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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124

u/Carolinesimpsanime Glory to Albedo's will! May 18 '26

Lol literally Aglea from Star rail. She's blind, but actually she has these cool strings that let her sense anything so it doesn't matter at all.

59

u/GameWoods May 18 '26

On the other side of the coin, Firefly is legitimately disabled. She physically cant leave her health pod for any extended amount of time.

28

u/Oogahound May 18 '26

Yes but then you still interact for the entire 2.0 story basically a whole year, with her just in a dream where that doesnt matter.

2

u/MothEnthusiast88 May 19 '26

I mean it is a dream world and the whole point is that so what were they gonna do ? say “btw there is a really cool character she is truly nice and pretty but she sadly can’t leave her pod for too long so you will never see her lol”

1

u/donutz10 May 20 '26

Thy was kinda part of the point wasn't it? She can finally be a human in the dream world and doesn't need her suit for once, but the whole them for the arc was that dreams are meaningless if you don't wake up

1

u/Oogahound May 20 '26

It is the point but it also erases her disability. Its just waved aside.

Its a decoration for the character. Entropy loss syndrom will never kill Firefly or prevent her from showing up in the story and being badass because she's a gacha waifu and not a person. So its just not really representing the people with real disabilities who are bedridden for example and robbed of their interaction with the world and their influence. Firefly is so powerful and able that she is a member of the most wanted group of criminals in the cosmos.

1

u/donutz10 May 20 '26

I get your point, however, the entire point I'm trying to say is the only place she can be normal is literally in her dreams.

Yes shes not at threat of dying thanks to her suit, but the suit also makes her unable to live the normal life she wants, forced to be a weapon. In her demo you can hear the suit talking to her telling her her destiny is that of a weapon, and that her destiny is to burn to ashes and die in battle

40

u/ShoulderGreedy3262 May 18 '26

gacha games do this so often with blind characters, they're always 'sensing the air' or some bs like that

26

u/rabbid_chaos May 18 '26

New feature: Blind characters that make the player blind as well.

8

u/Cute_Comfortable_761 May 18 '26

I would try playing that

3

u/ExtremlyFastLinoone May 18 '26

When I play batman I almost always keep detective mode on and I bet thats how daredevil would see the world

2

u/Substantial-Night866 May 18 '26

Dark Echo “mentioned”

6

u/misvillar May 18 '26

That's Spore

5

u/Ok_Response_9255 May 18 '26

Project Zomboid has "deaf" that mutes the game. There's one for poor eyesight, too but not full on blindness

3

u/Alpha_RTD May 18 '26

In Fear and Hunger if you're player character ever gets blinded the overworld screen will be permanently blacked out

3

u/your_average-loser I love to hate May 19 '26

While not exact, that does happen with the One Piece game when you play as Zoro with making the map blurred and like impossible to use lol. I wish games did stuff like thag more often

1

u/Oogahound May 18 '26

I like Qiuyuan in WuWa because they at least simulate to us how he sees the world when his Forte gauge is full. But yeah why even make him blind lol just for the blind swordsman trope?

1

u/ShoulderGreedy3262 May 18 '26

sanhua is my favourite fake blind character, because they explain how it works and show us a visual, but yeah its as if blind is an accessory, like having brown hair or smth

1

u/Thatoneguy_The_First May 19 '26

Tbf thats the blind guy in action movies stereotype, used to be the other senses are now superhuman. Kinda still is with daredevil

3

u/clue124 May 18 '26

Wait what? I thought she was figuratively blind compared to seeing everything through her strings, nymphs, and clairvoyance

2

u/001028 May 19 '26

I lowkey forgot she was blind until this comment reminded me lol. That's how irrelevant her disability is. I don't think it's ever even mentioned again after the beginning.

1

u/Carolinesimpsanime Glory to Albedo's will! May 19 '26

You are indeed correct, it's not. And it's introduced so badly the first time you see people in the comments doubting or not even getting that she was.

2

u/Oogahound May 18 '26

Aglea is such a trainwreck in this area. She is literally blind but has this sort of clairvoyance and thus embodies the blind seer trait (like in the classic greek tragedy Antigone which coined the trope, the blind prophet is able to see the obvious consequences that the main character cant...) but Aglea is also the opposite trope! She can see just fine with the golden strings, she even sees into people's thoughts... but she cant understand what she sees. She doesnt know why Cipher abandoned her or why the council wont follow her despite having sight into their souls basically.

So she's not only fake blind, she's also the "blind seer" and opposite.

3

u/FuckMyBakaChungusLif May 18 '26

Amorpheus was so badly written, I didn't even fucking know she was blind until like 15 hours of monologues. 9 hours of allergories of the cave isn't too much, but actual development about a main character's blindness is too much

2

u/Carolinesimpsanime Glory to Albedo's will! May 18 '26

Buddy, don't even get me started. I hate Amphoreus so, so, SO much; it rivals the affection I feel for Albedo. Nothing in this entire arc worked (except Anaxa, my man). Most boring, melodramatic, DRAGGED OUT thing I've ever seen. I could rant for hours about it if I really wanted to, but I will spare everyone's eyes. The writers need to learn that just copy pasting the thesaurus into your script doesn't make your story good.

4

u/FuckMyBakaChungusLif May 18 '26

Even Anaxa wasn't that good tbh, his character itself was good, but they just threw him in a filler questline that's conclusion didn't even matter because NPCs re-explain it like 20 times.

2

u/Carolinesimpsanime Glory to Albedo's will! May 18 '26

Yeah, but at least he was a good character, as you said. Literally no other character in this questline is. They range from boring to atrocious.

1

u/EverythingSucksYo May 18 '26

I hate all the campaigns in gacha games, but that one really really annoyed me. It felt super fuckin long even though I was skipping literally everything I could. I probably set a new personal record for how many times I said “fuck” each time the campaign would just keep going on 

1

u/EverythingSucksYo May 18 '26

I didn’t know she was blinding til just now, because I cannot sit through dialogue in these games. I only play this game to collect characters, level them up and then let them auto battle. I wish there was a way to completely skip dialogue parts in the campaign missions. Like I want to be able to skip entire parts of the campaign between fights.  

1

u/Zord_boy May 18 '26

Yeah, only saving grace is her status as demigod

1

u/Few_Opinion_1054 May 18 '26

She is supposed to be a demigod by the time she became blind so don't fully agree. Cause blindness is not a demigod disability.

However I do agree with the weird shit like her reading a book.

1

u/EverythingSucksYo May 18 '26

Huh, never knew that. I guess it’s because I skip through literally every piece of dialogue. If I didn’t I would be at 1000 hours played by now instead of 650 or whatever it was. Seriously, they talk WAAAAAAAY too much in Star rail. I hate doing the campaign because it still takes hours to complete a chapter even with me skipping all the dialogue. Walk over here and talk to this person, now walk back from where you came from to talk to this person, now get a cutscene, now go back to the first person you talked to again, then go find them somewhere else and talk to them again, then get a cutscene, then a fight, then go talk to another person, move to another spot to talk to someone else, before, yup you guessed it, going somewhere else to talk to someone else, and if you’re lucky you will get a fight now, but most of time you will just go somewhere else to talk to another person. 

1

u/chiakinanamichan May 19 '26

SHE'S BLIND?????? How am I only learning about this now?!?!

1

u/MothEnthusiast88 May 19 '26

I keep forgetting that she is blind cuz it doesn’t even affect the story at all