my intent is not to be mean but I am sure it will come off that way anyways so I'm sorry for asking, but I am genuinely curious how you, a sighted person, reading braille is any different than a sighted person cosplaying as matt murdock.
wow, i, uh. i don’t really have an easy way to answer this question.
cosplaying matt murdock - or any other disabled character - if you’re nondisabled is taking on a set of experiences that’s associated with a tremendous amount of stigma and systemic oppression for the sake of a costume. it’s approaching the tools and aspects of lived experience and turning them into something fun for a day that can be taken off and cast aside when it gets inconvenient.
it’s an action that’s totally ignorant of the impact of media, the social and historical contexts of spectatorship and disability, the lack of prominent disabled characters as representation, and the real life accusations of ‘faking disability’ that disabled people face every day (and which severely impact availability of needed resources). it’s disrespectful and harmful.
so. that’s cosplay.
now, i’m working in a broad sense to become more knowledgeable about accessibility, alternative formats, and the representation and misrepresentation of disability so that i can explore these things in more formal academic contexts and hopefully work towards more relevant and valuable change. i’m probably going to graduate with a focus in disability studies.
as far as braille comes in, i’m in the process of writing a 100+ page research paper on the representation of disability in daredevil. i’ve read about 200 daredevil comics, but i realized pretty early on that my paper would be absolutely valueless if my only point of attention was the comics themselves, so i did a lot of really varied reading and study. i am sighted, and the experiences matt murdock has as a blind person aren’t in any way something i would ever feel like i could just like, assume to be able to talk about. they’ll never be something i’ll be fully aware of, ever, but i think research remains important, because a paper like the one i’m writing doesn’t exist in the world and i think it’s valuable.
i’m working on learning braille because of its inclusion/lack of inclusion in the daredevil comics and its subsequent connection to my research topic, but also because a major part of what i’m working on is making a piece of media that centers so fully on a blind character accessible to blind/visually impaired people. because i think structures of accountability are really really key to representational work, and right now that’s basically impossible. braille is one aspect of a potential ‘accessibility kit’ that i’m working on for comics.
primarily, though, i’m learning braille because my attention to disability, representation of disability, accessibility, etc. extends well beyond this specific piece of media in a way that’s very distinct from the lack of awareness in cosplaying this character. i think it’s important to effectively address situations of inaccessibility and ableism, and doing so requires being knowledgeable and aware. i don’t know if things are improperly or incompletely labeled if i can’t read those labels. i don’t know how things should be formatted correctly, i don’t know if something’s a valid alternative format, i don’t have a method available to try to help make things suck less. like, many many many of the buildings at my college are incompletely brailled. so i’m working with the office of disability services and independently to try to approach that issue.
a lot of people accessorize basic braille. in those contexts, braille is stripped of its significance. it’s reduced to a fun thing for sighted people to play with and throw aside. the same thing is true of ASL. those uses of braille and ASL are absolutely in the same sort of vein as cosplaying a disabled character, because they’re disrespectful and unaware. but i don’t think that learning braille and ASL are inherently damaging or thoughtless. learning braille allows me to become a resource for translation and a prompt towards accountability.
ultimately it comes down to this: i’m working really hard to be aware of my positionality and how easy it is to accessorize experiences of disability. of course i fuck up, and i really encourage you to call me out if you see that happen. but for me, learning braille isn’t like. collecting action figures and t-shirts and reading as many comics as possible. it isn’t about the character. it’s about developing more tools to approach accessibility, accountability, representation, awareness.
Fandom collison!
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1
‘average writer kills off 3 gay characters per book’ factoid actualy just statistical error. queerbaiting rowling, who kills off over 10,000 characters per series and announces they are all gay after their deaths, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
I am sO here for autistic matt murdock!!!!
