If I Knew Then What I Know Now: NaNoWriMo Lessons From a Graduate of the School of Hard Knocks and Deleted Documents

Since attempting my first NaNoWriMo at age 18 in 2008, I have done NaNoWriMo (or Camp NaNoWriMo) 10 times, and “won” (reached 50,000 words) all 10 times. In doing so, I’ve definitely beaten the odds. I don’t have the exact number, but roughly only 15% of people reach 50,000 by the end of the month. For first-timers, the number is even lower. So how do I consistently do it again and again? Mostly, I’m stubborn and thick-headed and don’t know when to quit. But aside from that, there’s a few things I’ve learned to do (or not do) and a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way. If you find any of this helpful, great. If not…just get back to your story.

1. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save.

On a hard drive. On a flashdrive. By emailing the document to yourself. By making a copy if you’re doing it by hand. By printing. Back up what you are writing on somewhere OTHER than your computer AT LEAST every 10,000 words, ideally every 5,000. Not that I’ve, you know, almost lost 25,000 words because of a frozen computer or anything.

2. Make a plan.

Some people will read this and think, ‘duh,’ others will read it and think ‘no way in hell.’ ‘Duh’ folks, you can skip to the next number. For the rest of you...there are writers who balk at the idea of outlining. They feel it ruins their process, or traps them, or is a waste of time, or throw off their chi or whatever. Fine. That’s cool. Do what works for you most of the time. HOWEVER, this is NaNoWriMo, and the number one reason people don’t finish is because they write a stellar opening, maybe a few expositional scenes, and then they reach 20,000 words and think...I have no idea what happens next. You don’t have to do a complete outline. You don’t have to outline at all. I don’t. I just make a numbered list (much like this one!) of what’s going to happen. Most of the time I keep it very broad, with only five to ten bullet points about what’s going to happen.

This is what my list looked like for my second NaNoWriMo:

A.             Sarah meets Ben. He tells her it’s time for the second trial.

B.             The kids travel to Underhill

C.             Sarah, Sylvia, and Ariana are tricked and captured by the trolls.

D.             Paul et al try to find them, and the human villagers are less than helpful   because they are secretly smuggling fairies.

E.              Sarah and her sisters plan and execute an escape as the trolls head out to fight the humans. The kids are reunited as the battle happens.

That certainly isn’t an outline. It’s essentially the kind of summary a second grader would write for a book report. Imagine you’re climbing a cliff face. It’s hard. You’re sweating. You have to find tiny crevices and cling on for your life. But up ahead, you see a ledge. If you just reach that ledge, you can relax, regroup, and plan your next moves. These are your ledges.

If you don’t have a plan, especially if this is your first time, you won’t make it. Of course, there’s always an exception to the rule, but for 99.99% of you, you will get completely stuck around 15,000 words, 25,000 if you’re lucky. So. Plan. Have those ledges available so you have smaller, tangible goals, so you have a firm, stable place you can aim for.

That being said…

3. Be Prepared To Go Wildly Off Script

I’ve written the same story in three of my ten NaNos, and the main reason I’ve done it so many times is because I didn’t know how to let go. Letting go can and should happen for a number of reasons. Maybe it just isn’t working. Maybe your protagonist just isn’t interested in the boyfriend you so carefully crafted for her. Maybe you’re spending so much time trying to get your characters to the trading post on their way to the space station you’re wondering why they’re even going to the damn trading post in the first place.

In the words of Elsa, “let it go, let it go, let it go.” Don’t let yourself become trapped by your own ideas or outline. In the case of the story I mentioned above, I felt like I needed to set up so many things--lying parents, a budding romance, resentment between two brothers, secret past connections between characters, a magical library, etc--that I never reached the meat of the story. The only reason I finished a complete draft of that story was because on the third go-around I forced myself to skip all the complex exposition and just dive right into the adventure. Then, to my surprise, when I looked it over, I found I didn’t need most of the exposition I’d left out. The story was strong enough without it. Another example: I wrote a mystery where two characters set out to solve one of the main character’s parents’ murder. However, on the way to the parents’ house, they stopped at a farm, and found themselves in the middle of another mystery. After trying unsuccessfully to get them to leave for about 5,000 words, I gave up and just let them solve the mystery on the farm. The resulting story was 55,000 words long.

