the-lemonaut

[the-lemonaut]

Here I am, posting something similar like the fibro post... this one goes out to my psychotic folks🫶

[the-lemonaut]

Alright, that's enough boops for today

MUAH to everyone who booped back >:]

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[the-lemonaut]

@ people who depict vitiligo as perfectly circular/round shapes on the skin: maybe don’t.

vitiligo typically forms shapes that really aren’t perfectly round??? like it isn’t shaped like polka dots and tbh i find it kind of insulting when people do represent vitiligo in art with perfectly circular shapes. typically, it crops up on the hands, arms, and face (particularly fingers and knuckles on the hands, and on the face, it can often kinda starts out by centering around the skin around the mouth or eyes.) it can also affect the hair (which may or may not extend to eyelashes or eyebrows) or even the eye colour too in some instances – it all just depends on the individual.

vitiligo-havers all possess our own unique and fun lil patterns on our skin. those patterns of lighter areas will often expand if untreated, and/or the person who has vitiligo is subject to extreme stress/illness/etc.

usually, vitiligo leaves shapes/patches on the skin that are VERY irregular in shape, and the edges of the shapes aren’t generally super smooth. (in some instances they are – like i said, everyone is unique.)

on some people (on the face), it can have this really kool semi-symmetrical kind of  appearance, like this lovely lady below:

but for me, personally, the patterns are NOT symmetrical, especially around my mouth (which is the only place where it shows up on my face so far.) its a bit lopsided and bigger on one side of my mouth, a bit like this:

here are some other examples for good measure, just to demonstrate how much the appearance of vitiligo around the mouth/on the face can vary!

remember: vitiligo doesnt just happen to people with dark skin! vitiligo can affect ANYBODY, even white people. it is literally a skin condition that does not discriminate. i get that from an artistic viewpoint, contrast is nice and that vitiligo is probably going to be more noticeable on darker characters (which, in and of itself, has become a concept that i have mixed feelings about, because before mine cropped up, i was told to stay out of the sun because it made me “too brown”…. but now, it’s become “stay out of the sun because you dont want those weird spots to show up even more than they already do, do you?“ and “but aren’t you happy that it’s going to make your skin lighter? i thought that’s what you wanted!” maybe focus on depicting vitiligo because you care about people who have it and what happens to us, rather than it just being a kool design choice? idk.) for the sake of accuracy, there needs to be more characters of all complexions who have vitiligo. also, i dont feel like i should have to explain why depicting people with vitiligo in fantasy as funny polka-dot skinned aliens is dehumanizing. or that its weird when all your ocs are white and the ONLY dark-skinned oc your have has vitiligo.

please be aware that visible vitiligo is kind of stressful to have, and is still heavily stigmatized. i’d be lying to you if i said i didnt cover mine up with bronzer or makeup when i leave the apartment to run errands or hit the town – and speaking from experience here, the mask-wearing mandates introduced in response to covid has been a period of bliss for people like me who have mild vitiligo on the face. when those areas are covered up, people can’t gawk at them and make shitty comments.

tl;dr vitiligo is something that shouldn’t be gawked, ridiculed, or stigmatized, nor yet should it be fetishized and considered an ideal or co-opted into an aesthetic (especially by people who dont have it. seeing tik tok clowns utilize it as a maekup trend makes me nauseous.) vitiligo should just simply be normalized! if youre going to portray people with vitiligo – particularly poc – then do it right, or don’t fucking do it at all. you can literally just google vitiligo and you’ll be presented with zillions of images of how vitiligo can appear. also, as someone who depicts vitiligo but doesnt actually have it, id suggest supporting creators who do have it and/or participating in the overall effort to bring awareness to the many issues people with vitiligo are facing. there’s a lot more that i could say on the subject but for the sake of this post already being too long, im gonna leave it at that for now.

[the-lemonaut]

Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.

DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).

Talking about research and learning... don't make your burn survivor characters evil. Burn survivors are normal people and don't deserve to be constantly portrayed in such a way.

👍

[the-lemonaut]

More of my sweet sweet boi - i've named him Oatmeal ♡

[the-lemonaut]

Buy a crystal pony = help me and my husband survive!

A bit about them:

⭒ Their manes do grow and are usually shaped either by carving or melting

⭒ They can break! but they don't feel as much pain. Can be melted or glued back together

⭒ Grow their children from crystals. Live way longer than any other ponies

⬇️ Payment details under the cut! ⬇️

✶ Contact me on tumblr or here -> serenkiy.vovch@gmail.com

✶ Payment via Buy Me a Coffee (NOT Kofi!)

