capri0mni: A black Skull & Crossbones with the Online Disability Pride Flag as a background (Default)
[personal profile] capri0mni
Back in 2005, I tried my hand at writing original, personalized, fairy tales on commission, and one of my first was for a young man with C.P.’s 21st birthday.

First, I met with him at his home, to talk about the story he wanted, and what kinds of themes he wanted. Then, I flailed for about a week trying to pin it down before I realized I could email him and ask for clarification.

This is the reply he sent back:

I think about being a normal hero named Michael. He needs clothes like
fionne. Be like Fionne* but be me with Zena the warrior princess as his
friend. There should be the Lost Boys from Neverland but by another name as his friends, too. No CP in fairy tales.

Xena should need me as a healer after fighting. she needs a friend like me,
too.

thanks.

Mike


And that No CP in Fairy Tales has haunted me, ever since.

I agreed with him, when I met up with him for that first conversation, because nothing stings worse than having that aspect of yourself that marks you apart being treated as “special” and your one defining feature.

But it wasn’t long after I finished that story, and sent it off to him, before I started wondering: Why the Hell can’t we have CP in Fairy Tales?

After all, fairy tales have shepherds, and shipwrights, and kings, and cobblers, and beggars, and merchants, and old women, and young girls, and fools, and wise men -- every class and creed of humanity. And people with (what will later be called) “Cerebral palsy” have been part of humanity since the beginning (it’s a congenital condition that has many causes, results in life-long disability, but is also -- often -- survivable. So there’s no reason for people with the condition to not be part of the world.**

So, a couple of NaNoWriMos ago, I set out to write an original fairy tale with a protagonist who had “C.P.” for myself -- but I never used that term, I just described her as a person: what she could do, what she couldn’t, how she and her family improvised adaptive tools for her, etc., with a healthy soak of genre-appropriate magic for a sauce.

The result was my par-for-the-course 50K word salad. But I think there’s a good story in there, somewhere, that actually works.

Back when I was working on that story, I told myself that I was avoiding the specific term “Cerebral Palsy” because my genre’s setting was vaguely medieval/Renaissance Europe, and the medical term wouldn’t have been coined for another few centuries.

Anyway, the other morning, I woke up with a realization:

But that’s not the reason the phrase “cerebral palsy” should stay the hell out of literary fairy tales, whichever milieu they’re set in.

It’s because “Cerebral Palsy” is a medical attribute. And the medical model of disability (and the medical model of everything, really) sets the individual apart from the world they live in, as broken exception, in need of being fixed. And in Fairy Tales, the characters (and especially the protagonists) are there to represent the human condition for everyone.

So it’s not so much: “No CP in fairy tales,” but “no medical diagnoses” in fairy tales.

But in other genres (particularly in modern forms of literature), where the story does rely on a finely detailed individual (Say, for example: in a "One vs. Society," story arc), actually naming their disability would be better than avoiding the name. Otherwise, it would feel like you're treating it as something shameful, that shouldn't be named.

(And now, I'm wondering if it's possible to write something that is clearly a fairy tale, but set in an industrial, or post industrial world like our own. It's a thought.




*That's Fionn, as in the Irish hero, Fionn MacCumhail, BTW

**In fact, I think the Anglo-Saxon word “crypel” was simply a descriptive term for those people -- like “short,” or “tall,” “fair,” or “dark”; it didn’t get used in an insulting way until the 1600s.

Date: 2021-09-13 01:51 am (UTC)
siliconshaman: black cat against the moon (Default)
From: [personal profile] siliconshaman

Palsied as a word has been around for a very long time. Usually it's associated with age [probably Parkinson's disease] but there are other cases. Henry the Eighth's son, Arthur, was described as a palsied child, with symptomatology that was clearly C.P. [he died of complications from one of the 'treatments' for it, septicemia I think, from all the blood letting.]

But I agree, why make that the central defining feature of character? I mean, ok so your mage has tremors and isn't very dexterous.. but there are schools of magic that rely on chants alone for a start.

Date: 2021-09-13 08:33 am (UTC)
mesotablar: Echidna on leaves (Default)
From: [personal profile] mesotablar
About “no medical diagnoses” in fairy tales, I may be misremembering, but for some reason my brain is stuck thinking about a story where the main character loses their eyes. From what I recall it is a old middle-east-ish story (Maybe Eastern European) Even though it is definitely translated, there is no mention of the character being blind, or not being able to see. no medical diagnoses. I am wondering if it is so in the original work or if it a general convention of English language tales that the translator conformed to.
Not the best example, but I thought I should comment while I remembered that much!

as for industrial/post-industrial, I guess it depends on how realistic you go? There has been quite a bit of success with steampunk industrial settings.

Date: 2021-09-13 11:42 pm (UTC)
mesotablar: Echidna on leaves (Default)
From: [personal profile] mesotablar
Now that I have slept on it, I too remember plenty...not to mention even '3 blind mice'. Last night that story I was thinking of was just like an idea version of an earworm, I couldn't think past it. Now I'll probably spend weeks looking for it. I wasn't thinking enough, you are completely right on the optic neuropathy...

A fair proportion of the steampunk tales I have read deal with machine intelligence, or artificial life. They aren't just Snow White and the 7 Steam Engines (Though now I have thought of it I would love to read Snow White and the 7 Solar Panels!). The industrial Victorian/Edwardian just mirrors the aged-ness familiar with other fairy tales, but they deal with moral issues that have started arising in only the last 50 years or so.

Date: 2021-09-15 03:06 am (UTC)
mesotablar: Echidna on leaves (Default)
From: [personal profile] mesotablar
I don't know Ursula Vernon but I recently put a stack of Terri Windling on my 'to read' pile after I found a bunch on my grandmother's shelves.
I've actually just started 'The Wood Wife'! ...though I'm also reading about 4 or 5 other books as well

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