Part of having a successful plan is knowing when to toss that plan out the window and develop a new one. You’re the god of your universe. Crush some small cities if you feel like it.

4. Don’t Delete ANYTHING (Even Inopportune Russian Mobsters)

The first time I did NaNoWriMo, my protagonist was an eight-year-old boy who loved playing soccer. I opened the story in the middle of a soccer game, and I made the team coach a jerk who didn’t really care about the kids on his team and placed bets with parents on the kids’ games. (Based on a true story. Seriously.) Some 10,000 words later, my protagonist ran away from home and hid in his school gym. And then I was stuck. How did I get him out of that gym? How did I reunite him with his family? How did I set up their kidnapping which would kick off the main plot of the—ooh, I know! What if the coach was secretly laundering the soccer money through the mob!

Oh yeah. Russian mobsters popped up in the middle of my fantasy family story. They were as appropriate as a tap dancing alien in the middle of a serious period drama. About 2,000 words after I created them, I desperately wanted to blast them into so many bytes of data, never again to see the light of day. BUT. The rules say don’t delete, and thank god they do. If you start deleting (other than short paragraphs etc that you realize immediately aren’t where you want the scene to go) you’ll never stop. As they say, November is for writing, December is for editing. Keep those dang Russian mobsters. If you need to, do what I did and highlight the portion you know you’ll end up deleting. But don’t hit the delete key until December 1.

5. Your Writing is Crap (And That’s Okay)

NaNoWriMo is not for careful second drafts. NaNoWriMo is for messy, desperate first drafts, and occasionally complete rewrites. The biggest benefit of NaNoWriMo is that at the end, you have a more-or-less complete story, or at least a large chunk of it. Once you have that story, you can hammer it and refine it and twist it and rework it into something that’s polished and shiny. But you can’t refine something that doesn’t exist in the first place.

One of the biggest reasons people quit in my experience is they feel like their story and/or writing are just plain awful. They’re discouraged and frustrated and can’t understand why the words won’t flow. It’s that way for everyone. TRUST ME. Keep pounding out that story, no matter how terrible it seems. You’ll be able to go back and change it later. And you may even find that those scenes you thought were so awful and pointless actually had a few gems you’d like to keep, or that tightening up the syntax makes the whole scene sharp and engaging.

First drafts are crap. Embrace it.

6. Finally, Tell EVERYONE You’re Doing NaNoWriMo

This serves several purposes. It will keep your roommates from worrying if you don’t emerge from your bedroom for days on end. It will justify the growing pile of dirty dishes in your sink. It will explain your sudden disappearance from the world of social media. But, most importantly, it will give you motivation to finish. Your friends will offer you encouragement and ask to hear about your story. Your BEST friends will harangue you for being so behind on your word count and deny you food and sleep until you reach the next 5K.

Dirty (And Clean) Tricks

A.    Hit 10,000 words in the first five days.

After five days, you should be at 8,800 words, so this isn’t pushing it too much. But if you can hit 10K, you’ll have a head start, and you’ll have a little wiggle room so you can step back, assess, and plan what you want to do next. I also find that the going above and beyond on the initial push really helps jump start my project and gets me invested in my story.

B.    Celebrate the small victories

Award yourself after you hit 10,000 words. After you hit 15,000. 20,000. You get the idea. For each 5K I write, I generally give myself a fun drink or snack: hot chocolate, a cinnamon roll, a candy cane, whatever works. It’s satisfying to have a tangible reward for your effort, and it helps motivate you to write that next 5K. When I reach 25,000, I do something bigger to celebrate the halfway point. I’ll treat myself to dinner, or go out for drinks with friends, or give myself an evening off and play video games. One time, Bug and I made cupcakes and wrote our characters’ names in frosting on the tops. It was a disaster, but it was fun, and it let us celebrate.

