#osc humanized

Part 2: The Object Show Enthusiast's Guide to Limb Difference, Prosthetic Limbs, and Disability (Mis)representation

An important limitation to reiterate: this is a study and critique on media representation of limb difference, not a personal report. In this part, I turn the camera outward from BFDI and toward its fandom and the broader media it uses as inspiration. Describing the general realities of prostheses and limb difference should elucidate the ableism in these spaces, clarify how people assume incorrect things about limb differences, and address why breaking the cycle of poor representation should be an active goal for all of us. Without a limb difference myself, I cannot provide personal experiences in my critique. For this exact reason, many first-person experiences inform my conclusions throughout and as I share them with you through quotes and sources, I recommend you take their lead. Keep in mind that people within a disability group have diverse and varied thoughts on literally everything you can have an opinion on, including how they feel about their own disabilities. It should go without saying, but if you've listened to one disabled person, you've listened to one disabled person. By and large, though, I have listened to many people with disabilities, including limb difference, who advocate against the prominence of the medical model of disability, opting instead to imagine disability through the social model. The social model of disability provides space for different bodies to exist and be accommodated without being pathologized and forced into unwanted apparati of cure. I believe the social model is crucial to changing how the nondisabled world thinks about disability, but it's not the only perspective that exists, and there is nuance. Understand the limitations therein.

2.1 Okay, What's Going on in the Object Show Community?

If you've searched around the Internet, you'll see a lot of different people making a lot of different things for object shows, from fanart to cosplay to fanfiction, their very own object shows, merch, and really anything else you can photoshop Pencil into. As is the case with anything boasting a large, non-human cast, a common trend among fans of object shows is to draw these objects as humans. Translating the simplicity of the objects into a human person is fun because it exercises a creative muscle: what parts of a character and their design are most important? How do these traits carry over from an abstract or simplified shape into a human form? Fans take different approaches to humanization, some opting to be more fanciful, leaning into costume and cliché, exaggeration like performance art (this form of flashy cuteness is a trademark of gijinkas as a specific form of anthropomorphization). Another way of anthropomorphizing characters is to translate them in terms of realistic human people, using the constraints therein as another pivot point for creativity. Still others make them half-objects, or aliens, or science fiction or fantasy heroes, and so on. I've seen it all, and it's wonderful. One of the strengths of BFDI's fandom, in this regard, is its sheer creative breadth, and while I have my own preferences in creating humanized objects, I recognize that all of these forms of expression add value to the collective space. I love that about this fandom.

In short, there isn't really any overarching "wrong way" to create human designs, because the goal has always been fun. If not fun, then creative practice. Either way, it's a good thing! This doesn't mean, though, that biases don't crop up in these creative exercises, nor are these biases exempt from criticism. I love this fandom's creativity, and I want to see it continue to flourish. But I don't think it can actually grow without some understanding of how ableist tendencies surface in the human designs, intentionally or not.

Something that will make this argument a little more difficult is that I cannot, with good conscience, start putting specific examples of fanart trends into this essay, so you'll have to go off of my own examples, which are composites of various things I've seen. The reasons should be self-evident, such as, y'know, not lambasting anyone for something they probably did without really thinking about it, and more importantly, many of these artists are children and teens who simply do not know better. If you need to, it shouldn't be too hard to explore the fandom space yourself (tags on Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube etc.) to get an idea of what exactly I am critiquing.

I can pinpoint the exact point at which my frustration, once an annoying but tolerable side effect of perusing fanwork online, boiled over into a scathing wish to change the way this fandom thinks about limb difference. Months ago, I came across a piece of fanart here on Tumblr. It was a lovely, well-rendered piece of two humanized objects in water, like at a beach or pool, having a great time together. One of them was a nondisabled character nonchalantly standing beside an armless character. And wouldn't you know it, there this armless character was, in the water, in a swimsuit, with arms that were grey and bolted. While one of these arms was lifted weightlessly above the character's head in a natural wave towards friends on the shore, the other hung down...into the water.

It was and still is a perfect encapsulation of everything I have a problem with. It was lovely art, thoughtfully put together, until...it baffled me. What even are these prosthetics? Why are they shaped exactly like flesh and perfectly attached to the character's limbs, just painted grey and jabbed with screws and plates? How are they even staying on their body? Why does this character have both of them on in the water? How are they moving them exactly like their friend's flesh arms? Is the action of waving so necessary that this creative liberty has to be taken? It's possible this was just a heavily traced or referenced piece which, that's fine, I get it. That's good. You can't grow as an artist without reference. But...can you grow as an artist if you refuse to portray a character with a limb difference?

To stop beating around the bush, this is one example of a pervasive trend in the BFDI (and wider object show) fandom space: drawing armless objects with arms. Sometimes these are flesh and sometimes these are covered with floppy sleeves, but more often than not I see so-called "prosthetic arms" only identifiable through an inorganic colour that suggests metal or plastic. To illustrate, I see three options for translation here:

While I see a fair share of the left and centre, the popular example on the right is usually the thing indicating that the object originally was armless, as they are depicted using these robot arms identically to their fleshy-armed peers. For example, you're redrawing a scene from TPOT with your human designs, but while translating Golf Ball holding a wrench with her foot, you adapt it into a human version of her using one of these arms to hold it instead. It might be easier to draw this while using a reference image with nondisabled people, but this isn't really engaging with the character, is it? Golf Ball doesn't use prostheses, she uses her feet or mouth to do everything throughout the series. In this fandom, I've seen creativity of adapting scenes from object to human form in spades. Yet I am always seeing that this is where people draw the creative line, this is where people stop following the series' lead on disability, this is where people stop engaging with and learning about the things they are trying to represent in their artwork. I want to dig into why.

Some folks have a kneejerk reaction when I say that it is misrepresenting limb difference. Something like this: well, those are prosthetic arms, right? So that's not erasure. They're still armless, they just wear prosthetics.

I really want people to think about this. Yes, it is absolutely still erasure. It is making disabled characters nondisabled with the caveat of an aesthetic overlay. Reality is not considered. Disability is not considered. The characters themselves are not considered. And I'm very, very tired of seeing it. I've seen the incredible love that this fandom puts into their creations! So much life is put into the characters from their outfits to their hair to the quirks in their mannerisms. It just pains me to see that this same love is not extended into appreciating the character for the disabilities they have, which, as I've discussed in part one, is something BFDI itself manages to do decently well.

I know that people can (and surely want to) do better about representing disability, and robot arms just aren't cutting it. So...what does? That's what this part aims to help with. Let's get there together.

2.2: How Prostheses Actually Work

To understand why the common prostheses that pop up all the time in BFDI fanart are inaccurate to real disability, we need to understand how prostheses and mobility devices work in real life. The thick of the issue is in the ways arm prostheses are misunderstood, but before we tackle that, I want to go over some info on leg prostheses and wheelchairs too. It involves simpler misconceptions to crack, and it will provide a decent launching point for learning about upper limb prostheses.

2.2.1 How leg prostheses and wheelchairs work

Though not as numerous as their armless-but-legged peers, many objects in BFDI lack legs. For some characters that can fly (Lightning, Cloudy, and Puffball), lacking legs is of no consequence in the source material, while other legless characters like Stapy and 8-Ball get around differently from their peers, hopping and rolling respectively. Artists in the BFDI fandom, when considering their object-to-human adaptation, go one of two routes: some fans who keep fantastical elements also keep the flight intact, while others, adapting them more fully to real human life, give them an assistive mobility device, usually either prosthetic legs or a wheelchair to get around. One of my favourites is the way Cabby from Inanimate Insanity is often designed, which is simply depicting her as a wheelchair user, and this makes sense, given she literally has wheels as an object! The same goes for some of the altogether limbless characters, who I have seen in various wheelchairs, although usually they are given arms against their explicit design--more on that later. Prosthetic legs seem less common, but they do appear here and there. The general portrayal of these characters is often closer to reality than depictions of armless characters, but I've nevertheless seen decisions that come across as more "random guess" than "informed portrayal," so I want to provide some resources for that.

The main job of leg prostheses is to bear a person's weight and allow them to stand and walk. Often times this replaces a leg that was amputated during a person's life, which is the vast majority cause of leg absence, but leg prostheses are also sometimes used for leg differences that are congenital (present at birth). These prostheses fall under three main categories: below-the-knee (BK), above-the-knee (AK), and hip disarticulation (HD) prostheses. As the names imply, the former has to recreate the ankle joint when someone walks, while the latter involves the knee joint in addition to the ankle. Both types involve lengthy processes of customization and training (socket fitting, joints, acclimatizing to how it works, etc.) and do not replicate the movement or speed of a "fleshy" limb one-to-one, but we've been making leg prostheses for a long time and have gotten very good at making them comfortable and competent for daily use. Still, having to replace the function of weight distribution and joint movement makes a prosthesis heavier and more energy-demanding for the person to use than a flesh-and-blood leg, increasingly so with more that is being replaced. Regardless of what type of prosthetic someone has, it's never going to be as easy to use as slotting it onto someone's residual limb like a lego, nor are prosthetic leg users going to be wearing their prosthetic all the time, certainly not when they're at rest. In any case, leg prostheses can help people immensely, allowing them to move around more easily in a world designed for two legs. In short, a leg prosthesis can replicate the function of a leg much more effectively than an arm prosthesis can replicate the function of an arm.

