Life And Stuff

06x14 - Angela

Okay, so this was a few years ago. I was around sixteen, discovering the amazing world of cosplay. I was inexperienced, but eager, and spent about a year scouring secondhand shops and the like to put together a halfway decent costume. I was an absolute noob, still am, but it was fun.

The con I went to was during the summer, a tiny event compared to the mega-cons of the US, but larger than I’d ever seen before. I was overjoyed, because I’d found others like me, utter nerds who liked to broadcast their nerdism to the world.

I happen to have a chronic illness. At that time, I didn’t have my diagnosis, I got diagnosed later that same summer, the reason being that earlier that year, the illness flared up. My knee joints swelled up, it hurt like hell to turn around in bed, for a few days walking was so painful it took me an eternity to move across the room. I had to use crutches for months, including at that con, in cosplay.

The costume I’d chosen was the 11th Doctor. Easily recognizable with his bowtie, fez, suspenders, sonic screwdriver, et cetera. Since I had to use crutches, I made up a story about how the Doctor had suffered an injury from a Cyberman, but that was not going to stop him from saving the universe, right? It wasn’t going to stop me.

But then I got this off-hand comment, probably well-meant, and I don’t even remember who it was or the exact wording. But the message stuck with me.

“How can you be the Doctor if you can’t run?”

That hurt. I brushed it off, but it kinda hurt. For months and years after I felt kinda bad about never being able to save the universe alongside one of my favorite characters. I kept wondering about whether the Doctor and his superior technology could cure me, maybe, to fill the plot hole that the self-insert presented. Even today, my fantasies about living in fantasy worlds also include my illness. Either with possible in-world solutions, like magical healing potions or the cure that the human race hasn’t invented yet, or just with a resigned you could never really live there, could you? that would sometimes burst my happy bubble.

This summer, I cosplayed The Penguin, from Batman. Because at least then I wouldn’t have to joke away the limp, the weird walk that I still have. I didn’t feel any better about my limp even then, maybe it’s because I don’t feel like my disability should be associated with a villain, so we’ll see if I ever pick up my umbrella and top hat for that cosplay again.

The bitterness doesn’t consume me or anything. Life moves on. But I guess that if there’s a morale to this, it’s this: Be careful pointing out the inaccuracies that the cosplayer can’t do anything about, whether it’s gender, body shape, speech, a disability of any kind. Because we’re probably already painfully aware of it ourselves, thank you very much.

Don’t think I haven’t noticed that Davros remains in the wheelchair, while the Doctor keeps running.

For non-disabled people who don’t get it…

Disabled people living and behaving according to how their disability affects them get shunned and demonized for their issues while able-bodied actors are rewarded and lauded as heroes for mimicking them. 

Disabled actors cannot easily play able-bodied roles unless their disability is an invisible one, and that carries its own stigma.