Disclamer: I use the word “disability” here not to imply that these conditions are 100% a blight upon the written character but more so in the way that these characters might have the need to be written quite differently from typical characters and may have different challenges which can be written about
So I had this thought today, I was wondering about how diverse vanilla fe and fe hacks are in terms of writing diversity disability wise. I think we can safely say that vanilla fe and hacks have been very diverse cast wise in terms of gender, sexuality and race however how diverse is it when it comes to this other thing.
It’s probably easier if I throw out an example first, Lute is often headcanonned by the fandom to be neurodivergent, her supports are written very differently from other characters in fe8, for example this C support with arthur
Long text
- Lute: Hm… I wonder if… Oh, I see…
- Artur: What are you doing, Lute?
- Lute: Oh! I was just observing this chemida beetle.
- Artur: You haven’t changed at all, have you, Lute?
- Lute: What do you mean?
- Artur: You spent most of your time sequestered in your room, studying your books. On the rare occasion you went outside, you were paralyzed with fascination.
- Lute: Of course! There are so many fascinating things to be learned from nature! There are a great many books out there, and I have read most of them, of course. But I’ve found that what is written can differ greatly from how things truly are. Take this chemida beetle, for example. I’ve been reading from “The Glossary of Falibrian Entomology” lately. According to the glossary, their wings fall off once they reach maturity. However, I have just found an adult beetle whose wings still work perfectly! Exceptions do exist to the rules my books outline. This is a rare specimen. I wonder, should we take it back with us?
- Artur: Sigh… I hope this isn’t another of your pranks.
- Lute: My…pranks?
- Artur: Do you remember when I loaned you my copy of “Lux Aeterna”? You replaced my bookmark with the tail of a sedgel lizard. You scared ten years off my life, I swear it!
- Lute: Did I do that?
- Artur: And! Knowing full well that I have a…mild…fear of spiders, you caught a small army of them and unleashed them in my room!
- Lute: I thought that if I immersed you in the thing you feared, maybe you might be able to overcome your fear entirely! And I went to a lot of trouble trying to catch those spiders!
- Artur: …Why would you do that?
- Lute: Well, I did get a bit of a kick out of the experience myself. Why? Did it bother you?
- Artur: YES! Oh, don’t worry about it. At least you did it because you cared about me, right? I’ll just accept it as the best gesture of kindness you can manage, Lute.
we can see that she has difficulties reading social ques and talks about a specific special interest. Now the term of “disability” for neurodivergence is a bit iffy nowadays, but I’m also asking this question about other types of characters, how would a hack for example write a person that is hard of hearing, Hard of sight (and not like blind swordsmans thing where they’re basically daredevil), perhaps you have a paraplegic cavalier/troub or maybe dyslexic mage.
The key challenge here is ofc to represent these characters as fairly and relatably as possible. There’s an inherent value in writing these characters as characters in battle, it’s empowering yet at the same time you also need to write the real and unique challenges that people who have these conditions face in their character. A blind swordsman is cool but it’s not exactly the closest representation to how a real hard of sight person’s experience.
Anyway rant over, now to the question. My question is if you have experience with these conditions, how would you like to see a representation be written in the series or in hacks
or
are there already good representations in vanilla fe or fe hacks and if so how are they written?
I feel like there’s a lot of posibility for failure and success here, making fe stories more diverse and interesting but also IF they’re written badly it can be a huge problem. Still I’d like to see it more in fe as a whole, I don’t think we have a prominent deaf character in fe for example