#disabled representation

"Tutorial" on how to "draw" a blind OC.

My kofi

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general. Links below so that you can research and do a nuance. Ones that were directly mentioned are bolded.

in media it is (almost) always the villains who are different/disabled. and media is a massive part of how people form their world views.

i want to mention arcane for example, because people seem to be confused about what good representation is. people praise the hell out of that show, and for good reason it has great things about it, but people told me it had good disabled representation. so i watched it. and while parts of the disabled representation is good.. almost all physically different/disabled characters are portrayed as bad/evil/villains at some point in their story (or all of it.) and then by the end of the show most of them are dead.

abled people i need you to understand that is not good representation. please look out for these tropes it happens ALL the time.

good representation includes different/disabled characters who are heroes and morally “good” too.

It had EVERYTHING:

- Random kids carrying the flame

- Gays.

- French cancan't

- Furries

- Lady Gaga???

- Craftspeople and public workers

- Bloodshed, cannons and a metal band

- Masked genderless silhouette parkouring their way through the whole mess

- More gays

- Polyamory

- Non-binary dancers and actors

- POC dancers and actors

- Disabled dancers and actors

- Whatever the fuck was going on with those poles

- Lesbian kiss?

- France's most hated rapper singing a song written entirely in slang in front of THE FUCKING INSTITUTE DEDICATED TO THE FRENCH LANGUAGE?

- Her being accompanied by the National Guard orchestra.

- Gays. SO MANY gays.

- MINIONS???

- Hundreds of top quality instruments getting fucked up by the rain.

- Drag queens, opera dancers, fashion designers and...oh, yeah, Alsace.

- National icon Philippe Katherine but make it blue

- 100 years long horse ride

- Damn that armor's looking fine

- Giant balloon ascending to the sky and...just fucking staying there cause they had nowhere to put it

-Did I tell you about the gays?

Holy fuck.

I'm flabbergasted. I'm bamboozled. I'm lying dead on the ground, holding my last breath.

I mean yes, it was funny. Yes, it was strange. Yes, it gave France a super weird reputation.

BUT DO YOU REALISE THAT THE DESIGN COMMITTEE JUST SAW THE RISE OF OUR EXTREME CONSERVATIVE PARTY AND DECIDED TO THROW A MASSIVE "FUCK YOU" AT THEM???

Ever since i first watched Arcane i have wanted to know (and i mean this in the nicest way possible,) what was wrong with Viktor. His disability was never explained beyond “he was born with a malformed leg”.

And so, i was left alone in the house with my thoughts today so i took it upon myself to figure it out, (and talk about his medical issues so i can ignore my own lmao) and i am releasing my thoughts upon yall!

(disclaimer: yes i am aware that this arcane is a fantasy world that is not our world and the disorders/illnesses and treatments will not be the same but the issues he has have to be based off of something (especially with how detailed this show is and how many references are made throughout.) this is not me trying to say that he definitively has any of these conditions, i’m just comparing them to conditions that exist today and suggesting what Viktors disabilities may have been based off of.)

(disclaimer pt 2.: i have not played League of Legends, i do not intend to play League of Legends, i have only watched Arcane and i am only talking about Arcane and Arcane lore and what i have been able to figure out from watching Arcane and spinning it around in my brain like it’s in a microwave.)

Now, i think i’ll just start from the beginning, and go in order of development.

1. Viktors Leg

According to the wiki (and about every other site that talks about Viktor) he is said to have been “born with a malformed leg”, and said pretty much nothing else. Now, when Viktor is an adult, his leg appears to be very not-malformed, so, let’s start at the flashback.

Now, even in the flashback Viktors leg looks normal. It’s pointing forward, and looks totally fine. But as the clip goes on, and he gets up and starts moving, the problem becomes apparent. Here’s a clip:

Yall have probably already noticed what i’m talking about with this clip, but i want to illustrate it more because the clip moves so fast:

As Vikto moves faster, his foot shifts inwards! It shifts inwards pretty severely (i mean, he full on trips on it), and the only time in this entire clip where it is doing so. And that is because the other times he is around someone else. I think he is purposefully pointing his foot forward and in turn walking on the wrong part of his foot (balance issues), and more than likely causing himself pain 1. to appear less ‘crippled’ and more “normal” to other people, and 2. because clearly, his foot is pointing inwards to a degree that is impairing his ability to walk.

