(no subject)

[chordatesrock]

What do you think of this picture of Toph? (It shows Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender in an action pose, with the caption, "Oh, come on! That has to be a typo! Physical Disadvantage: Blindness cannot possibly be worth that many points.") Why do I feel like there's something problematic there, and why do I also feel like I'm just too ready to accuse everything not explicitly created from a disability rights perspective of being ableist?

Comments

[chalcopyrite]

To me it feels like the caption's saying, "Oh come on, being blind isn't that bad" -- not in the sense of "I am not helpless just because I don't rely on vision," but in the sense of "Quit whining, you can cope."

There's nothing specific I can put my finger on, but it doesn't read as friendly to me -- so yes, I know what you mean in your last sentence.

[kaberett]

Quite - and Toph being oblivious to difficulties faced by other people with similar impairments doesn't actually make it okay just because it's Toph. In character? Maybe. Okay? No.

[ghost_lingering]

This is what I was going to say: it definitely sounds in character to me, but that doesn't mean it can't still be ableist. Of course I'm not a gamer, so people's responses below might be more nuanced re: context?

And I should say it sounds in character to me because Toph on the show is constantly underestimated by people who dismiss her because she's a harmless little blind girl (aka because of both sexism and ableism) so in the show she's very much in the "anything you can do I can do BETTER" mindset while also rejecting things that might mark her as feminine or disabled. Which, while empowering for her (at least for the term of the show), isn't as empowering for people who aren't her / aren't badass earthbenders. I'd like to think that she grows up a bit in her understanding of disability and gender post-show -- she is only twelve in canon after all.

[chordatesrock]

Why are you giving me plotbunnies? Now I have to write them.

[ghost_lingering]

Hahahaha, that was not my intent but I would read the HELL out of a story about Toph's evolving relationship with disability activism. Teo can be her calmer partner in crime. But I bet that even after she's clued in to physical disability stuff it still takes her a while to understand mental health stuff. I mean, going crazy just means you're like Azula right? So I think that Ty Lee would have to knock a little bit of sense in her when it comes to mental health disability/activism.

Zuko can be the long-suffering ruler who has to answer for the fact that things aren't changing quickly enough.

[chordatesrock]

Why is Ty Lee the designated Knocking Sense Into Toph person?

[ghost_lingering]

Well other people could do it too, but since she actually likes Azula I suspect she has slightly more empathy for mental illness than Katara, Sokka, et all.

[kaberett]

PLEASE DO.

[beccaelizabeth]

It's the way some well meaning people tell me "But you're not disabled!" Just because I can, part time and slowly, get very good grades in higher education. It dismisses that it is actually a whole ton more difficult because yeah, actually disabled, have to deal with all that all as well.

Also it reminds me of the current UK government's tendency to suggest that, because there is disability rights legislation and access is supposed to be All Sorted Out Now, they no longer need to support disabled people as much because hey, the world is fixed, they're not really all that disabled.

It's unhelpful to not see the problem, even when it's helpful to see the achievements.

[chordatesrock]

I do hate it when that happens, and I love your last line, because I've been thinking that for a long time. May I quote you?

[beccaelizabeth]

quoting is good

[rydra_wong]

I dunno, my immediate response is to see the caption as a parody of a whiny tabletop gamer -- I mean, it's a complaint about another player having unfairly manipulated the system (in various games, I think?) where you get extra points in exchange for a "disadvantage" of some kind.

I may be attributing too much intent or misreading it, but I kind of see it as mocking that.

[beccaelizabeth]

my parody sensors are, like my sarcasm alert, lacking, but
I was just seeing the whiny gamer

(also, while a lot of people read it as 'points in exchange for a disadvantage', it's more that a starter character needs to be worth x number of points to be effective in a game, and if they have a disadvantage they need to be extra awesome elsewhere to get up to x points. the point of points based systems is the character with no disads and less by way of fancy powers or skills is still exactly the same effective if worth the same points total. acknowledgement of difficulties of disability is built into system, but not the usual discourse about the system, which just sees bonus points.)
(this bugs me)
(often)
(so you get the parenthetical explanation of something you probably understand already)
(sorry)

[rydra_wong]

my parody sensors are, like my sarcasm alert, lacking

OTOH, I'm also prone to over-reading.

(so you get the parenthetical explanation of something you probably understand already)

Noooo, not at all. Haven't gamed since I was very young, so my grip on the details is hazy to non-existent.

[chordatesrock]

Then the suggestion is that Toph's eartbending prowess is compensation for her blindness, and it's unfair that she be more skilled than she is disabled, because her Disability Superpower goes farther than merely balancing out her disability?

