#stop erasing disabilities for plot convenience.

[sawbiter]

this is an issue i see primarily on ao3, and i think that even if you're a movie only maze runner fan, u should be aware;

dont erase newt's limp!!! even in aus. erasing a disability is never okay!!! not only that, but its an important part of his character and his story. you can make it for a different reason, but erasing his limp actually makes me (and a lot of other readers) think that you lack a respect or knowledge of the character. yes, this includes in highschool/college AUs.

is this probably considered a "chronically online" take? yeah. but as a disabled writer, its unfortunate whenever i see representation taken away. especially because that representation also includes mental health issues and suicide attempts (!!which disable people physically far more often than anyone talks about!)

tldr; stop erasing character's disabilities for plot convenience!

[readygamerone]

Chapter 31: You’ve Gunt Red On You

Imagine my surprise: Wade's escape from corporate bondage is neither interesting nor exciting. After copying all the damning evidence of IOI's use of kidnapping and murder as means of competitive advantage, Wade puts on the maintenance worker uniform that he had previously ordered for himself. Thanks to his continued unrestricted access to all of IOI's systems, disabling and removing the security anklet and "eargear" that were meant to be permanent accessories is as simple as a few keystrokes. With that much control over the entire digital infrastructure of his sworn enemy, you might think that Wade would wreck their servers, delete all of their records or do literally anything to give himself an additional edge. He doesn't, of course. Wade doesn't even bother to free the rest of the indentured servants when he's in there zeroing out his own debt balance.

"I pulled up my indenturement profile, accessed my debt statement, and zeroed out my outstanding balance—money I’d never actually borrowed to begin with."

The unspoken message here seems to be "Well, I don't deserve to be here since my debts were fake. These other poor schmucks are doomed forever, though. They will reap what was sown." We're told a few lines later, however, that the "Indentured Servant Protection Agency" uses the cameras stapled to people's ears to monitor daily events "to ensure that [our] human rights were being observed." So I was worried for nothing, this government agency that mandates slavery with a smile seems to have it all under control. And I do mean literally that the ear cameras were stapled, Wade bleeds profusely after removing his the way it was intended to be removed. Luckily, he thought to smuggle some adhesive medical strips into his room along with the disguise.

Now changed and bandaged and debt-free, Wade is ready to make his way out of IOI headquarters. His reprogrammed security anklet now identifies him as an entirely new fake person, not the fake person he was mere hours ago. This new identity is a technician with access to the entire building so Wade is able to nonchalantly leave his room, walk down the hall, board the elevator and ride it all the way down to the lobby. It's only here that the master plan hits a slight hitch: Wade has forgotten to take off the disposable plastic slippers the indentured servants wear. But no one notices so the tension lasts less than an entire paragraph.

Someone does notice that Wade's ear is seeping blood, however. The bandage that was staunching the open wound has fallen off, leaving the entire side of his head slick and red. First-aid technology in this world, like its pop culture, has seemingly also not advanced since the 1980s. Wade quickly thanks the woman who stopped him for her concern and scurries out the door. We're informed that there are security guards present in the lobby but the sight of a slippered, bleeding smoothboy anxiously speeding for the exit must not have been worthy of their notice.

These dramatic events don't even take an entire four pages to transpire. For a conglomerate that seems to be on deck for controlling the entire world, getting out of there was pretty easy. After this, Wade goes to a nearby postal box where he stashed an OASIS rig, makes sure to log in via a hotspot not operated by IOI and erases his now compromised Bryce Lynch identity so that he can return to being the noble Wade Watts we all love. Oh yeah. He also buys a handgun out of a vending machine. Say what you want about this dystopia but it does provide convenient access to firearms. 

Ditching his jumpsuit for more appropriate (and cooler) street clothes, Wade drops several thousand dollars on a private, high-bandwidth OASIS cafe room where he can upload all the data he wants. Wade first sends warnings to Art3mis, Aech and Shoto, telling them they're under surveillance and that they should meet him at Aech's Basement hideout soon. Because he can't help being a bit of a creep even in this instance, Wade ends his message to Art3mis with:  "PS—I think you look even more beautiful in real life." With that totally normal and non-creepy postscript out of the way, Wade then sends the proof of IOI and Sorrento either plotting to commit or outright committing kidnapping and multiple murders to every major news outlet online. I would almost think that would be enough to end the gunting ambitions of the Sixers entirely but as there are still seven chapters left, I continue to be unlucky. 