So, beloved artist, how do you make sure you design a prosthetic leg correctly? There are many types of prosthetic legs, but generally you want something reliable to use in daily life. You want to make sure it is secure on the body and can properly bear the weight and balance of the person who is using it. One frequent issue in depicting leg prostheses is the tendency to give a character a blade (or other specialized sport) prosthetic while they're just hanging out with their friends. Compared to an "everyday" prosthetic like the one on the left, blade prostheses are a specific type used for sport, storing energy in a springy, flexible "blade" that propels runners forward:

Blade prostheses look funky, but they are very good at doing a specific thing and not much else. Your character, should they use it in place of a simpler prosthetic leg, will find it hard to balance, walk for extended periods of time, and stand. So by all means consider it for a sporty character when they're in the middle of running, but it's going to look out of place in any other scenario. It's a small design consideration that goes a long way.

The area of prosthetic legs gets more complicated when all of the leg is absent up to the hip and torso. Prostheses for these types of amputations are indeed made and used, but their use is difficult and energy-intensive. It stands to reason that for a person without any legs at all, especially those born without the musculature and the physiology conducive to prosthetic use, another means of transportation will be a lot easier to adopt. Some people with unilateral (one-sided) amputations up to the pelvis use forearm crutches, although they present their own issues if overused.

As an aside, you may have seen news articles about people with paralysis using "exoskeletons" to walk, sometimes showing them scaling stairs or talking to a nondisabled person at that person's eye level. Is this the future? These articles of spectacle suggest so. It gives the impression that the boundary between "broken" and "normal" can be broached if only we put disabled folks in full electronic body suits that mirror the nondisabled body, if only we pump enough money into making them more technologically advanced. But I ask: are they even a feasible thing? Are they a necessary thing? Usually researchers admit to the viewer that it's still slow, imperfect, uncomfortable, and expensive, some for kids costing $100,000. After this confession, they handwave; after suggesting it couldn't be perfect, they affirm that it is nevertheless the ideal. They say people have to walk. They say it should be what all disabled folks strive for: to have bodies that can scale stairs.

Is it that hard to install a ramp?

Anyways, as you can imagine, these are largely garbage articles made to be inspiration porn for nondisabled people, so please don't go the exoskeleton route. Wheelchairs exist. And for wheelchairs, it's best to use reference images to get an idea of what your human might want to use. There are so many types of wheelchairs that it can be overwhelming, but you can explore websites that offer wheelchairs to get a feel for the variations, as well as pick up some reference images for practice. Many (but not all) wheelchair users consider their chair an extension of their body, so it's important to put effort into giving them something that is comfortable and specific to their disability. In general, a manual wheelchair is propelled by the person using it, while a powerchair (also called a power wheelchair) has a motor controlled by the user. Hospital transfer chairs are different from everyday out-and-about chairs and those are different from sport chairs. You don't want to accidentally give Lightning a transfer chair while he's hanging out with his friends! For characters without legs, the amount of surface area that they sit on is smaller, and so pressure sores are going to be a problem without proper cushioning and support. Make sure they're also not about to fall out of their chair!

The wheelchair on the left is a lightweight, sporty custom chair. Note the lack of armrests, as the person who uses this manually controls their wheels, which could be hampered by having something in the way of the hand rims. Of course, some people do prefer armrests! It depends on the person. The powerchair on the right is a heavy-duty mid-wheel drive model. You'll note it has plenty of back and head support, and in front of the right armrest, you'll see a joystick controller that allows the person using the chair to control it. This is one of the most common control schemes, but is by no means the only one. (given that the divine right of kings power of capitalism seems inescapable, many of these sites will have weird corpospeak and will try to shove products down people's throats, so be wary of that. But they're still useful as a place to get an idea of what chairs look like.)

Both types of chairs require some effort to draw properly, but this can be a fun way to customize for a specific character. For manual wheelchairs, think about their needs. Would extra back support help them, or do they prefer a low back? Armrests or no armrests? How are their wheels configured? How do they decorate their chair? There isn't really a single right answer as long as you consider the character's needs and what they would be most comfortable with and interested in using. The same thing can go for powerchairs, which are helpful for either limbless characters or those who can't or don't want to roll a chair manually. Aside from choosing the chair design, you can decide how they control it. There are websites and shops online that you can use as a launching point, for example here, here, and here, but in short, you can learn how people without hand access move in real life and get inspiration for how you want to design your humans. Do they control their chair through head movements, switch buttons, a small joystick, or breathing (sip-and-puff)? Also consider if they'd feel more comfortable with a buckle, harness, or bucket to sit in to keep them secure in their powerchair. I rarely ever see any powerchair users in media, so I hope everyone considers adapting the limbless objects into limbless people, or otherwise people with disabilities (quadriplegia, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and so on) that inhibit arm movement. Even rarer in media are assistants and caretakers for those without limbs, which could be a whole new topic of discussion, but in short they deserve to be normalized too. It shouldn't be news to say this, but people without use of limbs exist and live meaningful and joyful lives. They deserve to be shown alongside friends and peers, not the least because they are also friends and peers themselves.

(If you're curious about the cost of everything I've mentioned thus far, here are some numbers. Crutches are often used because they're cheaper: compare a $200 USD price tag for forearm crutches to basic wheelchairs costing at least $400, custom wheelchairs easily entering the thousands, and powerchairs in the $4,000s. Prosthetic limbs are even more expensive, with USD$4,000 as the cheapest baseline, increasing with level of amputation and rocketing up to $50,000 for fancy electronic control. Price might not be the first thing on your mind when it comes to mobility devices for your designs, but it's just something to think about if you want to, and it would feel irresponsible if these realities weren't brought up at all in this discussion.)

As you can see, legless and limbless objects can be translated into human people without erasing their disability, and knowledge of how these devices work in real life only adds to their creative potential. People have a tendency to view the ideal form of "human locomotion" as walking on two legs, but this is a social construct. Like I discussed in the first part, the issue of a person using a wheelchair isn't that they're using a wheelchair to get around, it's that the building they want to enter has a moat of stairs around it, or garbage bins in their neighbourhood are left out for collection in the middle of the sidewalk. This is where you should concentrate your creative liberties. Imagine a world not where people with disabilities don't exist, but where people can access the world regardless of how they move.

In general, I see in the BFDI space that legless characters are more carefully interpreted into humans with disabilities than their armless counterparts, and I'm suspecting several things as to why: the function of legs is more easily replaced than the function of arms and hands, and leg differences are more commonly encountered in real life than arm differences. When comparing the purpose of these leg and arm prosthetics, one is meant to bear a person's weight and allow them to move in some way, while the other is meant to supplant the function of a highly complex and dexterous part of the body, one that also carries immense social significance. People might still give a legless character metallic overlays on top of typically-shaped legs, and I've explained why I think that's careless, but because of the (comparative) simplicity of lower-limb prostheses, this depiction is still closer to reality than that same depiction with upper limb prostheses.

So, now, on the other hand, we have arm prostheses. Buckle up, because we're about to get into the weeds.

2.2.2 How arm prostheses work

A much larger group of characters than their legless counterparts, the armless characters throughout BFDI have had a place alongside their armed peers right from BFDI 1a. Most of my first part was explicitly about the armless characters in BFDI, so I don't need to repeat myself here, but when it comes to people adapting these armless objects into human beings, this is where so many hurdles appear. More often than not, "armlessness" as it shows up in real people is completely ignored in favour of "perfect" prostheses, magic robot limbs that attach seamlessly to their body and move seamlessly with it. But how accurate are these depictions? Let's see.

Like lower-limb prostheses, most upper-limb prostheses can also be described in terms of where on the arm the limb is absent, either a shoulder disarticulation (SD), above-the-elbow (AE), and below-the-elbow (BE); like leg prostheses, an increasing amount of joints to replicate makes the former two more complicated to implement than the latter. If we're talking functional control schemes, arm prosthetics can further be described through two main control schemes: body-powered control and myoelectric control. Body-powered prostheses use the movement of the residual limb or torso to manipulate a prosthetic arm, allowing users to perform simple "elbow" or "shoulder" flexion. Often this is to flex a hook attached to the end of the prosthetic limb, although other terminal devices exist. This type includes a harness system strapped to the body that uses a lever and pulley system to move the prosthesis. In contrast, myoelectric prostheses use electrodes attached to muscles, which sense muscle contractions (myo = muscle) and cause a response in the prosthetic limb, like opening or closing the prosthetic hand. This is not the same thing as "linking up" directly with the nervous system, it's just reading muscle contractions and responding according to how the device is programmed. Another way of thinking about it is that these prosthetics use the musculature of the patient as a "middle-man" between brain and prosthetic. As a result, there's more control over what the arm and hand can actually do than with body-powered prostheses, but there is still only so much dexterity that these arms provide. If we combine these two types of control schemes, we get a hybrid system of control, which allows for slightly more movement and motion than either of the control methods alone, but it also makes for the heaviest and most energy-demanding of them all. Linking prostheses fully into the nervous system of a patient is a science fiction pipe dream, if it's even a desirable thing at all.