I notice that no one is complaining that Bumi doesn't have any disabilities at all to balance his only-slightly-lesser prowess, but still can't figure out what makes that bother me.

[rydra_wong]

Then the suggestion is that Toph's eartbending prowess is compensation for her blindness, and it's unfair that she be more skilled than she is disabled, because her Disability Superpower goes farther than merely balancing out her disability?

Yeah, it's sort of "If this was a tabletop game, someone would totally be whining about how accepting 'Physical Disadvantage: Blindness' for your character couldn't possibly be worth so many extra points, Toph is tooo badass to be fair on the other players, it must be a typo in the game manual!"

But that's just my first impression, and it's really hard to judge without context. I'm aware I may be reading in irony that isn't intended.

[terajk]

my immediate response is to see the caption as a parody of a whiny tabletop gamer -- I mean, it's a complaint about another player having unfairly manipulated the system

I wasn't sure how to read the incredulousness of the caption, so this reading makes a LOT of sense to me.

[qem_chibati]

I don't know the context of that picture, other than Toph is badass, but for me, my immediate thoughts are playing a dnd style game in which case Toph gets so many points, because she is blind - making her difficult to compete with. (so your Sokka character is basically being owned, even though he's part of the game longer.)

[terajk]

I read it as a reference to role-playing games, where Blindness [sic] is a common temporary(and negative) status. But Toph's blindness gives her a bonus instead. But where it gets weird is,the speaker is incredulous that Toph's blindness could BE a bonus. ("Oh come on! That has to be a typo!") The joke would make more sense to me as: Physical Disadvantage: Blindness +100" or something,but I don't know if that would fix what is problematic to me about it.

The stuff that's problematic to me about it is probably tied into my problems with the Disability Superpower trope--which Toph is kind of an example of, even if her superpowers don't negate her disabilities entirely.

(Then again, I'm playing a game right now where a playable character has one of my impairments, it IS her passive status, and I think it's hilarious. I only wish the developers had called the status something other than "Lost Child," as she is an adult.) So, I dunno.

[chordatesrock]

Oh, dear. Lost Child is a terribly problematic name for a disability. Why not Perpetually Lost?

I wish for more stories that didn't involve Disability Superpowers, but I do love Toph and her earthbending.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'd say it's apples and oranges.
Toph can't see light. She CAN
generate a 3D realtime map of
the environment in her head as
long as she's on the ground,
with earthbending. The disability
is real, and used excellently
in canon (frex, the desert and
ice bridge scenes). But for her,
light blindness is a much smaller
handicap because she can
compensate for it. I'd say, hm,
maybe 3-4 points on a scale of
10? 10 is the max in World
Tree, and I remember blindness
rated that way there, although
sheesh, that setting drips with
magic and I could totally make
a compensated character there.
This is one of my favorite motifts,
a character with a handicap who
overcomes it through ingenuity,
but there are still moments that
show her experience is different
from the usual.

A character who is blind, and
does not have a compensating
ability, would have a much
higher impact. Sure, I'd call
that a 10-pt handicap.

Making a joke of it on a poster?
Jerktastic move.

[aris_tgd]

In GURPS (the Generic Universal Role-Playing System set of rules), which I believe this is referencing, characters are built on a system of points--most games, players get 100 points at the beginning of the game, and can allocate them however they want. There are "Skills", which are things you can practice and get good at, there are "Advantages" which are privileges your character has because of their background or physical stature, and there are "Disadvantages", which are ways in which your character is... well, disadvantaged. In the original character-creation round, you can decide to give your character various disadvantages in exchange for more points to spend on different advantages or skills--if your character is Poor, for example, you can then put more points into learning Broadsword. (How this makes sense for your character you then have to convince your game master.)

The points system is understood by (some) gamers to be a capricious and arbitrary way of attempting to make balanced characters--giving all of your players a set number of points means that they all have pretty evenly weighted skills/abilities and nobody will be lagging in the campaign. That being said, some players are very invested in "Min-Maxing", the practice of figuring out which exact disadvantages will give the most points without making your character completely unplayable, and then putting all of those points into "useful" skills. Many roleplayers get fed up with this attitude, because it treats a character as a tool for "winning" instead of as a person to be building a story around.

... Long story short. I read the caption as someone complaining about another gamer who found a way to pump a lot of points into Earthbending. I don't think it's necessarily about Disability Superpowers, or anything--it's more a complaint of "We all got the same amount of points to start with, so why is she so much more badass than me?" ... And because of my particular POV, I see the complainer as being a typical min-maxer who would never think of taking Blindness because it affects your combat rolls.

