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terajkThis started as a comment on sholio's post about part 3 of The Promise. (spoilers). It ended up...this.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has several disabled characters, and I love them all. It handles some tropes about disability with more depth and nuance than I'm used to seeing in Western media. Still, it's not perfect--nothing is--and its treatment of Princess Azula's psychotic episode in the finale brought a lot of problems to the forefront for me.
I chose this very non-AtLA icon deliberately. Soul Eater's Black*Star and Death the Kid are two disabled characters who interact quite a lot; their relationship develops over time and they kick ass together and interact with the other disabled characters in the cast. In contrast, while in AtLA there are three characters with disabilities for most of the story, they don't interact with each other much. Teo never meets Toph or Zuko, and Toph is the only member of Team Avatar not to get a character- and relationship-developing field trip with Zuko. Arguably, the most meaningful interaction two disabled people have is Zuko and Azula's Agni Kai. (Black*Star and Kid had a Huge, Meaningful Fight too, but they had a lot of interaction before and after.) In Revamping the Bechdel Test for Disability, Renee Martin wonders what a Bechdel-type test for disabled characters would look like ("Two disabled characters who talk to each other...") Whle AtLA technically passes (Toph and Zuko have conversations that aren't meant to inspire non-disabled people), I wish it passed better, considering how major Toph and Zuko are.
But, like anyone else in the cast, individually, Toph and Zuko are well-rounded characters with strengths and flaws, and they change over the course of the story. (Azula is, too--I'd say she's more interesting and well-rounded than her father, who is supposed to be the Number 1 Villain.) Toph is blind. She can also fight, invent new kinds of bending, be an obnoxious jerk ("Three on three, plus Sokka"), as well as need to learn how to look out for a group of people rather than just herself. I love her and Katara's friendship, and how it challenges them both. In Katara's culture, people work together to stay alive; Toph's only idea of "help" is her parents' toxic belief that she can't do anything for herself. (In a sense, Toph doesn't want to help her new friends like Katara is asking in "The Chase" partly because they are her friends. Why would she treat people she likes like her parents treat her?)
Yes, Toph has Disability Superpowers, but these superpowers don't negate her disability entirely. There are some surfaces, like ice, water and sand, that she can't use earthbending to navigate; also, she can't read or write, as her culture has only a visual writing system. Also, characters tend to forget she's blind--and she sets them straight, snarkily. (Like "I don't see skin color!" "I forget you're disabled!" is really problematic and not the sign of utopia people think it is.) Toph's difficulty with "help" shows the harm that the Disability Superpower trope does--it says that, to be valuable, disabled people must have a special talent that benefits non-disabled people somehow, no matter what the cost. These are all fabulous things.
But.
Toph isn't just someone whose disability is part of her. She also teaches a Very Special Lesson about disability to the audience--namely, that disabled people can Do Things--in a way that, while much less didactic than usual, still takes me out of the story. When we first see a blind little-girl wrestler, Katara asks, "She can't really be blind...can she?" Frankly, I'm surprised that Katara would ask this. Her culture depends on people working together to survive. There's also a huge war going on--I'd think that disabled war veterans would still be part of her community, Doing Things in any way they could. To be honest, after 100 years of war I'd expect to see a lot more disabled characters than just three. It reminds me ofambyr's analysis of gender (im)balance in AtLA.
As for Zuko, the writers are certainly playing with the trope that evil characters have scars. His reasons for doing what he's doing are complicated, and he redeems himself after a long, long time. But, again, his scar isn't just there; it marks him and Means Something in terms of his character development. Because of this he eventually decides he doesn't want it cured, and also thanks his father for the lessons his scarring and banishment taught him. As Zuko gets more complicated and sympathetic, his hair grows out, covering more and more of the scar. Also, TVTropes points out that Zuko's narrow left eye (small eyes being associated with villainous characters) and his unscarred right one are a visual representation of his moral ambivalence.
So, while there are important disabled characters with depth and flaws and character development, disability in AtLA cannot just exist: it must Mean Something for the audience.
And then we get to Princess Azula; the way the show handles her psychotic break brings all these little problems to the surface for me, magnifies them, and contradicts stuff it had said about disability earlier.
