#stop it with the fucking ableism

[ozymoron]

i hate this show they keep using DID in their cases like jesus christ

[renthony]

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

[bipolarmango]

Love how people are bending over backwards to explain Musketeer's Nazi salute as "he's autistic" but please Brett from social media comments explain to me this: why can't I, an autistic, keep my headphones on without a lecture while he gets a free pass for sieg heiling around?

[crippled-peeper]

I think I need a break from this site lmao

[hellyeahsickaf]

Having grown up with pretty severe undiagnosed ADHD one of my core memories will always be the teacher in 6th grade that would go out of his way to humiliate students that weren't reading enough. Idk how common this was but we had AR points. Essentially a system where if you read a book you could take a quiz on it and get points if you passed, with each book being worth a different amount of points. A very short book might be 3 points, a book the size of Harry Potter might be worth 40-70. You get it

I was actually good at literacy, I had the highest literacy score in that class. But audiobooks weren't really much of a thing yet and sitting down to read a book was virtually impossible, it's something I still struggle with and thought I was stupid for. I knew how to read and was great at it, even liked the material, but physically sitting down and reading a book was close to impossible. There were kids with hundreds of AR points and I had idk, probably less than 25.

And every few weeks this asshole would have all of us line up from most points to least. He'd go through, first hyping up the front of the line saying how impressed he was. He'd tell the next few they were doing well, to keep it up. Further down tell them to pick up the pace, but god help you if you were within the last 6 or so (some of them had the same issue as me, VERY likely also something undiagnosed)

He'd spend most of this time on those last few students. Berating these 11 year olds individually and intentionally humiliating them, telling them how there are 7 year olds who read more than us. He'd say we had no future, at least nothing better than minimum wage at McDonald's. That or we'd be on the streets. He was the type to bully neurodivergent kids every chance he got and boy that was damaging.

Wasn't the first or last teacher of mine to bully and shame kids and other teachers knew he did this so they'd send them to our classroom. He'd sometimes take an entire hour (I'd counted) out of our class time just humiliating this kid or few kids sent in for things like not doing their work or causing disruptions. He'd sometimes put their sloppy unfinished work or something on the projector and make fun of it. If the kid started crying he'd tell them to suck it up or call them names. And he was actually really well liked by the students, just the ones he wasn't an abusive motherfucker to

[sharkaiju]

New challenge for 2024: to stop saying "narcissist" when you mean "asshole". I call it the "Quit Being an Ableist Sack of Trash Challenge"

[ask-postcrash-curly]

Congratulations, Captain! You have been promoted!

Maybe you're confused...

You're at the top of the ladder, so what else is beyond the summit?

Well, there's Heaven.

Or falling to death...

You don't think you deserve heaven, Captain?

Got a guilty conscience?

...Let me read this for you.

Dear Captain Curly, Congratulations on your promotion to:

NUISANCE!

Your new role will have you do the following:

Be a waste of much needed resources.

Be a poor excuse of a human.

Be a waste of (limited) oxygen.

Be a major nuisance to everyone.

Honestly, you'd be better off

DEAD.

We have attached your updated contract. Please review all documents.

Again, congratulations on the new position.

Yours sincerely,

Your Best Friend.

I've what? Pretty sure I've been fired. In more ways than one.

Heaven? Please. I'm not dead yet. Anyway, I don't—

...You could say that, yeah. All right. Go on.

Ow! Fuck, really? Who is this?

Stop it. I fucking know. Who—

!!!

If—

If this was a joke, it wasn't funny...

Please don't... do that. Again.

[disabled-dragoon]

Saw a review on something that was like "I don't have chronic illnesses but I doubt having them means you can't do things like a normal teenager?"

Well you see.

It can.

Very easily, actually.

But I wouldn't expect you to understand that considering you don't have a chronic illness.

How fucking ignorant can these people be.

[uncanny-tranny]

The most infuriating form of sanism is this idea that mentally ill people/people with mental disorders are just too stupid or too unenlightened to know how to be a proper, well-adjusted person

So many therapists have ignored signs of my unwellness simply because they assumed I was just... being stupid, and I just needed educating about why I'm acting disordered (apparently, mental disorders stop disordering you once you are condescendingly told why you're just disordered and dumb, who knew (sarcasm)).

Like, I could tell them that I knew my behaviour wasn't "rational," wasn't "reasonable" to do or believe and I'd still be treated like I was so dumb I needed hand-holding and scolding about why I'm acting disordered.

I truly wish that people would be able to take the idea of guidance and stop twisting it into "I am superior and enlightened and the people I am trying to help are stupid and wrong and beneath me!"

[thelegendofmik]

Stop Defending Ableists Challenge (Level: Impossible)

So the other day I made a post listing all the ableist things Jacob Richmond has included in Legoland and Ride the Cyclone.

And the response was abysmal - the amount of "well actually..." kind of responses I got was disgusting and I took down the post because I find it counterproductive to argue with teenagers on the internet. However, I stand by the belief that if you think you are old enough to post publicly on the internet, you are old enough to be held accountable for what you post.

But I think what I had to say was quite important, so I am going to reword it here.

