How joyous. I didn’t get any real work done besides the presentation for this week. I did do thinking on how many characters I forgot for my disability list. I wrote at the top “basically all X-Men” but only had two on my list. When making my presentation, I looked up “Marvel disabilities” and apparently someone did group photos of action figures they have with disabilities. And I forgot a ton of people. Noted, some I wasn’t going to include cause the list would be forever long. Like Dr. Strange has nerve damage but so far I haven’t found another character like that, so he is the only one on the list. If I wanted to include that. But Cable is disabled with his disease that makes him have a metal arm, forgot about him. Not even sure what category that is, science gone wrong? Amputee?? Callisto has an eyepatch, forgot about her. Forge, another idk if it is science gone wrong or amputee, but has metal limbs as well.

So, while I thought about the X-Men, I somehow forgot about them at the same fricken time. I saw those action figure group pics and went “… OH SO TRUE”. Disappointed in myself. Literally watched all of the X-Men cartoon this summer cause Natalia decided, thanks to Marvel Rivals, she likes Gambit and Rogue. This is why I said the list wasn’t finished.
When going on Reddit, I saw names and went “who…” but then looked the character up and remembered that character after seeing them. I will show it in my presentation, but I knew I forgot about people. Cause apparently I need to see them to be reminded of them. I guess those X-Men aren’t in Marvel Rivals so I don’t be thinking of them much, but man oh man did I forget a ton of people it seems.
Also, I got no clue who some of those people in the photos are. Not to mention I do know Jubilee but I have no clue why she is considered disabled. Which is why I was using Reddit or other social media lists, as the people would sometimes explain why they are there or put the show/movie/comic they are talking about.
But yeah so. I guess good on me having presentation week so I could realize an entire group of people I included but forgot at the exact same time. Joyous.

Anyway, Presenation

I couldn’t find if we needed to do a reaction paper or not. I spent a couple minutes trying to find that out. I couldn’t find that on the syllabus but to be honest I also couldn’t find the end-of-semester e-portfolio that we do so maybe I was in the wrong place there. If we do need that paper I will obviously do it, I just wasn’t sure how to do it since there aren’t readings? And that is usually part one of that paper, talking about the readings.

But yay! Presenting week!

I am actually excited this isn’t sarcasm. I love presenting.
I do wish there were more time in the week to get more work done but sadly I do not have time powers. So sad.

I did not get much done this week. I probably won’t get much done in for the rest of October. There is a conference in the middle of Novemeber that Guitar has me doing some work for, and he wants a finished paper by the 21st. It is the queer gaming thing I have mentioned in other classes, and it has taken me 10 hours to sort through the PlayStation and HALF the Xbox list. I still got the other half of Xbox and Steam to sort through. It might not seem important to go through all these list, but the Xbox one I did get through was interesting. There was a whole category for trans and nonbinary games, but I would say only like five at MOST out of the 60ish games should actually be on that list. So many games were on the trans/nonbinary list because the creator was trans or nonbinary. Which I don’t think should count at all. Just cause the creator is one thing doesn’t make the creation the same thing. Also, so many games have the main character that you play as be “nonbinary”. I say it doesn’t count, the game just defaults to using they/them to not offend anyone. It makes the player more acceptable to the game if the default is they/them instead of standard. I don’t really think it is to be queer I think it is to sell to more people. If the character isn’t even directly nonbinary I think it shouldn’t count. But yeah only a select few games have important enough queer story lines for me to think they belong on the list.

BUT, because of that deadline and the amount of research I have to do for that, I didn’t really find the time to do things for thesis. I am hoping to cram stuff in Novemeber and December for thesis, cause October is gonna be packed with queer gaming stuff. I can’t exactly lock in for extra time with thesis just yet. I am trying, trust, but not enough time in the week/day/month for all the research I need to do.

