#elfshape

Since I was talking about this a lot with Void earlier, I'm gonna talk about it a little bit here!

There are of course most of the same kinds of disability that we have on Earth, and Vuliros has been surprisingly forward thinking with a lot of that. A big part of that is that a large subset of the population of native Vulirosi folk are quadrupedal, which is something that the Sliasistic church 1) hates and 2) has tried to actively make impossible, but they've not been successful at that.

A big part of the culture on Vuliros as dictated by the church is taking "elfshape," which basically is that through magical means, any sapient non-elf creatures are expected to maintain a magical glamour that makes them appear as much like an elf as possible if they want to participate in society, including walking on two legs. There are a lot of folks that don't take elfshape for political reasons (like Void's character Llewelyn and my characters Callanin and Antanaia,) but there's also many folks that physically can't take elfshape and maintain those glamours AT ALL. Because of this, in the church's eyes they are considered disabled as well.

One of the big movements in Velana (the country on Vuliros that Imerial and Acentel are in) in the present day part of the timeline is about rights for quadrupedal folk, and a return to embracing Vulirosi culture from before the church came. Because quad folk are lumped in with disabled folk, making things that are accessible in a lot of different ways has been a shared and natural goal between the movements, and so they're largely one and the same. Callanin (the dictat- I MEAN PRESIDENT - of Velana) has really pushed a lot of change in quad and disability rights and making public spaces more accessible all across the country, but there's still a lot of pushback from the church so Imerial itself is lagging behind the rest of the country (and even Acentel) when it comes to accessibility.

And I will also note that I think there's a lot of disabled folk that AREN'T quad that are very frustrated by how quad rights has kind of become the main talking point that political action is centered around, but the movement has done a lot of good for non-quad disabled folk as well so for the most part it's more of an intracommunity discourse that never gets resolved.