[ SECRET POST #3890 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3890 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Harry Potter and Pretty Little Liars]


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03.
[The Crown]


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04.
[Me Before You (novel)]


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05.
[Little Women, Jo/Laurie, Jo/Professor Bhaer]


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06.
(Supergirl, Wynonna Earp)


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07.
[The Defenders]













Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #557.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

04. http://i.imgur.com/xUBdte4.png
[Me Before You (novel)]

[philstar22]

I really do want to know whether the author is ablist or just really strong on right-to-die. Because it would make a difference in how I'd read the book (or if I would at all). I don't like the idea of telling disabled people that they are good to no one and are a burden and so should die. But on the other hand, I believe that people should have the right to die if they so choose. And for me it is hard to tell with what I have read about this author.

[sadiesockmonkey]

Yeah, I don't know about Jojo Moyes. I can't speak for her. I don't know her.

But I got the impression from the novel (less so the film. I don't remember the film covering this aspect as well) that it's more the latter. Lou finds an online support group for people who are paraplegic and how they live with it. She talks with them and gets advice from them and tries in earnest to build a future with Will, but he struck me as an incredibly self-loathing character.

So I'm gonna sit here and be the arbiter of whether Moyes is ableist or not, but the book came across to me as though she's just a big proponent of the right-to-die, which I can relate to.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, as soon as I heard the plot I didn't want anything to do with it.

I remember once telling my dad, "If I was an animal, they'd have put me down long ago."

He said, "Me too."

It's just...that's not a message (it's a good plan to die!!!) that people with a history of depression issues needs to read, support, or approve of.

I don't. I won't. I don't care if the author MEANS to be ablelist or encourage suicide. I don't care if they MEAN to be or not. I care that it's a big, fancy blockbuster that some people very much take as "it's a good idea to kill yourself / your life isn't worth living / disabled people should probably just die" message.

So, in conclusion: fuck her, and all that attention that stupid piece of trash got that could've been focused on other, IDK, an author who actually cares about disabled people? Or maybe (gasp) is disabled and actually deals with shit and isn't just trying to wring every ounce of angst they can?

Oh, yeah, angst sells. I know. And who profits? Not fucking disabled people, that's who doesn't. Rich authors and publishers can rub their greedy asshole hands together and chortle over it, but I don't have to be OK with it.

I guess I have strong feelings about this.

[(Anonymous)]

The trash was actually meant to refer to the book, as I don't call people trash. But yeah.

[philstar22]

I want to ask a question, but let me say first off that I'm not disabled and I can't understand what it means to be disabled. I just, wonder, what about disabled people who do want to die? What message do we want to give to them? Maybe not "go ahead and die," but also I don't think we want to say "that's a wrong choice and you should feel bad about making that choice?"

Certainly, the message would be better coming from someone disabled. But I don't think saying that it is okay to make that choice is the same as saying you should make that choice? I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say. I just don't think we should be telling people that their own perspective on themselves is wrong and that they can't make choices they want to make. They are the only ones who can know themselves and what they are going through.

And I'm honestly sorry if any of this is ablist. I'm trying not to be, but if this is super offensive, feel free to just ignore it. It just seems like a complicated issue to me.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt and also not disabled but I follow some disabled activists

a lot of the trouble as I understand it is that the message 'it's okay to make that choice' just cannot possibly exist in a vacuum given 1) how shitty our society is to disabled people directly in terms of not supporting or accomodating them 2) how shitty and pervasive the messages are that disabled people's lives aren't worth living and 3) how super convincing depression is that you should be dead, even though 99% of suicide attempts that get stopped are glad later that they survived

there's a point at which even the hypothetical honest value of 'it's okay to make that choice' is just...totally overwhelmed by the awful stuff that it is easily co-opted by that makes it into an irresponsible message

and I think ayrt is having the reacting they are because they've had a whole lot of 1 & 2 in their lives, maybe sometimes armed with exactly this well-meaning sounding rhetoric


ALSO purely my own opinion, but I think right-to-die messages are a lot more convincing in the context of terminal illnesses and chronic pain, where it's a matter of timing and dignity, rather than ANYONE, even the person in question, deciding 'my life is definitely not worth living, my limitations are more important than anything else that might ever happen.' Because that's shit disabled people really do not need to hear more of.

[philstar22]

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

[(Anonymous)]

I would have had the same problem - it's part of the reason I react so badly to those "disabled person turned into perpetual child to ease taking care of them" things. When I was four or so, my mother had multiple people with advanced degrees in child development and one pediatrician telling her that I was inherently broken. That I was ahead of the curve now, maybe, but I was going to stop progressing soon. They'd seen it before. I was never going to develop beyond about the level of a six-year-old in any subject. She was looking at a life of taking care of a child in an adult's body.

As it turns out, my issues were that I was very intelligent and mildly autistic. Mom found out when I was six, after deciding that the child development experts and the pediatrician clearly didn't know what they were talking about, since at that point I was, among other things, reading fluently enough to get through 2001: A Space Odyssey with a decent idea of the plot. I'm a college student now. But that could have been me, if things had gone differently.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't read the book, and having only watched the movie for the Khaleesi being adorkable, what I took away was... being insanely rich resolves all of life's problems, even if what you want is to die in some fancy-ass spa. :[

[digitalghosts]

No idea on that specific author but the whole 'rich dude becomes disabled and cynical then meets a naive girl and helps her grow up while he opens his eyes to the world' is as stereotypical as it gets. Definitely, everyone should have the right to chose how they die but usually it takes a lot of meetings with doctors, psychologists and trying plenty other things first. If one choses to die - great, but it is no a lesson in life for some random abled person.

I wish there had been romances with people born disabled with conditions mainstream hates (nope, it is not any easier on people or mainstream in real life - holywood just likes pretty people with simple issues).