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Disability in Brandon's Books - [Spoilers All]


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On 6/22/2020 at 10:52 PM, Claincy said:

I've been thinking for some time about the presentation of disability and chronic pain in Brandon's novels. I've been rereading a number of his books to refresh my memory on some of the details as well and I ended up with a lot of thoughts. I've written him a letter trying to provide some insight and I think it's a topic worth discussing here as well. Fair warning: it's kind of...long. But I think it needed to be to really unpack and explain what I wanted to talk about.

Spoiler Warning: The letter includes direct spoilers for Mistborn, Stormlight, Elantris, Warbreaker and Reckoners. But other books are relevant to the topic as well. If you haven't read some of Brandon's books and are concerned about spoilers this is not a safe thread to read.

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Dear Brandon,

I want to start by saying how much I love your work, how much your books and characters have meant to me, and how your books have had a large part in developing my own interest in writing. I would also like to say how much I appreciate the care and quality with which you’ve written mental illness with characters like Kaladin, and neurodivergence with characters like Steris (who is simply wonderful). With all that in mind, your treatment of physically disabled characters and characters with chronic pain could be improved on. I have no doubt that you are capable of handling those topics just as well as you handle mental illness and I hope I can help you understand why you aren’t currently hitting that mark. I’ll try to be concise, but there’s a lot to unpack. Before I do I would like to note that I appreciate that there are a moderate number of disabled characters across your books. Some fall into some of the unhelpful tropes and others are largely minor characters, but I do still appreciate their presence. (I’ll mostly talk about disability in general but I’ll touch on chronic pain specifically at the end.) I want to be clear that this isn’t intended as a harsh criticism but as an explanation of something you might not have realised.

(To provide some quick context for my perspective. I have chronic pain and chronic fatigue, severe enough that I am barely able to work a couple of hours in a week at the best of times, frequently less. My head started hurting 7 years ago now and has continued to be painful literally every waking moment since then. We really have no idea why. Two other members of my immediate family have chronic fatigue syndrome and my aunt has fibromyalgia.)

The presentation of disability in fiction is typically poor. It is usually written based on ideas that people without experience of disability have without any real understanding of what being disabled is actually like. The general representation of disability in fiction is more of a fantasy version of disability for non-disabled people to enjoy. There are exceptions that are written well, of course. But the majority are not. Unfortunately the tropes and issues common in these stories can be harmful; setting unreasonable and harmful expectations and actually making people less understanding of disabled people. I’d like to talk about a few of these, but I’ll focus first on the one most common in your writing.

1) Magical healing & “Overcoming” disability. Allow me to present a scenario for you. Imagine that, at some point during the climax of Bands of Mourning, Steris holds and uses the bands. In doing so she taps an immense amount of zinc and copper, processing a huge array of memories from a vast variety of people in a matter of moments. This experience grants her a more intuitive understanding of people and effectively cures her autism. That would, of course, be an awful thing to write, even thinking about it as an example is painful. Let’s take another example. What if, when Kaladin achieved the 3rd ideal of the Windrunnders it cured his depression, and similarly if Teft were cured of his addiction. Not quite as bad as ‘curing autism’, but still pretty bad. You took care to make it clear that this wasn’t at all the case.

I expect you can tell where I’m going with this. Magically curing physical disability may seem to make ‘more sense’ as an aspect of the magic, but only because that is how you wrote the magic in the first place. It’s just as problematic as magically curing mental illness. Unfortunately this is rather common in the Cosmere, as it is in most media. Lopen, Renarin, (Gaz I expect), Susebron, all of Elantris, Spook (arguably). (I may well be forgetting others, but you get the point.) Renarin in particular is such a cool character in exactly the right setting to explore his experience as the son of a highprince in a warrior culture, who can’t fight due to his disability. But he gets magically cured. We don’t even get a viewpoint from him until after that. I can see why you wrote him that way and the secrets you couldn’t reveal too soon, but it is still quite disappointing.

It is also extremely common for disabled characters in fiction that, when push comes to shove, they can push through their disability through sheer force of will to accomplish something that they’ve been established to be physically incapable of. “Overcoming” their disability. Thereafter they are also usually cured, or at the least their life becomes a lot easier. So the typical narrative is that by virtue of character growth they overcome their disability. As an occasional story this would be fine, but as a common trope it’s actually quite harmful. I’ll try to break down why and provide a little more insight on what living with disability is actually like.

