#knightsofbadassdom

This movie was a surprise--a pleasant one. Disabled people don’t ask a lot of our media--we just want to see realistic, good representations of our lives. We’re tired of every movie about disabled characters being about how inspiring it is to overcome disability (therefore attempting to make non-disabled people feel like the hard things that occur in their lives aren’t that bad) or how mean/evil/cruel/etc being disabled will make you (if disability automatically turned everyone into an antagonist, at the very least, it would be way harder to oppress us). We also desperately want more disabled characters who just happen to be disabled--because that’s how our lives are. Our lives aren’t centered around being disabled and the struggles and triumphs that come with that--those are certainly aspects of our lives, but other aspects (sometimes much larger aspects) include career goals, romance, hobbies, etc (just like non-disabled people).

This move achieves all of the above. There are two disabled characters in it. One is a Little Person (played by the highly talented Peter Dinklage), but not once does anyone say anything about him being a Little Person...nor are there any of the worn out jokes about being short. His character is, instead, a richly woven portrait of a drug-loving dude LARPer. He is exactly what you expected from that stoner kid who sat in the back of class and made goofy jokes and mediocre grades as an adult. When LARPing, he is Sir Hung, a warrior who stands with rest, and is respected like the rest. Not a single mention of the fact that he is a Little Person is made--no one calls him a dwarf, he doesn’t LARP as an elf or a hobbit, no one makes snide remarks. He is, simply and beautifully, the best friend of the two main characters. Oh, and he comes back as a vengeance spirit after being killed by a demon the LARPers accidentally unleashed from the bowels of Hell in order to defeat said demon. This was a beautiful sight to behold.

But Sir Hung was not the only disabled character. Amongst the LARPers was another character, king of one of the two armies set to battle one another (and a dragon). This man used a wheelchair, which had been outfitted to look like a chariot. Again, not a single comment was made by any of the characters, not a single joke or complaint about an electric wheelchair being on the field of a medieval-fantasy LARP game. No one insisted on helping him, and he was clearly seen as a valued leader and capable fighter in the battle scene.

In short, this movie constructs a fictional world in which people with disabilities are not only accommodated without question or complaint, but valued and seen as part of the social group--equals to all.

This is the kind of media that disabled people want. We want to see People Like Us up on the silver screen (or on our computer, in our books, on our tablets, and in our theatres) represented as we are--as full members of the human race who, yes, might need to do some things differently from the non-disabled majority (such as use a wheelchair), but our lives are not solely about our differences. Some of us are stoner LARPers, just like some of you are.

I hold that, due to the normalizing effect that the media has on people (meaning: when people see it on TV/etc, they think it’s normal), those who create the media have a responsibility to accurately portray underrepresented and oppressed people (such as disabled people) and to try to do so way more often than they do. And this film, as goofy and ridiculous as it was, lived up to that responsibility almost perfectly (one of the characters did drop the r-word at one point, without consequence, which is what made it imperfect).

Knights of Badassdom is a pretty bad movie for a number of reasons. It’s super short which means all the pacing and character development feel really inconsequential and the action is never clean or interesting (unlike the LARPing in, say, Role Models) but I have a soft spot for movies that shoot for the stars and between some decent dorky jokes and a bunch of actors I really like, I had a good time with it.