valarltd | Meme, day 28

28. Have you ever written a character with physical or mental disabilities? Describe them, and if there's nothing major to speak of, tell us a few smaller ones.

Heh. Where to start? Everyone is damaged in my universes.

First, I don't write mentally handicapped characters. I can not do them justice because I refuse to have any contact with the mentally disabled, based on my past history with them (drowning attempt, anyone?). This is my own prejudice and intellectual elitism. I'm aware of it.

Mentally ill? Most of them, especially in the Nikolai'verse. David Inman is a functioning psychopath. He takes my prejudice to an extreme, failing to consider people of average intelligence to be truly human. He refers to them as the "monkeymass" and thinks nothing more of exploiting and killing them by the dozens/hundreds/thousands than he does of having bacon for breakfast.

Nick Boyd is a slightly less fuctional sociopath. He adheres to the rules to stay out of trouble, until it's time to step drastically outside them. Before his training he was a rapist, a murderer and a thief. Now he's added cannibal and attack dog to that list.

The whole crew is some level of sociopath, as they must be to function at that level.

In Shell-Shocked, Gabe is bipolar. His more extreme behaviors are drawn from Bun on her bad days. Sean is agorophobic and brontophobic, a result of PTSD. These are drawn from a variety of veterans' descriptions of the disease.

Gabe is also a double amputee after a subway accident. He uses a wheelchair to get around. Sean has some bad scars and artifical knees.

In Glad Hands, Seven has residual tremors from ECT. They especially manifest when he is stressed.

Edward and his nemesis Nigel from Curse of the Pharaoh's Manicurists also suffer from PTSD, actual shell-shock from WWI. We'll see more of this in the next book. Nigel's nightmare is drawn from my own grandfather's experiences as a WWII flier.

Alive on the Inside is set in a carvinal freakshow. We have Alice and Dinah, the conjoined twins. Wolfgang the wolfman, with hypertrichosis. Jene the hermaphrodite, who is (via magic, not birth) male on the left and female on the right. Torturo, who has no physical sensation of pain. Nagina is an actual naga, with a snake for her lower half. Elijah is 9' tall and Tabitha is 18 inches, yet they are a happy couple. None of these people consider themselves disabled, yet all of them would qualify outside the show.

Adrien, the vampire in "Hunger for the Edge" is blind.

Etarin in "For Love of Etarin" is a eunuch.

I also have several characters that are already dead when they start narrating their stories, including Rick, the stripper from "Deadman's Curve."

There were definite advantages to being already dead, Rick decided as he cooled his heels in a back booth of the 99 Fine Club, waiting to see Sterling. Namely, when his demonic boss killed him, he would wake back up after a few hours.

There were drawbacks too, especially the little point that his death certificate had already been filed when he woke up after the motorcycle crash back in '81. When the I-9 form had been required for employment, starting in '86, there was no getting a job without a Social Security card and a driver's license. Rick had the latter. But the Social Security Administration, in a rare fit of unwonted competence, had realized Richard G. Jax was dead and refused the card.

Does actual maiming during the story count?
If so, Robin is badly damaged in Heart of a Forest and Captain Thomas Harrison loses a limb (a common pirate hazard) in Kestrel on the Horizon.