I don't think Azula's psychotic break is a slapdash way for the writers to avoid killing her, as some fans have argued. For one thing, the word "crazy" is used in two specific ways throughout the series, even before Azula appears. It denotes things that are easily dismissed or silly (King Bumi is called "crazy" until Team Avatar decides they like him; then Aang calls him a "mad genius"; Sokka's disparagement of fortune-telling; "You're all gonna think I'm crazy, but there's a metal man coming"; "This is crazy! How can we beat someone who blows things up with his mind?"). It's also used to refer to Azula specifically ("Girls are crazy!"--when the only girl who did the thing Zuko was mad about was Azula; Katara referring to "...crazy blue firebending"; "She's crazy and she needs to go down").
Even Azula's terrible understanding of people--so terrible that she doesn't have the "glib, superficial charm" proper sociopaths are supposed to have--which leads to her psychotic episode only becomes obvious during "The Beach," but is evident in Season 2. She sneers at Long Feng forbeing a better sociopath than she is crawling up to power from the bottom (which probably involved getting people to trust him), rather than having it by divine right. But she doesn't have power by "right," either. She has it because her father gave it to her. (Your awesome ship and Zuko's crappy one didn't materialize out of nowhere, Princess.) And even Ozai's thing about Azula being born lucky and Zuko lucky to be born back in Season 1 is evidence that he's manipulating both his children.
I also think that Mai saw Azula's weakness in dealing with people from the beginning. When she refuses to go into the slurry and "I don't care how much lightning Azula slings at me," she knows that scaring people and exerting power over them is all Azula can do--not to mention, Azula wasn't controlling Mai as well as she thought, even then. "You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you"--"I have more power over me than you ever did"--is constructed so that Azula will understand it. (I also think that Azula is operating from a different definition of "love" than analyses of her character are using--something like, "Love is a power I can control people with?? Zuko has this awesome power to control Mai that I don't???"And then she tries to use the power of love by kiling Katara and destroying Zuko in the process, but Zuko and Katara can use the Power of Love better than her so it backfires, multiplies and kicks her ass.)
Not only is psychosis associated with a really awful person (again), but Azula's disability has a function in the plot: to make her easier for Zuko and Katara to beat in a fight. Now, I love that for all Zuko's growth he is *not* capable of winning against Azula himself, but disability as "Thank you, the Universe!" is just...no. (What happened to Disabled People Can Do Things?) It also represents how, as Zuko has matured and gotten stronger, Azula's fallen. The last shot of her dad? Zuko visiting him in prison. (Dude's not a threat anymore partly because he's behind bars for life.) The last shot of Azula? Chained to a grate. I'm sure it was supposed to show that not all endings are neat and tidy, especially when Zuko has all these complicated feelings about her, but it comes off like psychosis neutralizes her in itself. (Again, what happened to Disabled People Can Do Things?) And psychosis doesn't even have to be chronic.
Man, I wrote a lot of words about this. I'd better stop now.
sholio's post about part 3 of The Promise. (spoilers). It ended up...this.Avatar: The Last Airbender has several disabled characters, and I love them all. It handles some tropes about disability with more depth and nuance than I'm used to seeing in Western media. Still, it's not perfect--nothing is--and its treatment of Princess Azula's psychotic episode in the finale brought a lot of problems to the forefront for me.
I chose this very non-AtLA icon deliberately. Soul Eater's Black*Star and Death the Kid are two disabled characters who interact quite a lot; their relationship develops over time and they kick ass together and interact with the other disabled characters in the cast. In contrast, while in AtLA there are three characters with disabilities for most of the story, they don't interact with each other much. Teo never meets Toph or Zuko, and Toph is the only member of Team Avatar not to get a character- and relationship-developing field trip with Zuko. Arguably, the most meaningful interaction two disabled people have is Zuko and Azula's Agni Kai. (Black*Star and Kid had a Huge, Meaningful Fight too, but they had a lot of interaction before and after.) In Revamping the Bechdel Test for Disability, Renee Martin wonders what a Bechdel-type test for disabled characters would look like ("Two disabled characters who talk to each other...") Whle AtLA technically passes (Toph and Zuko have conversations that aren't meant to inspire non-disabled people), I wish it passed better, considering how major Toph and Zuko are.