TW here for the discussion of ableism and ableist slurs (they are all censored)

There is ZERO (0) justification for the use of THREE (3) ableist slurs across both works. I don't fucking care if it was the 2000's. The ADA predates both shows and disability activism had existed for decades before that (as yannick very kindly reminded me). So no, it was not ok for Richmond to use those slurs in his works, regardless of the time period. Because there is nothing "correct" (politically, or otherwise) about ableism.

And before you say "Oh, but it was the character who said it, not the writer..."

CHARACTERS ARE NOT SENTIENT BEINGS! They are not created in a vacuum. Their thoughts and actions are often a reflection of the author's own beliefs and morals.

It was not Ocean who decided to use the word cr*pple. It was Jacob Richmond who decided to use it. Same with the r word and sp*z in Legoland. It wasn't Penny and Ezra who decided to use those words, it was Jacob Richmond. Because each character's actions are dictated by the decisions that the author makes for that character. And in this case, the author decided to be an ableist asshole.

Yes, characters can be assholes. They can be complex and nuanced beings. But there are better ways to portray such experiences than being violently ableist (i.e.: without using slurs). And why does the ableist character get complexity and nuance, but the disabled character is simply the sad, disabled kid, with not much else in his personality until he magically becomes abled bodied. Like we deserve nuance and complexity as well, people!

In a 2022 interview with Curtain Call Bway (here), when asked who his favourite character to write was, Richmond responds with the following:

Ocean is definitely my favorite character to write because it’s based on certain people I’ve met and certain aspects of myself too.

Like he literally admits it himself, that his decisions when writing an ableist character were based off aspects of his own personality.

The reality is, disability has never been more than a comedic plot point to Richmond. He has never cared about portraying a realistic disabled experience. He has never cared about disabled people.

And the cherry on top is that his response to yannick-robin being hate-crimed was to rewrite Ricky so that he could be played by an abled and therefore production teams wouldn't have to give a shit about ensuring their spaces are safe and accessible for disabled performers. If he actually cared about disabled people and properly representing our experiences, he would have worked with a disability consultant and fixed the issues within the show. Instead, he doubles down and causes even more harm.

To add insult to injury, he then licensed that script to Sarah Rasmussen and her team of ableist cronies for the DC production. Because him choosing to continue working with Rasmussen and her team just shows that he shares the same ableist values as the McCarter/Arena team.

So by saying that "its the character, not the author", you are defending Richmond and his violent ableism. You are attempting to justify the harm he has done and CONTINUES TO DO to disabled people. YOU. ARE. A. PART. OF. THE. PROBLEM.

Ride the Cyclone and Legoland (in ALL its forms and versions) contains so much ableist violence. This violence has traumatised REAL PEOPLE, but yannick, myself, and other people speaking out are the ones ruining the vibe by calling it out? Be fucking for real people.

Now if only my university papers were this thorough...

[macabre-crab]

“laois is NOT a monsterfucker.” “laois doesn’t even know what sex is!” “laois knows monsters have sex but he doesn’t know humans can too” “laois is my little uwu autistic baby cinnamon roll too pure and too good for this world and bejeodkfkfkdkdnfkdkdkdkdkd

[desultory-suggestions]

Witcher fans forgive me. I finally watched the Witcher because everyone raved about it for so long. I just. I just don’t like this show. Devastated. Everything good about it (which there is plenty) is overshadowed by the most annoying narrative choices. I never know what time it is in the show (past or present?) there’s random choppy moments that make no sense until so much later but with no intrigue, and Ciri aged so much between recording seasons that I thought they recast her. No hate to anyone who likes the show, there’s a ton of good stuff about it but these things I just can’t get past. They chop up a great idea until I keep pausing to go “wait what happened? WHO is that?” I know this has nothing to do with my blog but someone needs to know my insanity over this.

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

i’m just dropping by and i wanna rant a bit about just how much i hate that people have turned the word “narcissistic” into a synonym for toxic or abusive. even if we’re ignoring the ableism towards people with NPD (which we shouldn’t), people are still not using the term correctly? they’re not evening referring to someone who is egotistical or selfish, they’re just straight up using that word for any person who slightly pisses them off.

[crowpunkcognitivedecline]

this is a cripple punk post; ableds must tag reblogs with #i’m able bodied

stop calling ND people’s ableism against physdis folks “lateral ableism.” it’s not lateral.

the vast majority of physdis folks are ND. while ND people can absolutely be disabled, ND disability works and is experienced differently, and isn’t just “physdis but mental”

ND people’s ableism against crips isn’t “lateral.” it’s ableism with an excuse.

[pomsephone]

Autistic people don’t owe you civility when you can’t even afford us humanity

[crippled-peeper]

i dont want to trample on ur emotions/right to be upset at people getting mad at you for not wanting to be called smth, but like. idk the way youre talking about DID is really weird and rubs me the wrong way.

you have every right to be upset at the people in ur inbox calling you heinous shit, but you dont have to attack (online) DID culture because of these people. it's reading very fakeclaim-y

I don’t think you would recognize sarcasm if it punched you in the face