Now to me, (and i’m not a doctor so if any actual doctors want to call me on incorrect information please do so!) this looks like Femoral Anteversion, or a twisting of the femur that points the knees inward (it’s typically found in both legs but it can happen with just one)

Now this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, ~10% of children are affected with Femoral Anteversion (or “pigeon toes”), and most of the time it resolves itself, unless it is super severe, at which point it requires surgery to fix it. Which, of course, Viktor did not have access to.

Now, his leg does appear to be normal as an adult, but the femoral anteversion thought is still plausible. There are 3 reasons i can think of for this one.

1. He got to Piltover and after a little bit Heimerdinger noticed how messed up his leg was and Viktor got the surgery to correct it as much as possible (it’s implied that Viktor was in Piltover for years, based on how he acts and the fact that he’s Heimerdingers assistant) (this thought doesn’t seem very plausible to me, i don’t remember seeing any surgery scars on his leg in the hexcore scene, but it is a possibility.)

2. He’s simply just still correcting his leg. The reason we wouldn’t see him mess up like we did in the flashback is that he’s about 24-25 in act one, and i’d say that 14-15 years is probably enough to get used to doing that sort of thing.

3. (Honestly this one seems to be the most plausible to me) His leg has (partially) corrected itself. Most children whose femoral anteversion fixed itself had normal gaits by age 8-10, but that’s an average age and those typically aren’t perfectly accurate to everyone (i have. very personal experience with that.) and it makes the most sense to me that his leg has mostly/partially corrected itself and he’s just also continuing to self-correct to avoid appearing any more disabled than he already does (he shows quite a bit of internalized ableism throughout the season, and his line about people not listening to him because he’s “just a poor cripple from the undercity” really drives it home for me, honestly.)

2. Viktors Deterioration

When we first truly see Viktor in act 1, he seems lively, and unless he’s actively walking, he’s not using his cane, not really (he hangs his cane on his arm to read a book with both hands (really great rep btw, we do in fact do that!), he leans it against a desk to pace in front of a chalkboard with Jayce, he puts it down somewhere to go help Jayce with the experiment, etc.).

I mean, look at his stance, he’s not really leaning on his cane for support, more likely he’s using it for balance, and as an assist to his bad leg, rather than an attempted replacement like we saw in the flashback.

But in act 2? Hoooo boy

Look at that, beyond just looking 10x sicker, look at his posture, his shoulders specifically. He is actively leaning on his crutch (because he needs a crutch now, the cane wasn’t enough), using it like a replacement. Now, over the course of the ~7 year time skip, Viktors condition has deteriorated enough that he 1. needs the braces 2. needs a crutch 3. can no longer even get up without his crutch, let alone take a single step!

i mean, even when he’s sitting down, he’s holding onto it, leaning on it. The way he uses his crutch, how skinny he’s gotten, how much more tired he seems, all of these things say some sort of newfound muscle weakness, but why?

And the braces. Let’s start with the leg brace, since it’s right there. How it’s built around the actual leg and knee looks a whole lot like a much cooler unloader knee brace, or a knee brace that redistributes weight away from the weakened knee. I have to wear one of those when my knee gets really bad in the winter, when it starts buckling randomly and just.. not working. Which makes sense for the muscle atrophy/weakness theory i have, because that leg was already weak to begin with, and his knee would have been all kinds of fucked up if he did spend basically his whole life misaligning it like i’m thinking he did. (and to support that theory even further, the way that the brace goes over his foot as well reminds me of the braces some children wear to attempt to correct their ‘pigeon toes’ (which have been proven not to work, btw)

Now, the back brace. I’m gonna be honest, this part took me the longest, it truly confused me.

When you look at it, it just looks like a thoracic back brace, with some extra support on the hips (once again, pointing to muscle weakness)

But the thing that really confused me?

The screws in his back.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what procedure this was referencing (Percutaneous Pedicle Screw Fixation (i’m like really sure that the screws aren’t showing in the real life surgery but the fact that they are makes sense with Arcanes style)), and an even more embarrassing amount of time to realize that the golden screws in his brace weren’t connected to him. (i am. very tired.)

But essentially, a Percutaneous Pedicle Screw Fixation is a less invasive spinal fusion procedure. Now a spinal fusion can be done for many, many reasons, but only one really fit.

Support, because of muscle weakness.

Every single thing that got added on to Viktor could be explained by muscle weakness, but there’s never any explained reason why he was so weak all of a sudden. His terminal illness is cited as a reason but that didn’t really make sense to me, all of these procedures, all of these mobility aids made perfectly to his measurements would’ve had to have been caused by something with a much slower onset than the illness would have given him.

