchairs that are actually affordable! A portable pocket sized device that makes ableds behave normally around disabled people!

The point of this post isn't to completely shit on sci-fi settings, but instead to urge abled writers to think a bit more and try to be creative in the way they go about speculative fiction. Write something new! There's one billion stories about how impossible it is for disabled people to exist in the future, and it's upsetting at best to read that constantly when you're disabled. As long as there are people, there will be disabled people.

mod Sasza

[butch4maryoliver]

my favorite new addition to my neocities is definitely my stupid little blinkie, stamp, and gif collection on this page. the vast majority were dug up from the graveyard that is gifcities, but the whole collection features some wicked cool freaks like these:

[rynris]

I love Alisae so much.

[blaaaaask]

If only Angeal did this, he would have easily skipped all the BS from Miniroth:

YOU'RE WELCOME

[flintbian]

There's a disabled angel in good omens 🥺

[pyroguesstuff]

save me junior year kristen applebees.. junior year kristen applebees.. junior year kristen applebees save me…

[katiefratie]

I don't think this is gonna happen but taking the gem out better not "cure" Lydia of needing a wheelchair like yes I know thats a huge/the reason she's there but Years of that physical stress cannot be undone just like that I will be so upset

[cripplecharacters]

I have a character with chronic pain who uses healing magic to manage it; I myself have mild chronic pain that I don't take any painkillers for, so I wanted to ask some questions on how to appropriately portray what is essentially magic painkillers.

My current idea is that healing magic in this setting can be used as a local anesthetic on top of typical healing. With some careful control, my character applies the same principles to relieve pain without fully numbing his body.

A drawback of this is that if applies too much magic this way, he can end up just numbing himself, which is dangerous in the combat situations his work frequently puts him in. When he pushes himself too hard or just has a bad day, his pain can exceed what he can safely mitigate with magic alone. He also works primarily as a healer, and has to balance between this form of pain relief versus saving enough energy for his work - to borrow video game terminology, if he spends too much MP on pain relief he won't have enough left to heal others.

My character does have access to medical/alchemical pain relief. He takes them to sleep because he can't control his magic carefully enough while asleep, though he otherwise prefers to rely more on magic purely because it's inconvenient to carry around a lot of potions when he travels.

Does this sound like there are any pitfalls I would have to watch out for, or aspects I should reconsider? Thank you for your time!

Hi!

To be honest, this solution is a nice breath of fresh air when it comes to anything related to fantasy healing and disabled characters. You are essentially dealing with painkillers who happen to exist in a world with magic - they exist, have potential side effects, and not always fix everything. Their magicalness is mostly in the convenience, which is great! Like I also find it annoying to carry my meds around; if I had the option to just make them Appear out of thin air, I'm definitely taking it!

This is in my opinion a good and realistic representation of chronic pain and taking painkillers in a fantasy world. The difference between your story and the experience of someone like me is that in your story there is magic because it's fantasy - while for a lot of other fantasy settings, the difference would be that chronic pain and my whole experience don't even exist there. But you're including it in a nice and tasteful way! Great work :-D

I genuinely wish more writers put as much thought into their fantasy-related disability solutions as you :-) Good luck with your story!

mod Sasza

[pulkitoki]

A Dream within a Dream.

[cripplecharacters]

i have a question if a story thread is okay; a curse is placed on all of the main characters, making them lose their memory and core sense of self and everything that's important to them, and they go through some physical changes, basically becoming puppets changed on a whim. two of the characters is disabled and the curse takes away their disabilities. over the course of the story they all start to remember more and more things about who they were before and break out of the curse, and the disabled people gets their disabilities back and it's very much a "oh thank god, i KNEW something felt off whenever i <impossible activity>, i could never place it, but its finally back, i'm ME again" scene, but does it veer too much into "magical cure" territory?

Hi asker,

Honestly, this seems like a really interesting inversion — to have the 'cure' be a curse, and for the "not being themself" part of the curse to specifically call out "not being disabled."

I don't think this falls into the magical cure territory, as you're not presenting this cure as the only good option for your disabled characters. In fact, you're doing the opposite – your character is satisfied to be disabled again, because it means they are themselves again.

As long as you present this narrative thoughtfully, I think it's a pretty interesting way to write about disability being an intrinsic part of these disabled characters you have created.

Hope this helps,

Mod Sparrow