Written by Hannah Dang, with support from the DAC Team
What kid hasn’t dreamed of being a superhero? Yes, playing with Disney Princesses and Barbie Dolls was fun, but watching superheroes was perhaps one of my favorite parts of childhood. If I became tired of romance stories and pretending to be a world-class fashion designer, I would don a makeshift cape and a mask and play make-believe, imagining I was a hero destined to save the world. Other than my parents, who more than deserve the title of super-parents for raising my sisters and me, I was raised by the heroes of Marvel created by Stan Lee and various authors, the D.C. heroes in D.C. comics, the Power Rangers, and a thousand others. Since the 1930s, during World War II, superheroes have been fashioned to inspire a surge of hope and strength in people around the globe (Eury, Michael, et al.). Based on ancient, mythological heroes, superheroes have an immense impact on the world, the consequences being a mix of positive and negative, especially in connection with the disability community.
As every story does, stories about superheroes include many tropes or, “a significant or recurring theme. Also known as a motif,” and stories featuring disabled superheroes are no exception (Kellgren-Fozard). One of the tropes I plan to discuss in this blog is the “Disability Superpower Trope,” in which a disabled person is portrayed as being “extra amazing” or should be considered to be someone special because of their disability. Known as the “Super Crip,” they’re characters who go above and beyond the scale of non-disabled people despite their disabilities. The character has a special talent or skill that no other character can beat, implicitly making up for their disability, bordering on a straight superpower. For a long time, disabled people were either historically portrayed as secondary characters in “sob-sub storylines” or they became characters who have to do the undoable. These misconceptions appear in a variety of ways. For instance, the character’s disability would be used as a plot device or linked as the direct cause of their superpowers, origin story, and morals despite the lack of connection and correlation.
YouTuber Jessica Kellgren-Fozard makes remarks about the problems of this trope in her video, “The Disability Superpower Trope!” by giving the following example. The Marvel superhero, Daredevil, is a lawyer by the name of Matt Murdock by day and a masked vigilante by night. According to the script, Murdock was blinded as a child due to a radioactive chemical spill, and as a result of losing his sight, he attained an enhanced sense of smell. The problem with this line of storytelling is that it does not give a visible representation of an actual blind person because Daredevil functioned as perfectly as he used to even with no eyesight. Yes, Murdock is canonically blind, but if his disability doesn’t have a realistic impact on his daily life, can it really be called a disability? Say the producers were to go down a different route and say Murdock received his radar powers due to coming into contact with the unknown radioactive and toxic chemicals, it would be more believable. But because this isn’t the case, the story becomes an irritating and unrealistic portrayal of blindness because the producers are communicating a fallacy: disabilities lead to superhuman abilities. Beguiling tropes like this place extra pressures and burdens on actual disabled people in the real world who don’t gain superpowers (Kellgren-Fozard). To put it simply, Daredevil doesn’t address actual problems in the real world; instead, it makes viewers believe disabled people function as normally as everyone else and have no need for accessibility because they’re “superhuman.” As long as disability continues to be represented poorly in superhero media, the misconception of disabled people being exceptional to normal, everyday people is implied, but the reality is, disabled people exist as regular people too. For too long, the portrayal of disability on-screen has been (and still is) viewed as tragic and “blundered by an overuse of stereotypes,” causing the disability community to experience a disconnect between themselves and able-bodied people. As Kellgren-Fozard puts it, “Disabled characters are written exactly as expected, but not representative or inclusive.”
That isn’t to say every storyteller is incapable of subverting their readers’ expectations. Here’s one example: Marissa Meyer, the acclaimed author of the Lunar Chronicles and the Gilded Duology, published a book series called the Renegades Trilogy, which features a diverse cast of characters. Set in the make-believe dystopian city of Gatlon, the trilogy covers the feud between an elite task force of superheroes called the Renegades and their extremist counterparts, the Anarchists. Told in the alternating perspectives of Nova Artino, an Italian-Filipina Anarchist, and Adrien Everhart, a Renegade and a person of color, readers will be enthralled by the secret identities plotlines, star-crossed lovers, clashing ideologies, and an epic conclusion to a long war.
One of the main characters in the book series I will focus on is Oscar Silva, a Renegade who goes by the alias Smokescreen due to his superability to summon and manipulate smoke at will. Oscar is one of the only characters to be anointed the title of Renegade and has a visible disability. In the story, Oscar was born with a genetic bone disease, and at the age of five, he died of suffocation in a house fire because he couldn’t escape his room. By the time he was rushed to the hospital, Oscar was pronounced dead only to be resurrected and have the superpower of smoke manipulation. Another subversion we see in Oscar is that “his power is not super-intelligence, one often attributed to physically disabled characters” to “make up” for their limited physical mobility (Kbbookreviewer).
