Reply by Dark 2018-04-19 11:33:19

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Lol ~Assault freak not too serious on the yelling attacks point, though your right about beatemups, I still remember standing in the back of an arcade in the nineties listening to the constant yells of "hadoken! Hadoken! Shoryuken! Yoga fire, Sonic boom" " before I got close enough to see what was going on and realized what all of that meant big_smile.

Btw, just came back to this topic because I had an interesting thought. As I said in the stephen King topic and the monthly chat topic I've just finished The Stand and finished writing a review.
There are no blind characters in that book, but there is a deaf character who starts off as comparatively realistic, having to have others read notes for him and not able to talk (I love the scene where he breaks a telephone in frustration of being able to contact anyone since that's probably something I'd do in his place). But then he winds up a sort of mystical semi ghost super deaf person.

In the past I imagine representations of deaf characters were probably about as off as those of blind characters, but it seems that increasingly these days being deaf is being cool, while being blind isn't, ---- I even read a paper published this year which listed five examples of "positive portrayals of disabled identity", three of them of death people, and the other two autistic, oh and yes,it was a pretty crappy paper, albeit I do have a rather interesting book on representations of blindness and theory of knolidge to read which looks significantly better (I'll report if it says anything sensible).

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

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Reply by assault_freak 2018-04-19 19:41:06

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Please do, that'd be fascinating. And I do agree on the yelling attacks thing being over the top... welcome to Japanese media. lol At least you always knew what games people were playing if you knew the attack names!
About the main topic though, some people might say Daredevil is a cool portrayal of blind people... and that paper was probably written by someone who wasn't any of those disabilities. People who actually are deaf might find those so-called positive portrayals just as eye-rolling as we find Daredevil or most other blind characters. Zatoichi is still my favourite, simply for the fact that he is a very human character who happens to be a blind masseur as well as a talented martial artist... both of which are perfectly believable things. The abilities he has are very realistic, just extremely exaggerated.

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Reply by Dark 2018-04-19 22:34:00

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Actually Assault freak the deafness thing is rather different since there are a lot of deaf people at least in the literature who spend a long time talking about "deaf culture" and "Deaf identity" and such and so really want positive representation as a thing in itself analogous to the way people argued for better portrayals of dark skinnned people, indeed a very large part of the "disability doesn't exist its all society's fault" stuff" tends to come from examples concerning deafness, ---- though only some of them actually written by deaf people as opposed to being written by others about! deaf people big_smile.

Still, it was interesting that in The Stand King featured a magical deaf person who wasn't really deaf as opposed to the usual magical blind person who isn't really blind, although in fairness to king said deaf person did actually start out as a really! deaf person and only achieved their magical not deaf powers after they actually died.

Getting back to blindness,one other character who is interesting is Paul from the Dune series which is one of the few examples where for me the magic not really blind thing worked. Partly this was because I thought the idea of someone who doesn't actually need to see because they had such huge precongnition that they could actually just visualise what was going on was interesting in and of itself and fitted really well into what we'd known about Paul and his powers up until that point. Partly its also because Paul is in a culture, the fremin who we're told abandon blind people in the middle of the desert because they're just harsh like that and thus Paul is majorly bucking the system, and partly its because at the end near his death Paul's visions actually fail him and at that point he becomes really blind and actually quite vulnerable, ---- -something which you'd expect from someone who'd just lost not  their physical vision but their precognitive vision as well.

Its also interesting to note that in the Dune universe Paul could! have had his eyes regrown, but since the Tleilaxu genetic manipulators are really rather dodgy and quite scary, (they did send Paul an undead zombi slave grown from the body of his best friend),  he didn't want them to have a hold on him so refused the regrowing eyes business.

Again, yes, paul is indeed the not really blind magical blind man, but at least Herbert did it in an interesting way.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

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Reply by assault_freak 2018-04-20 01:29:03

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Hmm. I must say my knowledge of blind characters in litterature isn't exactly plentiful, I haven't exactly gone out of my way to find them. lol Interesting about the Dune series, however... might be one worth checking out. And I definitely agree about liking the fact that losing his precognition would deal out trauma analogous to someone sighted losing all their physical vision in one go.

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Reply by Dark 2018-04-20 08:47:27

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I wouldn't say I look for blind characters in literature, more that I notice them for fairly obvious reasons.

Well Asault freak, the blinding of Paul only happens in the second book, children of doom, and his precognition is setup as a pretty major point in the series up until that stage and I will say to have him basically predict his way around describing what is around him by virtue of his visions is pretty cool.
My lady also reminded me that interestingly enough he bucks the Fremin attitude to blindness by going off into the desert when he loses his precognitive powers, then actually returns in the third book as a blind Preacher with a huge following.
Its interesting in that sense since I can't think of another occasion when someone goes from being super blind ninja, to being normally blind, to then actually doing something pretty cool while normally blind.

paul also gave us this amusing little ditty:

“There was a man so wise,
He jumped into
A sandy place
And burnt out both his eyes!
And when he knew his eyes were gone,
He offered no complaint.
He summoned up a vision
And made himself a saint.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

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