The most important marker to celebrate, though, is 35,000. That might seem like a strange number, but once you’re approaching it, trust me, it will make sense. 25,000 to 35,000 is the hardest 10K you’ll write, and 30,000 to 35,000 is the hardest section, full stop. 30 to 35 is a killer. You’ll feel like you’re out of ideas, you’ll be exhausted, you’ll feel like this is the worst story anyone has ever written, and each 100 words will be a struggle. So: I save my biggest celebration for 35,000. For the three years I was in New York, I got student rush tickets to Broadway shows. When I was in Ireland, my friends and I held a Star Wars marathon. Give yourself something to look forward to, and when you reach 35,000 give yourself a huge pat on the back. You deserve it.

C.    When you’re totally and completely stuck, have a character tell a story.

So now we get into the dirty part of the tips and tricks section. These are things you can try when you’re totally and completely stuck, and you feel like your word count is running away from you. First off: have a character tell a story. It can be a bedtime story, a fairytale, a myth, a movie, or even a comic strip. The point is, it should be something you didn’t create. Take something and retell it in your own words. Maybe your characters are in a car and someone tells a story to stave off the boredom. Maybe they’re solving a mystery and your narrator compares it to a Sherlock Holmes story. Maybe your protagonist and his boyfriend are just watching a movie. At any rate: give yourself a break. It’s simple, it’s often fun, it can be taken out at the end if necessary, and it will spark conversation between your characters and hopefully push you into the next scene.

D.    Fly over the sidewalk.

Every writer has experienced this moment: your characters are on their way from Point A to Point B. They found out something terribly exciting and important at Point A, and they need to reach Point B as quickly as possible to make use of this information. So you start them off on their merry way…and 2,000 words later they’re still not there. Bug and I call these “stuck on the sidewalk” moments. In comes from a story Bug was working on where her characters were literally standing on a sidewalk across the street from the warehouse they needed to enter to stop a psychotic assassin. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t end the conversation or transition them into just going into the damn building. We’ve all been there (my characters have a tendency to become stuck in council meetings) and it’s a huge pain.

So: just have your characters fly over the sidewalk. They’re planning to attack, and they won’t stop talking. They’re in the limo on the way to prom and they won’t get out. They’re preparing the dragons for battle but the battle never starts. The hero has to go in and confess his love for the heroine, but he won’t open the front door. Fly. Over. The. Sidewalk. Just stop writing the conversation or the plan or whatever. Jump straight into them doing whatever it is you need them to do, even if you cut your characters off in the middle of a sentence. You can always go back later and add things in, or, as I often find, you may not need that in between moment at all, and you’ll end up cutting the whole thing. Either way, these moments are killer, so if you find yourself bogged down in one, just teleport your characters to the next scene.

E.     Kill Someone

Or, if you absolutely cannot kill a character in your story because it’s a contemporary romance or a comedy or a memoir and killing someone just won’t fit, fall back on the most basic plot of all: A Stranger Comes to Town. The point of this is to shake up your characters and your story. Throw them off balance. Make them react. Even if it seems like the scene is pointless and going nowhere, keep tugging on that string. Who knows? Maybe that dead body will turn out to be the long-lost queen. Maybe the stranger who came to town is a harbinger of the apocalypse. Just saying. It could happen.

F.    If you can reach 40,000 by the 29^th, you can finish.

10,000 words in one day. Sounds nuts, right? Nearly every time I’ve done NaNoWriMo I have at least 5,000 more words I need to write on the last day. But it is definitely doable. You’re so freaking close, it would really suck to fail now. Just pound it out. Even if it’s awful. Even if you end up deleting it. Because regardless of how bad it is (and I’ve written some stinkers) nothing will change the fact that you wrote 50,000 words in a month. And that’s something to be proud of. You set out to do something, and you did it. What’s 7,000 more words? There have been times when I won with only 5-10 minutes to spare. So: don’t give up. Don’t give in. Keep those fingers locked on the keys, and go, go, go.

Secrets and Lies: The Ongoing Frustration of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

[The following post contains major spoilers for the ongoing series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; however, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it if you haven’t caught up with the show yet.]