Pop Culture References: 8 (0.88 per page)

Television Max Headroom I

Movies Brazil III 

Brands Band-Aid II Glock I Mace I

[mild-lunacy]

The Real Chekhov’s Gun

I know I talked about why believability is important for AU fix-its, and I get why people are ultimately more concerned with emotional pay-off. But I think it wasn’t quite clear what I was talking about with ‘believability’. What does that really mean? Stuff like ‘fix-it’ and ‘believability’ is pretty abstract. What I’m really talking about is the idea that actions have consequences. More specifically, I am talking about the fact that certain events in canon have to be addressed in a given fic that tries to replace or ‘fix’ canon by altering some aspects of the consequences. Fics that don’t do that suffer from narrative disintegration, of the exact sort that the Chekhov’s gun principle refers to. Certain things have to be addressed. 

A lot of people go on about Chekhov’s gun misfiring in TFP, and then go on to write fics that ignore the episode, which is actually a much, much worse violation of the very same principle. Basically, you can’t just excise the ending episode of Sherlock and attach something that doesn’t address the stuff in TLD (and previously), specifically about Eurus, who’s a driving force in TLD almost as much as TFP. All those beloved time skips and hand-waves about what Eurus was really doing and what ‘really’ happened to the cliffhanger at the end where she shot John: all that is sloppy, just plain bad writing practices. It makes it difficult for me to even give fics that ignore TFP a chance, because they’re announcing that they’re happy to shoot their own narrative consistency in the foot for the sake of convenience, just like the narrative they’re trying to ‘fix’!

There’s a lot of examples of this in Raven Cycle fanfic, where many people are very into resurrecting Kavinsky and Noah. The problem is that they’re inevitably treated as characters and not aspects of the narrative, whose actions and final fate are intrinsic to the overall plot. 

The fact is, the fate of the characters is plot development, and that’s apparently really hard for fandom to grasp. Not surprisingly, because sometimes to grasp it is to give up on some cherished dreams. But sometimes it just means trying harder, doing more to replace rather than just repeal the plot of TRB and TDT.

Kavinsky isn’t just a guy who died in The Dream Thieves, let’s say unjustly. He’s part of the larger plot of TDT, and if you make it so he doesn’t die, you have to deal with the fact that he was a dream thief who was seriously hurting Cabeswater, to the point where he could have destroyed it as surely as the demon. There’s a cost to keeping him alive, a cost paid by his death. He very emphatically didn’t want to change his ways, either. This is not a minor matter, and he’s not a character you can simply keep in any AU that keeps his and Ronan’s dreamer powers but lets the gangsey meet up later on, say.

In a similar vein, you can’t keep Noah alive in an AU that has magic, and not just because of how ghosts work in Stiefvater’s books. Noah isn’t just a character, but a plot point that explains how Gansey survived his encounter with the bees as a child. It was Noah’s sacrifice on the ley line that saved Gansey’s life; without it, he’d be dead. More to the point, even if you erase the bee incident entirely, you’d be stuck with an entirely different kind of Gansey, because it was Noah’s mysterious whisper as he died that led Gansey towards his obsession with Glendower.  Having Gansey fixate on Glendower in an AU where Noah never died or there is no magic is essentially a reverse Chekhov: it breaks the narrative by having consequences for precipitating events that never occurred. 

Essentially, there’s a bullet on the floor, but no proverbial gun on the wall.

Adam is different, because his motivations are so idiosyncratic and so much of who he is and what he does is driven by his own will rather than being a circumstance of the plot.  However, many AU fic writers like to pick the one event in Adam’s life that is circumstantial and treat it as if it’s part of his character, probably because it is distinctive on a surface level. Alternatively, this being fandom, people feel bad about taking away his status as being ‘disabled’. Anyway, the series of events that led to Adam losing his hearing in one ear in The Raven Boys was very specific and related to Ronan’s presence both before and afterwards. First of all, it was Adam’s lateness in coming back with Ronan that sparked the confrontation with his father. Second, it was Ronan who stopped Robert Parrish from hurting Adam anymore after he fell and hit his head. His father was ready to keep going, and probably would have. It’s more than likely that Adam could have died without Ronan. However, without Ronan, there’s no reason for that chain of events to occur at all. There was no trigger.

