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This thread covers topic of:
Euthanasia
Ableism
Sia
The use of restraints
Internalised ableism
So please read this with care and avoid it if any of these things trigger you.
Euthanasia
Ableism
Sia
The use of restraints
Internalised ableism
So please read this with care and avoid it if any of these things trigger you.
Okay so I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while now but I just haven’t had the right words to say the right thing. But this is important. To me, to the disabled community and our allies.
How many disabled characters can you think of in the contemporary media?
How many disabled characters can you think of in the contemporary media?
Will Traynor in Me Before Euthanasia, sorry I mean Me Before You. Ryan Stocks in Emmerdale. Rem-Dogg in Bad Education. Artie Abrams in Glee. Those are the only ones I can think of on the top of my head. And two of those four characters are played by actual disabled actors. James
Moore who plays Ryan and Jack Binstead who plays Rem-Dogg. James has a disability similar to mine called Ataxic Cerebral Palsy and Jack suffers from Osteogenesis Imperfecta or Brittle Bones Disease as it’s more commonly known as. Unlike the actors who play Will in Me Before You
and Artie in Glee. But the way the story is set out in Me Before You (and because I love Sam Claflin) I can forgive that casting.
However, I cannot forgive the fact that Me Before You even exists in the first place. Now, this book and film is a meme in the disabled community
However, I cannot forgive the fact that Me Before You even exists in the first place. Now, this book and film is a meme in the disabled community
because it deals with the topic of euthanasia and the whole saying of ‘I’d rather be dead than disabled’. Now, if you haven’t seen this film or read this book, basically, Me Before You is about this young woman called Louisa Clark, played by the ever-so-lovely Emilia Clarke,
who’s lost her job at a local café and gets a job being a ‘companion' for Will Traynor, a previously-successful banker with the perfect life who got caught in a motorcycle accident two years prior and is now paralysed from the neck-down. Here’s the thing. I knew nothing about
this film when it came out. I hadn’t read the book beforehand, I was just so excited that there was a love story involving a disabled person. It was everything my fourteen-year-old self wanted. Then I saw it on Netflix about a year after it came out and I heard people say that
they cried at it so I thought that Sam Claflin’s character died at the end from his disability because of complications, because disabilities are like that sometimes.
Oh, no. It was about euthanasia.
So, I know that this situation is a real thing that happens in day-to-day
Oh, no. It was about euthanasia.
So, I know that this situation is a real thing that happens in day-to-day
life. I know that people are born able-bodied and are then in an accident that renders them disabled and they don’t know how to cope and I really sympathise with that. But my issue is, why promote it? Why romanticise it and turn it into a huge love story? You are enforcing the
saying ‘I’d rather kill myself than be disabled’, you are saying that unless the disabled person is out of their reach, family, friends and other people around disabled people can’t be free and happy. No-one should have those thoughts. I don’t care who you are, these thoughts
cannot go through your head, nor any justifications of those thoughts. As for Kevin McHale, who plays Artie, I have no real complaints, except maybe they could’ve hired an actual disabled actor. I’m just saying.
Now… I’m an nineteen-year-old person and I have spent my whole
Now… I’m an nineteen-year-old person and I have spent my whole
life since I was aware of my disability wanting someone in TV, books or films to reflect me. A happy disabled teenager who was born disabled. That’s all I’ve ever wanted in life. A character whose disability isn’t used for a plot or whose main focus isn’t how sad she is about
being a disabled person. Just a normal character who just happens to be disabled. And not just a one-off character in a TV special. A main character who has friends and crushes and enemies just like everyone else. Say Toni Topaz in Riverdale or Harper Finkle in Wizards of Waverly
Place. And yet the media has failed to produce anything of the sort. Even if they have set a foot in the right direction with Disney Channel’s Andi Mack and Pop TV’s One Day At A Time. You only need to look at these shows and they scream diversity and social awareness. But there
are still no disabled characters. Besides that woman in Penelope’s therapy group in One Day At A Time but again, she’s not a main character.
And Sia... Sia, as a person and ‘filmmaker’, is disgusting. I am not autistic so I don’t want to speak for the neurodivergent community
And Sia... Sia, as a person and ‘filmmaker’, is disgusting. I am not autistic so I don’t want to speak for the neurodivergent community
but I do have some people very close to me who are and they have all said that what she is doing with her film is incredibly offensive. From the use of restraints that have been proven to kill people to the fact that she collaborated with a group that compares autism to cancer,
she must have known that what she was doing was harmful. Not to mention, she claimed to have worked with an autistic actress before hiring Maddie but it also came out that she wrote this film for Maddie and that she ‘just can’t not work with her’. First off, that’s fucking
nepotism and secondly, Maddie was very uncomfortable with playing the role but Sia forced her. Sia has also publicly told an autistic person who said that she would’ve reached out to play the role that she might’ve been a bad actor just because she’s autistic. If that’s not
ableism, I don’t know what is. She’s also deleted Twitter because she couldn’t handle the hate she got so that just screams she knows she did something wrong. Avoid Music by Sia at all costs and watch Loop on Disney+ instead. Loop is a Pixar short about a young nonverbal autistic
girl of colour and a neurotypical boy as they figure out how to communicate with each other without words. The voice actress for the girl is also a nonverbal autistic girl, which just makes the whole film even better.
The one TV show that consistently puts in disabled
The one TV show that consistently puts in disabled
characters who are strong and genuinely happy with their disability is BBC’s Call The Midwife. This is one of the many, many reasons why I love this show with every inch of my body. I could talk about Call The Midwife for days and days about every plot line I love that they have
come up with. One of which is the somewhat reoccurring appearance in seasons two and three of Jacob, a young man who has cerebral palsy. I loved Jacob and his story whenever I watch the two episodes he’s in and Colin Young just makes it even better. Because Call The Midwife is
set in the fifties and sixties, Jacob and other disabled people live in an institution and this is where we first meet Jacob in season two when a young couple with a baby who was born with spina bifida are struggling and are thinking about sending him to the institution. The main
thing I love about Jacob is how normal his character is. He’s a cheeky young man who’s in love with a woman who has Down syndrome and when he finds out that her mother had taken her home because she got pregnant, he goes after her to see her. Now, who couldn’t love someone like
him?
Call The Midwife is the only TV show, in my opinion, who has the gut to represent the disabled community accurately. And I am so happy we have something like that because this show showcases so many different plot lines, I could go on forever. Oh, and the first two or three
Call The Midwife is the only TV show, in my opinion, who has the gut to represent the disabled community accurately. And I am so happy we have something like that because this show showcases so many different plot lines, I could go on forever. Oh, and the first two or three
seasons are based on real accounts by Jennifer Worth, the author of the Call The Midwife memoirs and main character of the first three seasons of the show, played by Jessica Raine. But one show putting in accurate representations of disabled people isn’t enough, no way.
We need
We need
happy disabled characters in teen dramas, in kids’ shows, in blockbuster films. We need more. I want to be represented. I want disabled children to get the representation I never got as a child. I don’t want any other innocent preteen to enter their teenage years hating
themselves and giving themselves internalised ableism like I did. I hated myself for years before I found the disabled community on Tumblr because I couldn’t find anyone anywhere in my media consumption that I could properly relate to.
And even now, I get excited when I see a
And even now, I get excited when I see a
wheelchair in any promotion campaign for a TV show or a film.