I quit watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in frustration after five episodes, when it was utterly failing to engage me—and only returned to it when a friend accidentally spoiled the plot of “Turn, Turn, Turn” in conversation.  The revelation of Ward’s deception kept me going through the spotty Season 1 finale, but not through Trip’s death—until I accidentally stumbled upon a Tumblr post that informed me that all along I’d been watching a show about Daisy Johnson and just hadn’t known it.  Now I’ve left the show again, and patiently await the summary of the Season 3 finale that will finally give me the information I need to watch the entire rest of the current season and actually enjoy it.  

The primary problem with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a television series is, only too appropriately, the exact same problem with the organization S.H.I.E.L.D. itself: there are so many secrets and levels of deception that it’s pretty much always impossible to figure out what the heck is going on with any given character at any given moment in time.  (The secondary problem with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the equally-apropos one of it portraying morally questionable behavior as justifiable in the name of the greater good, but I’ll leave that one aside for the moment.)  Each season and each major plotline starts out by giving the viewer not nearly enough information to appreciate what’s happening, and then doles out tiny bits of the truth until finally it pays off with yet another reveal of some previously-unseen secret plot that has been happening under the surface of this story the entire time.  

Admittedly, this is a fairly new writing team standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to the concepts, plotlines, and characters of the show.  It cannot be easy to try and appeal to the Marvel Cinematic Universe fans, the Marvel 616 fans, the Marvel Ultimates fans, and the I-know-nothing-about-Marvel fans all at the same time, the way the show was asked to do.  However, they’re also here to try and entertain viewers, and so far their ability to do so has proven to be spotty at best.

In an interview with MTV producers who expressed shock at the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 ended, Joss Whedon jokingly commented, “Yes, that’s a device I invented myself that no one had ever come up with before, called the ‘plot twist.’”  Although a properly executed plot twist (like the reveal of what’s really going on in that very last scene of Buffy Season 6) can be the most memorable and best-written moment of a series, an improperly executed one can leave the audience feeling betrayed, frustrated, or lied to.  Worse, improper build-up to a plot twist can be either confusing or boring.  Enormous frustrating chunks of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. have proven time and again to be just that: excruciatingly long build-up to plot twists that usually aren’t worth the amount of lead-in they were given.

An early review of the Marvel television show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. predicted, as of the Season 1 hiatus, that the show would not be reviewed for a second season, and even expressed the hope that producers would kill it before it got any further.  The reviewer (whose article I have lost and therefore sadly cannot credit) expressed what many viewers, including myself, felt about the show at the time: that it relied entirely too much on its spottily-written and uninteresting protagonists Skye and Ward for emotional weight, while failing to individuate its supporting cast enough to make them engaging.  

If only that reviewer had known then, and if only we had all known then, that the reason Ward was so recalcitrant was that he was a sociopathic Hydra mole.  If only we’d known that the reason Skye had such a mysterious backstory was because she was Daisy Johnson, daughter of Mr. Hyde and Inhuman with earthquake powers.  If only we’d known that the reason Coulson was acting so strange was that he’d been brought back from the dead and had his memory altered on his own orders so that he never remembered dying.  If only we’d known why Agent May was so stoic and why she never wanted to talk about Bahrain.  If only we’d been able to figure out at the time what the heck the FitzSimmons relationship was actually about.  If only Trip had been introduced to us right from the start as Gabe Jones’s grandson (and if only he’d lived... but oh well).

The first several episodes are a confusing, often boring mess because the viewer doesn’t have enough information to make any sense of the character actions.  Grant Ward is introduced as having such a stoic demeanor that Maria Hill compares him to a porcupine (and Phil Coulson extrapolates that to compare him to a poop with knives sticking out), but he tearfully tells Skye about his rough family history within days of knowing her.  When the series reveals that he is (a) deliberately manipulating Skye’s emotions and (b) a narcissistic martyr who deliberately misconstrues his own childhood to excuse his current machiavellianism, this scene takes on chilling new meaning.  It also takes on meaning, period.  Almost three months after we all had to sit through it with our mouths hanging open wondering what the heck was going on with the writing on this show.  

