terajk | Oh, the hell with it (The PWD Being Awesome fest)

You know how when you're really craving, say, pizza, but you're trying not to eat pizza (for whatever reason), so you eat other things but then still end up eating pizza anyway? Yeah, so that happened to me today. Because even though I plan this for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, and even though KNOW

three_weeks_for_dw is a month away, I REALLY want characters with disabilities doing awesome things today.

Welcome to the People with Disabilities (PWD) Being Awesome Commentwork Fest!

How it works:

This is a multi-fandom fest celebrating characters with disabilities doing awesome things! Prompts can be from any fandom, and can feature canonically, non-canonically or supernaturally disabled characters. (Are Remus Lupin and Sookie Stackhouse awesome PWD? You betcha!) You can interpret an undiagnosed character as a PWD, or reimagine someone as one. Don't let the fest's name throw you. All disabled characters can come play, even if they aren't people. Also, no restrictions on rating!

But what do you mean by "being awesome?"

I mean a lot of things: Saving the world, going on adventures, facing off against ableism, hanging out with friends, struggling with changes in identity. A prompt/story doesn't have to be happy to be awesome.

What fanworks are welcome?

Fic, art, podfic, fanmixes, poetry, vids...anything you can think of!

Prompting:

Prompts should have the following format:

Fandom, character/paring, prompt.

For crossovers: Fandom 1/Fandom 2, character/pairing, prompt.

You can leave as many prompts as you like. Also, please use respectful language in your prompt.

Filling Prompts:

If you fill a prompt, either post your story as a reply to the prompt-comment, or post a link to your story as a reply to the prompt if it's hosted elsewhere (say, your journal). Also, prompts may be filled more than once. You may also fill your own prompts, if you wish.

Warnings:

You may use "Choose Not to Warn" or "No Warnings Apply," or use warnings/content notes for any triggering material.

If you'd like to bait your host...

Prompts in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Ranma 1/2 and Soul Eater are the best way to do this. Just sayin'.

Questions?:

Feel free to ask!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

First reactions say a lot.

That's always true, but no less so right now. How people react to Charles -- and more to the point, to his wheelchair -- says a lot about who they are. And about how they'll react to mutants.

Okay, yes, he's a telepath; he could muck around in their heads if he wanted to. It would be criminally easy to find someone with basic skills and then push and pull and mold their minds so that they react exactly the way Charles tells them to.

Easy, but frightfully boring. He wants someone who can think, and react, and, well, someone he can trust.

--

"Oh," says one woman, eyes wide, "you didn't mention," and she cuts herself off quickly enough, but it doesn't take telepathy to see that she's reconsidering her opinion of Charles and of the students. Children with special needs, he'd phrased it, deliberately ambiguous; two-thirds of the people he meets with think see his wheelchair and think they understand. This woman is one of them.

Charles smiles politely and wraps up the interview.

--

One candidate seems promising, and conducts himself professionally enough, except there are undertones of smug, self-congratulatory pity. Look at how awesome I am for helping the poor little cripples. Charles isn't sure how much of that is what he's picking up telepathically, and how much is just intuition, but it makes his skin crawl.

After that's over, he has a nice stiff drink, and allows himself a moment of wishing he could have Erik back, or Raven.

--

He finally finds who he's looking for: someone who is intelligent without being arrogant, who notices the wheelchair (and doesn't pretend not to) but files it away as just another fact about Charles, along with hair color and eye color and skin color and accent, part of who he is without being all of who he is.

When it turns out she's a mutant too, that's an added bonus, but he's already decided to offer her the job.

This is wonderful.

I...sort of want to quote the whole thing back at you? I love how Charles *could* use telepathy to make the potential assistants how he wants, but chooses not to; how he says his students have "special needs;" how he needs a drink after dealing with some ableist, patronizing jerkwad and thinks of Erik and Raven.