Remember the exoskeleton blurb? It's kind of the same with "bionic" arms: these are fancy spectacles that exist to excite and reassure the nondisabled viewer that disability can be "conquered". Check absolutely any children's human body book with a "future tech" section and they'll display a shiny bionic arm and a smiling person attached to it, the hand cupped around an apple or a ball. They present it as cutting edge technology while conveniently omitting any practical discussion of its weight, its practicality, the training, the effort involved in getting it to grasp, or the relative ease with which a one-handed person could hold that same apple with their other hand--or someone without arms could use their feet or a foot-powered grabber to hold it. None of that would acceptable, would it? None of that is affirming the norm of needing two arms to be "normal." The result is that kids (and of course the adults they grow up to be) don't ever have to look at disabled bodies; they understand inherently that to be disabled is to be broken and are quickly reaffirmed that the end goal of disability is a return (or for someone with a congenital disability, a translation) to the ideal human form. As writer and amputee Ashley Shew puts it in Against Technoableism, "disability is painted only as a tragedy and is used as a backdrop for stories of tech-driven intervention and subsequent redemption" (53). The result is a cultural reinforcement of arm difference as a problem to be "solved" with more and more technological progress.

A crucial thing is ignored in so many representations of prosthetic arms, both in fictional media and in cherry-picked "bionic arm" articles: prosthetic arms have considerable drawbacks. Body-powered prosthetics are the lightest, cheapest, and simplest to use, but they only perform simple motions and their harnesses can get uncomfortable. Myoelectric prostheses, often touted as these high-tech "bionic" arms, offer more actions, but they are heavy electronic devices that need to be charged regularly, programmed for the user, and repaired should anything with its computer or mechanical systems go awry. Britt H. Young, a writer living with a congenital limb difference, has written several pieces on her experience with "bionic" arms. Though she has an expensive and high-tech prosthetic, she finds it easier to live using her residual limb to help her with tasks. Here, she describes her new prosthetic arm as "heavy as hell" and "exhausting" to use as more than an occasional "party trick." Tumblr user submalevolentgrace describes her experience similarly, saying that "myo prostheses are a hassle to put on, often taking several attempts to get positioning right, it's hot and sweaty, there can be pressure sores, and it's real heavy in a way your shoulder never really gets used to." Similarly, hybrid prostheses, though adding further motion, are the largest burden to carry on the body, having both harnesses and heavy electronic components. For situations where the entire arm is missing, a harness must be used regardless of its type to keep it secured to the body. I should mention an up-and-coming type of socketing for prosthetic arms--osseointegration--that eliminates the need for harnesses. However, this procedure requires invasive bone implants that can get infected and commitment to keeping it in working order, and there are too many unknowns right now to assess its benefits long-term (Al-Tameemi et al., 2025). Regardless, for someone with a bilateral arm absence, prostheses would offer a setup that is extraordinarily heavy, uncomfortable, takes forever (and requires external help!) to put on and take off, and is, for someone who has learned how to take their time and use their feet to manipulate things, ultimately pointless.

All prostheses, regardless of type, also face issues of proprioception. The bulk of a prosthetic arm is a somewhat lesser problem for people who acquire a limb difference, as their brains are still technically wired for an arm or hand even if it no longer exists (which is why phantom pain is a problem for amputees). However, for people with congenital arm absence, there was never an arm to begin with and so a bulky prosthetic arm is not easily going to register as part of one's own body. Imagine strapping two clunky weights on both sides of your body and trying to navigate around your house. You're going to bump into things, you're going to feel unnecessarily weighed down, and the lack of dexterity, precision, and speed will make for more frustration in using them than satisfaction in what they can accomplish. You also have to pay full attention to what the prosthetic hand is doing, as you don't have the subtle proprioceptive and haptic feedback of flesh. All of these drawbacks considered, most people without an arm or two do not use prosthetic arms. Furthermore, many people who do end up getting prosthetics fitted ditch them. High-quality medical studies of upper-limb absence are scarce, but one claims that up to 50% of people with upper limb differences ditch their prostheses (Riccardo et al., 2025). Though limited in scope, another study finds that dissatisfaction with prostheses is even higher in people with more proximal (closer to the body) amputations (Resnik et al., 2024). This shouldn't be surprising: prosthetic arms are heavy and uncomfortable, they simply don't have the dexterity or speed that would make them useful, and this only compounds the more of an arm you try to replicate.

Just as leg prostheses are expensive, the complexity of arm prostheses makes them even more so. Many different numbers float around the web, but according to two websites, prostheses start around the low-thousands range for cosmetic (i.e. nonfunctional) prostheses and can reach up to $100,000 dollars (and beyond!) for myoelectric and hybrid ones. Insurance might help if you've got it, but these hefty price tags block access for the vast majority of people for whom these prostheses are advertised. Because consistent prosthetic usage also requires training, repairs, and replacements down the line, more and more money is needed to keep using them. If osseointegration has a heftier price tag too, imagine how expensive future tech with its bells-and-whistles and neural linkage would be too. This billion dollar industry and its pursuit for the golden egg of prosthetic technology might literally not be worth it. Who, at this point, are these devices actually helping?

These are the basics of how arm prostheses work. As you can see, the types of "robotic" arms that some folks tend to give their BFDI human designs do not exist and can really break the immersion of an otherwise solid character design. Prosthetic arms can be useful in very specific circumstances when used as very specific tools for specific limb configurations, but for the majority of people with upper-limb difference--those fully without arms especially--prosthetic arms just aren't necessary. They don't have a worthwhile benefit. At worst, they can be more disabling. And yet our obsession with giving fictional characters robot arms, let alone real prosthetic arms, doesn't reflect this reality at all.

Given the advice I provided in the section on lower-limb absence, you might now be expecting a flow into practical advice for how you could represent correct arm prostheses in your work. I will get into that in a bit, but...not yet. Instead, I want to dig a little deeper. I'll start by asking a question: if these bulky, frustrating devices are often ditched by their users or never used at all, why do we still see them touted as necessary for people with limb differences? In fact, why do we see these egregiously inaccurate "robo-arms" everywhere?

Asking ourselves what it means to be "missing" an arm will make the problem with "perfect" prostheses that much clearer.

2.2.3: When you see an arm, what do you see?

How we see prosthetic arms is deeply influenced both by the poor portrayals of limb difference in media and the misconceptions that manifest in the real world. Our assumptions that they are essential to someone with a limb difference, despite the reality of their use, come from media portrayals that assert a particular narrative.

Fictional depictions usually ignore the basic reality of arm prostheses as situational tools, instead assuming them to be complete replacements. As an example, Vriska Serket's prosthetic arm in Homestuck looks and acts exactly the same as the arm she lost, just with plates and a metallic hue. This is Homestuck, so expecting careful representation is like losing at chess to a dog, but it's just an example of the abundant low-effort prostheses you see here and there. Another more unanimously-adored example is Finn from Adventure Time, who has to contend with losing his arm several times. As promptly as he loses it, he receives either a magical or mechanical "replacement" that he can immediately manipulate with little issue. Homestuck and Adventure Time set a lower bar compared to a less cartoony, more "serious" show like Fullmetal Alchemist or a live-action portrayal like Star Wars, but funnily enough these examples also have the same general problem when it comes to prosthesis portrayal: Edward Elric and Luke Skywalker each have a "perfect" prosthetic arm. Yes, Edward's arm has to be repaired and phantom pain plagues him, but Edward is ultimately able to control this prosthetic arm with the dexterity of his amputated arm, indeed surpassing it outright in terms of strength. Because it has the exact same shape as a flesh-and-blood arm, he can also hide its metal appearance when he has his gloves on. Say what you want about the show itself being great, but this just isn't a prosthetic arm in any realistic sense.

