In Brightest Day: Characters Don’t Get to Stay Disabled

If you have seen “Breezy,” the most recent episode of Adventure Time, then you will know that something really awful happened. That’s right—Finn grew his arm back. Just grew it back. And maybe I would be less annoyed if 1) I didn’t expect better of Adventure Time, and 2) this wasn’t symptomatic of a bigger problem. “Curing” disabled characters is one of those things that happens a lot in genre fiction and it sends an awful message.

In Brightest Day: Deucalion

We’ve made it no secret on this site that we love Teen Wolf. However, while there were many parts of this past season that we liked, there were also quite a few things wrong with it. Unfortunately, some of those things were also rather offensive—Boyd’s death by fingernails comes to mind—but for me, a really big issue came about from Deucalion’s blindness. Lady Saika already talked about this briefly before:

[The] ugly trope of magically healing the disabled is something that we are very against. It neatly removes any representation for people with disabilities and sends the message that people with disabilities are not whole people and need to be healed to live a full life. It also seems to apply a moral standard to disability: if you are a good enough person—if Our Hero believes you deserve it—you can be healed. If you’re still disabled, then you must have done something wrong.

While that is true, that’s not the full scope of how hard Teen Wolf failed in this regard.

Teen Wolf Season 3A: This Might Hurt.

[Warning for Spoilers]

Lady Saika: Well, Lady Geek Girl has dragged me into this fandom as well, and I have to say: the season three tagline was a bit of an understatement. “Might” hurt? My ass.

But now we’re on hiatus (does the Teen Wolf fandom have a silly word for hiatuses like Supernatural‘s ‘hellatus’ and Hannibal‘s ‘he-ate-us’? Howlatus?) until January, and we can sit back, lick our wounds, and collect our thoughts about the first twelve episodes of season three.

Lady Geek Girl: Now, Madame Ace and I have delved into Teen Wolf before. We discussed both seasons one and two, as well as feminism in Teen Wolf and race issues in Teen Wolf. I have praised Teen Wolf before, because, while not perfect, it is a very feminist show. This season I had high hopes for the show to continue with its usual feminist themes. And while we still have many strong female characters and feminist themes, the ladies certainly took a hit this season.