@zarohk asked for my thoughts on a Disability Studies/Media Studies perspective on the disability depictions in Animorphs. Which was foolish, because I’m teaching an entire dang class on the subject of superheroes and mental health, so I have Many Thoughts. [PLEASE NOTE: I am nondisabled, so if I err, please tell me so.]
Loren’s role in #49: The Diversion does a lot of things right, and a lot of things wrong. She incurs a traumatic brain injury that results in memory loss and blindness a couple of years after Tobias is born, and lives with said injury for about ten years before Tobias finds her and gives her the ability to morph, which restores her sight but not her memory.
A few places where I commend the depiction of Loren:
It gets into the massive underemployment of disabled Americans. Loren is smart, canny, athletic, compassionate... and working a call center job in exchange for state benefits. Said state benefits do not afford her a decent standard of living; Tobias notes that she has few possessions and almost no time for leisure activities. Americans with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed as those without, and those who do have jobs are ten times more likely to be paid less than minimum wage, e.g. in sheltered workshops.
It shows how inaccessible a lot of systems are in the U.S. Tobias notes that Loren accidentally grabs an expired quart of milk — because nothing on the label is printed in Braille. Putting raised text and/or Braille on food packaging is a health and safety issue, one that the U.S. ignores even though it violates its own laws (e.g. the ADA) because companies tend to do what they want and “what they want” is usually not to spend more money on packaging. The call center and bus system are both marginally more accessible, especially when Loren has Champ to help, but they’re still clearly spaces set up for sighted people that don’t take blind users into account very well.
It shows some of the workarounds that help deal with accessibility problems. Loren’s house is set up so that there are clear paths to and from all of the relevant spaces. She’s doing that to allow herself to move around comfortably in that space, because she’s made it accessible for herself. She memorizes the layout of the local store, and uses that to get around as well. All of those details help show that she’s adjusted, and actively interacting with her own circumstances.
It drives home the difference between service dogs and pets. This distinction is extremely important, and it gets ignored all the time by entitled ableists who want to bring their pets into stores. Tobias and Marco both assume from the outside that it can’t be that hard to become a service animal — just do what Loren says to do, right? — but it takes Tobias 0.02 seconds to realize that it’s not that simple and that he cannot imitate Champ’s lifetime of training on the fly. He says that he manages to get his mom home in one piece, and that that’s about all that can be said for his sad performance as a guide. Champ has skills like ignoring interesting smells and applying exactly the right amount of pressure to the harness that most pets don’t have and also most pets can’t learn. Champ is not a pet, at least not while he’s in that harness; he’s a gainfully employed expert assistant.
It rounds Loren out as a character, and definitely does not just make her into a lesson or problem for Tobias. Loren is gently humorous, tolerating her coworkers’ teasing and Ax’s attempted juvenile delinquency with an eye-roll. She’s compassionate, listening to other people’s problems on the phone with genuine concern and not swatting flies if she doesn’t have to. She’s tough-minded and stupidly brave, chucking rocks at Visser Three’s head and flying at attack helicopters as a three-pound bird. She’s fallible, unable to support Tobias emotionally even when he asks her to do so and unwilling to check in on him after leaving him with her sister. She’s a fully rounded person, one whose personality is informed but not defined by her disability.
It talks about some of the unromatic aspects of a Traumatic Brain Injury. Too often in other works of fiction, we see a person get bonked over the head and wake up with no episodic memory but all other brain functions intact (*cough* Rachel in MM1 *cough*). Loren actually gets into the fact that she forgot huge chunks of language, forgot how to brush her teeth, forgot how to walk across a room. She obviously lost her sight as well, and she mentions lifelong balance and coordination problems. Even her amnesia isn’t absolute — she has some traces of recall, but can’t make anything coherent of her impressions. Her injury isn’t 100% realistic, but it’s more so than many TBIs we see in fiction.
It focuses on the intersection of disability and social class. Tobias notes that Loren is under a compounded threat because of her inability to move to a more secure neighborhood and her obvious vulnerability. He feels a lot of disgust with himself when he and Marco and Ax are harassing Loren, because it’s so clear that this isn’t the first time she’s been harassed. Tobias understands that his experience with poverty as a nondisabled male minor is different from Loren’s for those reasons.
