When Blind Is Forever
I used to think there would be a magical cure for my blindness. I don’t remember this, but my mother assures me it’s true.
Browsing: tropes
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Discussion: Romanticizing Mental Illness
Romanticization is a common element of mental illness narratives, including many in the YA category; what kind of message does that send?
Happy Endings and Overcoming Autism
Autistic people learn, change, and cope like anyone else. However, when a character is autistic, many authors appear to see only one route for character growth: effectively making the character less autistic.
The Extra-Special Autistic
An exceptionalist narrative might, at first glance, seem like a positive or even empowering one. But, as it always goes when it comes to depictions of disability, the situation is much more complicated than that-
Narrative Devices and the Autism Voice
The “autism voice”—characterized by narrative devices and a detached character voice—tends to portray autistic characters as unworldly, hyper-rational blank slates defined purely by a series of unusual behaviors.
The Mystical Disability Trope
At its core, the Mystical Disabled Person trope is about a disabled character—frequently mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and/or blind—with some sort of unusual ability. This trope is varied, flexible, and depressingly common.
The Beautiful Tragedy
What’s so wrong with the Beautiful Tragedy trope? Why is it wrong to emphasize the supposed irony of a person with beautiful eyes who can’t see or a good-looking person “confined to a wheelchair” (another horrible, tragedy evoking phrase) or the like?
The Trope of Curing Disability
For disabled characters, being cured is a common trope. What’s more, in most of these narratives, the characters are cured because they’re better than they were at the start of the book: kinder, gentler, braver. And finally, finally, they’re normal and whole.
Review: Viral Nation by Shaunta Grimes
The description for this book uses the phrase “brilliant but autistic” to describe its main character, and that’s where our conflicted feelings about Viral Nation start.
“Don’t Worry, It’s Fine When It Happens to Crazy People!”
When we see institutions in YA, we usually see them in one of two contexts: a “sane” person wrongly incarcerated in one, or a spooky (often old, sometimes abandoned but haunted by ghosts) asylum filled with “crazy people.”