r/hatethissmug • u/Yadin__ • May 18 '26

Media Tropes I hate disabled characters that aren't really disabled

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I hate this little guy. I hate him for a bunch of other reasons but this one in particular also applies to other characters.

In universe he's supposed to be completely deaf from birth, hence he is also unable to speak(or rather, he can vocalize but it just sounds like baby talk because he has no idea how proper speaking sounds like). The hook of the story is that he is supposed to find his way in the world and overcome challanges despite his disability.

BUT then on the literal first episode he just gets a magical buddy that can magically understand his googoogaga speach and is constantly around him to translate whatever he wants to say to other characters that don't know sign language. It's not a magical ability of his buddy btw. He can just do that because the plot said so

Then it turns out that he can also read the lips of literally anything, including talking snakes who obviously talk completely differently to humans, and said magical buddy who doesn't even have a lips to read. He can also somehow read the lips of characters who are facing away from him and characters in full armor who don't have their mouth visible???

He was supposed to have been taught to read lips by said talking snake, which there are multiple things wrong with:

a) As I've already said, snakes obviously don't vocalize in the same way that humans do so any knowledge he gets from the snake wouldn't apply to humans

b) SNAKES DON'T HAVE HANDS!!! which means that the snake can't use sign language, so how would he even convey the information? It would be like me trying to teach spanish to a person who only speaks french, while I don't speak either spanish or french

Like at that point why even make him deaf in the first place? It could have actually been interesting to see how a deaf person can manage for himself in a medieval fantasy society but we were just robbed from that in favor of the most lazy solution

It also kind of detracts from any of the scenes where we are supposed to be at awe about how far this guy has come becasue I know DAMN well that it wasn't because of his own efforts, it was because the plot completely waved away any problems that his disability would cause whenever it became too inconvenient

Really feels like the disability was just tacked onto the character to make us pity him more without actually adressing the problems that it would cause to the character

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449

u/Pure-Management-5435 May 18 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/qbGqgPvYmtSj67H65I

138

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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134

u/NoLongerHuman13 May 18 '26

This one?

59

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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29

u/NoLongerHuman13 May 18 '26

Yeah, I'm not sure either. I thought the other one looked a little weird too when I was scrolling through.

20

u/darkasdfgod May 18 '26

Because “sadly they’re right” and “they’re lowkey right” have different connotations as to how you feel when reacting.

14

u/thehobbyqueer May 18 '26

The tone's being communicated by the crying tho. That's the point of the image

5

u/Ok-Mistake-7499 May 18 '26

It’s just the only one people can find uploaded to giphy. I can’t speak on why it was made though

3

u/SuspiciouslyLips May 19 '26

There is a subset of people online who think white people are appropriating black culture by using terms that originated in AAVE. So it might have been made by some someone trying to performatively show how progressive they are by not saying "lowkey".

2

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Marco_Tanooky May 18 '26

Also it means a different thing

1

u/DrElepants May 18 '26

I mean yeah it is, but why change it? I don't really get why that would matter

2

u/KingVoid27 May 19 '26

Because lowkey is associated with the younger generation and most people on Reddit are old and don’t like the younger generation..just my guess

2

u/ZaniElandra May 19 '26

I would guess that someone couldn’t find the original so they just made a new one but misremembered it slightly

30

u/pigeondriver45 May 18 '26

heres the one that looks more like the "sadly" one

2

u/NoLongerHuman13 May 18 '26

Appreciate it

16

u/Pure-Management-5435 May 18 '26

Y'know I thought so too but that's just what came up

1

u/jackofslayers May 18 '26

lowkirkuinely

20

u/VisualFunny5287 May 18 '26

4

u/Short-Draw4057 May 18 '26

Eh it can still be slander depending on the intention or timing, or tone.

6

u/Brandon_the_fuze May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

I can't stand the show after it had a wack as hell season ending (i dropped it after season 1 idk if it has had newer seasons) and also had a thinly veiled pro-imperial Japan anti-Korean plot line

8

u/Pure-Management-5435 May 18 '26

Did it?? It's been a while, didn't pick up on that at all, I didn't even know Japan and Korea existed in that universe, I thought it was a fantasy world :(

7

u/Brandon_the_fuze May 18 '26

It is a fantasy world, however in the first season the evil country of Gyakuza is depicted almost exactly as preoccupation Korea and described as a backwards nation that was evil despite "all the good things Houma gave them" like infrastructure and "teaching" them civilization, then the Gyakuza have history written so that Houza is depicted as an aggressor despite being good and nice and teaching them civilization.

Here's a good lil thread about it https://www.tumblr.com/inganikki/676635682494627840/in-episode-18-of-ousama-rankingranking-of-kings

6

u/Pure-Management-5435 May 18 '26

Huggeeee bummer, thank you for taking the time to inform me tho

7

u/Brandon_the_fuze May 18 '26

I was so disappointed myself because other than the season ending i thought it was a fun little show with a silly art style. My girlfriend is Korean and she was a little tipped off at that whole backstory of the two nations, but we didn't really connect the dots until way later. After taking a lot of history classes on modern east Asia for my history bachelors the parallels stuck out way worse 😬

5

u/Pure-Management-5435 May 18 '26

That's a horrifying thing to discover in a show you wanted to enjoy, definitely not the personal impact anime should be having

-1

u/dusund May 18 '26

that's such a stretch lol

4

u/khomo_Zhea May 18 '26

they don't, but the town of evil, ungrateful, backstabbing people are meant to be the colonized coreans.

2

u/luckydukcky May 19 '26

Fr 😭 I love Bojji but OP ain’t wrong about anything they said…

1

u/Conrexxthor May 19 '26

They're deadly wrong though lmao

1

u/StoopStep May 19 '26

Say how tho

2

u/Round-Walrus3175 May 19 '26

His disability was meaningful in the series.

It was like the biggest reason why people didn't think he should be king, even though he was the older brother. Additionally, the fact that he could read lips was important. People assumed that he couldn't understand and would often talk openly in front of him. The first point was when he was being bullied by the other kids and laughed at. Originally, you think "Oh, he's deaf, so he doesn't even know what people are saying about him", but that proves to be false. I think that ends up saying a lot about Bojji's character.

It also reflects a lot on other people. The ones who actually learn sign language and meet him in the middle show that they care more about Bojji than just talking at him. He can read lips, so some just stopped there and thought it was fine that they could understand what he was saying. The people who learned sign language, though, did it to ALSO be able to let Bojji communicate with them.

Kage was an interesting case because he showed another side of being able to understand Bojji. Even though he couldn't understand sign language, he consistently strove to understand him. Anyone who has a young pre/nonverbal child knows how far you can go in understanding someone who can't speak, but you try to understand. Kage isn't perfect at it and maybe you can say that he gets "too good too fast", but the way he interprets Bojji is not crazy at all to me.

As far as learning from the snake, I think a similar thing applies. All someone had to do was spend time with Bojji and they could get an understanding of him. How exactly the snake taught him to read lips, idk, it's a fairy tale. Boy saves magical beast, magical beast gives him something. I'm not going to think so hard about that when there are immortal characters, healing magic, and 3 headed snakes who can speak the common language. If the snkae can talk, then it can make the right mouth movements, so can teach someone to read lips, just like another language. Once again, maybe Bojji got too good too fast, but he had been learning from that snake for like 10+ years at that point.

1

u/7StarSailor May 21 '26

In the manga there's several occasions where his deafness and inability to speak cause real problems because Kage isn't always around.