So, I didn’t get around to looking at more literature as I had planned/hoped to do. I did get started on a list of disabilities/characters though. I would like to go through more lists, but I feel like this is a good start/all the characters I could come up with for now. I wanted to look around the internet some more for some ones I might have missed/not thought of. I looked through three lists so far and have included ones I thought of, ones I think are popular enough, and ones that connect to my research. Apparently, some Agents of SHIELD show has a ton of characters I haven’t heard of/die? One list mentioned the character and did a parenthesis if they did and almost every character mentioned from that show died so. Idk what is going on in that show but it seems everyone just be dying so not sure if that is even good Marvel lore to include. But, considering I have seen almost all the Marvel movies and a bunch of the other shows and didn’t know those guys, they must be niche comic characters. And I figured it would be better to stay to the more popular ones, espeically the ones not found in a show that kills off everyone. I didn’t think that show was popular enough but if these characters do keep poping up maybe I will include them? I don’t want to have a 50 paged list though, so sticking to the more popular characters has to be the way to go. And if I don’t know them, with my decent Marvel knowledge, then they aren’t going on the list. Anyway, the list.

Amputees/missing limb

• Bucky, metal arm  
• Nebula, multiple metal parts  
• Echo: Maya Lopez, prosthetic leg 
• Misty Knight, metal arm 
• Ulysses Klaue, arm turns into gun 
• Razor Fist, kinda like the name suggests this guy has knives/razors for hands 
• Eitri, Thanos ruined Eitri’s hands in Avengers: Infinity War by forcing them into a vat of molten Uru metal, which solidified and encased his fingers into useless metal blocks
• Yo-Yo Rodriguez, loses both her arms and gets metal prosthetics  

Deformities/Disfigured

• Thing 
• Dr. Doom 

Visually Impaired

• Visually Impaired 
• Daredevil, blind 
• Cyclops, without special eyewear that has him see in red, his eyes are portals to a punch dimension 
• Alicia Masters, blind 
• Nick Fury, eye patch 
• Thor, eye patch/fake eye  
• Odin, eye patch  
• Stick, blind (skilled and experienced grandmaster of various Asian martial arts)  
• Gordon (as shown on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., eyeless Inhuman teleporter), blind  

Hearing Impaired

• Hawkeye: Clint Barton, hard of hearing  
• Echo: Maya Lopez, deaf 
• Makkari (member of the Eternals) deaf 

Science gone wrong

• Dr. Morbius: As a human, was dying from a rare blood disease very similar to the one that killed Harold Ramis but combined with severe bone depletion. Morbius experimented on himself and accidentally became a scientifically created vampire but with certain draw backs 
• Lizard. Amputee that used Lizard DNA to regrow his arm, but the science went wrong and transformed him into a lizard  
• Man-Thing: Man-Thing used to be a brilliant Scientist.  Now he is something of an empathic plant monster that can sense emotions, especially fear. He’s mute. 
• Aldrich Killian, A limp that requires him to use a cane for walking, severe scoliosis or stooped posture, resulting in hunched and awkward body movements.Driven by a fierce desire to overcome his physical limitations, Killian founded Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.)  to develop Extremis—a techno-organic virus designed to rewrite the body’s genetic code to heal crippling injuries and illnesses. Killian used himself as a primary test subject. The Extremis serum completely cured his disabilities, corrected his posture, and eliminated his need for a cane. When he later reunites with Pepper Potts in 2013, he covers up the radical transformation by lying and attributing his new look and perfect mobility to “5 years of physical therapy 

Mobility Issues

• Professor X: Paralysis from waist down, wheelchair 
• Iron Patriot: James Rhodes: permanent paralysis from the waist down. His mobility issues stem from a severe spinal column fracture sustained during the airport battle in Captain America: Civil War. Moves using advanced bionic leg braces and his War Machine armor 
• Jonathan Pangborn, paralyzed from an industrial accident, healed through magic at Kamar-Taj, and later stripped of his powers by Karl Mordo, which made him paralyzed again. 
• Bullseye: Ben Poindexter, had spinal surgery after Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) slammed him into the corner of a wall in the climactic fight scene of the season finale of season 3. Moves fine in Daredevil Born Again  

This is the list for now. After like two or so more lists, I plan to look at how the internet views these characters to see if how Marvel handled the disability sits well with people. Like I doubt people enjoy the representation of these people with mobility issues getting fixed up. So the list is still a work in progress, but it is the only progress I have for this week so it is getting posted.