Worse still, Skye’s backstory is a melodramatic mess that makes Ward’s practically look sensible by comparison.  She comes in as a rebellious computer hacker who joins a giant government organization she professes to hate for no logical reason... until eventually we find out that her no logical reason is actually a search for the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who sheltered her as a baby.  Which itself leads to a long string of mysteries that ends in the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent being long dead, which then leads to the discovery that an entire village died to protect Skye, which continues not to make sense until we find out that her father is some kind of steroid-popping supervillain, which itself doesn’t explain much of anything until eventually we find out Skye’s real name and finally have an ah-hah moment of recognizing Mr. Hyde... But the full puzzle doesn’t fit together until we know about Skye’s mother being different from the relatively innocent prostitute of the comics.  

Probably the most excruciating moment at the nadir of that whole mess was when the show itself joked about Skye being a Mary Sue in “The Only Light in the Darkness.”  Frankly, by the definition of a Mary Sue as “a character... who is given or expected to be given unwarranted preferential treatment and unearned respect, thereby compromising the integrity and believability of the story and/or its characters” (X), Skye fits the bill... as of that point in the series.  She has Coulson’s admiration even though she has yet to show the mentorship canniness she demonstrates in “Laws of Nature,” the selflessness she shows in “What They Become,” or the toughness that gets her through “One of Us.”  She appears to have the sort of nearly-angelic backstory that was already cliche back when Homer was writing about half-human people getting delivered to Earth in mysterious disasters.  The viewer doesn’t have nearly enough information about her to know why anyone, much less stoic fighters like Ward and May or aloof geniuses like Coulson and Simmons, should care what the heck happens to her next.  

The show’s failure to give the viewer enough information to appreciate emotional moments persists to this day.  The most recent episode, “4,722 Hours,” reveals that Simmons was not alone on the alien planet the way everyone assumed she had to be; she instead had a lover who Fitz inadvertently tore her away from when he rescued her.  Imagine instead if the show had told Simmons’s full story in order from start to finish, informing the viewer about Will’s presence before the moment when Fitz rescues Simmons.  We could have experienced the heartbreaking dissonance of Simmons struggling with her loss as everyone hastened to congratulate her on her return, appreciating the dramatic irony of Fitz’s well-intentioned but tone-deaf attempt to cheer her up with that dinner they missed the night she disappeared.  Instead we can only assume what these moments must have been like for Simmons. While that plot is actually playing out, she comes off as whiny and ungrateful.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. remains so very concerned with preserving its plot twists at all costs that it continues to play its cards too close to its chest where its plot arcs are concerned, and the show continues to pay the price.  If someone had told me right from the start that I would be watching a show about a newly-resurrected Agent Coulson recruiting Agent Johnson while struggling to incorporate Kree DNA into his makeup and mentoring a team that included a Hydra agent, a trauma-scarred fighter fearful of loving again, and two best friends who would be torn apart by romance, I think I probably would have actually enjoyed those first ten or so episodes that turned me so thoroughly off the show.  Instead, the show’s failure to establish what the heck is going on at any given moment in time makes its moments of foreshadowing come off as character inconsistency, its hints of character motivation appear to be shoddy writing, and its build-up for future plots appear to be a series of nonsensical asides.  Like a joke whose twenty-minute setup leads in to a weak punchline, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. demonstrates time and again that insufficient transparency is just as bad in television shows as it is in government organizations.  

—Bug

How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up? Marvel, Sci-Fi Escapism, and the Disappearing Disability

For those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s a moment in Marvel’s latest TV series Daredevil where Foggy Nelson discovers that his “blind” best friend can navigate unfamiliar rooms without a cane, win fistfights against dozens of opponents, and even read standard-printed newspapers.  Foggy angrily waves a hand in front of Matt Murdock's face and demands, “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Matt, who still claims to be blind, correctly answers: “One.”  

It is, of course, Foggy’s middle finger.  