  • This is a non-disabled fantasy, it doesn’t reflect our existence nor is it necessarily that enjoyable for us to watch or read. Generally speaking we want to watch characters who struggle like us. Have some success, and continue to struggle. Because that’s how life is.
  • This overcoming disability or achieving amazing things despite it is commonly referred to as disabled “inspiration porn”. Stories that motivate non-disabled people. Because if someone like that can accomplish something so great, why can’t you? I think when spelled out it’s fairly clear how dehumanising that can be.
  • A common thing we are told by non-disabled people is to not let ourselves be ‘defined’ by our disability. But my disability impacts every single aspect of my life. Of course it is part of what defines me, pretending otherwise will only make things worse. Another common comment is about how ‘brave’ we are. Which sounds nice, but it’s not like we chose this. That kind of thinking often leads to comments like “I couldn’t live like that.” That isn’t a compliment. It’s someone saying they think the disabled person would be better off dead. Given the number of disabled people who are murdered by their carers to ‘put them out of their suffering’ that kind of sentiment literally gets disabled people killed.
  • If disability can be overcome by, in essence, being good enough or trying hard enough. Then by extension those who haven’t overcome their disability mustn’t have tried hard enough. Mustn’t be good enough. So in a way it’s their own fault, right? This is of course ridiculous. Most people don’t hold this opinion directly of course (though some people certainly do and violence and abuse towards disabled people is a serious issue). However if something is reinforced constantly by the media you consume it can and will create an unconscious bias unless you’re aware of it and wary of that possibility. It’s so easy to ask someone “Well why haven’t you tried X treatment yet?” or “It can’t hurt to try X.” (It can, and often does.) If they just tried that they might be better right? So maybe they’re just lazy and it’s a little bit their own fault.

I appreciated that in Calamity the harmsways can't heal Knighthawk and from what I understand of how healing works in the Cosmere it could be the same there. As I understand it Cosmere healing restores your body to it’s normal state, a spiritual blueprint as such. With that in mind it would be quite reasonable to say that a condition from birth couldn’t be healed. Or for that matter, any injury that had become a sufficiently ingrained part of their identity. So the option is there even for characters with powerful magic. I think the precedent is already there in Edgedancer with the children the Stump can and can’t heal.

As a quick aside. I’ve been watching your BYU lectures online this year. (Which are very enjoyable and instructive by the way.) In lecture 9 you talked about flaws, handicaps and limitations. In that you described a handicap as “..something that must be overcome, absolutely must be overcome, but is something that is not the character’s fault. And they have no power over whether this thing can be changed. Now some handicaps through the course of the story will be evaporated by the story. But the point is, the character up to this point, you don’t blame a character for being born blind. This is a handicap, and you frame the story a very different way.”

You then describe “A limitation, for me, is a thing that is not to change, not to even overcome. It is a constraint you work within that you don't necessarily want the character to overcome.”

Your intentions are good, of course. And you could look at learning to live with a disability and work around it to an extent as partially overcoming it, in a sense. However, by placing disability in the list of things that must be overcome in the first place you’re setting yourself up to make the same kind of mistakes repeatedly. Physical disability is much better thought of as a limitation that cannot be changed (and frankly should not be changed in most stories).

2) It is more common than it should be for disabled characters to nobly sacrifice themselves. Thereby ‘proving’ that they can still be ‘valuable’ despite their disability. I don’t think I need to say more to explain how that can be unhelpful. I don't think you've ever really done this. I should also make note of the idea of disabled individuals being a ‘burden’. Many disabled people struggle with feeling like a burden at some point in their lives. As you can doubtless imagine this is a really unhealthy mindset, but a common struggle nonetheless. The other side of this is other people viewing them as a burden which leads to a lot of mistreatment, emotional manipulation and abuse on a personal level. Not to mention inaccessibility and lack of support on more systemic levels throughout society. Much of that struggle with feeling like a burden comes about specifically because of others in their lives, and society at large, treating them as such. You can absolutely write about disabled characters struggling with this. It’s very real and relatable. But please make it clear that it’s not true; without resorting to noble sacrifice or remarkable achievements.

3) It is also reasonably common for disabled characters to be killed or hurt to motivate the protagonist. Or to show how evil the villain is. This isn’t common in your work but there is one slightly atypical example I want to make mention of. I like Ashweather Cett in Mistborn era 1. He’s a cool character. But the only time his disability matters or influences anything is to reinforce to Vin that she’s going overboard when she raids his keep. Him being a cripple feels like it’s as much there for Vin’s character as it is for him. It’s not awful by any means, but it’s not ideal either. To briefly note, the only other disabled characters in era 1 are Clubs and arguably, in a way, Spook. Clubs’s limp is mostly just character flavour, it’s fine, just unremarkable. Spook could be looked at as having chronic pain via hypersensitivity. But it’s much more a super power and it’s cured by the end anyway.

