“There’s a cure?!” asked the girl that kills everything she touches. “Hey shut up we’re perf” replied the girl that makes clouds.

For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. “Makes clouds my ass” she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and that’s how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.

I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY

kawaiite-mage

“Finally, a cure for my chainsaw hands!” decreed Chainsaw-Hands Joe.

“There is no cure,” said Johnny Five-Dicks. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”

holyromanhomo

The last comment literally always cracks me up

The X-Men are an extremely good metaphor for oppressed minorities until they are suddenly an extremely terrible metaphor for oppressed minorities.

davidmann95

The scale on which the first reply misses the point literally never ceases to awe me.

lyricwritesprose

I gotta say, though, this is a place where the X-men are being a good metaphor for oppressed minorities. Specifically, in this case, the disabled community.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” says the girl with depression. “Cure for what, motherfucker, I’m not sick,” says the person with autism.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days. “Yes, because it’s easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,” says the Deaf person. “‘Cure’ is violent rhetoric.”

The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of “disability,” and many of them don’t even resemble each other. Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated). Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community. These things really should not be grouped together, but they are. And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.

It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all “mutants” as one group. You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and that’s not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time. “Realistically,” if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches. But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.

So it’s actually not a bad take. Mind you, the X-men have had bad takes, and will do so again, and I’m skeptical about whether “powers” of any kind even work for a metaphor about minority representation—but this particular vignette has something useful to say.

philosopherking1887

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what bothers me about purely social analyses of disability.

prismatic-bell

And even if you look at the mutants as being all one group, it’s still a useful metaphor.

Put another way:

“They can cure us?” asks the autistic person who struggles to think clearly, can’t form full sentences, is overstimulated at the drop of a hat and misses out on a lot of things they’d otherwise like to do because for them, autism is literally crippling.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” I say, as a person with autism who has a job, car, excellent communication and coping skills and a relatively normal life, because for me, autism is a thing I’ve adapted to and worked around.

(And yes, autistic people in the first category do exist. I’ve encountered a few right here on Tumblr and seen more than one say “don’t forget us in your autism activism because we aren’t ‘just a little different,’ this is a genuine problem for us.”)

Or perhaps:

“They can cure us?” asks the amputee who has never fully adapted to the loss of her arm below the shoulder, and gets by okay most days but very much misses being non-disabled.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” says the person who was born with only one arm and has never considered it any kind of deficit because it’s just how things are.

Different people will experience the same disability in different ways. It may have to do with how they were diagnosed, or how they came to be disabled; it may have to do with complications related to the disability (not to use the same metaphor twice, but someone whose arm was crushed and experiences terrible phantom pains daily probably feels a lot more negatively about their lack of an arm than someone who was born without it and has no phantom limb to feel sensation in). It may even be because of how other people around them treat the disability! A blind person treated with dignity and appropriate accommodation is probably going to feel very differently about their disability than someone with the same kind of blindness, but also a bunch of condescending pricks who want to make it into a terrible tragedy.

The metaphor still works even within any given subgroup of disabled people, and I think we need to remember that in our activism, too.

specifically, roaches have a one-two-three combo punch or abilities that can destroy or disable nearly any bacteria, even superbugs!

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