busyCrowdfunding makes it easier to get these things. I have characters with handicaps; people who want to read more about them can request a return appearance. Or they can suggest new characters, or whatever. I like that.
Looking at the different tests, my scoring varies. They all include the presence of a disabled character. Check, I have a bunch of those. Whether the character has a goal in the story or not -- that varies. Sometimes the disabled character is the main focus, other times there for background parity, but I don't use them as literary lawn ornaments. Some people like background parity and others hate it. (Background parity: when a motif can appear without making the whole story necessarily about that thing. It can be ordinary, it can be in the background like everyone else's traits.)
Whether the disability matters to the action is important to me; it's rare that I set a disabled character as protagonist without factoring in how their disability affects their path through the world. In background parity, it may or may not come up much. It bugs the crap out of me when a writer puts in a disability, but it's like window dressing and doesn't affect the action even when it should.
I also tend to avoid the disability stop-tropes, mentioned in one version as "Death, Cure, or Revenge." Being a minority isn't a "get out of death free" card in my writing, but I am slightly more protective of such characters. Sometimes my characters can get adaptive equipment, but a complete removal of disability is really rare. That's still a touchy issue: I've had people complain about the Eye of Fate in Monster House. For me it's an integral part of the daughter's character, though, because it affects how she perceives the world and thus how she interacts with people. She is still different. Revenge rarely comes up, but then, most of my disabled characters were either born that way or got handicapped through no-fault situations. So it's just not relevant for them. I do have an inkling of an idea for a disabled villain, but I think "revenge" is less precise than "stop the adversary." More generally, I suspect all the stuff is simply a fancy fractal branch off my core of "I don't write what everyone else is writing, unless I pick up a popular motif to twist it into a corkscrew."
I'd be happy to see more stories that pass any version of the disability Bechdel. Not just because they are more respectful, but because if you look at the requirements, you see that those angle toward stronger stories in terms of literary structure.
December 4 2012, 14:47:46 UTC 8 years ago
Oooers. Today I have learnt something. Thank you!