4) Disabled villains are unreasonably common in fiction. More common than protagonists. Often they were driven to villainy and callous evil by their disability. Again, I don’t think I need to explain why that’s problematic as a trope. (Though I will note that while disability and chronic pain can make people desperate, in my experience it also more often than not makes them more empathic, not less.) This is a trope you have mostly avoided in your writing, with one unfortunate exception. Professor Irich is the only significantly disabled character in Mistborn era 2 and the only character I can think of with chronic pain you’ve written since Elantris. We really, really, didn’t need a viewpoint of him showing how utterly immoral and hateful he was.

Far too many disabled characters end up in one of these situations/filling one of these tropes. (It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but some of the most common.)  Any of them are fine individually of course. We could and should have stories with disabled villains and with disabled characters who die or recover. The problem is in how extensive these tropes are. It is very rare to find a major character who lives and struggles with their disability and continues to do so as the story ends. But that’s what disability is like for the majority of us. I will take a moment to note that of the disabled characters in Stormlight, the ones who are left anyway, Rysn has strong potential. We’ve only had the one viewpoint from her since she was crippled so far, but it was a good start. And frankly 1 viewpoint puts her ahead of almost every other disabled character in the Cosmere. What I mean to say is, I’m looking forward to her novella. (And if you haven’t already done so I’d advise having some frank conversations with people who have been similarly crippled to help you finish writing that.)

I really hope this isn’t coming across too negatively. I love your books and I’m not seeking to criticise as much as to provide some insight.

Alright. Time to talk briefly about chronic pain and Elantris. I don’t want to dwell on Elantris too much, it was after all your first published novel and your writing has progressed massively since then. (And Elantris was still generally pretty good.) However, I think it’s necessary to touch on it for this discussion. Elantris is a book in which people who get a particularly unpleasant chronic illness/pains are thrown into a crumbling, walled off city to suffer where society can try to pretend they don’t exist. Any who try to escape are permanently injured and any who try more than a couple of times are burnt alive. They’re also the target of extreme hate for political benefit. That’s one heck of a premise. And one that is horrifyingly close to the reality in many places. But the book isn’t about that, nor does it do that premise justice. In fairness; I would be hugely impressed if you had managed to do justice to a premise like that in your first published novel.

The concept of being in pain constantly, that gets worse repeatedly, is presented as a fun fantasy concept. I have a feeling you didn’t realise at the time how close to reality that experience is. (I didn’t either when I first read it, that was sometime before I got sick.) Unsurprisingly the resulting depiction of chronic pain is hit and miss. I’m not going to try to go into detail on that here as this is already overly long and everyone’s experience with disability & chronic pain is different anyway. It’s definitely best to talk to people who have similar disability & pain to the character you’re writing.

If you read through all that, thankyou for listening. I hope it provided a little insight. I’m really looking forward to Rhythm of War, which I’m sure will be outstanding as usual.

Sincerely,
[Claincy]

 

Thank you so much for writing this, it was really enlightening. I haven't thought of making a disabled character yet, particularly because of this and my lack of knowledge and experience, but this will certainly make me more aware when I decide to write one.

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Just spent the last 20 minutes reading the thread- gotta admit, never noticed most of this, though, I have noticed how often blind people get some super ability that completely makes up for it. I like how mental illnesses aren't the sort of thing you can just wave away though, because I know a lot of people think you can do that, but I've heard several of my friends talking about this and they're really not.

Never thought of spook as being disabled, though, since he always referred to it as a penance. I suppose you could call it an addiction, though that has connotations that don't quite seem to fit.

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6 hours ago, bridge7 said:

Never thought of spook as being disabled, though, since he always referred to it as a penance. I suppose you could call it an addiction, though that has connotations that don't quite seem to fit.

Well, he uses a substance to feel things he normally wouldn't and can't function normally without it... so, I guess it counts.

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8 hours ago, Frustration said:

Well, he uses a substance to feel things he normally wouldn't and can't function normally without it... so, I guess it counts.

Well... It's magic not a hallocinogen and I guess he can't function without it, and ruined his body with it so he needs it... Dunno I thought an addiction was mostly mental, and your brain causes the physical aspect. This is a physical need caused by an overused substance so maybe? Like Teft, that's a normal addiction. He gets highs and lows based off a substance (there's more to the definition than that but he fits everything). Spook is more sketchy.

