More prompts plus Avatar: The Last Airbender squee

[sqbr]

• Avatar the Last Airbender: Toph and Teo, Iroh and Zuko, bonus Mai.
  
• Grey's Anatomy: Miranda Bailey
  

I was also inspired to write some fic about Toph and Teo inventing Braille and installing ramps, because that's my idea of wish fulfillment.

pippin suggested four different characters for "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (NOT THE SAME AS THE MOVIE AVATAR) and having watched the show it is pretty much made for this challenge: it's not just set in an alternate East Asia (thus making all the characters non-white, even if not everyone seems to have noticed(*)) the characters cover a variety of ethnicities, ages, and body types, and several of them are disabled or scarred. It's also made of awesome :)

Some thoughts I had on a recent post of trouble's which I will edit slightly:
I think Avatar does pretty well in letting it's disabled characters actually be disabled rather than negating any difficulties with superpowers etc.

Toph is blind but can "see" via vibrations through the ground. Most of the time she's like a sighted person, but she can't read or fight flying opponents, and if she's flying/floating can at best see the inside of the ship. There's lot of humour about people saying "Read this!" and her saying "I'M BLIND YOU IDIOT" (I'm not sure how blind people would feel about it, but I liked that they were making fun of the idiots not her)

Teo is in a wheelchair/hangglider living on a mountain so can fly. But that's only helpful in really limited circumstances, and he's shown needing help getting up stairs once or twice. (He's a fairly minor character)

I love that the existence of these characters plus Zuko means fangirls are making lots of happy romantic fic/art about characters who have disabilities or scars but no or little angst about it.

(*)I read a fic where the characters were arguing whether after death you ended up flapping around fluffy clouds with wings in Heaven or rotting in the ground. The WHOLE PREMISE of the show revolves around reincarnation!

Comments

[ex_pippin880]

The other day, in conjunction with something you or someone else posted along with some magic system I was world-building, I started thinking about magic for non-abled people, e.g. using sign language or !braille !magnetic tattoos able to be read by !magnetic reading-finger-things (...yeah, words) instead of speaking for spells.

It is rather difficult to NOT go "well there is x part of the magic that can perfectly replicate whatever they are unable to do" because that is so often a part of non-abled magicians/superheroes/etc. it's pretty... ingrained into me. :(

[sqbr]

Yeah, I started pondering how the deaf inhabitants of Amniat would relate to Vorn with him being psychic and my brain TOTALLY kept going to the "Maybe they're psychic too!" place. And all attempts to see if anyone else has considered how deaf people would relate to psychic characters in a fantasy setting..found me deaf psychic characters.

[ex_pippin880]

Hmm. I guess it depends on what sort of psychicness it is? What with Teo being able to understand him, despite the language barrier, I'd assume deaf people who know a sign language would have his psychic thoughts also directly translated into their language. And, again, since he can understand what Teo says, I don't see why he wouldn't be able to psychically understand non-spoken speech?

Unless the psychicness is tied to some kind of ultra-high-pitch frequency magic comprehension sound but that would be silly.

[sqbr]

Oh, they can definitely understand him about as well as anyone else whose language he doesn't know (which is only a little worse than those who are speaking a language he does know).

What I meant was the effect of his existence: in most pre-modern cultures (and some modern ones :/) Deaf people have no structured sign language and aren't taught lip reading (it doesn't come naturally) So they have no way to communicate with anyone except maybe their family (and even then only with a limited set of signs) and if born deaf will be seen as mentally disabled.

So you have this group of people who were voiceless suddenly getting a way of communicating with those around them, but only when Vorn is in their vicinity.

[ex_pippin880]

*wikis*

Oh! Huh. I thought sign language was older than it is.

[sqbr]

Heh. While I googled and discovered it was older than I thought it was :D (I think I got confused between when it was invented and when it became very widespread and accepted. Not that it's fully accepted now...)