The Walls That Contain Us: Transition, change, and I Want to Be a Wall
Thoughts on name changes, transition, and how Shirono Honami’s I Want To Be a Wall is a reminder that we can shape our own barriers and boundaries.
disability and neurodivergence Tag
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The Day I Became a God and the mistreatment of disabled people
The Day I Became a God, while not featuring representation of a specific, real-world disability, features a lot of insidious ableism in its last few episodes. This final arc of the show perpetuates a lot of harmful ideas around how those who are disabled should be treated, and the agency that they often do not have, serving as a painfully apt example of the clichés and stereotypes narratives about disability often fall into.
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How My Brain is Different allows the neurodivergent to tell their own stories
When manga author Monzusu realized how poorly the general population understood neurodivergence, she sought out the stories of ordinary people with experiences similar to her own, eventually turning some of them into a memoir manga. In doing so, she offered neurodivergent people like her a rare chance to tell their own stories in their own words.
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Overcoming Barriers: Mobility limitation; “inspirational” disability; and Josee, the Tiger, and the Fish
Josee, the Tiger, and the Fish, a 2020 adaptation of a 1987 story of the same name, is certainly an uplifting and inspirational film, but its treatment of its central character usurps this concept. Instead of being saintly, Josee is a rounded character who works to achieve her dream of living as an artist.
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What Role Are You Playing? Communication, queerness, and neurodivergence in Yuri is My Job!
Miscommunication as narrative conflict is often linked with contrivance and bad writing—and no genre faces this criticism more than romance. That’s what makes Yuri is My Job! so refreshing. In the process of building a will-they-won’t-they story, it explores the gendered, neurotypical, and heteronormative expectations that are built into social interaction.
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Reading The Duke of Death and His Maid as disability allegory
The Duke of Death and His Maid takes what could be a cheap device for titillation and, intentionally or not, transforms it into something far more emotionally powerful. When looking at the show as a story with metaphors about disability and navigating disability in that space, it becomes difficult to remove the fanservice without making the story weaker.
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The Orbital Children’s Rejection of Ecofascist Ideas
The Orbital Children rejects the ecofascist idea that humans need to be controlled and culled in the name of someone’s idea of “humanity” and demands we imagine a better future that everyone gets to be a part of.
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A Double Edged Sword: Reconsidering Moe Through a Neurodiverse Lens
Many criticisms of moe characteristics stem from the idea that these girl characters are created to be appealing to male viewers, and therefore cannot be relatable to any real woman in the audience. However, so-called moe series have yielded several characters that are extremely relatable to the neurodiverse female experience.
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ADHD as Investigation: How Hyouka’s Chitanda carves space for herself as a leader
ADHD is often maligned as strictly a lack of the willpower necessary to concentrate, or a simple inability to ignore distractions. But through her investigations, Chitanda exhibits behaviors characteristic of ADHD that contribute to, rather than hamper, her ability to lead herself and others.
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Thinking Outside the Circle: Accessibility and education in Witch Hat Atelier
Using its “magical school” premise, Witch Hat Atelier explores diversity among students and argues for the importance of accessibility throughout society, but especially in education. With supportive mentors and a focus on individual accommodation, anyone really can wield their own kind of magic.
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The intersection of queer and Deaf identity in I Hear the Sunspot
As a long-time reader of manga, I always found the medium to be a means of escape to fantastical worlds. Yet, there remained a disconnect between me and the stories I was reading. Discovering I Hear the Sunspot filled that absence with its portrayal of the specific reality of being both gay and Deaf.
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Perfect World, Disability Narratives, and Writing Outside Your Experience
Mainstream media tends to over-dramatize or romanticise disability to make the intended able-bodied audience feel pity or inspiration. While I can’t say Perfect World completely escapes these tropes, Aruga still strives to make a narrative that incorporates experiences from the disabled community.
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Disability and Power Through the Cyborg in One Punch Man
Genos’ characterization explores media representations that contribute to discussions about disability through negotiations of humanization and pathways to power. Although Genos retains able-bodied functions, he shows experiences associated with disability through his anomalous body and how technology interacts with the disabled body today.
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Playing My Song: Queer autistic representation in Given
I related to given‘s Mafuyu in a way that was different from how I’d ever connected with a character before. He was queer. He was coping with loss. He was socially awkward. And, most importantly, he was autistic-coded to the max.
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The Demons Are in the Details: Disability representation in Dororo
Dororo is a complicated work to parse from a disability studies perspective. The story is set somewhere in the early- to mid-fifteenth century, was written by “godfather of manga” Osamu Tezuka in the 1960s, has been told in multiple mediums in the ensuing decades, and was recently adapted into an anime for the second time in 2019. These disparate time periods have created a jumble of disability representation that ranges between accurate, inaccurate, and downright confounding.
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The Inclusive World: Positive representation of disability in Natsume’s Book of Friends and Masamune-kun’s Revenge
In an inclusive world, everyone would understand people with disabilities as a valuable source of social diversity. This world would be materially and socially accessible and barrier-free. This world does not yet exist, but there are ways to imagine what it would look like.
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In Defense of Resasuke: Autism-coding and ableism in Aggretsuko
Aggretsuko’s seemingly simple yet charming premise got me on board when it first aired, but now I have mixed feelings about it. There is one problem with this otherwise awesome and progressive anime, and it has to do with the heavily autism-coded Resasuke.
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BanG Dream! and the reality of being a young caregiver
When I was six years old, my mother had a heart attack, thrusting me onto a new path in my life that I didn’t understand the importance of until I was older. In fact, it never really bothered me to care for my mother. It was just a thing that was understood. I didn’t know any different.
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Mitty the Person, Mitty the Cursed: Made in Abyss and the paradoxical representation of disability
While both Nanachi and Mitty underwent the dramatic transformation from human to Hollow, they are constructed with perceived differences of ability. Ultimately, this leads to Mitty’s life being depicted as having far less value than Nanachi’s.
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From Yandere Girlfriends to Social Anxiety: Handling mental illness in The Future Diary and A Silent Voice
Mental illness is a part of life for many people, yet it’s still a taboo topic that has a lot of stigma attached to it. Often times in fiction it’s portrayed through a “crazy” person, and there haven’t really been a lot of realistic discussions about it. Anime is no exception.