And after literal hours of scouring, i have a theory.

Post-Polio Syndrome.

The timeline makes sense, Viktor would have most likely gotten sick before the flashback, when he was a child (a lot of children who get Polio fight it off without even knowing they have it). Viktor is estimated to be about 32 in act 2, and the average time between the initial Polio infection and Post-Polio Syndrome onset is about 20-40 years (inconsistent numbers).

Now some of the symptoms we have no way of knowing if they affect Viktor or not, but the main ones that caught my eye were muscle atrophy, chronic fatigue, and, you guessed it, muscle weakness.

Given where Viktor lived as a child, and how heavily polluted it was (remember that Viktor was in the undercity over 10 years before we saw it in act 1 with Vi and Powders childhood), it’s not too far of a stretch to say that he could have contracted an illness very similar to Polio as a child, and only really be feeling the affects of it now.

3. The Illness

I have 2 main theories for Viktors illness, the first one seems to be the most popular among the fandom: Tuberculosis.

If you’re unaware, Tuberculosis (TB) is a sickness that mainly affects the lungs, with the main symptom being coughing up blood. Now this is a really good theory imo, it fits pretty well, with some of the other symptoms being muscle atrophy, fatigue, malaise (general feeling of discomfort/unease with no discernible reason), loss of appetite, and severe unintentional weight loss. all of this sounds like our guy, no?

TB can take weeks to be symptomatic, so we probably just caught Viktor at the worst time ever lol with this theory.

My other theory is actually one my friend suggested to me, and that theory is COPD.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a progressive disease that is basically a terrible combination of chronic bronchitis and asthma that can be caused by exposure to pollution (Viktor grew up in the Undercity before Cassandra’s vent system, i mean the river he was playing on had an oil slick on it, i think it’s safe to say he was exposed to some pretty severe pollution as a child.)

This theory makes a lot of sense to me, because it’s said in the show that his illness was probably caused by the air where he grew up, which this would have been, while TB would not. (not 15-20 years later, at least) COPD, once it reaches stage 4 is very severe, any flare up of symptoms could be life threatening at that stage, and the symptoms? Fatigue, shortness of breath, coughing, weight loss, and less frequently, coughing blood.

Anyway, i guess that concludes my analysis/comparison? I’m gonna repeat that i’m not definitively saying that ‘he has this condition and this is why!’, i’m just analyzing and speculating on what different parts of his disability is based on in real life. So, let’s just all be nice, yeah? (also PLEASE feel free to use this as a reference point for modern aus and stuff!!)

i do genuinely think that Viktors disease progression and his deterioration is one of the best examples of chronic illness that i have seen in media, in my experience (both with my own issues and what i’ve seen in other people) and Viktor himself is one of the BEST representations of what it’s like to be young and disabled and the internalized ableism that comes with it (if anyone wants to hear about that i will happily yap your ear off about it!

Anyway, for real this time. Yap session over.

[ID: The thumbnail from this artical. It contains a photo of a page from the Wings of Fire Comic, featuring Starflight and Fatespeaker, two black dragons with starry wings flying with a larger group of multicoloured dragons. Fatespeaker is holding Starflight's claw as they fly. A speech bubble from starflight says "…and lots and lots of scrolls… I wish-" and a bubble from fatespeaker saying "We'll find a way to make scrolls you can read, Starflight." Over the photo is text that reads "Disability in Worldbuilding: Thinking beyond your character". /End ID]

When you're writing a story in a fictional setting, worldbuilding is essential, but one area of worldbuilding I see repeatedly ignored is disability. Specifically, how disability is accommodated in a setting. Even when a character in the story is disabled, this stuff is often overlooked, so much so that A LOT of stories simply take the approach of "nothing existed before this character, they (or their allies) invented the accommodation/mobility device/assistive technology themselves".

But just like with any other aspect of worldbuilding, you need to think outside of just your characters if you want your world to feel alive and not like a flat backdrop to your story. So if your story contains a disabled character, or a character becomes disabled during the plot, here are some things to consider about the accommodations and assistive technology they might or might not have:

1. What kind of accommodations and assistive technology already exists in your world for your character's disability?

It can be easy just to think about your character in a vacuum but unless they have a super-setting-specific disability that only exists in that world, there will almost definitely be others in their position (and even if it is specific to your setting, unless there's a specific reason why their disability is unique, there will likely be others), so think about what these other people might have come up with. What came before the modern era? How do designs vary from person-to-person? How dose the solution to the same kind of inaccessibility change based on environment? Their cultural values? How individualistic their society is? How much your character's wider community value individuality vs conformity? For example, A more conformist community might sacrifice functionality to make the mobility aid or accommodation less noticeable, whereas the individualistic society might not care as much about the appearance, or might even sacrifice functionality to make the mobility aid stand out even more in more extreme cases.