Narrative logic and character logic are intertwined, and I don’t see how you can have a good, satisfying emotional pay-off if you dismiss the need for all logic in favor of the feels. Surely there’s a reason that people complain about the plot holes in Series 4, although I’ve admitted that many fans probably wouldn’t care that much if the emotional continuity aspect of the narrative felt authentic to them. For me, no amount of emotional authenticity can overcome the fact that people ignore or hand-wave certain underlying aspects of the characters’ history and important aspects of plot. But I realize that it’s been a particularly sore point of mine. It’s just ironic, considering how much fans liked to go on about Sherlock canon and how dissatisfying the resolution of TLD felt. 

Chekhov’s gun isn’t just an abstract narrative principle. It’s a real, instinctive need people have for narrative continuity, and it’s incumbent on fan writers to consider these sorts of questions seriously if they want to write good fic.

[haltandcatchfiretothemax]

Mystery and Misery: "I/O" and Cameron and Donna's roles therein (or, a sort of/inverse H&CF recap)

The first thing I noticed when I put on the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire for this dedicated rewatch is that it’s long for an hour of network television, at 47 minutes. It didn't feel long though, probably because it doesn't waste a single frame or second, and thusly manages to cover a lot of ground. Rather than merely setting up the premise of the show it effectively establishes it, including the characters, most of their relationships and dynamics, and their relationships to the places and locations in the show; there is nothing tentative or conveniently ambiguous about it. It is an incredibly ambitious introductory hour of television, which is appropriate for a show about what turns out to be a group of very ambitious individuals.

The second thing I noticed is that "I/O" feels more like a movie than a television episode, and that if it were a bit longer, it probably could be. I don't know if it would be possible or worthwhile to make a two hour movie about the entire process of designing the Giant, but I think it could work as a feature film about facing off against IBM (though not necessarily an interesting one, but either way, the pensive legal drama about one young male lawyer's ethical struggle is a thing, is it not?). All you'd really have to do is draw out and really dramatize all the IBM/deposition stuff -- and fill in all the 'missing' scenes of Cameron and Donna that are curiously absent.

Based on the rest of the series but against my better judgment, I'm going to give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt and say that Cameron and Donna appear sparingly in the pilot for good reason. It's easy to read their limited presence as a quiet commentary on how both fictional and real women are frequently sidelined in television and in life, and as a set up meant to surprise the viewer with how essential they both quickly become to the plot, though just writing this out makes it feel overdone. (And if I remember right, a lot of critics and recappers weren't feeling it either.) But it makes sense if you look at Cameron and Donna's roles in "I/O" separately.

Cameron appears in the opening scenes of the pilot, and then returns at the end of it. This is partly because she's still four hours away from the action for most of the show, but the show could have cut back to her life at school -- it doesn't. When we do see her again, getting (physically) thrown out of an arcade, you get the sense that this isn't because her life as a student is typical or easily guessed at; the arcade fight suggests pretty strongly that she hasn't been hanging out on the quad with her friends or planning parties with her sorority sisters. Her absence cultivates genuine mystery and a dark but not so much sinister as sad gut feeling around everything we don't know about this strange, aggressive girl. It might not read for 'normal' viewers, but real life 'strange' girls, orphans, throwaways, gay and trans feminine women, disabled, cr*zy, and especially non-white otherwise marginalized social misfits will understand that people like Cameron are hidden from view because their experiences are not positive or 'normal' by mainstream society's standards, and are not understood or valued. Cameron isn't in most of the first episode because she is truly Unknowable, and literally doesn't fit in with the rest of our characters.