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Now I love this. I think there is definitely things that are not addressed that should be addressed. Another thing is LGBT inclusion. Now, I think dawnshard did this right. Both in LGBT matters and in disabilities. 
 
spoilers!

Spoiler

Rysn gets to try to live with a disability of not being able to use her legs. She is frustrated by it and wants to change that. She seeks the fabrial devices for that assistance. It makes sense for her character and the issue you are addressing.

there was also mention of a trans king gaining the body of  a man after he bonded a Radiant spren, which I thought was just wonderful.

Now @Claincy, I will say that you did not say anything that would be doing things right, or at least not many. It would be useful if you listed some of the things you should do in addition to what you shouldn’t do. That would help people not just know what to blacklist, but also know what to whitelist for their writing.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I remembered seeing this topic when I got to the "trial by witness" chapter in Rhythm of War.  I don't know how things are going to turn out yet, but the Honor Sprens' umbrage on behalf of the deadeyes got me thinking about the principle of validation I've been contemplating relative to minorities in some communities, specifically those where the behavior of the community has been alleged to contribute to suicidal intent in minorities.

Spoiler

I'm now going to talk about the community of Mormons and the minority of LGBTQ+.  (Mormon is largely used in the cultural sense in the following).

Spoiler

Mormons have a lot of rules, and many people break them (I'd go so far as to say everyone breaks some of them some of the time, cf. Mosiah 4:29 "I cannot tell you all the things whereby ye may commit sin;")  Some take LGBTQ+ as a sin, and not only a sin, but one that is problematic for mormon identity.  Like smoking, or not paying tithing.  Whereas not paying taxes might be considered a sin, but it's not one they're going to devote General Conference talks to because it's not problematic for mormon identity.  Or speeding on the highway.  Or being dark skinned... we try at least, but without editing the Book of Mormon there will always be some invalidation there.  

So things that are held up as problematic for Mormon identity I would consider points of invalidation.

Another example is the tension between the Autism Self Advocacy Network and Autism Speaks.  Autism Speaks treats autism as a scourge to be vanquished.  Autism Self Advocacy Network tries to find a balance between that and the overly cheery "autism is a superpower" thing that works only in early childhood.  

There are similar echoes in the experience of the Deaf community and the tension between cochlear implants and sign communities.  I'm not sure how this stacks up next to the wheelchair analogy.  The closest I've experienced is glasses.  My husband always needed them and felt very liberated when he was able to get lasik correction.  I started to need them from age 18 or so, but could get by without them until my mid 30's, at which point I really liked them because I could see better with them than without them.  

Communities are sometimes defined by what they are not.  And minorities who fall into "what they are not" suffer invalidation.  I think invalidation is important due to Linehan's Biosocial theory of suicidal intent.  It is just a theory, though Linehan's dialectical behavioral therapy for suicidal intent has been proven clinically.  As a parent of people with minority status, I hope to find more relatable ways of expressing this to make communities less hostile for minorities.  

 

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As someone who was born blind, I just want to thank you for writing this letter. It provided some much-needed insight and really made me think. I haven't had much experience with Brandon's books beyond Stormlight, Elantris and a little bit of Mistborn, but I do think that, in general, it would be great to see more well written characters with disability. The tropes you mentioned are things I hadn't even realized were there, but I now realize that characters often get their disabilities healed or forgotten somehow, when that's usually not how it works. Disabilities shouldn't be something that people feel the need to apologize for, pity or try to fix/overcome in books, and they don't just magically go away, though I suppose it would make sense for this to happen in a place like Roshar. Still, I think disabilities should be handled in a better way, as things that we live with and that are a part of us, not things that must be fixed by the end of the book. I'm not saying disabilities don't suck, because they do. But they also shouldn't be something that people are desperate to change or erase. Oftentimes, I just want to be validated and treated normally, and it makes me feel guilty or embarrassed when people apologize or pray for me to be healed. This is just my "thing," and it's not anyone's responsibility to make it better. And in relation to the stereotypes you mentioned, I definitely agree that disabled people shouldn't constantly be portrayed as weak, villainous, tragic, or different in some way. I do understand that disabilities must be crazy hard to write (I can't even write blind characters...), so it's a mistake that I can understand. (Note that I am not speaking for anyone else but myself. I have no idea what most other people with disabilities are feeling; this is just my outlook and experience. I hope that I haven't offended anyone by saying these things, as that wasn't my intention at all.) 

 Anyway, that stretched longer than I intended. Thank you so much for bringing up this point, I enjoyed reading it and I wish you the best.  