When you allow these supernatural prostheses to flood the media, you create and reinforce a fantasy of what prostheses are, or should be like, in real life. It's fiction, yes, but it also isn't. It's never going to be that simple. Not only does it provide viewers inaccurate ideas of real prosthetics, it judges what should be desirable for the disabled body. It tells the disabled viewer that her body is broken and needs to be changed to fit a norm, simultaneously reassuring the nondisabled viewer that her body, the one that does not "need fixing," is that norm. By, say, concluding a series with the amputee character "earning" their flesh limb back, we implicitly accept the notion that at a societal level, if we could whisk away the problem of amputation and congenital limb difference altogether, we would do so without a second thought. Remember what Emily Leduc in Disfigured said about disability as a symbol of narrative consequence? How in stories as old as time, disability vanishes once the symbol has been vanquished and the lesson has been learned? Yeah, there it is again. Edward gets his arm back because the story is over. There is no room for disability anymore. Symbolic lack, an imperfection in character, or a transgression, has been corrected, the reward doled out. The fiction of perfect mechanical arms might seem like cool transhumanism on its surface, but if you peel back the robotic facade, you'll find flesh.

Even fully in reality, we take disability to be a curse. In some respects, this can be linked to the Christian/Western belief in humanity as a "designed" thing, something created by an upper power to be a certain way, meaning any aberration to that supposed blueprint is a defect that should be fixed. But I don't know, this is the same thinking in a white Western culture that assumes women to be lesser, people of colour to be lesser, gay folks to be lesser, and so on. This same sentiment flourishes today in systemic ableism. There is nuance to feeling "incomplete" in individuals who have to deal with traumatic loss of function, such as losing a limb, and I don't want to discredit that. It can be hard, and it involves so much adaptation and acceptance that things must be done differently. But the way people react to this life change is itself informed by what we internalize, from our social context, about becoming disabled: we internalize that becoming disabled is a loss of personhood. In Brilliant Imperfection, writer Eli Clare describes the ideology of "cure" as it pertains to the complexities of disability. Of this societal pursuit for cure, he says that "it grounds itself in an original state of being, relying on a belief that what existed before is superior to what exists currently...it seeks to return what is damaged to that former state of being" (15). In other words, the only way to restore personhood and wholeness in an acquired disabled life is to reverse time and recreate the old, rather than adapt into the new with the understanding that the body inevitably changes and grows over the course of a life. It reinforces that there is a single kind of body that is ideal, and all those that "fall short" of this ideal ought to pursue it if they want to be deemed complete human beings.

Turn to congenital limb difference, and the idea of being incomplete makes even less sense. Nondisabled folks tend to assume that people born without an arm or two are born immediately into a lesser life, "missing" something that they should have had, but is there anything really saying they should have been able-bodied other than socially constructed norms? It's literally the only life they've ever known. Clare, who has cerebral palsy, further elaborates on "cure" in context with people born with disabilities like himself. He notes that in this framework, an "original nondisabled state of being doesn't exist. How would I, or the medical-industrial complex, go about restoring my body-mind? The vision of me without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and coordination doesn't originate from my visceral history. Rather it arises from an imagination of what I should be like, from some definition of normal and natural" (Clare 15). Applying this rhetoric to arm difference, is a body that has never lived with an arm really even missing something? Is a person who has grown up and learned to live with one or no arms cursed to be forever incomplete? Or is it our notion of how people "should" live or what people "should" have that needs to be rejected? Indeed, I reject the notion that someone born without limbs is not a whole person with a whole body. It's their body. It's ludicrous. If a nondisabled human in our world were whisked away and raised in a society where humans are born with wings and can fly, an ableist social structure here will teach this person that they are defective and assume their life to be miserably limited--"look! They can't scale tall cliffsides, reach these top shelves, or glide off the mountaintop! How sad!" Where in one framework their body was "whole," in another framework it's suddenly incomplete, "missing" something. Their body has not changed; only the expectations of the society have.

This push of what constitutes a "whole" body leads to beliefs that these criteria of wholeness must be met at all costs. Even if they're nonfunctional and uncomfortable, some people that use prosthetic arms "report a preference for devices that resemble natural limbs, citing the goal of going unnoticed" (Andreia et al., 2026). These exact principles of defect and wholeness influence this pressure; to be visibly armless in public is to expose yourself as different, and in an ableist culture that devalues disability, onlookers reflexively squeeze your very personhood into an assumption made through that difference. I don't blame the people who wear cosmetic limbs--it can be brutally difficult to experience ostracization, because people want to feel that they belong. But again, my critique of prostheses isn't with a woman who is concerned about upsetting her boss by not wearing a prosthetic arm, I'm prodding the culture that makes her boss scared to see her body without it, and I want to ask what it might take to change that. Submalevolentgrace sums her experience in public with a prosthetic arm like this: "I am treated more like a human being while wearing a bulky robot claw with electrodes pressed into my skin, than when I dare to exist as I now naturally am" (post). What is reinforced, then, in our own depictions of disability? When people continue to portray armless people with prostheses as the "right" type of disabled, are we not just reinforcing that their natural state is defective and needs to be fixed? What happens when our derision forces people to cover who they are, keep their body away from sight? Is it more comforting to see prostheses because we don't have to question how people have different bodies and have different ways of doing things? Is it uncomfortable to be reminded that bodies can change throughout life? What if, instead of judging someone with a residual limb as broken, we see them as a person and move on with our lives, unbothered, accepting? Especially when we do not have limb differences ourselves, we have a responsibility to challenge the ableism underpinning our beliefs. Being more considerate in how we portray people without arms is a good start. We should not force people into a mould that is more comfortable for us; we need to meet people where they, and their bodies, are most comfortable.

As an aside, consider who benefits from the continual push for prosthetic and bionic arms as a cosmetic necessity rather than a tool. According to Britt Young in another article, "some prosthetic startups are pitching a subscription model, in which users continue to pay for access to repairs and support." This is obviously something to blame on nightmare capitalism more than prosthetic limbs (and make no mistake, this already happens with other medical technology) but it presents a troublesome conundrum: while many medical devices are useful for people, the industry in other respects is inseparable from its capital gains. If you, a person without arms, learn that it is wrong to find other ways to do things with your body--that you must learn how to use prosthetics regardless of the cost or your comfort--then you will buy into this technology that companies swear you need at all times, you will keep giving them your money to keep it from breaking, and there's no guarantee to what happens after that company inevitably goes under. The billions of dollars being pumped into this industry do not follow disabled activists, nor advocates for the social disability model, because it doesn't make money. Acceptance would mean flushing a lot of this capital away into obscurity, so if they can make money by telling people with limb differences they are either permanent customers or they're worthless in the eyes of the world, that's the narrative they're going to pursue.

Every person with a limb difference is going to have a unique body and relationship to said body, so I don't want to conclude that arm prostheses are wholly negative. They simply can't be. Task-specific prostheses can be useful for people, in particular those who have lost an arm during their life, and they provide the most help when they are understood as valuable tools for performing, again, these specific tasks--think rowing, cycling, or showering. This isn't a critique about personal choices to use a tool, it's a critique against societal biases that incorrectly see this tool as a replacement and a replacement as necessary. Shareholders who pour money into prosthetics might push back against this reality, insisting that to refuse prostheses is to fail, is to have a broken body, is to suffer. This couldn't be further from the truth. Things aren't always going to be sunshine living in a world that expects two functional hands, sure, but the worst suffering is not because of the body itself but a world that shuns and others the disabled body, restricts their participation, and compares them relentlessly to their own fictional ideals. People with limb differences do not suffer when they are allowed to learn about, adapt to, and love their own bodies. They do not suffer when the world gives space for them to do things the way that makes sense for them. They do not suffer when they are allowed to face the world with visibly disabled bodies, neither being diminished by expectations nor harassed as if performing a spectacle for the nondisabled gaze. They deserve nothing less than being met, with acceptance, support, and nonchalance, where they're at.

In short, prosthetic arms are not going to reach the dexterity and manipulation of fleshy arms, nor are they going to mimic the robot ones we see everywhere in fiction. That is okay. They're going to be bulky, annoying, and expensive the more they mimic the precision of fleshy arms. That is okay. Many people will find using their residual limbs or feet to finagle tasks is easier and connects them more closely to their own bodies, and if they cannot do something on their own, they have people they trust who can help them out. That is okay.

Robot arms may never exist. And you know what? That is okay. Arms aren't vital organs.

2.3 Returning to BFDI

Fandom rehashing of age-old ableism is almost never done intentionally, but when we operate in a system of oppression that surrounds everything we believe and everything we see in our media, poor portrayals are plentiful and, unless they remain unquestioned, will continue to be made. Between magic robot arms on heroes and inspiration porn news articles on TV, we internalize two assumptions about arm difference: a) that arm absence is, or will be, easily eliminated with advanced technology, and b) all arm difference should be eliminated, because living without an arm let alone two is, in this framework, to be "stuck" in a body that cannot live a full life. It should be clear now that neither of these assumptions are true, but there's a reason such a disability-positive show as BFDI nevertheless spawns a fandom with these implicit beliefs: it's culturally embedded in all of us. Let's focus back on the image we put a pin in earlier, the one illustrating how armless and limbless characters are often portrayed.