Being sick pushed me back on work by a LOT. I thought I was gonna get ahead on things, I did not. I feel a little behind on other stuff, but oh well.

I did find some new articles to add to my lit review. I wasn’t able to dive deep into if I will use them yet. When reviewing things to make blog one I notice that, in doing so many things with so many disabilities, I only got the social media side of amputees. I wanted to get more representation on them, since I feel like it is a thing that characters lose limbs and just get a metal replacement of some kind like it is nothing. And thank goodness I wanted to expand a bit because I think I found good stuff.

It took forever to find what COULD be good stuff, as I did what Craig showed us and expanded the search to include all kinds of terms related to what I was looking for. “amputee or amputation or limb loss or prosthetic or prosthetics or prosthesis or prostheses”.
Let me tell you. There was a lot of out there stuff for what people thought of for prosthetic or prosthesis. Interesting stuff, sure, but a looooot of stuff I was not looking for at all cause I was looking for the real deal. Or so I thought.

“The Shape of Air: American Sign Language as Narrative Prosthesis in 21st Century North American Media” by Pamela J Kincheloe. Didn’t read it in full, but seems like a great pull.
The deaf community is a hard one as some do believe that hearing aids and such are a huge sin to do since it makes you hear. It is a whole thing, big fights in the community on getting hearing aids or not, but sign language being brought up in this way is interesting. Not fully what I was looking for but caught my eye as the deaf community got a lot going on.

“Prosthetic fantasies: loss, recovery, and the marketing of wholeness after
breast cancer” by Samantha Crompvoets. This was more of what I was looking for. Based on the abstract, I can tell I will use this paper. “In this paper, I show that the breast prosthesis is marketed as a device that aligns the post-surgical body with wellness and normalcy.” I also liked “the powerful influence of prostheses manufacturers who link traditional notions of how the female body should look and act with recovery from a breast cancer crisis”. Right what I was thinking, that some medical devices are sold to make people go back to fitting what humans “normally” look like, even though the person might not want these medical devices.

I found one that caught my eye because I love the movie. “Fishlegs’s Journey: Acknowledged and Unacknowledged Stigma in the How to Train Your Dragon Book Series” by Cath Nichols. Again, the abstract caught my attention “In a best-selling book series by Cressida Cowell, Fishlegs is a Viking runt—a weak baby
cast on the oceans for the gods to decide his fate. He is skinny, has asthma and eczema, wears broken glasses, and is clumsy. On screen, he is non-disabled (though overweight), and appears with several likeable characters who have prosthetic limbs, including the anti-hero Hiccup; the villain Alvin is now non-disabled”. I did have the first book at some point, and not gonna lie I do not remember this at all. That is kinda a whole other paper, characters in books not translating into their movie selves, but hey this person already wrote that paper for HTTYD so. Just another thing going against disabilities it seems. One I didn’t even consider, how some books might have disabled characters but that isn’t shown in the movies. Interesting idea.

That was sadly all I could find there and I skimmed 100 articles so far. Like I said, looots of interpretive stuff on what is a prosthetic. Loooots. And four I put in the maybe pile.

“What Is Disability Studies to Make of Fetal Amputee and Cosplayer Laura Vaughn and Her Emulation of Female Warrior, Imperator Furiosa of Mad Max: Fury Road?” By Sue Smith had some quotes I may use, just based on a quick skim. “And I have NEVER seen a physically disabled, kickass, female lead character in a Hollywood movie EVER— not once, until yesterday”. “‘NO. ONE. EVER. FEELS. SORRY. FOR. HER. BECAUSE. OF. HER. DISABILITY.’—nor is ‘Her body […] a plot point. It is simply allowed to be.'” “For Vaughn, Furiosa is powerful precisely because her “missing hand is never mentioned in dialogue […] her prosthetic is realistic [… and] there is no tragic backstory regarding her missing limb.” Instead, Furiosa’s “missing limb” or
“nubbins” as Vaughn calls it, is simply part of her physical being, which she
uses to full advantage.”