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...
On 11/12/2020 at 1:14 AM, Koloss17 said:

Now I love this. I think there is definitely things that are not addressed that should be addressed. Another thing is LGBT inclusion. Now, I think dawnshard did this right. Both in LGBT matters and in disabilities. 
 
spoilers!

  Hide contents

Rysn gets to try to live with a disability of not being able to use her legs. She is frustrated by it and wants to change that. She seeks the fabrial devices for that assistance. It makes sense for her character and the issue you are addressing.

there was also mention of a trans king gaining the body of  a man after he bonded a Radiant spren, which I thought was just wonderful.

Now @Claincy, I will say that you did not say anything that would be doing things right, or at least not many. It would be useful if you listed some of the things you should do in addition to what you shouldn’t do. That would help people not just know what to blacklist, but also know what to whitelist for their writing.

Hey, I’m sorry it’s taken me such a long time to respond. I had another health issue crop up and that ended up making my RSIs worse and it was all a bit of a mess that sapped most of my spare capacity for a while. I’m getting things a bit more under control now and I’ve got some good voice typing software so hopefully this is better late than never. (Sorry for reviving an older topic mods.)

  1. Include disabled characters, preferably multiple. There are a lot of disabled people in the real world, probably more than you think. I don’t recall the exact statistic but it’s something like one in five people are disabled. So if you have a cast of a dozen or more characters, having a couple of disabled characters in the mix is actually quite realistic and it makes it much easier to avoid token representation and some negative tropes. They don’t all need to be main characters by any means, though it helps if they’re not *all* extremely minor characters.
  2. Avoid bad tropes. Pretty simple, but it is worth noting that many tropes are mostly bad because of being overused/predominant. For example: if the only disabled character in your story is a villain that’s bad. But if you have a number of disabled characters and one of them is a villain (and they aren’t a villain *because of* their disability) that’s fine. Just try to avoid connecting physical abnormality to villainy. We should have disabled villains on occasion, the issue is in linking disability to villainy and in using it as a shorthand for villainy.
  3. Following on from that thought; disabled characters should appear in all sorts of different roles and positions, as we do in real life. There are, of a certainty, some occupations/roles/actions that certain disabilities make extremely hard. But just as often the reason a disabled person can’t do something is more down to a lack of accessibility and accommodations (or people just assuming that a disabled person couldn't do it and not giving them the opportunity). A very simple example relevant to the current times: right up through early 2020 many disabled people were refused jobs or positions studying because they would need to work/study from home much of the time and many employers and universities/colleges/schools said that wasn’t possible. I.e. they weren’t willing to bother dealing with it. (There are legal rights about accessibility in many places but they are often ignored. And fighting for them often takes money and energy that many disabled people don't have.) Then the pandemic starts and suddenly these “impossible” accommodations are commonplace because nondisabled people needed them. And you can be certain many of these places will go right back to considering such accommodations impossible as the pandemic wanes. (There’s an extensive rabbit hole here about how disabled people have been ignored, left behind, and otherwise severely impacted by the pandemic (including being refused treatment based on “quality of life”/perceived value and such). But that is a whole other topic and I've already gone on enough of a tangent.)
  4. Read about disability representation and the experiences of disabled people. There are a bunch of resources out there that go into a lot more depth than I have about representation. And if you’re writing about a character with a specific disability there are plenty of people who have written about their experiences with that disability. Even as a disabled person I have a lot to learn if I want to write characters with other disabilities well.
  5. Get feedback/get disabled people involved. If you’re writing a book, having disabled alpha/beta readers is extremely helpful, as can be disability consultants. For a film or TV show you really want to have disabled people involved in the production and, crucially, to listen to what they have to say. So disabled writers/consultants/actors/etc. I don’t remember the exact numbers but the proportion of characters in American film and TV who are disabled is a fraction of the ~20%+ proportion of people who are disabled in real life. And of the characters who are disabled somewhere in the region of 5% are actually played by disabled actors. Seriously. That number might have improved a little bit now but it’s still ridiculously low. Also “fun” is seeing how many nondisabled actors win awards for playing disabled characters. Just because they won an award for it doesn’t necessarily mean their portrayal was accurate or positive. It means they did a great job of portraying how the critics and a lot of the general audience like to see disabled people in film/tv. Which means even if the performance was good, often the surrounding story and themes were quite problematic.

Just doing 1 and 2, including disabled characters and avoiding the negative tropes, is sadly enough to be well above average. But it isn’t hard to do a lot better if you put some effort into doing so. :)
I hope that’s of some use, late as it is.
 

Edited by Claincy
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