I would say it’s more like an accent difference, we just tend to sign a little differently but not too much that we wouldn’t recognize what they’re talking about.
The name signs are usually assigned to a person by another person. But there are cases of people coming up with their own name signs if they do not like the original. I did that a long time ago when I did not like my name sign so I changed it to a sign very similar to Mexico because of my ancestry.
See… reading through this post has kind of made me hestitant now.
My original plan was to include points in the story where the PC can become disabled. The disabilities I had planned were:
Mutism (Tongue cut out to keep secrets)
Missing Limbs (Legs and hands so damaged by beatings that they have to be amputated)
Chronic Pain (from being beaten for messing up)
Half-blindness (Blinded for seeing something they shouldn’t have)
Whole Blindness (See above)
See, my WIP is set in a fantasy ancient china (soft fantasy, the only fantasy element so far has been floaty scarfs and a charm that makes it so you can’t get pregnant at all or impregnate anyone) and these kinds of wounds could have happened on servants in that time period. The PC is playing a servant in the imperial palace.
Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t do this at all, because honestly… I don’t have any personal experience with these disabilities, and while I can do research on them… the fact of the matter is that these things happening to the PC exist only to add drama and stakes to the story. My plan had been to research and make sure that these disabilities were felt in the story, that they affected the PC and the story.
But should I? If done well, I think it’d be good rep… but now I’m worried I won’t do it well.
You’ll have to do a lot of research - and in particular, you’ll have to find accounts of people who acquired their disabilities later in life, which is a very different experience from being born with one. You should also try to find sensitivity readers with firsthand experience as close to your character’s as possible who can tell you what you’ve done right and what needs to improve.
CoG won’t publish it unless you have sensitivity readers for each kind of disability. They cost hundreds of dollars each. Writing stuff about minorities that makes the world better rather than worse is HARD, especially if you’re not part of that minority.
And be careful not to imply (eg through a choice that effectively selects the type of disability) that the various disabilities your PC can have are equivalent to one another.
Genuine question: What would these options add to your story? What kind of experiences do you intend to portray? And what exactly are the stakes here for your game? Pick the wrong choice and get punished (= become disabled)? Just from your description alone, it sounds like a potential setup for a lot of suffering and misery.
If you are passionate enough about the idea, I would suggest that you focus on one specific disability first, research it, and then get feedback on your writing from the right people. If that turns out well, maybe think about adding more disabilities. If it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board or throw the idea out altogether.
There’s rarely any kind of rep that’s considered to be good and flawless across the board. Something that person A finds deeply cathartic about a story can be totally offensive to person B, even though both are members of the same minority group. Personally, for me, the most pertinent question would be in this case: “As a community outsider, what value does my story have for members of this particular community?”
I don’t think every game with disability as a gameplay feature has to represent real people with that disability. Fear and Hunger comes to mind, where the dismemberment just adds challenge to the gameplay (and suffering and misery is the point).
Value is a very personal thing, sometimes we find it in places that weren’t intended to have any value aside from ‘telling a story’ and ‘having fun’. I definitely wouldn’t expect any singular person to decide what’s valuable for the entire community.
Whiskey Four is coming out soon…ish. It’s very well written and MC has a prosthetic hand and spine (lower body paralysis when battery runs out).
This is really helpful for me to think about! Thank you so much for your response.
TBH, I thought of putting it in because A) it’s pretty common in the kinds of stories I’m writing for the main character or those around them to suffer physical punishment or poisonings or murder attempts, and I thought that I should make it somewhat realistic that these could potentially really hurt someone. And that such hurt could be permanent.
Thanks for this recc! I’ll have to check it out.
Worth noting that all disabilities are severely under-represented in most media. Something like 10% of people have a disability of some kind, versus only 2% or so of fictional characters.
Which is a problem.
I almost got into it with someone on Reddit who said it was understandable that there aren’t more ROs with disabilities because it’s unlikely that most authors even know someone with a disability.
Most people do not realize they know people with disabilities.
All of this is very, very true, which is a part of why I wanted to add disability into my game. But, after realizing I was only putting it in to add drama and consequences to player actions, I shelved the idea until I could do more proper research on it. The fact that it was my intention to dramatize the disabilities, spoke to me of an issue. Specifically with the fact that I had no idea how someone might live and thrive with these disabilities in the era I chose as my setting, because prosthetics and surgeries and the kind of accomodation needed to thrive with them didn’t exist back then, and were in fact, Actively Discouraged, as disability was seen more or less as a failing of morals.
So I worry that if I add the disabilities into the game, it’ll be “bad rep”. Which, I know “any rep is better than no rep” but… Like, I don’t want anyone to feel shitty, playing my game, yknow? I want it to be difficult and I want it to be challenging, but I don’t want it to feel like a death sentence.