But, like anyone else in the cast, individually, Toph and Zuko are well-rounded characters with strengths and flaws, and they change over the course of the story. (Azula is, too--I'd say she's more interesting and well-rounded than her father, who is supposed to be the Number 1 Villain.) Toph is blind. She can also fight, invent new kinds of bending, be an obnoxious jerk ("Three on three, plus Sokka"), as well as need to learn how to look out for a group of people rather than just herself. I love her and Katara's friendship, and how it challenges them both. In Katara's culture, people work together to stay alive; Toph's only idea of "help" is her parents' toxic belief that she can't do anything for herself. (In a sense, Toph doesn't want to help her new friends like Katara is asking in "The Chase" partly because they are her friends. Why would she treat people she likes like her parents treat her?)
Yes, Toph has Disability Superpowers, but these superpowers don't negate her disability entirely. There are some surfaces, like ice, water and sand, that she can't use earthbending to navigate; also, she can't read or write, as her culture has only a visual writing system. Also, characters tend to forget she's blind--and she sets them straight, snarkily. (Like "I don't see skin color!" "I forget you're disabled!" is really problematic and not the sign of utopia people think it is.) Toph's difficulty with "help" shows the harm that the Disability Superpower trope does--it says that, to be valuable, disabled people must have a special talent that benefits non-disabled people somehow, no matter what the cost. These are all fabulous things.
But.
Toph isn't just someone whose disability is part of her. She also teaches a Very Special Lesson about disability to the audience--namely, that disabled people can Do Things--in a way that, while much less didactic than usual, still takes me out of the story. When we first see a blind little-girl wrestler, Katara asks, "She can't really be blind...can she?" Frankly, I'm surprised that Katara would ask this. Her culture depends on people working together to survive. There's also a huge war going on--I'd think that disabled war veterans would still be part of her community, Doing Things in any way they could. To be honest, after 100 years of war I'd expect to see a lot more disabled characters than just three. It reminds me of
ambyr's analysis of gender (im)balance in AtLA.As for Zuko, the writers are certainly playing with the trope that evil characters have scars. His reasons for doing what he's doing are complicated, and he redeems himself after a long, long time. But, again, his scar isn't just there; it marks him and Means Something in terms of his character development. Because of this he eventually decides he doesn't want it cured, and also thanks his father for the lessons his scarring and banishment taught him. As Zuko gets more complicated and sympathetic, his hair grows out, covering more and more of the scar. Also, TVTropes points out that Zuko's narrow left eye (small eyes being associated with villainous characters) and his unscarred right one are a visual representation of his moral ambivalence.
So, while there are important disabled characters with depth and flaws and character development, disability in AtLA cannot just exist: it must Mean Something for the audience.
And then we get to Princess Azula; the way the show handles her psychotic break brings all these little problems to the surface for me, magnifies them, and contradicts stuff it had said about disability earlier.
I don't think Azula's psychotic break is a slapdash way for the writers to avoid killing her, as some fans have argued. For one thing, the word "crazy" is used in two specific ways throughout the series, even before Azula appears. It denotes things that are easily dismissed or silly (King Bumi is called "crazy" until Team Avatar decides they like him; then Aang calls him a "mad genius"; Sokka's disparagement of fortune-telling; "You're all gonna think I'm crazy, but there's a metal man coming"; "This is crazy! How can we beat someone who blows things up with his mind?"). It's also used to refer to Azula specifically ("Girls are crazy!"--when the only girl who did the thing Zuko was mad about was Azula; Katara referring to "...crazy blue firebending"; "She's crazy and she needs to go down").