The scene is somewhat painfully self-aware.  It sums up how a lot of people feel about Matt's (and the writers') gall in claiming that Matt counts as a blind character, given that he can do everything sighted people can and never experiences any drawbacks as a result of his blindness.

The Daredevil TV series does nothing with the character of Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, that is not already present in the comics.  In the comic series popularized by Frank Miller, we see Daredevil do everything from recognize faces that he has only “perceived” with his radar sense to read standard-printed books by running his fingers over the text to defeat a ninja-trained opponent when his sense of hearing is blocked by the presence of nearby jackhammers.  But the TV show utterly fails to interrogate or update these aspects of the text started in the 1970s, not even incorporating more modern interpretations such as Brian Michael Bendis’s (2008) depiction of Daredevil as unable to use photographs or traditional computers because of his (however partial) blindness.  

Of course, in the Marvel movies* it’s not just Daredevil who has a disability but then gains abilities that do more than compensate for it immediately afterwards.  Steve Rogers has everything from scoliosis to a congenital heart defect at the very beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger, but he takes the sci-fi equivalent of steroids and gets magically fixed by the movie’s twenty-minute mark. Bucky Barnes loses his left arm in The First Avenger--and by the time he pops up again in the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier he already has a prosthetic that not only functions better than any existing prosthetic ever could, but even gives him greater manual strength than his original arm would have had.  In fact, he seems to be better off for having lost his arm!  If only the antagonists such as the facially-deformed Red Skull or the bodiless Arnim Zola could have access to such high-quality treatment.  Instead, they are shown as trapped by (or struggling to conceal) their physical forms.  

In the series Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, the heroic Mike Peterson loses his right leg, right eye, and most of the functioning on the right side of his body in an explosion.  Fortunately, he's found by a group of mad scientists before he ever has to cope with the disability and gets a series of cybernetic upgrades that turn him into a super-soldier.  In the rare example that cannot be justified by the (however flimsy) excuse of having a comic precedent, the teleporter Gordon receives similar treatment: he loses his eyes when he transforms into his Inhuman form... and after no screen time at all regains his ability to see, through no means that are ever explained in the series.  Leo Fitz suffers a traumatic brain injury in the Season One finale that by the midpoint of Season Two has been completely healed, for all that the season started out with a complex and interesting portrayal of his struggles to adjust to his newly limited abilities.

The only mention of disability in Guardians of the Galaxy is an extended joke mocking a man for only having one leg.   I don't think I need to explain why that's problematic.

Iron Man features a protagonist battling heart disease, and actually does portray his struggles with mortality, at least at first... But by the third film (which does deserve commendation for its portrayal of anxiety disorders, in a largely unrelated side note), he has injected himself with a magical sci-fi compound and has completely healed his broken heart.  Thor and Avengers both feature characters who are missing a single eye, and yet neither one is shown struggling with limited vision.  We see Nick Fury shooting and driving with incredible accuracy, suggesting that he suffers no loss of depth perception because of his disability.  Odin is such a minor character--and spends so little time doing anything other than sitting on a throne looking stern--it’s hard to say what his range of vision or ability is or is not.

The X-Men movie series has been roundly criticized for its portrayal of LGBTQ struggles which includes no actual queer characters, but far less so for its nullification of Charles Xavier’s paraplegia in Days of Future Past.  Once again, that plotline comes straight from the comics, where Professor X spent several years walking around unhindered because of... sci-fi magic, essentially.  But hey, at least they’ve left aside the scores (Cyclops, Destiny, Blindfold, Grace) and scores (Madame Web, Nighteyes, Philip Summers, Videmus) of “blind” characters from the comics who demonstrate the ability to navigate the world as handily as anyone with sight.  It’s a start, right?