Matt Murdock is an autistic, manic-depressive, disabled superhero with sensory processing disorder and i will fight the Whole World About All Of It
some facts tho, like, canon facts gathered from comics and show:
matt murdock sleeps under a thick heavy blanket
matt murdock sleeps with silk sheets because “cotton feels like sandpaper on [his] skin”
matt murdock is generally very sensitive to texture and feel of clothing and fabric and can’t life comfortably in ones that are Wrong
matt murdock is very sensitive to taste and texture of food and can’t comfortably eat things that are Wrong (oysters)
“What I wasn’t taking into account was maybe my greatest weakness: sensory overload.”
in fact let me just quote that whole section
“For me, it’s not just about warmer weather or navigating traffic. Because of my hypersenses, everything out here is new to me. But the human brain, no matter how smart, can only process so much data at any given time. The more there is to learn, the more difficult it is to maintain your normal level of concentration.” –matt on the difficulties of moving to a new city
incidentally i’m like 900% sure this is a big piece of why matt continues to use a cane even after his identity is revealed (so that he doesn’t have to devote so much of his energy and concentration to orientation and mobility)
matt murdock gets sound and smell sensitive migraines
matt murdock hates crowds
matt murdock has frequently gone manic in response to traumatic events in his life and has stayed manic for months on end
matt murdock is known to both himself and his friends as someone who struggles with severe depressive episodes and self-destructive behavior
matt murdock literally word-for-word canonically describes himself as having depression. he uses the word depression to describe his experiences. i’m not gonna put the panels in here because they stress me out.
matt murdock (on the show) is a massive fidgeter. he fidgets extensively with the handle of his cane and continues to make those same gestures even when he’s not holding the cane
matt murdock (on the show) uses a script to describe difficult situations, even if that script is not 100% appropriate for the situation (he uses the same script of “world on fire” to describe his supersenses to both foggy and claire, even though it’s not suited to foggy; consistently says “i’m blind” as an excuse for superhero behavior things even though it doesn’t fit the scenario- although lbr nondisabled people are so awkward about disability he probably does this because it works 99% of the time. still a script tho)
fisk on the show is So autistic-coded that many many of the things that are like “you’re like me, daredevil” that fisk says/does/the parallels between fisk and matt are actually autistic-coded things
when in college, matt wears huge ear protectors and a dust mask to sleep in to mitigate the sensory input of trying to sleep in a room shared with another living person (who is the ever-loud, ever-smelly foggy nelson)
matt murdock has super extreme empathy levels for the people in hell’s kitchen, but only hell’s kitchen- which helps to explain why he’s pretty chill with crime as long as it happens outside his neighborhood
matt murdock develops extremely close, strong connections with a very limited number of people
even though matt murdock cares So Deeply about the people in his life, he is truly terrible at spoken, neurotypical communication
matt murdock’s emotionality is Off given his circumstances and the traditional/typical neurotypical response to those situations. foggy comments on this when matt is happy-go-lucky after tragedy, and he’s so known for it that they literally call him the man without fear (it’s not that matt has no fear- it’s that matt presents fear differently, responds to fear differently)
matt murdock has developed specific coping mechanisms and behaviors to respond to certain sensory input:
“Three-hundred-some pulse rates just doubled. I can’t unhear them, so I use one of my mental exercises. I picture all those hearts as instruments in a giant orchestra.”
it’s kind of hard to make distinctions between the things matt does because he’s blind (textured suits, specifically organized desk, routines, etc) and things that he does specifically because he’s neurodivergent, and i know folks are going to challenge me on that, because how dare i headcanon a character as autistic. especially how dare i claim a character can be disabled and also mentally ill and neurodivergent
but i think this difficulty of distinction makes sense, a) because supersenses, and who says that supersenses can’t also be described as sensory processing disorder and in terms of neurodivergence and b) intersectionality of experience; because guess what people can be autistic and blind and you can’t always separate out specific elements of why people respond to their world in certain ways because brains are fucking complicated
What the ever-loving fuck?