Even Azula's terrible understanding of people--so terrible that she doesn't have the "glib, superficial charm" proper sociopaths are supposed to have--which leads to her psychotic episode only becomes obvious during "The Beach," but is evident in Season 2. She sneers at Long Feng for
I also think that Mai saw Azula's weakness in dealing with people from the beginning. When she refuses to go into the slurry and "I don't care how much lightning Azula slings at me," she knows that scaring people and exerting power over them is all Azula can do--not to mention, Azula wasn't controlling Mai as well as she thought, even then. "You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you"--"I have more power over me than you ever did"--is constructed so that Azula will understand it. (I also think that Azula is operating from a different definition of "love" than analyses of her character are using--something like, "Love is a power I can control people with?? Zuko has this awesome power to control Mai that I don't???"And then she tries to use the power of love by kiling Katara and destroying Zuko in the process, but Zuko and Katara can use the Power of Love better than her so it backfires, multiplies and kicks her ass.)
Not only is psychosis associated with a really awful person (again), but Azula's disability has a function in the plot: to make her easier for Zuko and Katara to beat in a fight. Now, I love that for all Zuko's growth he is *not* capable of winning against Azula himself, but disability as "Thank you, the Universe!" is just...no. (What happened to Disabled People Can Do Things?) It also represents how, as Zuko has matured and gotten stronger, Azula's fallen. The last shot of her dad? Zuko visiting him in prison. (Dude's not a threat anymore partly because he's behind bars for life.) The last shot of Azula? Chained to a grate. I'm sure it was supposed to show that not all endings are neat and tidy, especially when Zuko has all these complicated feelings about her, but it comes off like psychosis neutralizes her in itself. (Again, what happened to Disabled People Can Do Things?) And psychosis doesn't even have to be chronic.
Man, I wrote a lot of words about this. I'd better stop now.
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no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 02:26 am (UTC)I didn't feel that Toph was being used as a lesson and I'm not surprised by Katara's initial reaction. I'm not surprised that she did a double-take at someone blind participating in something where there are rocks flying at them without warning. On further reflection, I think if Toph didn't have her Disability Superpower, it would be feasible to listen for where the rocks were being pulled out of the ground from. That could be defeated by lifting it in one location, moving it a little to one side and THEN hurling it at her, but she could defend against that by creating a wall all around her first and then making the entire floor unstable. Or, more awesomely, encasing her own feet in it and flipping it upside down. But that's not something I'm particularly surprised didn't immediately occur to Katara. It read more as surprise and confusion as to whether "blind bandit" actually meant blind (after all, it doesn't mean she's an actual bandit). And as for disabled veterans in her culture, we don't see anyone of fighting age left in her village and none of the warriors we see later *look* disabled (not like that's a reliable indicator or anything!), so while I agree with you that it would make sense, it... doesn't appear to be that way. Which is odd. It's like nobody ever gets injured unless it's going to be Deep and Meaningful, even offscreen. (Except Teo.)
I got the impression, though, that the portrayal of people's reactions to Toph wasn't a Very Special Lesson for the TABs watching. Maybe I'm obtuse, but I felt like the writers were showing one particular (disability-specific) way parents can be bad, to give Toph a reason to run away and to provide conflict to an episode that otherwise would have been about the ever-so-thrilling tale of how Aang easily found an earthbending teacher who happily agreed to teach him and all was sunshine and roses and flowers. Stories need conflict, and the show needed one new conflict every episode that got resolved that episode. I didn't feel like Toph and Aang vs. Toph's Overprotective Ableist Parents was treated differently (by the narrative) from Aang's Desire To Cure His Friends vs. The Fire Nation's Desire To Keep Him In Prison. (I forget the actual episode titles, but you know the one I'm talking about. It's the one with the frogs.) I mean, the show ended up using nightmares about facing the Firelord without any pants as the main conflict of one episode. I actually liked that they chose to portray virulently ableist attitudes as being wrong and not as totally understandable because of course parents know what's best for their children and having disabled children is so very hard and the parents suffer so terribly and are such martyrs and so saintly and GAG ME NOW. Unfortunately, if I want to see ableists portrayed with care and loving sympathy, I can just watch the news. >:( I really, really, really, really, REALLY liked seeing ableism get treated by the narrative as on a par with sexism. (Actually, I thought the episodes in the Northern Water Tribe were much more heavy-handed and Lessony than Toph's.)