The Amazing Spider-Man starts out with a complex and sympathetic portrayal of Dr. Connors, who is born with one arm but still becomes a highly successful researcher... and then rapidly transforms the movie’s only disabled character into the villainous Lizard.  Worse, Dr. Connors arrives at his terrible transformation specifically because he is shown as greedy for wanting a second arm.  The final credits scene compounds the issue when it portrays Norman Osborn with melted skin that presumably reflects his twisted personality.  Maybe most offensively of all, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 portrays a man with an unspecified mental disability, Max Dillon, who as a direct result of this disability (and some electric eels, because sci-fi) goes insane and tries to kill the entire city of New York as the supervillain Electro.  As is the case with villainous Red Skull, the film amplifies rather than nullifying this disability, focusing on the ways in which it makes Max Dillon frightening and “other,” instead of fixing it as the series might have if he had been a hero.  It’s not entirely clear what sort of problems Max suffers from--he experiences everything from auditory hallucinations to social blunders--but he eventually dies from his lack of awareness rather than recovering as Leo Fitz does. 

So what’s the big deal?  Science fiction and fantasy are all about imagining the impossible.  They also portray death as reversible (Agents of SHIELD), aging as preventable (Winter Soldier), universes as traversable (Avengers), and gods as tangible (Thor).  Given that mortality is one of the major facets of life and the adage about the only people who stay dead in the superhero world being Bucky Barnes, Jason Todd, and Ben Parker (all three of whom were resurrected, two for good, in 2005) has been effectively subverted, why is the impermanence of death not a big deal as well?

It’s my (utterly inexpert) opinion that where this kind of portrayal of disability becomes problematic beyond the impermanence of death, despite the fact that it’s mere fantasy, is that it does not actually deal with the reality of disability.  Tony Stark is not, in practice, a survivor of cardiac injury, nor is Matt Murdock a functioning blind person.  Charles Xavier’s disability is portrayed as a burden he must assume for love of the rest of the world, and Mike Peterson’s and Bucky Barnes’s are both “fixed” as soon as they occur, at least in cinematic time.  

This kind of writing of disability is actually sort of hyper-normative, because it suggests that having two working arms (to use Bucky as an example) is a requirement for being a successful fighter and a competent person.  We never see Bucky accomplish anything in between losing his original arm and being fitted with a superpowered prosthetic (although, to give Ed Brubaker credit, in the comics Bucky does kill three of his captors and make a nearly-successful escape attempt with only one arm), which suggests that the only way a person can be strong and agentic is through having a body that has two working fists and ten working fingers.  Although it would be possible to remain faithful to the comics and to portray Bucky as a competent person even without his left arm (I can think of half a dozen fights Bucky wins sans prosthetic in various comics), the movies instead never show him without some kind of left arm outside of a single brief flashback where he is helpless in the clutches of his Soviet captors without two working hands.

The Daredevil show contrasts the competent, independent Matt Murdock (whose blindness has been nullified by his hyper-senses) to the genuinely blind workers in Madame Gao’s factory.  These individuals are not only powerless, but also helpless: they rely entirely on others for their survival because apparently they cannot even take care of themselves or live full lives thanks to their disability.  In the only scene that actually features these characters doing anything more than feeling their way around the streets of New York, they stand around helplessly when they are attacked, unable even to defend themselves from fire or assault.  In the universe of Daredevil, then, to be blind is to be a terrible burden to society, and the main character’s great strength is that he has had the good fortune to remove his own disability.  

Although the first several X-Men films all feature a Professor X who is highly competent while still genuinely paralyzed (and do show him overcoming difficulties caused by his disability in X2 when he must rely on his students for mobility after being forcibly removed from his wheelchair), Days of Future Past shows Charles Xavier taking a potion that, for no logical reason, nullifies both his superpowers and his disability.  By explicitly tying Xavier’s telekinesis to his paraplegia, the film undoes a lot of the power of the previous representations by suggesting that the disability is, yet again, just a doorway into greater powers.  Xavier must take on the burden of his paralysis in order to gain his mutant abilities.  One can imagine an old-school divine power in this universe, handing down this disability as punishment for Xavier’s lack of faith in himself.  Again, disability is portrayed as making him “other,” forcing him to be “weird” and to belong in the mainstream world no more.  

