im so tired of being nice. if you aren’t normal about disability in fiction and especially fantasy genre fiction im actually going to come to your house and kill you
“it wouldn’t make sense for this modern accommodation to exist in a fantasy setting so-” it’s fantasy just make something up
“any disabilities would be cured very easily with magic so there’s no reason why-” first of all if that’s true your magic system is dogshit and second of all it’s fantasy just make something up
“i don’t want to include disabled people in this universe because-” go fuck yourself???
the magic one is especially dogshit to me because it shows a fundamental lack of forethought and care about what you’re creating. everything has to have some amount of rules dipshit it came free with your fictional universe. if a broken spine or missing arm can be easily healed by a low-level spell then literally nobody will ever be in danger in this setting because it’s apparently not an issue to simply reattach their head if it falls off. this is even without tackling the eugenics implications of people in-universe being able to casually heal away what they consider defective. grow up make better bloody excuses write a character with zero limbs because they replaced all of them with sick spider prosthetics etc etc. be creative for once in your life im begging you
Have I reblogged this before? I’m reblogging it again anyway.
If you don’t know how to put limits on magic, you’re going to lose a lot of narrative tension, whether you’re using it to excuse a lack of disabled characters or not. Showing your reader that undeniably fatal injuries can be healed with magic and then letting characters die of other injuries for drama reasons, only tells the audience you don’t care about consistency.
Don’t get me started on the number of books where pregnancy health complications are somehow unfixable but a character getting their throat slashed or their guts spilled can be easily healed if someone else just puts a little panic into their healing magic.
And then by the same poor logic, you either get tokenized amputees who probably could have had their limbs reattached with the same magic that put some dude’s guts back in his body, or you get no disabled people at all because obviously the magic fixes everything. All of which is so deeply unsatisfying.
If you don’t know how to fix this because you struggle to come up with magic rules, here’s an easy one: just make the healing magic work within the limits of the body. Instead of instant magic fixes, it just enhances the body’s healing ability and trying to make it do more than that causes problems. There, now you have a free easy way to limit your magic system and avoid erasing disabled people in your setting.