The opposite seems to be true of Donna, who appears here and there in the pilot, but only in scenes with Gordon. This episode doesn't cut to Donna or her life outside of Gordon, either, and she seemingly only pops up to 'nag' Gordon, if by 'nagging' one means dragging Gordon back to the present and/or reality. We get a real sense of what their marriage really feels like, but mostly of what it feels like for Gordon, who unsurprisingly seems to think he's the main character in his marriage. We eventually learn that Donna doesn't seem like she's getting drinks with friends after work or lunching with her sorority sisters either, but by contrast, her daily life isn't shown because it is entirely 'normal', an iteration of womanhood, marriage and working motherhood, based around constantly and silently performing an incredible amount of domestic and emotional labor so taken for granted that it's invisible. Cameron's life is hidden from view, while Donna is practically erased and redrawn as a mean, miserable wife right in front of us.

Until we get our emotional climax toward the end of the pilot, and Gordon realizes that Donna has been right all along. After 30+ minutes of J*e, Gordon, the weird dance they do at Cardiff, and the consummation of their relationship via their illicit 3-day weekend of successful reverse engineering, Donna comes home to a tidy living room, where Gordon is happily engaging with their two young daughters. Thinking that this is the result when Gordon is allowed to pursue his dream, Donna tells him, "Whatever you're dreaming of, build it, I know you can make it great," and Gordon tells her what she's needed to hear, and what he's needed to say, which is simply that their family is more important to him than a pc clone. They make a deal that Donna thinks will make her happy: she will fully support Gordon's pursuit of this project so long as he prioritizes her and the girls.

In the following scenes, Cameron is convinced to drop out of school, move to Dallas, and write the BIOS code for this project. She is both guileless and completely unbeguiled by J*e and his slick charm, but has no immunity when he switches over to warm, not overly paternal approval, and tells her, "See? Now you're thinking like a professional." You can see his manipulation start to finally work on her after he says this, and the way her eyes and face go from tough to perilously vulnerable here is quietly devastating. She finally arrives at Cardiff Electric, where she integrates swiftly into the action around the hasty legitimization of the presently illegal Cardiff pc project, even if she still doesn't exactly blend in. Cameron is immediately taken into a solo meeting (deposition?) with Cardiff's lawyer, where she quickly catches onto and gets on board with the deceptive legal maneuvering that this whole thing is apparently going to require.

As Cameron answers Barry the lawyer's questions and allows him to coach her into saying that no, she has not ever attempted to disassemble or reverse engineer any products manufactured by IBM, we hear his voice over Donna's last scene of the episode, in which she goes out into her garage and gazes at several tables' worth of evidence of the illegal reverse engineering Gordon did just days prior. We unexpectedly cut to her, gazing at various hardware with concern, or is it envy? She's in the garage where Gordon and J*e really bonded over the very laborious process of figuring out an IBM boot code (…or something? And probably other stuff I don't actually know about? sorry), by herself. She's too late, either to stop it or get in on it.

But, she's there, finally, and so is Cameron. Their positions haven't changed much (yet); Cameron is still a true and genuinely unknown quantity and outsider, and Donna is still a long-suffering wife, mother, and some kind of employee at Texas Instruments. But now, we can see them, at least.

Other notes:

I blog for the people who had no idea that "i/o" is short for input/output and had to google it (which I did when I rewatched s1 early last year). No judgment, friends.

The focus on J*e and Gordon feels how I remember it feeling: like a very intentionally hollow version of Mad Men, where J*e's 'charm' and speechfying are barely tolerated by the people most affected by him. Literally everyone sees through him, and we see them see through him.

The thing though, and what makes this series resonate with me personally, is that seeing through someone isn't always enough to protect you from them. Gordon and Cameron are both smarter than Joe, but they both desperately need to be seen by someone, and so his attention works powerfully on them. Donna and Bos are both savvier than J*e, but they’re caught off guard by him, and unprepared to even try to anticipate his calculations.

Still, Gordon recognizes that J*e's enthusiasm is one of the few authentic things about him. He relates to it, and defends him when Donna (not unreasonably?!) identifies J*e's showing up at the movie theater as "cr*zy" ("He's just keyed up, is all")

J*e's whole shtick feels especially and deliciously phony when compared to the visceral and organic-feeling air/stormcloud of 'WHO IS SHE???' that Cameron generates when she's literally just sitting and doing nothing.

NB: there is obviously nothing wrong with having sorority sisters! Just saying that Cameron and Donna are really friendless, and that it’s painfully real. Cameron doesn’t have enough chill for them, Donna doesn’t have the time, and they probably both have trouble relating to other people who aren’t engineers.