It should be clearer now why these "robo-arms" are a misguided attempt at trying to represent prosthetic arms: they're just not prosthetic arms. I don't believe this is ever portrayed to erase limb difference, and I recognize these are good-faith attempts at acknowledging the "armlessness" of these characters. But it doesn't mean it isn't still an ableist thing to do, representing prostheses incorrectly and reinforcing the norm of what people "should" look like, i.e. either being or appearing nondisabled. Additionally, we can take what we have learned here and assess the fandom depictions of one other character: One.

One's lack of arms is central to her overarching narrative. In-universe, the yoylelite grants her the ability to hold and lift things she couldn't or didn't know how to before, and this is important to consider in her relationship between herself, her disability, and the way she (mis)treats and is (mis)treated by the other algebraliens. Importantly, One is never shown conjuring phantom arms to perform this lifting and holding, she just uses her mind and occasionally forces things around with her foot. Yet just like the common depiction of objects with "robo-arms," I see a lot of One humanizations translating this telekinesis into "magic hands," usually one of two ways here:

Surely I can't blame people for adding her magic into their designs. It's fun magic, right? It's stylish. Mona, do you hate fun? No! But we've trodden this ground before, haven't we? The trend here still falls into a very specific shape of disability erasure in that it reinforces a certain attainable ideal: the nondisabled, two-armed body is the one that all disabled characters aim to replicate. Just as the objects are never shown using prostheses in the show itself, One is never shown forming arms out of ghost material to hold things. Yet in both of these circumstances, artists find it necessary to take these disabled characters and push them from having a body they (unconsciously or consciously) find unappealing and don't appreciate or respect into something they do: disabled to nondisabled, unsightly to endearing. "Magic" means you now have the capacity to get rid of a disability in any way possible, and, as I have explained by now, that reflex, the one that wants to snuff out seeing and accepting and portraying disability, is crystal-clear ableism. I know that a lot of the time it is unintentional and unconscious, but at the end of the day, these unconscious decisions are informed by the systemic devaluing and dismissal of disability and we need to actively work to uncover them.

Now, to be generous, I might consider it in-character for One to want to erase her own disability and give herself arms, given her internalized ableism. She has subconsciously accepted the social belief that her lack of arms means she is broken, or that she is inferior to the other algebraliens and cursed to be ostracized without mercy. It would make sense for her to give herself arms, then. But she doesn't. They would be annoying. Like I said before, her own interaction with the yoylelite power undermines her own belief in herself as inferior; she can still do powerful things that the others do with their own yoylelite power, she just uses her mind and her feet to do it, as that is what she has used all her life. In short, she doesn't use arms or make arms because they aren't useful to her. Whether she realizes it or not, she is doing what makes the most sense and is most familiar to her body.

BFDI explicitly recognizes that these armless characters are disabled. Understanding this and adapting these disabled characters into disabled humans is unquestionably the best way to celebrate this aspect of the show. And, knowing what we know now about arm prostheses, we can think more critically about our culture's "bionic arm" obsession and subvert these tired tropes to represent disability more truthfully. The most considerate way to adapt armless characters into human people, all of this considered, is to just...let them be armless.

But, well, look again up there at One's example, then the objects. Regardless of what happens in the show itself, regardless of whether or not magic arms exist, regardless of whether or not prosthetic arms are even helpful to real human beings, artists seem to go any length to draw explicitly armless characters with arms in one way or another, almost like it's harder not to. It's disheartening. This is a reflection of systemic ableism in the individual choices people make with their art, sure, but what does this actually mean? What exactly is stopping people from keeping an armless character armless, and how can we make it so the task of portraying accurate disability is less daunting?

I have some suspicions. Here are three things in particular that I assume stop people from ditching these representations.

1. The realistic portrayal of disability is not important because it's just a fictional/fantasy/sci-fi setting

I get the urge to reject realism for the sake of convenience, but by transforming every disabled object into either a fundamentally nondisabled human or functionally nondisabled human through "perfect prostheses", you are ignoring a major part of their character identity while simultaneously telling real people that their lived experiences do not matter. Again, I know it isn't intentional, but this is the systemic understanding of disability this reinforces. It asserts that the best case scenario for all people with limb differences is to have their disability removed altogether. It's not the most common disability, but plenty of people live with the limb differences you're assuming aren't important. You should consider it important to represent correctly, not just for those people but also for the wider disability community that wants people to see physically disabled lives, shown as they are, as valuable.

2. Drawing or seeing a person without arms makes people sad/uncomfortable/other negative emotion

This is a prejudiced way of thinking, but again, it's the kind of emotional response to disability we learn right from babyhood. You might feel uncomfortable seeing someone without arms or watching someone in a powerchair roll around in public, but ask yourself: what about this person is making me uncomfortable, and why? Do they make me sad? Am I just assuming their life is sad because they're disabled? Would I be making these same snap judgments to a nondisabled passerby? You cannot assume anything about a person's quality of life or happiness, struggles or misfortunes, just by looking at them. That's why part of the solution to fight ableist representation in media is normalizing disability. That can begin with you. Depict these disabilities in a wide variety of circumstances and show that they're a mundane part of a character's life. Disabilities can be neutral and flexible traits, sometimes annoying or painful, maybe, but sometimes joyful and positive too, especially when they have other folks with disabilities to interact with, which BFDI offers. It would be weird to assume anything about someone, good or bad, from a quick glance at their glasses (a disability aid!) or their curly hair or dimples, right? It should be the same here. I hope one day we can see disabilities like limb difference as things people just happen to deal with or have, just as they have freckles or brown eyes.

3. People have a difficult time understanding how one could do things without arms

This is, I think, the epicentre. This is what I imagine is the number one thing stopping people from drawing armless humanizations, and I can see why: it's not easy to figure this out if you've grown up using your arms and seeing others use their arms to do things, but you also can't really figure it out without learning from folks with arm differences. The very short answer is that lots of things can be done without arms or hands. Given the support and opportunity to do so, people without arms figure it out just fine. Take it from real human people.

Most people of course are just regular folks without Wikipedia articles, but here is a short list of some public figures who do things without arms. There are two paralympic archers, Sheetal Devi and Matt Stutzman, who were born without arms and are proficient archers; Stutzman also participates professionally in motorsports. There are swimmers, runners, actors, pro-life religious guys, mountain climbers, makeup influencers who are also transgender women you love to see it, pianists, pilots that are also black belts, random Canadian radio guys, you name it, people are people. Mark Goffeney, Felix Klieser, and Pascal Kleiman, a guitarist, horn player, and DJ, respectively, use their feet to play their instruments. Painters both hundreds of years ago and alive today have painted with either their feet or their mouth. Alison Lapper, a British artist, uses her mouth to paint professionally and has raised a son against the belittling and demeaning objection of family and health professionals. She tragically lost her son to an accidental overdose in 2019, but she continues to make art as a way of healing from that grief. She says this about being raised in an institution and forced into prosthetic arms, which especially back then felt stifling:

I started working with colour and pens and pencils at the age of about three, and there is some film footage of me on a cine camera with me with pens in my feet and they were trying desperately hard to put the pens in my artificial limbs that I was wearing and I didn't want to. I think the other thing that sticks in my mind as well, when I had these arms on and I was sitting on the floor I picked up the doll exactly the same way as 35 years later I picked up my own baby. I find that really quite phenomenal because they were trying to change the way that I did things, so that it fitted society. (link to transcript for the video; emphasis mine)

The point in detailing all these folks who live with limb difference isn't to treat them as spectacle, it's to emphasize that people with these disabilities are not hypothetical but real, complex human beings living complex human lives. When Golf Ball writes and draws with her feet and holds a key in her mouth, it's literally the sort of thing armless people do in real life. BFDI never treats these actions as special because they're done with feet; they aren't special at all, they're just what Golf Ball does when she wants to write or draw or unlock a door. It's not like the person without arms is painting with her foot to prove a point or pose for a camera, she's painting with her foot because she likes to paint. Goffeney didn't play guitar with his feet to be special, he played guitar because he loved to make music and shred some chords in the process. The way people with limb differences live their lives doesn't exist for nondisabled people to judge against the nondisabled majority, it should be theirs alone to create. We ought to respect that and meet them where they are.