Most damningly, it is the heroes who receive these sci-fi fixes, and the villains who must suffer with disabilities.  The heroes are the ones with the muscular, unscarred, magically fixed bodies.  The villains are the ones with the consequences for their disabilities, the ones portrayed as grotesque or untouchable in their exaggerated otherness.  Both Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt receive exactly the same (*cough* anabolic steroids *cough*) super-soldier serum; Steve Rogers is so good of heart he becomes more traditionally beautiful as Captain America after its use while Johann Schmidt is so wicked that he is rendered unspeakably ugly as the Red Skull.  The pitiful minions of Madame Gao’s empire were not granted the ability to overcome their blindness; the virtuous Matt Murdock (who, it should be noted, retains a set of flawless blue eyes despite allegedly being scarred by radioactive chemicals as a child) can function better after losing his sight than he could before.  Leo Fitz and Max Dillon may not exist in the same universe, but one is loving and therefore gets granted magical recovery from mental disability while the other is selfish and eventually succumbs to  his “madness” and dies.  

Therefore, the message that emerges from all these portrayals is painfully clear: disability in all its difficult-to-handle occasionally-unpretty reality is the sort of thing that is used to punish the wicked.  What is beautiful (or at least unscarred, unblinded, and undisabled) is good.  What is ugly (or scarred, deformed, and mentally disabled) is bad.  The virtuous get granted magical recoveries from on high; the wicked are punished for their sins with disabilities that don’t just go away.  Essentially, the Marvel movies are showing disability as the sort of thing that shouldn’t get in a person’s way if the person tries hard enough.  They are conveying the message that any blind person who can’t beat up half a dozen Russian mobsters (the way Daredevil and Stick can) is not capable of being a competent independent person.  They are suggesting that all fighters must not only have keen vision and wide-ranging skills the way the Winter Soldier does, they must also always, always have four fully capable limbs.  They equate traditional physical beauty standards with morality, suggesting that people are correct to judge others by their appearances.

And that’s where it goes beyond simply imagining a fantasy world where people don’t have to worry about death or distance or disability.  That’s where Marvel is genuinely making a mess and sending a message that has the power to do more harm than good, by imagining the absence of disability in such select ways.  

However, there are signs of hope in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  (SPOILER ALERT)   Agent Carter has a heroic supporting character, Agent Sousa, who lost a leg in World War II and suffers both discrimination and physical difficulty because of his amputation but proves to be quite handy at fighting off opponents and infiltrating secret bases anyway.  The most recent season of Agents of SHIELD features a Phil Coulson who has not only lost his hand, but has a prosthetic with no more special abilities than any standard prosthetic hand from 2015 would offer.  Avengers: Age of Ultron showed Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff dealing with symptoms of PTSD and has continued to imply Steve Rogers’s depression.  Fans are pushing hard for future movies and shows to feature Milla Donovan, who marries Matt Murdock and is portrayed as highly competent in addition to being actually blind, and the recent comic interpretation of Hawkeye as severely hearing impaired but still the world’s greatest marksman.  Marvel Cinematic Universe writers have acknowledged both of these requests, although there’s no sign for sure that they will do anything with them.  

The Marvel comics are ever-expanding their representation, updating old identities such as Captain America to feature an African-American man, Ms. Marvel to focus on a Muslim girl, Thor to portray a female doctor, Hawkeye to focus simultaneously on a deaf man and a bisexual assault survivor, Captain Marvel to feature a female military commander, Miss America to portray a lesbian hero raised in a nontraditional family, the Hulk to heroicize a plus-sized female lawyer, and Spider-Man to include a black and Latino teenager.  They have successfully blended both the old-world idealism of these Golden Age and Silver Age heroes with the complex, diverse, modern awareness of the plethora of American identities.  Although there are still ongoing problems with the disability portrayals of the comics, they are making an effort to move ahead.  One can only hope that the movies will follow their example.  

- Bug

*For the sake of space and time (and because this is a blog rant, not a dissertation), I focus on the Marvel movies and TV shows alone, leaving aside the vast and ever-shifting universes of the comics for the moment.  If there are any disabled characters in the Blade or Hellrider series that I’ve forgotten to mention, I apologize--none came to mind when I did a quick mental search.