Now yall better listen to Craig cause I searched every one of these words separately and got like five results. But for some reason I put it all together, “disfigurement or deformity or deformities or disfigure representation in media” and I get 140 results. Idk why it hates me but whatever. Literally none of the good stuff showed when I searched “deformity” on its own.

Anyways, “B(e)aring the Beast: Deformity, Animality, and the Ableist Gaze in French Literary Variants of ‘Beauty and the Beast'” by Adrion Dula. A quick skim and I can see this will be something I can use “the fairy tale in particular employs metaphorical language and concretizes the ideas presented into literal meaning; thus, a character whose actions are beastly is narrated in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic terms, and internal deficiencies are often rendered externally: ‘In
fairy tales, the hero escapes the tiresome clichés of reality by entering a world
where the figurative or metaphorical dimension of language takes on literal
meaning. Ideas become matter. The mother or stepmother who is like an
ogress at the beginning of a tale becomes an actual witch. . . . Such literalizations of metaphors can at times translate into grotesque effects'”. “As Schmiesing
has shown in her analysis of disability in the Grimms’ fairy tales, disability and
physical impairment in particular are often used to elucidate the lack of moral
virtue of characters or as punishment of fairy-tale villains”. Seems good to me.

“Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny:’ Readaptation and (Textual) Deformity in Two Recent Frankenstein Films” by Paul Mitchell. First sentence of the abstract, “In this article, I discuss two recent films, Frankenstein (Kevin Connor 2004) and Victor Frankenstein (Paul McGuigan 2015), in terms of how they represent disability for mainstream television and cinema spectators.” But you can’t just go off the first sentence. So, I also go off of these “More specifically, my analysis illustrates how the visual depiction of the Creature in Connor’s Frankenstein serves to maintain a nondisabled gaze. Although the film subverts the typical conflation of a character’s atypical body with a malevolent disposition, it does not, in fact, disrupt the longstanding ableist paradigm that views disability as monstrous”. And I like.

I will say EBSCO be lying. I say full text and sometimes it shows me articles but doesn’t have the full text. So I get my hopes up. Would’ve had so many more articles if this thing wasn’t a fricken liar.

But yeah after many different key searches and looking through a lot of weird out there interesting stuff, I found those possible articles. Wish I wasn’t sickly so I could’ve actually locked in and got more done than just finding the articles, but I guess I will save actually reading them for another time.

I kinda started TRYING to narrow down what I wanted to do, but that backfired. I looked at so many lists of characters with disabilities, and there is a ton to do there. Everyone has their own idea of what a disability is. I am using Marvel, which I thought would limit things, but then I realized just how crazy things could get. For I WAS going to try and keep things simple. Focus on blind, deaf, amputees, and deformities. I realized I didn’t really have enough characters on my own for those categories. For blind, I could only really think of Daredevil. Deaf, I got Hawkeye and Echo. Amputees included Bucky, Echo again, Dr. Connors, and Nebula. Deformaties I was thinking Thing and Dr. Doom.

But looking at lists I realized that everyone has their own ideas, not to mention how complicated things get depending on which version of the character you use.

For variety in lists, some lists presented a great idea I didn’t think of, science experiments going wrong. I knew Dr. Connors becomes the lizard with a “failed” science experiment (technically the guy did get his arm back, but he becomes a lizard to do so… so… failed??). But there were other people who did science experiments that got crazy, so do I make that a list?
It would be an interesting topic, that people with disabilities go intense with trying to fix themselves to the point they change. That could be an interesting argument, showing the connection with disabilities and lab “accidents”.

