How Ascendance of a Bookworm depicts the challenges and triumphs of chronic illness
Ascendence of a Bookworm depicts both the societal forces shaping the lives of people with chronic illness and how accessible community can help ameliorate them.
disability and neurodivergence Tag
Results-
-
Reading Violet Evergarden as an autistic woman
While it’s not necessarily overtly intended, one reading of Violet Evergarden is that the series explores the notion that the ways that empathy can be expressed by neurodivergent women are not inferior to those expressed by neurotypical individuals.
-
Press Start to Begin Again: Mental Illness, Adulthood, and Recovery of an MMO Junkie
We might have only one life but the chances we have are limitless. Thankfully, Recovery of an MMO Junkie demonstrates that there’s infinite ways to meander the path of adulthood, no matter what life throws at you.
-
A World That Can’t See You: Otherness and disability in Tsukihime
When thinking of “disability representation” a dark urban fantasy and a former eroge like Tsukihime may not be the first thing that comes to mind, but its unfiltered depictions of Shiki’s experience with his curse, and its overall themes of otherness, isolation, and perspective speak profoundly to the marginalized experience.
-
Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon’s “Electric Soldier Porygon”
As an Epileptic, I’ve been very outspoken about my opinions on the increased use of strobe lighting effects in American cartoons. Yet people have accused me of being a hypocrite: why do I continue to love Pokémon? My response often surprises people. That, in my personal opinion, morally speaking, the animators were not responsible for what happened. That Porygon was, in fact, innocent.
-
Attention to the letter: Lettering and Deaf representation in A Sign of Affection
It’s clear that Yuki’s the one we’re following along this journey, without the assumption that an able-bodied reader needs to have everything about her disability painstakingly explained to them. As well as the storytelling structure itself, this is achieved through suu Morishita’s ingenious use of lettering, wherein the format and function of the words on the page themselves allow the reader to experience the world as Yuki does: thus allowing this to be her story, told with her own words, and of her own experiences.
-
How Another Code: Recollection rewrote its villain in an empathetic way
Among the changes that this remake made to its source material, the most personally striking was the radical difference in one character: Ryan Gray, a neurodivergent-coded antagonist originally presented as an unambiguous villain, but reinvented as a nuanced, sympathetic figure.
-
Nagata Kabi and the Mundane Pain of Sickness; or, That Time My Body Broke and I Had To Figure Out How to Keep Going
Nagata Kabi’s sixth autobiographical entry is a story about what happens when your life falls apart and you can no longer escape. That last bit is what this article is about: falling apart.
-
Crunchyroll fails to meet industry standards for Closed Captioning
Despite having a near-complete monopoly on the anime streaming industry in 2024, Crunchyroll does not offer closed captioning for the majority of its English dubs.
-
Cyborgs and Identity in Cyberpunk, from Ghost in the Shell to Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Identity is a complicated subject; the ways we can reflect, parse, and better try to know ourselves are nearly infinite, while the ways we can convey that to others effectively are not. Usually, we are limited in how we present by the economic and social pressures of our society. The cyborg challenges its fans to ask themselves: if what makes us people isn’t as concrete as flesh and blood, then what other unshakable, unchangeable truths about ourselves have we been wrong about?
-
SHY, Stardust, disability, and the double empathy problem
Shy’s embrace of a Double Empathy Problem framing reveals larger tensions in the struggle for autistic self-determination, both allowing a deeper understanding of the process of Stardust’s self-conception and also revealing the limits of the mainstream culture’s understanding of “empathy.”
-
Many Ways to be a Warrior: Illness, martial arts, and seeing myself in Kojirō Sasaki
By watching how Record of Ragnarok told the origins of Kojirō Sasaki, I reminisced about my time wrestling. The samurai would lose his matches; but Kojirō uses his defeats to study and learn the way of the sword, playing the matches and possible outcomes in his mind, analyzing how adversaries move and think.
-
BL Manga Artist Aiba Kyoko on Industry Demands, Artistic Growth, and Writing About Young Carers
We were able to sit down with Aiba for a gregarious and sadly brief conversation to discuss writing relationship dynamics, greater awareness of LGBTQ+ issues, and her latest work.
-
You’re Already Doing Your Best: Healin’ Good Pretty Cure and chronic illness
In a season about environmentalism and illness, Nodoka is in remission from a years-long infection and doesn’t want anyone to suffer the way she did. While she’s not quite depicted as disabled or chronically ill in the show itself, her arc focuses on recovery from a chronic illness in ways that can be similar to managing one.
-
Forcing Yourself for Love: Hotaru, Sailor Moon, and “Overcoming Disability” Narratives
Hotaru’s story represents the tension between our desire for comforting narratives of disabled people healing and the reality of disabled life as shaped by capitalism and the limits of our bodies.
-
Akiba Maid War and the rare representation of disabled joy
No amount of blood splattering across the screen or sudden, emotional character deaths hit me quite as hard as the post-credits scene of the finale. It took just fifty seconds to make me squeal out loud and cement Akiba Maid War as one of the most impactful shows of 2022.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