A few places where Loren falls into the common traps of implied ableism creeping into fiction, as written about in Narrative Prosthesis:Â
She gets “cured.” Loren falls into the “kill or cure” dichotomy, like most of the other disabled characters in Animorphs. In her case, it’s that she gains the power to morph and in the process regains the ability to see. It isn’t a complete cure, true — she still has no memory — but it means that she’s no longer blind for the rest of the series. Having the occasional character no longer be disabled sometimes isn’t automatically problematic; having every disabled character get either “fixed” or killed off inherently treats the disabled body as a problem that needs to be solved, through sci fi nonsense if no other way is available.
She implies that she’d rather die than continue to be disabled. When injured by dracon burns, Loren initially refuses to morph out even though Tobias tells her she’ll die if she remains a bird, because (they both assume) to morph out is to return to her blind human body. This moment buys into the stereotype that it’s better to be dead than disabled, again inherently devaluing the lives of actual blind individuals.
There’s a certain amount of mystery around how she became disabled. It’s interesting that we never actually get a definitive answer on that one — Loren says she was told it was a car crash, but there’s also an implication that she was attacked by controllers, and we don’t know for sure. However, the fact of her disability is treated as an aberrant state that needs to be explained, the book inherently asking “why are you like this?” By contrast (for instance) she doesn’t ask Tobias “why are you in the body of a hawk?”
She views herself as a burden, and the narration doesn’t do enough to contradict her. Loren says that she couldn’t possibly be expected to raise a child while also blind and coping with a TBI. Real blind people raise kids all the time, however, including blind single parents, and it’d be nice to see some evidence in the story that Loren’s assumption is wrong. Loren also apparently assumes that she can’t begin to play a role in Tobias’s life even now that Tobias is more self-sufficient, again because she views herself as relatively helpless and non-contributing due to her disability. There are some hints that she’s wrong, but we don’t really see her either begin to contribute to the resistance or build a relationship with Tobias until after she’s become un-blind.
Tobias’s view of Loren is often pitying. As much as Loren doesn’t initially view herself as a potential maternal figure to Tobias, he doesn’t view her as a potential mentor either. He repeatedly expresses horror or sadness at her life circumstances, and assumes that her life must be barren due to the spartan nature of her home. (Of course, that begs the question of why the hell a blind woman living alone would ever bother hanging pictures on her walls or putting doilies on her coffee tables, but Tobias doesn’t consider that angle.) Again, Tobias is allowed to assume that her life must be meaningless if she’s disabled, but it’d be nice to see some contradictory evidence in the form of her having close friends or inane hobbies or some other proof that to lead a disabled life is not to automatically lead a lonely one.
Loren expresses bitterness and desperate desire to be nondisabled. Again, it’s fine for any character to say “I wish my life was different,” and it’s a common consensus among blind writers/bloggers that being blind is often a pain in the butt. However, views as extreme as “you need vision to have a fulfilling existence” or “vision is part of what makes us human” are ableist crocks of shit. Loren doesn’t go so far as to espouse those extreme views, but she also doesn’t seem to view herself as having a well-rounded life in spite of her disability. It’d be nice to see Loren talking about sight as handy or enjoyable or a thing that the designers of 99% U.S. environments assume everyone must have, rather than a necessary precondition for a minimum standard of life.
Loren’s disability is somewhat medicalized. Same caveat as above: disabilities are by definition medical things that some bodies do or have that other bodies do not. However, discussing disability primarily through “this is how your body is different from Implied Normal of Nondisabled Body” and focusing on doctor’s notes, diagnoses, physical differences, etc. can serve to disconnect the lived experience of the individual from their body. It also tends to focus on the ways that the body is “the problem” rather than focusing on the ways that environments and attitudes are problematic, which then prevents anyone from asking hard questions about the environments and attitudes. Loren’s doctor’s note, discussion of scarring and loss, and repeated physical descriptions are somewhat more medical than social. It’d be nice to see a little more emphasis on the social factors that make blindness a disability (e.g. improperly labeled milk), and less on “your eyes are different from those of Implied Normal Nondisabled Person.”