There was also mentions of cancer. Like Jane Foster, who I knew gets cancer, but to me that isn’t a disability. I mean it does kill her, she is sick from it, but she also kinda in a way kills herself by using Thor’s powers and speeding up the cancer. So, is that a disability or just a misuse of power? Getting into tricky waters with that one.

And then people had Black Widow on their lists for having a hysterectomy. This was forced though? Like I would maybe consider it if she couldn’t have children based on her body not being able to, but to consider it based on the fact that she had a forced hysterectomy due to her awful spy program… That is a bit of a stretch to me. But does that count? Having a surgery, making you unable to do things others can? Now this is why I am including what the disabled community says on these characters. Cause not being able to have children is not what I think of when I think of disabled, which could be a whole other conversation on what people even think is disabled. My own bias of not wanting children could be impacting me to not include this on the list, but this is proving how complicated things can get.

For, to counter my own point of how Black Widow had a forced hysterectomy, we can’t just make disabilities things you are born with. That gets rid of like every one on my list. Daredevil wasn’t born blind, Bucky and Dr. Connors lost limbs in a war, Hawkeye lost hearing due to fighting in so many wars, Thing got his rock skin from being in space, heck even Professor X wasn’t wheelchair bound at birth. None of the people I have put on my own list had their disabilities at birth. Some mutants do, like Nightcrawler, which is a whooole other thing. If we do talk about mutants, they are all basically disabled, having so many changes to what we consider a “normal” human body. Some have wings, others have blue skin, some have less fingers, some have more limbs, it gets really crazy. I could just count that all as deformities, but truly we get into such crazy stuff with all of that.

Also the stories chosen depend on the disability the character sees. Like how Hawkeye is deaf in some stories but hard of hearing in others. To help out with this I might just change the categories to be “vision impairment” and “hearing impairment” which would also help to add more to the lists. Like with the vision impairment I can add Nick Furry or other characters with eyepatches. Maybe even include Cyclops because of being forced to see in red. Could also add “movement changes” as a big category. Includes amputees, those who are wheelchair bound in various ways, people with limps or needing to use crutches, or even characters like Doctor Octopus who uses a bunch of metal arms to move around.

Most of the lists I have found have been heroes or side characters, a small fraction of the lists others have made have been villains. Now, I also can’t think of too many disabled villains, but also who is counted as a villain? The Winter Solider is a villain, but Bucky is a hero, so do I include him on both the villain and hero side of things? Nebula is also both a hero and a villain. Are villains those that kill, but then what counts as killing because the Avengers have destroyed New York countless times in trying to fight bad guys. But maybe also there aren’t many villains with disabilities.
If I find that out, I might have to do diabilies seen in Marvel (to the best I can show that) and THEN disabilities seen in horror films. Those are kinda villains, just in a different genre than the superhero one. But, using the horror films would help show the disability tropes at large, and how disabilities “can be” scary.

The problem with my thesis is there is way too much going on with disabilities. Doing the horror films might be a whole other paper, but honestly any of this could be a separate paper. Like I think I am going to avoid deep diving into mental disabilities for that opens up way too much. I can’t even decide if cancer counts as a disability, I doubt I would be able to figure out what mental illnesses count as a disability. If they all do, that is soooo much to cover in one paper.

So the focus is still Marvel’s disability representation. Vision impairment, hearing impairment, and movement changes (might change the titles later, who knows). I will be seeing how these characters react to their disabilities and the conversation around that. I know the Hawkeye show demonstrated how hesitant he was to getting help with his hearing loss and how others judged him for not trying to get that help. Not learning sign language or getting hearing aids. But also studying the conversation around all that is going to be interesting. Did the hearing loss community feel like the show and the characters did them justice? This is what I want to focus on. Showing what Marvel does with disabilities and how the communities feel about it. Then use all of that to make my own story of superheroes with disabilities.