I suppose, since my setting is also a soft-magic system, I could add in disability assistance (prosthetics, etc) using that as an excuse… but I feel almost like that would cheapen the setting. then again, I’ve already added in societal stretching for nonbinary individuals that didn’t exist in the setting in the first place.
I dunno. I’m still mulling it all over.
Far too many people consistently fail to realise that not all disablements are visual to an outside observer. Many acquired debilities fall into the “invisible” category and both lay and medical people are not educated enough on any of them.
Late to this thread, but I think you’re spot on to be leery about this idea.
Even though it’s absolutely true that people in ancient China suffered disfiguring accidents and other kinds of severe injury that could lead to disabilities, if those are the only types of disability in your story—especially if they’re injuries the player receives based on their choices—I think you’d run the risk of implying that disabled people are always damaged and/or that disability is a punishment.
I don’t think either of these is your intent, btw, and I’m definitely not suggesting it’s what you believe or want to say! But I think if “wounds” = “disability” is the only narrative element that includes disability, it might be what people take away from the game.
Have you thought about other ways you could include disability in your game? At least for me, I think including background characters who have disabilities without making a big deal out of it is at least as important as making it a major part of the player’s gameplay experience.
People with disabilities that weren’t caused by some kind of truama certainly existed in classical China, in any case, and are attested to in all sorts of stories, paintings, histories, etc. Admittedly, many of those are… not great, positive examples of representation, to say the least. Part of the problem in China is that things like Confucianism and some interpretations of Buddhism and Taoism essentially blamed people for their disabilities.
There are also some “stock representations” of disabled people, like blind masseuses, where you’d have to be careful not to imply that it’s the only thing blind people can do–as well as others like blind fortunetellers, which trade in what today would be considered harmful stereotypes of the “mystical disabled person” variety. (Blind people were thought to be good fortune tellers because their lack of “vision” in this world meant they could “see” the mystical worlds–would not recommend taking this approach!)
In fact, I found an article (which I’m not going to link here because the way it’s written uses extremely offensive ableist language throughout, unfortunately!) which suggests that disaibilites of some form or another were more common than ancient texts and histories imply, because they just weren’t considered that remarkable. The article mentions that one Zhou period general had dwarfism, for example, and that the only reason we know this is because a single historical text mentions it in the context of someone insulting him–all the other texts which talk about him don’t consider it worth mentioning it at all.
So I don’t think it would be a huge stretch to include people with disabilities as part of the background fabric of the game’s world. They seem to have just been an understood, unremarkable part of life in ancient China. In fact, even prosthetics are recorded as existing in China at least as far back as 300BC. (To be honest, I think it’s true that people with disabilities fit in any setting no matter the time period or location. People with disabilities have always existed, and not in that harmful-stereotype “they were doomed to die!!!” kind of way.)
Some examples that might not seem out of place could be a fellow servant who was born mute but communicates so well with eloquent gestures and facial expressions that everyone always knows exactly what she means; a visiting aristocrat with a hunched back that nobody seems bothered by or even mentions (again, this one is historically attested as a thing in ancient China!); a concubine who has arthritis and can’t do too much physical work without suffering from pain but is otherwise indistinguishable from her peers.
Etcetera.
These don’t have to be huge drawing-attention-to-it moments. I think the trick (like with any kind of representation!) is to make disabilities of various kinds seem normal–because they are normal–rather than focusing on the “difference” that marks disabled people as somehow “other” or whatever.
Phew. This is a lot of text! I do want to add, though, that I hope this doesn’t feel like an attack (either on you personally or anyone else in this thread!). This stuff is super complicated. But it really can make a positive difference to people to see themselves included in media as people rather than as stereotypes or nonexistent, so I think it’s worth thinking about and trying to do!
One last brief comment (lolol) is that I’ve recently been reading about the social model of disability. Basically, the idea that it’s not a person’s body (or mind) that makes them “disabled” so much as it is the fact that society is not set up to include them or accomodate their needs.
That link has more information about that concept. It’s not without criticisms, but I feel like it’s a more interesting–or more positive–way to approach representation, because it forces us to think about the interactions of people with their world, rather than just viewing those with disabilities as in some way inferior.
For the record, I have rheumatoid arthritis, although I don’t consider myself as speaking from within the disabled community in any way, and also have anxiety and depression–but mental health / neurodiversity stuff is its own lovely can of worms!
ETA: I’d be happy to send you find and send you some relevant articles or other sources if that woudl be helpful! I’m a research librarian so it’s usually pretty easy for me to find things. 
casual/backgrounds references to diverse characters is honestly not a bad way of making your work more inclusive without leaning on tokenism. Stewart has already kinda knocked it out of the park when it comes to suggestions about working things into the old Chinese context, but it’s absolutely noticable in any kind of work when there’s been an effort made to be representative.
