Why Can’t Physically Disabled People Be Heroes?

I’m tired of reading sci‐fi where disability has been completely eliminated. I’m tired of people who decide that an ideal world is one where I don’t exist.

While I feel strongly that being disabled is not ideal, disability is still part of the human experience and should be represented in our creative endeavors as a species. Disabled folks don’t just need heroes, they need to be heroes.

Why can’t a person in a wheelchair be a hero? Why can’t someone who uses a wheelchair?

How important are leg muscles in that situation, for example? Not very, I would suppose.

Or how about here?

I want to see people who look like me in movies and other forms of media. I want to see people in wheelchairs be more than background characters and information brokers.

Writers who claim that writing such characters is hard are fucking lazy. What’s that? You create a magic system involving break‐dancing and blood‐magic but can’t be bothered to figure out how a character in a chair would climb a mountain?

Let me tell you how: They would strap themselves to their fucking chair and climb that mountain using a pair of really sharp picks, raw (unbelievably sexy) pectoral and arm strength, and and a lot of creativity. And when they got to the top they would be tired, pissed, and incredibly dangerous.

I can tell from personal experience that non‐wheelchair users are quite surprised at the strength of wheelchair using folks when anger / violence is involved. I want to see that fear in the villain of a story where someone like me is the hero.

It’s not that fucking hard.