RandomTwitterGuy
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2019
What really pisses me off about this is that it would be SO FUCKING SIMPLE to give the chair literally ANY means to fly. Just tilt the wheels into a V-shape and add some glow and particle effects, BAM! Flying chair that doesn't look completely lazy and terrible.
Not to mention that it looks so... handmade, but is completely translucent. Usually magic, flying platforms in wow look like they're made out of a single piece, or at least as few as is possibly required.
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Which means Khadghar intentionally created a rickety wooden contraption out of magic, way overcomplicating the spell to add wheels and shit, and then never uses the wheels. We're supposed to believe he's one of the greatest archmages to ever live... It's all so frustrating.
Yeah, when I saw that, I had a kind of spit-take. I couldn't believe it was real as I broke away from WoW a long time ago, but damn. This is bad even for modern Blizzard.
You are a master wizard, and you made a shoddy-looking wheelchair, and it can fly? It looks so fucking bad, and ignoring the whole if this is pandering or not that I have some talk about, as a concept, it looks bad and patronizing.
Why is it not like a Floating Disk, an elemental carrying him around, a summoned magic creature to ride?
No, make it a shitty-looking wheelchair that looks like it was made by outsourcing to the lowest possible contractor.
Even if you, at times, want him to have a wheelchair, why not make it look intricate and well-designed? Nope, let's make it look like shit. Don't you feel appreciated, all you handicapped people?
In contrast, this is Taimi from Guild Wars 2. Many people dislike her, and she can be annoying, but that's not the point.
She has some weird sickness thing, so she can't walk properly and is disabled. So she is slow, limps around, and has some other things. BLABLABLA!.
I am bringing it up because, in lore, she made a Golem so she could move around and so on.
Golems are Common with the Asura (her race), and she is a "Genius," so this plays into what she is supposed to be in the story.
If this were Blizzard, it should likely be in a flying purple shitty-looking Iron loung.
This is Khadgar a mage, make him do cool mage shit to help him overcome these limitations.
A damaged, battle-scarred character is fun and interesting and there are tons of similar types done throughout fantasy and speculative fiction in general.
But the preachy, hamfisted attempts at arguing someone is fully capable (or whatever) despite having a disability, or that a disability doesn't hamper them? It's stupid because it just ignores the realities of a situation.
There's a difference between infantilizing or coddling someone who has a disability (ie, pretending they're retarded because they're in a wheelchair) and acting like someone in a wheelchair can do the exact same things an able-bodied person can do.
I hate characters like this because it is so patronizing to people with disabilities and ignores the actual issues they face by just hand-waving it away as not being a problem with magical thinking.
Now, I am not a massive fan of Game of Thrones or anything like that, but Jamie Lannister , he is one of the best swordsmen in the kingdom, and he loses his dominant hand, so he can no longer fight and therefore has to retrain to learn how to fight left-handed. He never fully overcomes it and has to deal with this handicap, but instead, he becomes an interesting character.
I had a friend who had severe birth defects from the time he was born. Severe deformities of his entire body, and he was wheelchair-bound his whole life.
He died some years ago because of complications with his heart and deformities in his organs. He was dealt a shit hand in life, but he held a job he liked, had many friends, enjoyed good hobbies, traveled when he could, and did his best to live as fulfilling a life as possible, given the limitations he faced. He never lived a "normal" life, as he literally could not, and at times, he had to ask for help because simple things were not possible for him.
He had numerous limitations, yet the fact that he accomplished so much in his life is truly remarkable.
He died some years ago because of complications with his heart and deformities in his organs. He was dealt a shit hand in life, but he held a job he liked, had many friends, enjoyed good hobbies, traveled when he could, and did his best to live as fulfilling a life as possible, given the limitations he faced. He never lived a "normal" life, as he literally could not, and at times, he had to ask for help because simple things were not possible for him.
He had numerous limitations, yet the fact that he accomplished so much in his life is truly remarkable.
In media, disabilities should be presented for what it is: a limitation, and potentially an extremely limiting one, rather than some accessory that is as life-altering as wearing a hat.
Instead, this is pandering that not only feels insulting but also cheap.