2. If something is an issue for your character, it will usually be an issue for others too

If your character has an issue with the existing technology or accommodations and requires something new to be made, there's almost definitely others with that same problem too. This doesn't always mean that problem will be solved, mind you. In real life, things like prosthetics and wheelchairs are custom made, but a lot of their components are mass-produced, which makes it harder to deviate from the base design if a small portion of the users don't find it suitable. In a situation where mass-production doesn't apply though, it's worth taking some time to think how different people might address the same short-comings of the existing assistive technology and accommodations in your setting. If your character makes a big innovation or change, will they share it? How do others in their community (disabled and non-disabled) react to the change? Will people who see them try to copy what they did? this is especially important to consider if your setting has some kind of widely-accessible way of getting information out, like TV's or the internet.

3. Disability aids will often mimic and reference other technology of the culture it's creator comes from

There's a reason why a lot of "invalid chairs" (the predecessor to self-propelled wheelchairs) tended to look like the popular styles of regular chairs of their era with high backs and big, padded seats, even if it wasn't the most practical design. Either that, or they looked like mini-buggies or carriages which also had their drawbacks. It's because people will draw from what they know and what already exists for inspiration, and it's much easier to convince people to use something that they can already kind of understand because it references the shape of something they already know how to use. There's also the fact that it can make sourcing parts easier, especially in time periods and settings where budget would be a serious issue. The more sleek, active frame wheelchairs we have today often use racing bike wheels with small modifications to add the push rims - one of the biggest suppliers for wheelchair wheels in the world, is actually a bike company for this reason.

4. Make sure it fits with the rest of the setting

This is a continuation from 5, and also something I mentioned in my "perfect prosthetic" video a while ago, but make sure the assistive technology matches the technological level in the rest of the setting. For example, you tend to see prosthetics that are way more technologically advanced than everything else in a lot of different genres, but I've also seen sci-fi settings with faster-than-light travel that are still using hospital wheelchairs straight out of the 1950's. Now, the caveat here is that you can create a mis-match, just make sure there is a reason behind it. For example, if your society shuns disabled people or views disability as divine punishment, they're probably not going to put much effort collectively into innovating the technology they need. This doesn't mean individuals won't, but that will have a ripple effect on how people react to seeing that kind of invention in the world, they might look down at people who use them, or maybe even see their creation and use as heresy for defying the will of the gods, which will impact how people react to the character who needs it.

5. If there really is no existing accommodation in your setting yet, why?

...And don't just stop at "because not many people in my setting are disabled". I mean, you can, but I think it's way more interesting to dig deeper than that! It only takes one or two people to invent a solution to a problem. Keep in mind, they don't have to be the most efficient or practical solutions, especially if you're thinking about this in the context of what was available before your character, nor does it need to be in wide-spread use. It just needs to work for that person and their community. But if there genuinely is no existing assistive technology or accommodations for that disability, think about what stopped people from creating them. Maybe it was a technical barrier that just made it too hard, maybe there's a social stigma against disability, so people don't want to associate with them or help them, or maybe some kind of legal red-tape meant something could be created, but it was banned from use (at least in public). These are all things that happened in the real world!

For example, you didn't really see self-propelled wheelchairs until the 1600's when Stephen Farfler designed his own, called the "manumotive carriage". A big part of why this was the case, was because there was very little in the way of accessibility in wider public spaces, meaning a wheelchair, even a modern one, couldn't go many places unless it was able to handle a lot more than it's modern counterparts would need to, and technology (and society) wasn't really there yet. So, for a lot of people, it was simply more efficient to be pushed or carried by someone else, or pulled by an animal in a kind of carriage or chariot. The manumotive carriage worked for Farfler, but it's design didn't really catch on as a personal "wheelchair" and if I had to guess why, it would probably be because it was quite big and bulky in order to get him over unpaved roads and grass, but this doesn't make it especially practical for getting around tight, enclosed spaces. So for most people, the older methods were simply a better fit. It is, however, thought to have influenced the design of the tricycle and bicycle, which is a great example of how innovations for disabled people often do help non-disabled folks too! (which I'll talk more about in a moment!)

