Communication is key
Dec. 18th, 2013 05:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI’m reading fanfic with involuntary animal transformation. There’s a basically human mind in a tiny cat body now. And as almost always happens, the fic is driving me nuts, because everyone is trying to guess what the tiny cat dude means as if he’s a cat having cat opinions in only body language.
Give him a touchscreen or keyboard!
If that won’t work, make bigger buttons!
Or a bunch of flashcards, or yes and no cards, or something.
Fic treats becoming non-verbal as if it were a unique problem, instead of a common one. Non-verbal and lacking fine manipulators is trickier than being able to write or quickly type, but it’s a thing that happens to actual human people, even abruptly. Animal transformation is a unique method, but the problem is old and the solutions available.
Other fantasy situations bug me the exact same way. I got wound up by someone becoming a ghost because I read it as sudden disability, and all his friends / allies / acquaintances just kind of left him to it, as if wandering around unable to touch anything was just the new normal. I was all, get him a computer that can see or hear him! Hire him an assistant, at least for some of the day! So he can’t pick things up any more, so what? You ignore him now?
I think the problem is that most people don’t think about losing an ability, suddenly or otherwise, so when they do it to a character they act like they have to think up solutions on the spot. Whereas I think about disability a lot, and will think of a transformation in terms of impairments and how they are now disabled, and then there’s whole catalogues and careers of accessability solutions. It’s probably not the most obvious mindset when you’re talking ‘suddenly has paws instead of hands’, but it’s pretty obvious from here, where disability is just a thing that happens.
Or, alternately, I see a lot of fantasy story stuff as basically about disability, because that’s the lens for a lot in my life. And that means that stories the author probably thinks are basically about cats are scored, by me, on how they write about disability. Which they don’t know they’re doing, so they don’t score very high.
To be fair though, it do seem to have properly observed felines.
It’s just not cool watching someone have to communicate in tail mime because their friends keep forgetting there’s a person in there and go straight to the pet shop, not human solutions.
Give him a touchscreen or keyboard!
If that won’t work, make bigger buttons!
Or a bunch of flashcards, or yes and no cards, or something.
Fic treats becoming non-verbal as if it were a unique problem, instead of a common one. Non-verbal and lacking fine manipulators is trickier than being able to write or quickly type, but it’s a thing that happens to actual human people, even abruptly. Animal transformation is a unique method, but the problem is old and the solutions available.
Other fantasy situations bug me the exact same way. I got wound up by someone becoming a ghost because I read it as sudden disability, and all his friends / allies / acquaintances just kind of left him to it, as if wandering around unable to touch anything was just the new normal. I was all, get him a computer that can see or hear him! Hire him an assistant, at least for some of the day! So he can’t pick things up any more, so what? You ignore him now?
I think the problem is that most people don’t think about losing an ability, suddenly or otherwise, so when they do it to a character they act like they have to think up solutions on the spot. Whereas I think about disability a lot, and will think of a transformation in terms of impairments and how they are now disabled, and then there’s whole catalogues and careers of accessability solutions. It’s probably not the most obvious mindset when you’re talking ‘suddenly has paws instead of hands’, but it’s pretty obvious from here, where disability is just a thing that happens.
Or, alternately, I see a lot of fantasy story stuff as basically about disability, because that’s the lens for a lot in my life. And that means that stories the author probably thinks are basically about cats are scored, by me, on how they write about disability. Which they don’t know they’re doing, so they don’t score very high.
To be fair though, it do seem to have properly observed felines.
It’s just not cool watching someone have to communicate in tail mime because their friends keep forgetting there’s a person in there and go straight to the pet shop, not human solutions.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-19 07:51 am (UTC)Two relevant recs, both Superman/Batman, by
When The Bat's Away... - Batman gets turned into a cat via mad science. Superman promptly gets a Ouija board for him, and they communicate pretty much normally.
Puppy Love, or, the Dog Prince - Superman gets turned into a dog via magic. This kind of thing happens in-universe a lot, so he and his allies have a whole contingency plan set up, and he heads straight for Lois's place to start barking in Morse code...only to find the magic redirects him into random cute doggy behavior every time he tries to communicate in any way.
The last one is a nice demonstration that, if you really want to write a character limited to fun cute animal behavior, you don't need to make the other characters totally hapless -- all you need is a good in-story excuse.
...although honestly, I have just as much fun coming up with realistic ways to deal with fantasy disabilities. Especially anything that lets you play with different ways people communicate.
There's this WIP I'm in the middle of right now where one of the characters has a fantasy form of vision impairment, and it's a whole set of things to work out. What can he do unaided, what would he be doing with standard IRL-type accessibility software, what does he need assistance with? What kind of background details have to be worked in so that various canon elements still happen in the same way?
(I kind of want to discuss the details endlessly, but the POV character -- who's only familiar with non-fantasy forms of vision impairment -- hasn't even noticed it yet. Really looking forward to the reveal, and/or to readers working out ahead of time that some of his "unusual habits" are in fact adaptive strategies.)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-20 10:35 pm (UTC)