When considered at large, nondisabled people usually divide their conception of people with limb difference into poles: either claiming that they can do everything nondisabled folks can do, or they can't. It should be obvious that it's more complicated than that. To be sure, many armless folks can't do everything that people with two functional arms can, but so many actions requiring two are either unnecessary or can be adapted to better fit how one's body works. One of the most absurd things I've come across in my research is an example of an activity of daily living (ADL) that amputees and people with arm differences cannot do, cited in reference to quality of life. The example? Amputees can't pass "a 20-pound turkey or ham" around the dinner table (Andreas et al. 2026). Big whoop? Seriously, you can't even do that if you have wrist issues. I know this is an example of a more generic ability (being able to hold something heavy), but it exemplifies the ableism that medicine upholds when these ADLs are treated as inflexible measures of quality of life. Instead of accepting alternative ways of doing things, getting someone else's help with little things here and there, or really asking if a certain task is necessary at all, medicine insists that disabled folks must replicate the exact nondisabled ideal. To them, what matters most is that you use prosthetic arms to hold a turkey on a big plate, exactly as a nondisabled person might. There is no room for, say, going to the store to get a rotisserie chicken, putting smaller cuts in the oven on a sheet that you can manipulate more easily with your feet, or even just getting assistance from someone who knows your limitations. Once again, the disabled body is judged against what it cannot do and blamed for falling short of the nondisabled standard, even when there are so many ways these "problems" can be solved or sidestepped. Personally, I think you and your family will survive just fine if you're not heaving entire beasts around the kitchen table every day.

It should matter to you to keep disabled object show characters as disabled, because it shows that limb difference is not something to obfuscate for the sake of an audience that gets "uncomfortable" when they see a character without arms. Limb differences exist, and it's just normal life for so many people. Sure, people have to do things differently or get extra help, but that shouldn't influence any value placed on their lives. BFDI itself understands this so well: it doesn't whittle characters down to their disabilities nor erases them altogether, and it refuses to construct character arcs around "cure" of disability as is so brutally common in media. This perspective is helped by the open-ended nature of the show, but it's also an active choice for the writers to continue to portray these disabled characters as equal participants alongside their nondisabled peers. It's even rarer to see characters with limb difference exist without a need or longing for prostheses, either, and I want to reiterate that BFDI handles this with surprising realism. Remember what I said about Golf Ball in the first part? Golf Ball has moments of understandable frustration grumbles, especially when her needs aren't being met, but if she wanted to "fix" herself, she would have done so by now with the robot arms she has already created. She hasn't; she doesn't need to and she shouldn't need to. She is a whole person, and all her fellow limb-different contestants are as well. Nobody really needs them in a world where their bodies are accepted and considered, and funnily enough, I think in between bouts of cartoony murder and chaos, BFDI offers in this framework a glimpse into a kinder world.

So, where does all of this leave us as artists and creators? I have a proposition: because so many object characters have absent limbs that can translate to real human limb absence, this fandom space is uniquely equipped to combat these exact biases pushed in other media by following the lead of our inspiration.

So...no more robot arms. Let yourself find creativity and joy in representing disabled characters as they are.

2.4 Putting Knowledge into Practice

Before I finally talk about how prosthetic arms can be portrayed in object show community fanart, I want to reiterate that we should prioritize getting more comfortable with seeing limb difference as it is and stop expecting people with limb differences to conform their bodies to what nondisabled folks perceive as normal. I'm relieved if I can help people add realistic prostheses to their human designs, but I also hope it's evident that no prostheses at all is the best option for your characters. If you find you still hesitate to ditch the prostheses and feel more comfortable seeing armless objects as human characters with arms, I implore you to ask why. Why default to prosthetics? Is it easier to adapt reference images, which rarely show disabled bodies? Is it just more comfortable to see someone with a "normal" body? Whose comfort is worth more: your character, or you? You should be representing upper limb difference in your BFDI human designs, and it's important to do it right, even if it means uprooting some subconscious ableism along the way.

Regardless of whether you decide to show them or not, arm prostheses will be uncommon, because while many people don't use prostheses at all, the people that do never wear them all the time. It'd be like holding a wrench in your hands at all times: might be great for loosening a nut, but you're otherwise simply lugging around a tool you don't need. Remember that the more of the arm you want to "replace" with a prosthesis, the heavier and more involved wearing it will be. Though there are now myoelectric prosthetic arms that attach all the way up to the shoulder that require fewer harness straps, they're still going to be heavy and their dexterity and speed don't parallel that of a fleshy arm. The most important thing to remember, though, is that proprioception will hamper usability no matter what type of prosthetic it is. For people without arms, especially from birth who are used to having nothing there, adding large attachments onto your body to then have to manage without knowing where they are is exhausting. People tend to draw prostheses as though they are literal extensions of the human body/nervous system, and while this would be helpful, that's just not at all how they work. In many cases, they feel heavy and get in the way so much that the minor benefits don't outweigh the plethora of problems that most folks experience.

Here's an example of a character with a prosthetic. My human take on Price Tag has no left arm and a transradial (below-the-elbow) limb absence on their right arm. Now, If I were to think of a "full" prosthetic setup for Taggy, it would look something like this:

Their right arm here is a very expensive myoelectric arm with electrodes attached to their residual limb, meaning they would be able to grip and move their robotic hand. Their left prosthetic arm is a cheaper body powered prosthetic with simple dexterity. While this setup technically fulfills the "two arms" ideal, this doesn't exactly look that comfortable, does it? Because their left arm is completely absent, a full shoulder prosthetic is going to be very uncomfortable and relatively pointless. As a matter of personal preference, I think Taggy likes using a prosthetic on their right arm when they're out and about and want to do things with their hook, so when they're using this prosthetic arm they're wearing it like this:

Now, when it comes to a more "magical" character like One, you really don't have to give her magic phantom arms at all. In fact, she's probably the easiest for people to translate into a human, because it's the exact same thing: it's literally just telekinesis.

You can ultimately adapt the objects and numbers into humans how you want, of course. I'm not your mom, or a cop, or whatever, nor are my examples prescriptive. I'm just concerned about people burying their faces in their own biases against people appearing disabled, and I think it's easy for people to hide their discomfort behind aesthetic. Magic arms might seem like a prettier aesthetic for a magical character, but I really want people to ask themselves if they're giving her arms subconsciously to suggest some form of ability and "correction" to a body with a limb difference. Same goes for objects. Is it more "aesthetic" to be nondisabled? Or can you challenge yourself to change the way you see aesthetic? Can you adapt your aesthetic vision with their disability still accepted as a part of who they are? Again, I've seen the creative brilliance of this fandom. I know that you can.

(Also, just to get this out of the way, I really wish people would stop being so weird about feet and people using their feet to do things. I get that there's a lot of cultural baggage with how we understand feet as unclean things that people think are gross, but hands deal with their own share of disgusting stuff and we trust that people wash them when they should. This is a can of worms, so I'd rather not get into it, but I will say this: at some point you have to acknowledge that feet are just limbs some people use in various ways to do what they want to do. That's all they are. You don't need to call attention to them to represent people accurately, but you can't be acting, in the same vein, like drawing them or seeing them in any capacity is obscene. It's offensive and annoying.)

Anyway, here's where I stand with translating objects into humans--again, not prescriptive, but an example of what you can do to implement disability into your creative work. Personally, I take a pretty literal approach to human designs. If they're armless objects, they're armless humans; limbless objects, limbless humans. Further, my humans have either never used prostheses to begin with, only use them for certain tasks, or have ditched them altogether for an easier way of doing things. Especially in a community like the one the objects have in BFDI, not having arms is something many characters can relate to one another about, and I'm sure they share ways of doing things and commiserate when something's annoying them. If I'm showing these characters doing something as humans, they're just going to do stuff with their feet or their mouth.

Another layer: I consider the kind of object they are and translate that into a human form, considering what their body type is like. You may have guessed this already, but I adapted Price Tag's string, which acts as a simplified limb, into their right arm. Considering that their string resembles the kind of hooks that appear as terminal devices on body-powered prostheses, I imagine they often use a BE body-powered prosthesis because they simply like using the hooks for their hobbies. I also see them wanting to try a myoelectric prosthesis down the road, maybe saving up for the hefty price tag on those too! With other objects, I explore a lot of other ways congenital limb difference occurs. Clock has phocomelia, which is the congenital absence of arms but the presence of the hands attached against the shoulder. Gaty has two little fingers on her right side to represent her hinges; vestigial fingers occur in a lot of congenital arm absences in real life. Foldy has the top of her humerus on both sides, giving her short residual limbs, Clapboard has one arm that stops after his elbow like Price Tag, and Cloudy has a small part of his left and right arm that allows him to pilot a powerchair with a joystick. Puffball doesn't have use of her limbs or voice due to a genetic disorder, and as I mentioned before, Stapy has one leg (his right leg) and uses crutches and a wheelchair depending on mood and what he's doing that day. There is a lot of variety in how limb difference occurs in real life, so I'm happy to reflect that with the objects as inspiration.

