A clean bill of health for all characters?

Yesterday I started a treatment for my feet again. Since I already had a pain in my left foot from something else and now I’m getting this new treatment for my left foot, which is also painful, walking around is, in fact, a pain.

So, and this is the funny part, I’m currently waddling around. On my left food I can only put pressure on the side while on my right foot, I can only put pressure on the heel. This of course led me to reflect on disabilities in fiction and when and if your characters should have them. Now maybe it is the type of novel I read which is more action/adventure type, but I am having a hard time thinking of a main character that starts out a novel with a disability or illness.

 

The first main story character that comes to mind with a disability is Matt Murdock or Daredevil in the Marvel comics and currently in the Daredevil TV series. The fact is though that even though he’s blind, he is not disabled at all, and his blindness is always an asset and not a liability.

 

Honor Harrington, the main protagonist in David Weber’s Honorverse series, starts out the series healthy and whole. As the series progresses, Honor gets scrapes and bruises, loses an arm, gets half her face paralyzed and loses an eye, if I recall correctly. However, most of these things have no real effect on her actions. Since she lives in a futuristic society, it all gets replaced with robotic eyes and arms so the net effect in the end is to make her even more powerful than before.

 

The only other story I can think of that I have seen or read recently with someone with a disability is the movie Mall Cop. The main character, Paul Blart, has diabetes or some sort of condition like diabetes, where if he doesn’t get regular sugar intake he falls asleep. This is played for laughs of course and I think partially exaggerated.

 

Outside of stories where the whole novel revolves around the protagonist disease or disability and how they deal with the world, I can’t really think of any other character that has a disease or disability outside of the occasional wounded soldier in military sci-fi but those are usually never the main characters. This got me wondering: do writers intentionally go about avoiding writing about disabled or unhealthy characters? And if so, why?

 

While researching this topic I found a blog in which the author claims that any disabled person in a story is generally given one of four generic roles: victim, villain, inspiration or monster， and that the disabled character’s storyline is resolved through either a cure, death or institutionalization but never left to carry on his or her life in the same fashion that the novel started.

 

The character that comes to mind for me is Tyrion Lannister from A song of Ice and Fire, more commonly known as the TV series “Game of Thrones.” I don’t know that being a dwarf should be considered a disability but it is definitely a disadvantage, especially in a medieval society. Tyrion himself is well aware that, had he not been born into a noble family, the Lannisters, he would probably would have died at an early age. The good thing about Tyrion’s character is that he is not pretending he is not a dwarf. He accepts that he is a dwarf and knows how society and his family feel about him: “all dwarves are bastards in the eyes of their fathers.”

 

I think the reason why most writers avoid writing about disabled people is that they really don’t know them that well. Let’s say you make a character that is in a wheelchair? How easy is it for them to get around? What is life like for someone in a wheelchair? The aim of the author is to have someone who just happens to be in a wheelchair but the story isn’t meant to be “A day in the life of a cripple.” How to avoid spending too much time talking about the wheelchair? Also there is the fine line of not boring the reader with iterations of “Being a cripple, he wasn’t able to…”

 

In my upcoming novel, the main character has a, I guess I will call it a condition, to keep from putting spoilers out, for which she has take treatment which has an effect on the end of the story. I wouldn’t call her disabled or anything like that until the very end which I cannot get into right now because “spoilers.” There is another character that has a mechanical arm, having lost his natural one when he was younger. The loss of an arm is part of the character’s back story to explain certain attitudes he has and it does come in useful at one point.

 

When writing a novel that takes place in space, it is hard to fit in people with major disabilities. There is a reason NASA vigorously screens its astronauts’ health. If you are disabled than space really isn’t a good place for you. I think any society where space travel is common place would be aware of this and its people would act accordingly with disabled people staying on planets or stations. The simple fact is that emergencies can happen very easily in space and if there is an emergency, you don’t want your rescue dependant on someone not at their 100 %.

 

Let me know if you can think of any examples or have any thoughts on this subject.