✶ Refund is not possible

✶ All funds will be used to help me and my husband survive our refugee life! Thank you!

[the-lemonaut]

Make Video Games More Accessible By...

Dear game developers: 

Make your games more accessible by

Allowing Button remapping

Supporting multiple kinds of controllers

Supporting multiple types of inputs for when solving puzzles or clues

Match the color and or pattern puzzle

Follow the sound and controller vibration to find the mcguffin

Allow for zooming in and out if you’re doing any kind of “pattern alignment” puzzle. 

Subtitles on everything, for fuck’s sake

If your motion/camera thing’s instructions start with “stand up and….”, rethink your design.

Allow for adjusting the field of view

Aim assist.

If someone is struggling with a puzzle or task, start offering tool tips and hints on screen

Remember that the goal is not to have the player play the game like you would. The goal is for the gamer to have fun and experience the game and art you’ve spent so much time and energy to create in a way that brings them joy.

Removing and avoiding harmful tropes around disability - physical or otherwise.

[the-lemonaut]

Still art blocked, went off-style again and drew whatever my hand wanted. Wasn't intentional, but the end result sort of reminds me of the art of Margaret R. Thompson, though hers is much better in my opinion :P

[the-lemonaut]

The Jaws Effect and what it means for media representation

The Jaws Effect is the name of a phenomenon that described the panic and fear that sprang up around sharks, fuelled by Steven Spielberg's movie, Jaws. While the fear of sharks and other marine predators had always been a thing, Jaws launched the fear of sharks, and Great White Sharks in particular, to new (and mostly unfounded) heights. Most people will never encounter a real-life shark and so their only knowledge about the creatures come from movies and other forms of entertainment. Entertainment that largely portrayed them as mindless, unfeeling killing machines. After Jaws, sharks became a staple in the creature-feature genre of movies, which only perpetuated the idea of sharks as dangerous monsters even further, reigniting and reconfirming the beliefs the public held about them in the process. These ideas about sharks are, of course, not true, but the misconception and fear has had a real, observable impacts on shark populations, shark conservation efforts and even laws and legislations surrounding sharks and shark conservation around the world.

Ok but Cy, this is a blog about disability and disabled representation, what do sharks have to do with anything you talk about? Well, Because The Jaws Effect is just one of many examples that shows how massive of an impact representation in the media can have, for better or for worse, especially when talking about subjects the public generally knows very little about.

This conversation is not unique to disability representation, nearly every person I've seen who's talked about how to write and design characters from any minority brings it up eventually, but the media we consume, the movies we watch, the books we read can all have big impacts on people's perceptions on those topics. When talking about disability specifically, it's an unfortunate reality that not many people know all that much about us, and so, much like sharks, for many, their only real exposure to disabled people is through the media they consume.

If you don't know anyone in a wheelchair, and your only knowledge of life as a wheelchair user comes from books and movies like Me Before You, of course you're going to (spoiler) come away thinking that life in a wheelchair is horrible and death is better than living like that. If you don't know any DID Systems and your only exposure to a condition like that is through movies like Split (and honestly, a number of other horror movies and crime shows) of course you'll think people with DID are unstable monsters who could become violent any moment. If your only exposure to autistic people is Music, then it's not shocking that you might think Autistic people are "trapped in their own minds," completely unaware of the world around them and lacking any kind of agency. As much as I'd like to be able to say these are "just movies" or "just books," and that if we don't like them, we can just not watch them, they all had an impact on the real world and real people's perceptions of the disabilities they depicted, as do the many, many smaller examples of bad representation.

This is why I personally spend so much time focused on the portrayal of disability in the media, why so much of my content is focused on creating resources for creators to represent us better, and why I think writers, artists and other types of creators should care about the representation they include.

Unfortunately, people believing misinformation and stereotypes, while annoying, isn't the worst of the impacts bad rep can have. If a stereotype is prevalent enough, and enough people believe it, it can both put us in harms way and cause us to loose access to things we desperately need and things designed to help us. One really common example of this is when movies and TV shows show a character getting up out of their wheelchair, and use this as proof that the person is faking being disabled. However, in reality, there are many disabilities that might mean someone has to use a wheelchair, even if they can still walk a little bit or stand up. The stereotype of someone standing up from their chair being a fake, especially when it's reinforced over and over again in the media, leads non-disabled people to believe that anyone who stands up from their wheelchair is faking, and results in a lot of real disabled people being harassed and denied things like access to disabled parking, toilets and other accessible spaces. There were even a few cases of people reporting those they see get out of their wheelchairs to Centrelink (The Australian "welfare" department, for those not familiar) as frauds, and while these investigations don't usually go far before someone realises what's happened, it has, on occasion, resulted in people loosing the income they depend on to survive, even temporarily.