I just finished watching After the Dark and I am...I am astounded. I think I loved it? But I'm so in shock at present that I can't decide. I certainly loved the plot and the characters were phenomenal...it was incredibly visually effective and beautiful...
But the ending! I have no idea how to handle it!
Please, if anyone has seen it, please please please talk to me about it. Please, I'm begging you. Someone needs to share in this delightful, brain-fucked agony.
Gorgeous and fantastic commission for me by batcii (who is super nice and amazingly talented) of Achilles and Patroclus being young and in love.
and here we have a small collection of images i like to call “Canes: Does Anyone At Marvel Actually Know What They Are” because i did like the base level amount of work to feel comfortable even making a casual tumblr post about daredevil and much of this seems like shit
[images: a collection of panels from marvel’s daredevil in which either matt murdock or his wife milla donovan, both of whom are blind, are holding or using a cane]
image 1: literally what the hell. matt has a short red crooked support cane that is not even facing the correct way. this panel is very old and not from volume 2 but i included it because it’s just wild, even though crooked canes like this for the visually impaired were popular in, like, post-WWII era, because it’s so short and facing the wrong way and so out of time
image 2: thirty years later and matt has a support cane again, but at least he’s holding it right and at least it looks closer to the right length (this came after a good run of matt actually having a reasonably effective looking cane, so i was understandably pissed)
image 3: matt has a collapsible cane that… doesn’t work… like any collapsible cane i’ve ever seen does
image 4: matt is holding a cane that looks closer to me to being right, except it’s very short even for a guide cane and it looks like it has a strap at the top except he’s holding it like it’s a handle, and that is an incredibly awkward way to do anything
image 5: that cane looks short as hell, again, even for a guide cane
image 6: that cane looks long as hell, even for a long cane and especially for a straight cane because then it’s unadjustable, and why are you holding it like that
image 7: milla, how is holding your cane straight out from your body like a gun going to be helpful AT ALL ? why is your grip so weird
image 8: milla, how is holding your cane two stairs down helpful at all, and are you just holding onto the top of it
relatedly: i’m honestly kind of disgusted that the daredevil fandom is so horrifically unwilling to put in image descriptions on photos/gifs/videos
like, this is always something that you should be doing and something you should be aware of, but if you’re actively engaging with a piece of media that has a blind protagonist, you seriously need to put in some effort to make your content about that blind protagonist accessible to actual blind/vi folks
otherwise you need to think damn hard about who the intended audience of that media is and what that says about the structures of accountability it (doesn’t) have in place, what the implications of that are for representation, and how that ties into the call for “nothing about us without us.” and then, as matt murdock says to people he catches doing crime, change your life.
Let’s play a game called: Someone Lobotomize Me Please My Brain Is Killing Itself And I’d Like It To Stop
As a huge thank you to all of you who have supported the comic from the very start up to now and bore with the delays and dramas, let’s have a giveaway!
1st place: a FREE commission of any size (see here) as well as any product from my Society6/Redbubble, including shipping.
2nd place: an A5 sketchbook filled with art of the apollocomic gang and also character bios/sneak peeks of upcoming pages.
3rd place: same as 2nd place but in an A6 sketchbook, with storyboards of past and upcoming panels.
- Giveaway will end September 30th, winners will be messaged privately (people can get weirdly jealous and send rude messages so i’d rather leave it as your choice). All postage costs will be covered by me as this is when my student loan comes in, and also because I’m so thankful for all the donations you guys gave for the Gofundme - I’d be in serious trouble with my rent and whole financial situation without you guys and this is the only way i can think to repay your generosity! The Gofundme has ended, but there is a donation link in the sidebar at all times, and anything (even a dollar) is SO appreciated - art doesn’t do much for the bank account, sadly.
- Reblogs count as an extra entry, but aren’t necessary as likes are completely fine :) (If you left your url during the gofundme you get entered three times! also any donations from now until the end of the giveaway will also count as extra entries.) (also, must be following apollocomic!)
THANK YOU SO MUCH and good luck!