By the present day, Oscar is openly described as using a cane to walk and as a weapon. Some people misread Meyer’s intentions and believe Oscar’s superpowers are a result of his disability. Their thinking correlates along the lines of “Oscar has a superpower because he was unable to escape the house he was trapped in due to being unable to walk.” Although his bone disease contributed to his death, it did not contribute to his attainment of a superpower. Meyer makes it clear Oscar gains a superpower as retribution for dying in the fire, not due to his bone disease. His disability doesn’t disappear after he recovers nor is it swapped out for the ability to manipulate smoke. Even as a superhero, he has to use a cane to walk and faces discrimination because not every Renegade accepts Oscar. Luckily, his teammates don’t write Oscar off for having a disability as long as his safety isn’t compromised. The difference between Daredevil and Oscar is miniscule, but it makes it all the more impactful.
In our stories, we need more realistic narratives. As Kellgren-Fozard says, “Everyone deserves representation on screen, and accurate representation at that.” We have to stop correlating people’s disabilities to having superpowers because realistically, magic isn’t real, and it shouldn’t be used as a cure-for-all for disabilities. The detrimental effects of their prevalence don’t end there. Ranging from correlating villainy to physically disabled characters and characters who have physical enhancements (ex. replacing a missing or defective limb with cybernetic parts, prosthetics, or armor) in comparison to the physically perfect heroes, “This trope is rooted in eugenics-based ideas linking disability and deformity with a predisposition towards vice, criminality, and insanity.” To the world, a crippled body equates to a crippled soul, when it shouldn’t be.
One more example I would like readers to take in is the characters, heroes, and villains, in mangaka Kohei Horikoshi’s best-selling manga, Boku no Hero Academia (lit. My Hero Academia). In the world of Boku no Hero Academia, 80% of the population is born with a quirk, a genetic mutation in the host’s cells that gives the host either superhuman abilities and/or anthropomorphic appearances. Centered around Izuku Midoriya, Izuku is one of the “unlucky” 20% of the population to not be born with a quirk. We see first-hand as Izuku’s hopes of being accepted at U.A., the cornerstone of the world’s greatest academies for superheroes and the school of Japan’s number one hero, be shattered as reality sinks in. Izuku quickly loses the respect of his teachers and classmates, his best friend, and nearly his dream. It is not until Izuku earns a quirk to call his own, bestowed to him by his idol, that Izuku’s heroism and ideologies are constantly put to the test. As Horikoshi’s world is designed for the superhuman, the predisposed better division of the human race, there was no place for the Quirkless, an allegory for the disabled community (Meinberg). The theme Horikoshi formulates in a world in which having superpowers is normalized questions if it is superpowers that make a hero or is it how a person uses their powers that shape their heroism. There is more to Horikoshi’s story in terms of the disability allegories he subtly slips into, but I’ll be sure to cover it all in another blog.
There is no shame in looking up to a fictional character as a role model or a superhero at that. At the heart of it, superheroes are around to inspire people and serve as a reminder that good will always prevail over evil even in the darkest of times. Just as superheroes never give up in front of the villains when it comes to saving the world, we can’t give up when it comes to advocating for the representation we righteously deserve.
Works Cited
Eury, Michael, et al. “Superhero.” Edited by Barbara A Schreiber et al., Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 Aug. 2023, www.britannica.com/art/superhero.
Funk, Allie. “Disability Allegory in My Hero Academia.” Medium, 3 Sep. 2022, medium.com/@alliedfunk/disability-allegory-in-my-hero-academia-212d46b25dac.
Kbbookreviewer. “Renegades, by Marissa Meyer.” KBbookreviews, WordPress, 21 Dec. 2019, kbbookreviews867789450.wordpress.com/2019/12/21/renegades-by-marissa-meyer/#:~:text=Silva%2FSmokescreen–%20This%20hero%20is,best%20heroes%20in%20the%20Renegades.
Kellgren-Fozard, Jessica. “The Disability Superpower Trope!” YouTube, 8 July 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDiIklBhmIg. Accessed 16 Oct. 2023.
Meinberg, Michael. “Disability and Ableism in My Hero Academia.” The Geeky Gimp, 10 Aug. 2018, geekygimp.com/disability-ableism-hero-academia/.
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