I think part of why I have no problem with this might also be because Aang, though initially surprised, immediately accepts that okay, Toph's blind, let's get on with convincing her to teach him earthbending. And Katara only shows disbelief that one time. If the protagonists had spent the episode learning a Very Special Lesson, I might have felt differently, because we're obviously supposed to identify with at least one of them to some extent or other. If I felt like we were supposed to identify with learning that blind people can Do Things Just Like You And Me (You And Me being sighted, obviously), then I'd be annoyed, but I feel like what we're supposed to identify with is that the parents' ableism is a problem because it affects Aang's ability to learn earthbending, and secondarily because, well, it sucks for Toph, and the fact that the ableism is wrong as a simple question of fact is a given.
I agree with you that Azula's reeeaaaaally problematic, and I was particularly bugged by the implication that "crazy" is a good reason to dismiss someone. That said, my problems with the last fight are way different from yours. I don't find it implausible that Azula lost her edge that day (a servant almost kills her, the Dai Li are traitors, she can't trust those closest to her, her mother is haunting her... she's NOT having a good day and I can believe her emotional state would NOT be helping). What I thought was ridiculous was Zuko talking about some sort of mystical indefinable something (that the viewer knows is psychosis) that was different that would somehow magically help him in some unknown way. Azula did NOT look normal. It's very apparent that something's happened to her hair, and that it HASN'T been fixed, which means she hasn't gotten fixed up by servants since something probably very upsetting happened. Azula looks like she's already dealt with something today and you can guess that she's probably stressed. So WHY did the show need to mysticalize her mental illness into some kind of magical indefinable something that can only be picked up on instinctively through some sort of sixth sense or something?
That said, I didn't feel like psychosis was being portrayed as neutralizing her in itself. That was some pretty epic lightning for someone supposedly neutralized.
And finally, I don't agree that disability in Avatar: the Last Airbender must necessarily Mean Something for the audience. Teo's seemed (to me at least) to Mean that the creators wanted to include a disabled character. (And I wish that weren't something so rare that it primes people to expect a token or something really Symbolic And Deeply Meaningful. On a side note, I really hate disability having a symbolic meaning. It feels erasey, almost like disability is a magical thing somebody just thought of for their story, as opposed to something lots of people live with every day.) And I like Toph's, because it feels like it gets treated as something that just is, at least after she runs away.
Wow did this ever become tl;dr. Sorry!
no subject
Date: 2012-11-05 07:15 am (UTC)Teo and Toph make a good contrast with each other because of two very different approaches to disability portray. Teo’s disability (and it’s probably not paraplegia) just is, and doesn’t matter. Definitely one way to do it. But that doesn’t mean that portraying ableism is ableist. Toph’s family is ableist, and it’s portrayed. Unthinking assumptions on the main characters’ parts are portrayed (initial disbelief that Toph is really blind if she’s a fighter), but it is NOT a “characters learn a lesson” story; the conflict is NOT about getting the leads to realize that disability doesn’t prevent someone from being awesome. There is conflict caused by Toph’s parents’ failure to realize that, but it isn’t resolved with their learning a lesson.
The narrative doesn’t care. The characters care in one case and don’t in another, but the narrative doesn’t intrude. The portrayal is-- well, Toph can see with her feet and Teo can fly, I’m not sure “realistic” is actually the word I’m looking for. It doesn’t break my suspension of disbelief, it isn’t othering, it doesn’t put the characters on a pedestal and it doesn’t portray ridiculous cliches. (Though blind people with magical navigation is getting kind of cliche. It’s not quite there yet, and anyway, in this case it seems reasonable.) And given that they have their magic, how they live with it and their disabilities doesn’t seem too ridiculous.
The kid at the Southern Air Temple, on the other hand, is pretty faily. He looks stereotypically intellectually developmentally disabled, which may just be an appearance. That’s used to cue you to the fact that he’s not a valuable team member for whatever game the children excluded Aang from. And yes, I actually am talking about that kid seen in one scene in flashback. I think he has a name. I don’t remember it.
“She’s crazy and she needs to go down.” Crazy is not a good reason to give up on trying to get along with someone. How about “she’s evil and has been this way by nature and not by circumstance”? That would be more to the point, if not so snappy.