I’m writing an au fic of a story that involves a character who is blind due to an accident. At the end of the story she decides to get surgery so that she can see again. I’m focusing my story on this character, and I’ve been considering changing this. There is a bit of “my life is dark and depressing since I lost my sight” in the original, and I want to lean away from that. Is this a positive conclusion for a character who is blind, or will this come off like she can’t be happy if she’s blind?
Hi! Thank you for asking.
I would definitely advise against having her vision restored in the end. It sounds like the original concept has a lot of risk of reinforcing the idea that blind is the worst possible outcome and that a person cannot be happy if they go blind, and cure narratives are usually pretty uncomfortable and negative. Plus, it can also run the risk of giving the impression that all blind people would want to be cured if they could, or that wanting a cure is the common and most natural response to going blind. In reality though, most blind people are perfectly comfortable with the way we are and would not take a cure even if it was offered to us.
I also think it’s important to know that for most people, surgery that fully restores vision is also really unrealistic, especially if your story is set in a relatively realistic world. Total blindness especially is next to impossible to fix completely, and most of the time when you hear about it, it’s a one in a million experimental surgery done by a world renowned ophthalmologist, and it usually does not make the person fully sighted again. It’s also usually incredibly expensive and using very experimental technology, which often breaks shortly after or is incredibly cumbersome and difficult to manage and maintain. It often comes with lots of frequent follow up surgeries, and it’s not uncommon for it to be a very temporary thing that does not last very long because of all the complications. Surgeries like that usually also have a very low success rate, so there’s a pretty high chance that you will get them and it will not work, or it might even make your vision worse. Plus, with experimental technologically advanced surgeries like this, the vision you receive often isn’t exactly the same as real vision, either. Often times it is using technology, and what it’s really doing is creating a sort of artificial vision, and it will often look very different and not work quite the same or as well as real vision.
It is fairly common for real life blind people to get corrective surgeries, but most of the time, these surgeries only make minor improvements to the vision, and it’s not usually enough to make the person no longer qualify as blind anymore. It also doesn’t usually help if the person is completely blind or so close to that that they only see light and shadow. It’s usually only effective for people who already have a fair amount of residual vision, and again, the improvements are usually minor and not exactly life altering. Plus, just as mentioned above, these surgeries for this group of people that are more common still often have very low success rates, and really high rates of complications, so it’s not super likely that you will actually experience any improvement, and it might make your vision even worse.
I would generally advise steering clear of cure narratives, especially if you are not blind yourself. Not only can it come off offensive and reinforce negative stereotypes and public perceptions about going blind, but I think it’s also just not nearly as interesting as allowing the character to remain blind and learn that they can be comfortable and happy and successful regardless. Cure narratives are relatively common in popular media, so going against that is honestly more revolutionary and groundbreaking most of the time, and will make for a much more interesting story. Plus, of course, it will be much better representation of blindness, and blind readers will be much more interested in reading your story. We hardly ever find stories about us that aren’t sad and tragic and negative, so we love to share good ones around with each other when we find them.
— Mod Lane