My favorite non-Donna/Cameron scene is the sales call-lunch thing. "I'm not going to apologize for caring about your business" is J*e's "I'm not here to tell you about Jesus" moment, but the whole thing, his whole "pitch” where he is so clearly talking to Gordon -- "You can be more; you want to be more, don't you?" -- is like some kind of next level, Don Draper-meets-Tyler Durden shit. Good thing Cameron will be there to keep them from turning into fascists.

The title "Mystery and Misery" is taken from a song/band I love too much to not link to, even if they have nothing to do with any of this.

[nyxelestia]

Inattention, hyperactivity and impuslivity are just a few symptoms of ADHD and guess what? Stiles does not only take Adderal because of it but he showcased all the symptoms in canon. But ofc according to ur logic (or lack of thereof) it's perfectly safe to assume that a mentally illed character or real person takes a specific medication simply because he likes its taste and their parents let them because teenagers using adderal without prescription makes perfectly sense right? Reach harder! >:)

Judging by your bitter, ableist posts, YOU are the one who can't stand Scott not being canonically as brilliant and smart as Lydia, Stiles, Derek or *insert TW character name*. Like, how bitter can you be to ignore canon and claim that a fictional mentally illed character who suffers from ADHD and takes Adderal under medical prescription - otherwise his father and teachers and counselor would NEVER let him - does not have any mental illnes despite the show and the writers proving otherwise?

stop erasing canon and teen wolf portraying stiles as a mentally illed character who has to take actual medications just because you can't stand scott not being a special snowflake. why should people ignore stiles' mentall illness? lol you seem perfectly fine fetishizing abuse and painting scott as a poor abuse victim despite literally nothing in canon suggesting that  except his father accidentally pushing him down the stairs once - something scott doesn't even remember in the show btw. >:)

Of course Stiles is not the only smart person in the show. Lydia, Derek, Peter, Cora, Mason, Allison, Kira, Malia... They are all brilliant and incredibly intelligent according to canon. You are the one who keeps desperately trying to put Scott 'hard working average student at best' Mccall into the same category as them. There's no really need to force other characters' canon traits, abilities and mentall illness onto Scott in order for him to be more interesting, ya know? Chill

You still haven't actually told me what scenes show Stiles' amazing grades. Nor have you come up with a reasonable explanation for all the times Stiles had to have basic things explained to him. Nor have you come up with an explanation for Scott's good grades and periods of academic excellence in the later periods of the show, or come up with an explanation for why Melissa was so confused and shocked that Scott was falling behind at school.

Nor have you actually explained how my argument is in any way invalidated by Stiles having ADHD, given its central point is that whether or not Stiles had ADHD is largely irrelevant. Maybe Stiles has ADHD, maybe he doesn't. Maybe that Adderall was his, maybe he bought it off of someone else.

It does not matter.

That was the entire point of the post. ADHD (a learning disability, by the way, not a mental illness) doesn't magically make someone smarter. Having good grades doesn't mean you're smart, nor does having bad grades mean you're dumb. Some of the smartest kids I've ever tutored had shitty grades because they could never remember their homework, or couldn't keep their attention on their exams in class, or kept getting kicked out of class for being "too disruptive". Are you going to claim that any kid who has low grades is an idiot, even if they have a learning disability?

(Also, seriously, Stiles hid the existence of the supernatural world from his father for half a year and you think he can't hide some Adderall? The teachers don't even know that some of their kids aren't human and are regularly involved in mass murder plots, how hard do you think it is to hide drugs from them?)

And I think you may actually be mixing me up with someone else, because I never once tried to imply Scott has a learning disability of any kind. I honestly am just baffled as to where you got that idea. Presumably, the same place where you think I'm the one making Scott a "special snowflake" when you're the one who is cowardly hiding behind anon to clog my inbox with messages denigrating him and implying he's the only "dumb" person the show. (Which is particularly confounding since you appear to subscribe to the notion that grades are actually an accurate measure of intelligence. So presumably all the smart kids who have low grades because they have ADHD are actually idiots? I guess that's why even though Malia has to go to summer school to graduate high school, Scott is the special "dumb" snowflake?)