I think any time we talk about disability in gaming terms it's problematic, because the way that games are set up, you're automatically going to be using shorthand and shortcuts to deal with a lot of really complex issues. On the other hand, I think that GURPS' model of advantages and disadvantages has some of the best basic discussions of privilege I've ever seen in a roleplaying game manual. I think the basic problem here is talking about an actual physical disability in the simplified terms used to make an RPG work as a game with rules. I think it's funny as long as you assume that everyone involved with the joke knows that the RPG abstraction has nothing to do with people in real life... and we can never be sure that everyone involved with the joke actually realizes that.

tl;dr: Problematic, sure. Funny? Maybe. Assumptions? Not checked by creator.

[chordatesrock]

How does a character from a socioeconomic background where xe's less likely to have had the money to buy a sword or pay a teacher and less likely to have had as much time to devote to it as a character who didn't need to work to stay alive, have more points available for learning to use a broadsword? That's broken!

Someday, I'll learn how these systems work... probably.

[aris_tgd]

Right, see, the point is, in a reasonable assessment, having a poor background is a disadvantage, so if your character was poor while all the rest of the characters were middle-class or rich, your character would be harder to play. The game mechanics are about creating a party of characters who all have the same "playability" or "kickassery" or "usefulness to the party", which is a very, very difficult thing to legislate in any accurate fashion.

What the point system does is say, okay, you're all "100-point characters" (or 50-point or whatever, they say that most people IRL should be 20 or 30-point characters by their metrics, but the players are playing Heroes or otherwise exceptional people) so if you're disadvantaged in one area, you are badass in another area, bringing your average badassery up to the level of everyone else in the party. (Who are also doing this thing.) Depending on your game master, they could well say, "If your character is poor, zie's not going to have access to the newest technology/best teaching/whatever, I won't let you take those skills." And you can argue back, "But my character's mother did a favor for the Domingo Montoya, the local swordmaster, who built my character a sword and taught me three levels in Rapier, which crosstrain to Broadsword with a penalty of DEX/2, so--" and then the GM can rule whether or not that makes sense for your character.

As I said, the problem is when people think that game mechanics are how things actually work in real life. They're not. They're a shortcut for making a game system flexible enough to have lots of different kinds of characters who are similarly "useful" without someone whining that they have to play the cleric or something.

[chordatesrock]

Interesting. If I ever get a chance to play these games, I think my first character will definitely be a deafblind quadriplegic with PTSD. How much kickassery would I get as compensation, and would it be enough to keep the rest of the party from abandoning me?

[aris_tgd]

*shrug* As someone who actually plays the games, I'm just glad to have a game system which actually tells players to think about how different forms of discrimination work, not just reduce disability to something that happens in the course of adventuring to "normal" characters to make them suffer.

[chordatesrock]

...Taking that seriously, rather than immediately trying to break it, it sounds awesome. Do you think it has an impact? Are people becoming more aware of the idea of privilege and more accepting of disability through gaming?

[aris_tgd]

I don't know, honestly--most of the people I play with are pretty SJ-aware themselves, and like to craft characters for story challenges rather than for minmaxing. So it may be a case of the game system's instructions aligning with my preconceived worldview and biases. ;)

I think playing in a campaign with a character with multiple disabilities would be a fun challenge (We had a paraplegic character in one of the last campaigns I was in, and got to play around physical accessibility workarounds, especially when we had to get into a basement to stop a demon-summoning...) but it really depends on if your GM is good enough to incorporate zir into the flow of the game.

[chordatesrock]

You make this sound amazingly fun. Quests! Awesomeness! Access barriers!

in GURPS rules

[beccaelizabeth]

Deafness is -20
Blindness is -50
Quadriplegic is -80

PTSD is a complex disorder that would have to be put together from several different disadvantages listing specific triggers and effects, say phobias, nightmares, tendency freeze up in combat, flashbacks, lots of different possible parts. That could easily add up to more than any of the above.

-150 already blows through the disadvantage limit on many campaigns
"A good rule of thumb is to hold disadvantages to 50% of starting points"
300 points is well past the 100-200 points for a career adventurer and up into Supers territory.

With 450 points to spend to bring you to the same effectiveness as the rest of the party? You would have a lot of options. A LOT.


With those disads I'd look into psychic, shamanic, magical or cyberpunk style hacking powers. If you can summon spirits to do your bidding, physical disadvantages would matter less. Or you could be Oracle with some accessible hardware.

Scanning Sense (Radar or Para-Radar) or Vibration Sense would also be available to give a different ranged sensory awareness, as I understand Toph has?

All of this would have to fit the setting and convince the GM it was playable before it could annoy the rest of the party.

/helpful with rulebook in searchable PDF form

Re: in GURPS rules

[chordatesrock]

That's amazing! I think I might actually do this, if I ever end up playing GURPS with someone. :D Thank you!