Not sure what to do with the villain aspect, if people just don’t pay attention to villains or if there is a lack of villains with disabilities. The horror stuff is very interesting, might have to be a separate thing. Not sure because I do want to show the dark side of disability representation in media, how “monsterous” or “scary” people make disabilities. But also just focusing on the villains we do get to see is interesting in itself, as the ones I have found are amputees, deformed, or science gone wrong. Haven’t really found “calm” disabilities with the villains yet, but I got more searching to do. Gotta lot of thinking to do. Might have to make my own list of disabilities which would be hard to do because I don’t want to be bias and discount disabilities, or count things in the wrong way. I would have to explain my choices in disabilities and characters, but some of the fan made lists do a terrible job at explaining why they put characters on the lists. It is all a little complicated right now, but at least I have a direction to go in. Things will find its place, I trust that.

Oh boy am I glad we get two semesters to work on this.

Summary of the research: Disabilities have bad reputation in media. I want to demonstrate that evidence and create better representation for those with disabilities in terms of creating a superhero story.

A little more detail: Disabilities have a loooot of things going wrong for them in media. For stories set in worlds where people get powers or have abilities, a lot of disabilities get healed (think Spider-Man no longer needing glasses after getting his powers), go away (think Max from Stranger Things being able to walk fine with no limp soon after waking up from a coma she was in for TWO YEARS), don’t matter as the person gets abilities to make up for the disability (is Daredevil really blind if he has advanced sensing abilities), and other various bad representations of disabilities.
In stories, disabilities are rarely seen or talked about. But when they are, there are some not great things going on. Like amputees always getting prosthetics, deaf people always getting hearing aids, autism shown in a specific way despite there being a spectrum, and so on. Even if the story is based on a real person, if it is made into a TV show or film things are changed to make the story more interesting.
For horror or super hero stories, a lot of villains have some sort of physical disability. Lots of scars, limps, hunched backs, or other deformities.
In social media, comments in videos of those who are disabled are a hit or miss. Some are supportive while others go the typical internet troll route.
Overall, a bad rep in media for representation, which leads to a lack of understanding. These people don’t get their voices heard, especially not when certain disabilities are thought of to be connected to villains.
So, the research is going to be presenting all these various examples of media doing disabilities a disservice with a deeper dive on the super hero representation of disabilities, as that genre tends to have a bigger pool of disability representation to analyze.
And then, after showing how much it all sucks, I plan to go into social media and look up how people feel about certain characters being disabled. Like, does the blind community think Daredevil is blind? Is he good representation? For those with deformities, does the Thing feel more like them than other characters with deformities? Clayface? Do they do deformities justice, with them being seen as/called monsters? How does the autism community feel about Mr. Fantastic, with all these examples of autistic people being very smart? Just get a vibe for what works or doesn’t work with the disabled community to know how to do the next part.

Which is then to take all this evidence of how representation sucks and the feedback from people and create a story that will do some justice. I doubt it would be perfect, but it will hopefully be better than what is already out there. Research and a creative aspect is the goal.

I am doing a lot, and I will probably lean more towards Marvel than DC to try and limit the super hero pool. DC I really know Batman, and not much else. Marvel I know more generally, so I feel like I can talk about all that better.
I also have to decide what I will count as a disability in terms of “do mental illnesses count”?
Cause if so, we got a LOT more to discuss. So many heroes and villains have PTSD and other various mental disorders. So many just mention it in the paper and be like “that is a whole other research paper”. Mention it just so mental illnesses don’t get ignored, but just mention it and not a deep dive so I can actually manage to get all this done.

Looking back I found a lot of stuff on deafness for the lit review, I should totally add more. More on deformities, more on the villain aspect of disabilities, more on the representation not being accurate, more is always good. I could always find more stuff. I haven’t touched the social media aspect yet, but that will probably be done before getting more literature, as I feel like the disability spaces will bring forward things I didn’t consider.

That is what my plan is/my idea of where my research is going at the moment. Demonstrate the poor disability representation, get feedback from the community, make a better story.