Everyone else? They have absent limbs, depending on if that's legs, or arms, or both. Wheelchairs and power chairs help immensely as a means of mobility for the few characters without legs; Lightning uses a lightweight, sporty custom chair while out, though at home he usually just gets around on his arms. There's really no reason to give the armless characters prosthetic arms as, like I have thoroughly discussed, they would be immensely annoying to use. Among such a large community of disabled characters, too, I imagine there's less pressure to cover or try to diminish being openly disabled, and I like to imagine a world where "cosmetics" that really just benefit nondisabled people do not have to exist. Seriously, I cannot overstate how important their community, having so many people with a shared disability, would be for their capacity to exist as visibly and openly disabled. So community is a major theme of BFDI, so it is a major theme in how I see them living as humans too. Community is everything.

Given she's been in several examples throughout this essay, you might be curious about my take on Golf Ball, known inventor of machines and gadgets. I sincerely doubt that Golf Ball would use prosthetic arms for anything. She just wouldn't. Remember what I said about proprioception? That's the key, there's not going to be proprioception in any prosthetic across the board, and she is the type who especially values precision and control when building her inventions. Why would she choose clunky things of metal or plastic over the feet she already has, which she easily knows the location of given they're part of her body? I'm sure after some intense bout of frustration, she might try and make arm prostheses for herself, but her frustration wouldn't get better. She'd immediately find them cumbersome, impractical, and in any case inadequate. She's proficient with her feet! She can write, she can draw, she can use a power drill, she can do so much already, and she and Tennis Ball share a common disability that allows them to synergize and understand one another so profoundly. To assume that she must nevertheless try to change herself to be more like her able-bodied peers is to neglect that she is not like them, and not being like them is not a bad thing. If she can do these things her way, why change that for some perceived norm, even if it isn't the norm for her? (and all this goes for many of these characters, Tennis Ball and Basketball included!)

If you're still stuck wondering how people live without arms, here are some resources and ideas for consideration. Always remember that residual limbs if present, and feet and mouths, are probably the answer for a lot of your questions, as this is how many people with bilateral amelia go about doing things. It's easy to forget that feet are basically just less flexible hands, and if you've been using them to manipulate things since you were toddling around, you're going to have a level of flexion and dexterity in both your toes and your legs that nondisabled people won't have. There is an organization in the United States, Enhancing Skills for Life, that advocates for people with bilateral upper limb difference. Their YouTube channel has videos answering questions and holding discussions on their shared disability, and I've found it to be a very valuable resource here. If you want some short-content quickref answering questions like "how do you do x or y?" then I also suggest browsing this YouTuber's shorts. She has a ton answering these exact questions.

Here are some specific things that you can show human versions of the objects doing without hands. Seriously, the show itself is your best guide for so many of these examples! Holding and using a pencil, for example, can be learned, as can writing and drawing.

So can using a spoon, fork, chopsticks, a toothbrush, a screwdriver, and many other tools; If you can grip it, you can use it. Sometimes, though, you need to consider how your humans hold some of the objects without the cartoony creative liberty objecthood affords them.

For Ice Cube holding this mixing spoon, for example, she might be able to grip it with her toes, but if it's too wide, she could use a strap against her foot or an attachable handle that allows her to hold it.

Gaty might have a little trouble as a human holding this cup in this exact way, given that knees don't just become elbows like they do with the objects, but remember that many people without arms have legs flexible enough to do things others find impossible. Still, you could make it less of a nuisance for her, giving her a straw or another type of cup altogether, like a tumbler, or setting it on a table to let her sip from it. There are many solutions!

For other little things about living without arms, some creativity and thinking outside the box can make things easier for your characters. For one, slip-on shoes make sure your feet available when you need them. If you want to create a home that's more accessible, you can get low cabinets and drawers to open with your feet, and you can sit on stools to use your feet when you're at the sink in the kitchen or bathroom. Adaptive handles for things like cups, mugs, and kitchen knives help with food prep, and putting carts, laundry baskets etc. on wheels with switchable brakes would get rid of the need to lug tables and laundry baskets around. Adaptive computer mice and keyboards already exist, though some people also opt to use generic keyboards/laptops either out of convenience or preference. You can also wear a lanyard for cards, for example having a bus pass or ID card that you can easily tap without needing any limbs available. There are so many more solutions, and though there are a lot of resources out there, you can also dream up a better, more accommodating environment for your humans and have fun doing so. Even if your character ultimately can't do something their armed peers can, that's just how it is sometimes, and that's okay, too.

Funnily enough, adaptive tools like these probably aren't new to you, either, if you watch several object shows. Inanimate Insanity has shown an adaptive tool! In season two, episode 14, Baseball is shown using a hammer that straps to his foot:

This is the exact sort of thing you can easily adapt into human life. It might not be fancy, but it works, doesn't it? I've also considered that this is where Golf Ball expresses a lot of her creativity--not changing her own body, but changing how her environment works for her and using little tools here and there to help her with things she can't change. For example, why not have her build a prosthetic device but foot- or leg-powered rather than body-powered? It would be a lot easier to control this way, and it could be used when, for example, she's trying to open a heavy jar and needs the grip. A wearable velcro band on her foot could help her move laundry, and something that uses suction cups that can attach and detach can grab annoying round things that are otherwise hard for toes to grasp. Keyrings can help with small zippers, longer handles can help with reach, mounts can hold things like hairdryers against walls, and mouth sticks can help people without any limbs use touch screens and other devices. The point here is that inventiveness can go far beyond trying to replicate the "norm" of things designed specifically for functional hands. Of course I say all this is Golf Ball's genius, but a lot of these tools also come from the real-world "Hands-Free" catalogue that Enhancing Skills for Life have put out to help real people with real limb difference. I truly can't recommend their resources enough.

I have a few other notes about representing limb difference to keep in mind before we wrap up. In media, people without an arm are often shown with a sleeve either tied or pinned so as to close off the sleeve against the residual limb. While this might be done to warm up a cold residual limb, tying up sleeves isn't commonly the way to do this, and as this post also observes, it frankly reads as just another way people sidestep having to see or show a residual limb. For those without a residual limb, people usually let the sleeve droop down without issue; if that sort of thing really bothers them, they can get it tailored or stuff it inside-out in a pinch. Specifically for those with a residual limb that they will use to manipulate things, a really long sleeve would get in the way, but knotting the sleeve and blocking the limb altogether would only be more annoying. The aesthetic of the knotted sleeve, though common in fictional depictions, just isn't founded in real experience.

Gestures are another important consideration, and I think this might be another reason people give their armless humans magic prostheses. I get it, because hands have immense social significance: we gesture with them when we talk or when we need to say something from afar, and the way we move them when we talk says a lot about how we're feeling. I get wanting to preserve that reflexive sense of communication in the art you create, because it comes naturally to a society where most people have functional arms. But, again, the reality is that "most" is not "all", and some people just don't have arms. These gestures are also simply unnecessary! If you want to make your character wave, don't! It's fine! Why not just give them a smile instead, or a knowing look? It accomplishes the same thing but will appear so much more natural to these characters. Plus, it isn't like you only gesture with your arms, right? Gesturing with a foot or nose is another option, if for example you really need to point someone in the right direction. Designing and illustrating gestures for people without arms isn't an impossible task, it just takes some thinking, and it's okay if your character doesn't ultimately gesture in a way your other characters might.

I should finally acknowledge that even though flexibility is key for using your feet to do things, amputees have to be careful about overusing their bodies. People who use their feet are at risk of messing up their backs if they aren't careful and mindful of the way they go about doing things, and given that their lower limbs are working double time for pretty much everything, the risk and consequence of overusing their legs is something they're going to need to avoid. This might mean that even if someone can still technically use a tool or lift something with their foot, they might still decide it isn't worth the risk and let someone else help them out, or do it in a slower but less intensive way. Regardless, you can acknowledge body overuse without treating it as a uniquely terrible or inevitable part of having a limb difference; showing characters working at their own pace, stretching, and staying aware of their limits helps a lot. Not to mention messing up your body is something everyone can do with enough bodily neglect--just ask any artist shrimping over her drawing tablet. :)

If you're still unsure about anything else that I don't touch on, you can explore the resources I've offered throughout this essay, and you can also ask me and I might be able to find an answer. Please do not start using real people with real limb difference as personal search engines. It's one thing if they explicitly have asked people to send them questions, but follow their lead--don't just start rattling off invasive questions in random comment sections. Wanting to learn is great, but be tactful and respectful as you're doing so.

2.5 Conclusion and a Recap

Wow! We've covered everything that I wanted to cover: the BFDI fandom's tendencies to misrepresent or outright ignore limb difference, the reality of prosthetics, the misconceptions from media that influence how we represent limb difference, and, ultimately, what we can do to more thoughtfully and actively include these disabilities in our art. I didn't expect this part to be twice as long as my first, but it kept growing from a simple informational guide to a bigger interrogation into how we perceive limb difference. Combine the nuances and diversity of lived experience with the misconceptions about limb difference that people internalize from a young age, and trying to disentangle everything into something coherent, or at least considerate of reality, becomes a mammoth task. Regardless, I hope that this essay pushes people to think even a little more about what they're doing when they create art. I know not everything is going to sink in on a first or second read, but I'm not worried about people getting or taking in all of it all at once. Instead, I hope this essay can act as a resource that folks can turn to when they need it.