But the impact of representation, of course, can go both ways.

I was in high school when the first How To Train Your Dragon movie came out, and at the time, I didn't really like people being able to see that I was a leg amputee because I was sick of kids in particular staring, pointing at me, asking their parents "what's wrong with them?" or asking me directly, "what's wrong with your legs?". I wore long skirts and big, bulky tracksuit pants to keep my legs covered, something that became dangerous in the hot Australian summer, but I didn't care.

But the impact of How to Train Your Dragon came in two ways. The first, was that it was one of the first times I'd seen an amputee (or rather, multiple amputees) who didn't keep their prosthetics covered or hidden, and it gave me the little boost in confidence I needed to do that myself and wear clothing that was more comfortable and functional. And second, the comments from children changed, albeit slightly, but enough that it was noticeable. The questions and comments went from "what's wrong with you?" to "oh cool, your legs are like Hiccup's!" I even had one little girl ask me once if I had a pet night fury. They went from being scared of me and my legs, or at the very least concerned for me, to genuinely curious and impressed. While reactions like that did become less and less common over time, they didn't fully go away either. Even today, I occasionally get young kids asking me why I have legs like hiccup. A friend of mine who was born with one arm shorter than the other and without fingers on that side had a similar experience with the movie Finding Nemo. Her disability was a bit more complex than what I described here, and she always found it hard to explain "what happened" to small children, however, after Finding Nemo came out, she was able to simply tell kids "this is my lucky fin, like what nemo has!" and that was enough to take her from someone "scary" to these kids to someone like their favourite characters.

Of course, it's much easier to see the impact positive representation can have on people's perceptions when we're talking about kids media, but it's not exclusive to it either.

When it comes to a minority like the disabled community who are so thoroughly misunderstood by the wider public, misinformation can and does spread easily. What people see and read in the media they consume plays a big roll in how people perceive the real people attached to the stereotypes. We often hear people say "Fiction imitates life" but the reverse can and often is also true, life can imitate and be influenced by fiction, and those of us creating should be mindful of this, especially when we're talking about a group of vulnerable people.

[Thumbnail ID: An illustration of a Great White Shark swimming near the rocky bottom of the ocean, surrounded by silver fish. In the bottom left corner of the image is "The Jaws Effect and what it means for media representation" in big, white bubble text. /End ID]

[the-lemonaut]

a cup of coffee

A woman clutches her eight year old son to her hip and blocks his view of me with her frame. She watches me over her shoulder to be sure I haven't noticed him asking her questions about me. I have. They've been asked countless times before, so it's more her fear of embarrassment that I feel wafting. She grabs her coffee and a small treat for him and scuttles away, pressing her palm on his back to keep him moving forward.

I sit with my rollator tucked in a corner, away from where it could be tripped over or bumped. Four people touch it anyway - mindlessly, carelessly, as if it were another piece of communal furniture. They like to stroke the crocheted cover along the back support, it seems they can't help themselves.

A pack of teens stock my bubble as they enter. The very sight of me breaks loose from their throats - they laugh, ogle, and howl. Hushing and shushing each other, they manage to calm their laughter long enough to get out their drink orders.

Everywhere I go I am somehow simultaneously the thing which takes up the most space, and that which is not thought of. I am ogled yet dismissed, entertainment yet unworthy. Every cup of coffee makes a statement - an act of radicalism with every sip, an act of rebellion in such a mundane ritual.

Disability is the act of existing despite of.

[the-lemonaut]

The Perfect Prosthetic: Video Version

The perfect prosthetic is a super common trope surrounding amputees and people with limb differences who use a prosthetic limb, so let's talk about it!

This is a kind of extended version of the written post from yesterday with mostly the same stuff, plus additional examples, "red flags" that this trope is showing up in your work to watch out for and some additional detail that got cut from the written version.

[the-lemonaut]

early halloween Maric

[the-lemonaut]

some autumn Maric scribbles

[the-lemonaut]

I completely forgot to post this, but better late than never!! These are the page illustrations I did for the @wandersongzine last year, it was SO AMAZING to work with all these talented people. It really was such a fun project, I'm glad I could be a part of it!!!

[the-lemonaut]

shoebox for my blorbo's house