[ID: a black and white drawing of a man sitting in a small car-like device with three wheels, one at the front and two at the back. Above the front wheel is a large box with two hand-cranks, one on either side, that the man is turning /End ID]

In many European cultures, morality was also often tied to disability and specifically attributed it to either being a punishment by gods, or the work of the devil in more Christian regions. "If you were disabled, you or your parents did something to deserve it" is an attitude that has unfortunately, always existed. So when you tie the existence of a vulnerable population to the displeasure of gods or the work of the devil, you get people not wanting anything to do with them at best, resulting in them being shunned from society and their existence becoming a taboo subject. Even into modern times, stigma like this persists, but when a whole culture believes it, it's going to result in a lot of disabled people getting left behind or actively shunned, like what happened in the US with Ugly Laws, or people outright killing them. In this case, disability was not necessarily associated with divine punishment on a cultural level, but rather it was associated with beggars and the poor. The ugly laws aimed to make any displays of such things illegal in public, and unfortunately in many cases, that included the bodies of disabled people themselves. The stigma pushed disabled people out of the public eye, and as a result, the development of anything that would make their quality of life better was not exactly a high priority.

finally, sign languages have been used by d/Deaf people for thousands of years, but in 1880, their use was internationally banned in schools for the Deaf thanks to The Milan Conference in favour of oralist teaching methods, so things like lip-reading and verbal speech, which isn't practical for many people. This had wide-spread impacts on the d/Deaf community. Deaf teachers who primarily used signing to communicate were fired on mass, causing unemployment of d/Deaf people to rise and students caught signing had their hands beaten and caned. As you would expect when you deprive people of language and a way to communicate, the quality of their education globally declined, which further isolated them from the wider community. So in this case, an accommodation was available and widely-used, but it's use was banned in favour of making the population who needed it conform to be more "normal".

So like I said before, you certainly CAN just stop at "This disability just isn't common" but it's so much more interesting to dig deeper than that and actually think about why. The only thing is, if you're going to use any of these kinds of reasonings for why no other examples exist, make sure you actually make it clear why within your story, not just in your world-building document.

6. Consider the Curb Cut Effect

Nothing ever happens in a vacuum in real-life, developments in one kind of technology will often have run-on effects and impact other aspects of life, and this includes disability accommodations and assistive technology. When something created for disabled people helps others, we call it the curb cut effect. Curb cuts, the little ramps you see cut out of some footpaths and sidewalks that lead onto the road, were originally a disability accommodation for wheelchair users so they could cross the street and get onto side-walks easier, but it also helped so many other people, such as mothers with prams, cyclists (if you live somewhere where cyclists are allowed on the footpath), shoppers pushing trollies (carts) and so many others. But curb cuts are not the only example of this. Captions were created for d/Deaf people, and are widely used by non-disabled people, especially if there is a TV in a public place such as gyms and bars. As I mentioned before, Stephen Farfler's manumotive carriage, a mobility aid he made for himself, was the predecessor and inspiration for bicycles and tricycles. A lot of search engines like google use alt-text to help you find image search results, but alt-text's primary job is to describe images and videos to people with screen-readers. Even the screen-reader itself, which works by reading on-screen text and alt-text aloud to a user who is blind, was the origin of modern text-to-speech tools, including the ones you see used on apps like Tik Tok. In my high school, we also had a program called "pathways" where you could opt to spread your classes over two years, so you would only have a few classes every day. It was designed to help disabled students who had to travel for medical treatment, so they wouldn't have as much to catch up on when they came back, but it was also very popular with athlete students who had to travel for sporting commitments, students who worked while studying, or students who's home lives weren't great, and so studying after school wasn't really an option. Even those really corny TV ads you see, selling oddly specific tools to help around the house? most of those were accessibility tools first that found a market in the wider public! All of these are just a few examples of disability accommodations and assistive tech helping other people!

So think about how the assistive technology in your setting has helped to change the world your characters inhabit, beyond just the direct disability applications.

Conclusion

Now, none of these are rules, it's your setting, you can do what you want with it, but they are just some examples of things to think about to get the cogs turning!

History of Wheelchairs - Science Museum

History of Sign Language - Auslan: Now & Then

The Milan Conference of 1880: When Sign Language Was Almost Destroyed, An Unpleasant Setback in Deaf Education - Verywell Health

The History of Disability Book 3: The Ugly Laws, Disability in Public by Susan M. Schweik

Disability Through History by Jamie-Lee Dwyer