To wrap it up in a bow, here are some quick reasons to keep armless objects armless as humans:

most people with upper limb differences do not use prosthetic arms, and fully armless folks either cannot use them at all or do not benefit from their use

showing this disability and normalizing it rejects the systemic ableism we internalize over the course of our lives to be true, for example the idea that there is an "incomplete" or "broken" type of body that needs to be fixed with robotics or technology

media that contains arm amputees who do not use prostheses is exceedingly rare if not completely nonexistent, so you are doing something that is both more accurate to reality and subverts tired tropes bogging down other franchises

you will learn a lot about your own internalized beliefs about disability and you will learn a lot more about disability from real disabled people instead of tech bros selling their "bionic" arms

having some characters disabled and some nondisabled requires more thought into how to build and adapt the world, but this also means your work will be so much more engaging and interesting.

It's also so important that those of us without limb differences reject cosmetics as a necessary thing outright. Residual or nonexistent arms shouldn't have to be hidden with cosmetic prostheses. People should be allowed to exist as their body naturally is without pressure to fold themselves and live uncomfortably for an ideal they never agreed to.

In an ableist society like ours, we are all going to do things that are ableist. I've done it, you've done it, we've all said and done and thought things that devalue disabled lives in one way or another, and in many cases we don't realize it. This essay is not meant to inspire shame in people for conveying these biases, it's not meant to shoot down their ideas, and it's not meant to paint anyone as a bad actor. It is, however, meant to be a launching point to reflect on the decisions you make as an artist. It's so you start to ask yourself, "hey, wait, why do I tend to give all these characters robot arms? Why do I want to give them arms?" When I say that drawing "perfect" prosthetics and "magic" arms reflects ableism, I don't mean that the people creating this art are consciously asserting their own negative beliefs about disability. Indeed, I believe that in the vast majority of cases, people are doing things in good faith. People want to be fair. People want to be good. But that's the thing! Good people can still perpetuate ableist ideas. Right from birth, we understand there to be "good" bodies and "bad" bodies and we internalize that into a system of understanding human people. When we then go into creative projects, we design things a certain way based on that foundation, and all the biases and stereotypes and personal feelings that have built our understanding of the world will manifest in the lines we draw. When we, for example, feel sad after seeing someone in a wheelchair, have trouble entertaining the idea of a life without arms, or assume that nobody ultimately wants to live life disabled, these things seep through into the ideas we propagate. It is our responsibility to realize, think about them, and challenge these assumptions moving forward.

I want to dispel the idea that creative corners must be cut when it comes to disability. Disability should be a welcome part of everything, including your art style or the aesthetic you want to put into your artwork. When it comes to BFDI and its object show descendants, human character designs should acknowledge and understand the disabilities they have in the show. I want to see more armless human designs around, not hidden away or denied altogether but fully and actively acknowledged. I know that fandom is the most micro of microcosms and activism cannot begin or end with online space, but it should matter that we stop ignoring and erasing disabilities in these smallest of places. When we accept disability in our art--when we allow disabled characters to be disabled-- we become more mindful of how we see disability in reality, too. But that's dreaming something bigger than any of this. All I can hope, after this essay, is that I see more object-to-human designs that reflect lived realities; I see Golf Balls and Basketballs, Nickels and Ice Cubes living, struggling, succeeding, crying, and laughing alongside their friends and foes, their lives without arms a normal part of that greater whole.

Thank you again for reading. I hope you've taken something important from this essay, whatever it might be--information, inspiration, advice, whatever. Like I said in my first part, it would mean a great deal if you could share this, spread the word or even just talk about it with your friends. No matter how this gets to people, I want us to have a conversation about how we portray limb difference in the object show community. I want us to reflect on what kind of systemic (and personal!) beliefs these portrayals reinforce or subvert. It's important to making the object show community more thoughtful and inclusive, and pushes us to be kinder and more considerate in the real world too.

Works Cited & Book Recommendations

There are so many books I could add to this list but I'm keeping it simple. These are books I have either quoted or think would make for good introductions to disability from a social perspective.

Blake, Melissa. Beautiful People: My Thirteen Truths about Disability. Hachette Go, 2024.

I quoted this one in my first part! I really enjoyed this quick read. It's a half-memoir half-treatise from a writer with various physical and mobility disabilities. This one is more of a "beginner's" disability advocacy, having simpler points to make and easy language to understand, but it is a valuable book written with a lot of love.

Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke University Press, 2017.

This is a spectacular collection of essays (and poems!) on the concept of "cure" in disability, written by a disabled transmasc author. It takes the nuance of cure and its plethora meanings for disabled people, weaving his thoughts also into his walks in the more-than-human world: ecosystem destruction and revitalization. A little more academic than the others on this list, but it is so, so rich.

Gies, Kate. It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: a Memoir of My Body. Scribner Canada, 2025

This is a memoir by a Canadian writer and educator that was born without a part of her ear. Doctors constantly tried to build and recreate an ear for her so that she would look like the "normal" kids, but the pain and discomfort it caused made Gies question the purpose of it: was it ever really for her, or was it pushed onto her to conform her to what is "normal" and what would make her body "finished"?

Ladau, Emily. Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be An Ally. Ten Speed Press, 2021.

An accessible and concise primer on disability. Explains a lot of terminology, the nuance of identity and the history of disability (limited to the United States), types of ableism people face, what we can do about it, and more resources for further learning.

Lapper, Alison. "Beauty Unseen, Unsung." Excerpt from My Life in My Hands. The Guardian, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/sep/03/art1.

Content warning for ableism and sexual abuse. This article is an excerpt from Lapper's memoir, recounting her experiences growing up, going to school, dating, and having her son. Not only invaluable but also peppered with snarky Britishisms that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Leduc, Amanda. Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. Coach House Books, 2020.

Another one that I quoted in the first part, this is genuinely one of my favourite nonfiction books I've ever read. It combines two of my interests, literature and disability studies, into a very important assessment of fairy tales, both old and modern (read: Disney), as reinforcers of ableism.

Lee, Matt. The Backwards Hand. Northwestern University Press, 2024.

Another memoir! Matt Lee was born with a congenital limb difference where his wrists do not rotate. This memoir is not solely focused on Lee's own disability, but he does a great job of mixing his personal experiences with observations of how disabilities are represented in horror movies (i.e. badly).

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.

This one requires prior knowledge of Disability Justice as a movement to fully appreciate, but I wanted to add it to this list because it is so important. The author, a queer artist of colour, addresses the nuanced and often difficult realities of living disabled within an ableist social fabric, but it simultaneously "dreams" up a future of collective care and community action where disabled folks (especially queer and trans folks) are at the forefront of each other's lives. This isn't really a primer for the nondisabled passerby in the way most of these other books are, but it should be read by everyone with sincere interest in understanding disability as it intersects with other social identities. I also reaaaaally want to read her other book, The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs.

Shew, Ashley. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

This book covers a variety of disability issues in specific reference, as you might imagine, to technology. The author is a lower-limb amputee and so she brings a lot of personal and professional knowledge to the section on prostheses. I found it a very important read that digs deeper into the prosthetics industry and media's immortal obsession with superhero-inspired bionic arms. This infatuation with science-fiction and erasing disability, trampling the tangible preferences of people with disabilities, is indeed the mammoth problem at the core of this essay.

Wong, Alice, editor. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. Vintage Books, 2020.

Another absolutely essential read for everyone reading this. It contains a wide variety of personal essays about different disabilities, with queer and racialized voices at the forefront. It was put together by the late Alice Wong, a disabled Asian-American activist who was (and still is in her legacy) a prominent figure in the Disability Justice movement. Actually, if I asked you to read a single thing from this short list, it would be this collection.

Research papers consulted (APA citations)

Al-Tameemi, R., Hashem, M., Chiad, J. S., & Mahdi, S. (2025). Analysis of performance of bone-anchored implants for amputation limb prostheses. Applied Mechanics, 6(4), 77. https://doi.org/10.3390/applmech6040077

Andreia, C., Matos Demétrio, de, E. A., & Nuno, M. (2026). Redefining prosthetic needs: Insights from individuals with upper limb Loss—A systematic review. Sensors, 26(2), 734. https://doi.org/10.3390/s26020734

Diers, M., Schredl, M., Flor, H., & Bekrater-Bodmann, R. (2025). Body representation in dreams of congenital and early-life amputees. Scientific Reports (Nature Publisher Group), 15(1), 9919. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83000-7

Resnik, L. J., Borgia, M., Graczyk, E. L., Barth, J., & Ni, P. (2024). Prosthesis usability experience is associated with extent of upper limb prosthesis adoption: A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. PLoS One, 19(6). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299155