A character has a walking cane, another is described as using a screen reader (obviously not a historic setting, but still).
Any rep isn’t better than no rep imo; bad rep suuucks and leaves a really bad feeling. However, the rep doesn’t have to be huge component for it to feel meaningful. I can certainly speak as to sitting up and being like ‘oh??’ when a character’s adhd symptoms are mentioned, even if it’s brief. Though, is is even better if your diverse characters are more important to the novel. The greater the role, the better it feels, just of course, the more attention and care the writer must pay.
Bad rep can actually be harmful. Even beyond making people feel bad, it can promote misconceptions and damaging stereotypes. If I never read another thriller in which the writer attempts to inject sensitivity and nuance by making the scary bad guy some kind of generic mentally ill instead of just evil, it’ll still be too soon.
And I do so love these moments; it’s surprising because you don’t ever expect it to happen to you, but that recognition for a trait you’d all but given up on being mentioned is… very nice.
Having disabilities occur due to injuries/other external factors is a very interesting thing to explore, but as others have said, it’s… a little eh if ALL it’s for is shock/dread factor. I have a character of mine who goes through multiple awful ordeals, and by the end of it is almost unrecognizable from the start (I don’t just mean they’re sad and depressed now, I mean they LITERALLY have different features (mutationsss!!), and have been through arcs that would have been impossible were they still on earth, so when they come back, their loved ones have to reconcile with this new but also familiar character.) But a lot of the would-be story is them getting these lasting and permanent reminders of stuff and just… finding ways to work around it. Surviving, thriving with all of these things. It’s harder, yes, but they don’t ever give up hope or stop continuing, out of spite (“You think all of these things can stop me? Every attempt to distance me from myself only makes me stronger etc. etc.”) but also out of love. The character connects and makes friends through the disabilities, and there’s a lot of learning about how to navigate them (they get to make cool gadgets about it, which is one of my favorite things!!). There’s more there than just angst. (now if only I could make it into a coherent novel…)
I dunno how common this is, but from what I’ve seen of me and my friends, having any kind of disability isn’t just. Like. A factor or trait about yourself. It’s very entwined in who you are and what you’re able to do and what you pursue in life. It’s kind of a part of your identity as a person, sometimes, so for disabilities that happen later in life, exploring how the character views themself/the world differently now is interesting to explore.
I rambled a bit, but TLDR; you can have the disability happen and have it be horrifying and painful etc etc etc, but if you’re to do so, maybe also showcase the more mundane things about it. Give it some humanity that isn’t just “bad thing happened :(”, yknow?
I understand what you are saying here, but I have a couple of cautionary thoughts on this.
When writing, making sure not to give the message that the disability is purely a limiter is a necessity.
Sometimes pursuing something in life is a matter of figuring out a different way, not accepting that a disability defines what you are able to do and what you pursue in life.
A disability can be entwined in who you are without being the dominant or controlling factor defining who you are.
I find many authors are eager to explore themes of this nature, so they keep going back to the well and each time they do, everything else that makes up the character fades further into the background and even disappears.
Honestly, I’d say that the last point is a bit more nuanced. As a disabled person whose disability (autism) really truly defines who I am and what I’m capable of, I’d say it’s just as big a part of me as my personality or my eye color. It’s there, it’s not going away, and I can cover it up for a short bit but it will still be there.
My disability makes up who I am just as much as anything else I can’t change about me does, and it can be that way for a disabled character as well. As long as the disabled character isn’t only ever talking about their disability, it can make up a lot of what they do talk about.
THATS EXACTLY WHAT I DONT WANT. And why I’m trying to figure out whether I want to put that system in at all.
Yes, this, exactly, is my problem. Servants who worked in the palace wouldn’t be hired if they had obvious disabilities, at least not IRL. And for the setting to make sense, I worry that if I just go “Oh yeah, no, they relaxed these standards” it’d slowly break the elasticity of the setting, like a rubberband stretched around something too big.
These examples are AMAZING. I wouldn’t have considered these… TAT Thank you so much! I’m gonna see if I can find some others too, because yeah, there should be places I can put in some rep, SOMEWHERE!
It most certainly did not feel like an attack to me, at all.
PLEASE DO, OH MY GOD THAT WOULD BE SO HELPFUL
SAME.
See, this is what I kind of hoped to imply with the disability system I had planned. Having the PC find ways to thrive and live With their new disability sounded fun, and an interesting take, since most of the hero/ines of Harem drama novels and Xianxia/Wuxia/etc novels don’t EVER have those kinds of disabilities. I can think of ONE off the top of my head, and he gets cured.
This would be what I’m aiming for, honestly.
Your cautionary thoughts are intriguing, and really good advice!
This is a really good point. My disabilities do the same, and I suppose we just have to try and figure out how to balance that narrative.