Excellent essay... albeit I'm not quite getting the rage against Dean Priest, who is psychically twisted because he's physically so, not the other way around (as per, say Shakespeare's Richard III). As you say, if there is going to be realism around this issue it must be admitted that sometimes disability does deform the spirit -- with the inevitable corollary that some are not going to overcome that. It's very plausible that Dean's acute awareness of his limitations should make him bitter with it, especially around a beautiful young girl. :)
I think -- carrying on from the above -- it must be a very difficult thing, to write a disabled character so that their disability is truly a non-issue, especially in the realm of fantasy/adventure. While I do wholeheartedly agree that the melodramatic extremes you quote above are flat-out silly, I'm not so sure that the search for a middle ground is quite that cut-n-dried.
Realistically, if you're introducing a disabled character, you're consciously limiting them in some way. Ergo, you must demonstrate either how they overcome their limitations, or how they... well, don't. And that's inevitably going to be at least a little bit dramatic, and the temptation to use that within the story nigh-on overwhelming.
Instantly, you're looking at a minefield of offensive implications -- but if you're going to insist that your characters are real people, you can't insist that there's a right and a wrong way to write them, because that makes them cliches before you've even started. Let them behave as real people would, by all means; assuming that real people are complicated, and sometimes behave in ways that are not the ways the group would like to be represented.
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As you say, if there is going to be realism around this issue it must be admitted that sometimes disability does deform the spirit -- with the inevitable corollary that some are not going to overcome that. It's very plausible that Dean's acute awareness of his limitations should make him bitter with it, especially around a beautiful young girl. :)
I think -- carrying on from the above -- it must be a very difficult thing, to write a disabled character so that their disability is truly a non-issue, especially in the realm of fantasy/adventure. While I do wholeheartedly agree that the melodramatic extremes you quote above are flat-out silly, I'm not so sure that the search for a middle ground is quite that cut-n-dried.
Realistically, if you're introducing a disabled character, you're consciously limiting them in some way. Ergo, you must demonstrate either how they overcome their limitations, or how they... well, don't. And that's inevitably going to be at least a little bit dramatic, and the temptation to use that within the story nigh-on overwhelming.
Instantly, you're looking at a minefield of offensive implications -- but if you're going to insist that your characters are real people, you can't insist that there's a right and a wrong way to write them, because that makes them cliches before you've even started. Let them behave as real people would, by all means; assuming that real people are complicated, and sometimes behave in ways that are not the ways the group would like to be represented.