I'm not calling anyone a special snowflake. Literally the entire point of my meta is, "different people are intelligent in different ways, so let's stop calling one character stupid just to make another one look smarter". You're the one who took this as an attack on one of the characters.

You're the one who took "grades don't really have much to do with intelligence" as an attack on learning disabilities. You're the one who is in my inbox calling learning disabilities "mental illness". You're the one who...actually, I don't know what the fuck kind of mental gymnastics you did to keep coming back to the issue of prescription legality when I pointed out that Stiles could be illegally buying the Adderall he mentioned once (and only once) in the show.

You're using "ableism" as a convenient buzzword, but you fucked up big time in using this argument on someone for whom mental illness and learning disability are not just buzzwords I get to forget about when I get off Tumblr. They are a reality of my brain, my background, and my life.

You don't actually care about learning disabilities. You don't actually care about students with learning disabilities. You don't actually care about students with ADHD.

You don't actually care about students who struggle in school - because of learning disabilities, because of problems at home, or just because they need time to study, and that's time they don't have.

All you care about is making Stiles look better than everyone else - and the only way you can do that is by making Scott look worse.

Think about this for a minute.

Think about the implications of your argument, when you accuse me of ableism because I posit that these characters have different intelligences, and that one form of intelligence is not inherently “smarter” than the other. Think about the implications of your argument that you interpreted "grades and intelligence aren't correlated" as an attack on learning disabilities. Think about the implications of your argument when you try to claim that the fact Scott takes the time to study for his class is me "forcing a mental illness onto him".

Think about the implications of your statement when you imply that a student needing to study for a class makes them "dumb".

The entire point of your argument only makes sense if you assume that grades are an accurate measure of intelligence, and thus suggesting someone has low grades is akin to calling them an idiot. Does this mean all the smart kids who have low grades because of learning disabilities are actually dumb?

As a neurodivergent adult with ADHD, as the daughter of a teacher who partially specialized in special needs children, and as a tutor to a multitude of incredibly bright students who struggled because of learning disabilities (and mental illnesses, after school obligations, and problems at home), I have zero patience for this kind of bullshit.

I'm temporarily disabling anon, but my Messenger is still open. If you honestly believe that I was being ableist, if you can actually point to my posts to support even half your claims about my statements, then come talk to me in a private space under your own name. I'm perfectly fine discussing this when I've calmed down, and if you can convince me that something I've said is actually insulting to students with learning disabilities, then I'll happily apologize on my blog, in public, and admit I said something wrong.

But given that you sent me all of this anonymously, I rather doubt that's going to happen.

[invested-in-your-future]

why do you keep saying rwby is erasing yang's disability with the robot arm? saying that a person is somehow less disabled because they use aids (like, yknow, wheelchairs, hearing aids, prosthetics) to help them get through life easier is really shitty and ableist. and i don't see you calling mercury's legs 'convenient'.

Because it is different in real world and in narrative fiction. In real world you can’t “erase” the downsides even if you get prosthetic because you are not in control of narrative. While in a narrative, getting prosthetic usually ends up with writers being able to pretend nothing happened. We already had signs of that with Yang talking about how natural arm feels and all that stuff.

IF Yang was allowed to DEAL with her disability before actually accepting the arm, it would be one thing. But the fact that she was basically guilt-tripped into using it and the show just skimmed past any sort of dealing with not having an arm is what is problematic here to be honest.

Let’s be frank. i would have preferred for Yang to become badass without an arm. To prove that even being disabled does not stop you from being empowered. However show chose the robot arm. The prosthetic use itself is not the problem in on itself tho. Its how it is used.

Yang did not accept the arm as a natural development of her situation. She just got it because plot needed it and she got it in very uncomfortable way that basically implies that she has to be “normal” to get any sort of attention or care from people around her.

Mercury’s legs ARE convenient, since we literally only saw them as relevant when plot needed it. Otherwise NOBODY would have ever guessed it. Its perfect example of what the problem of “magic robo arms and legs” is in fiction.

TLDR: There was no development of Yang dealing with her disability or PTSD(or problems with Blake), she was guilt-tripped into using arm in very uncomfortable way and its a common plot device to ignore disabilities in fiction.