cure culture in media

The bad disabled villain wanting to cure everybody because he is a grouch is a trope we don’t want to see anymore. We are tired of it. It feels like Ebeneezer Scrooge for the christmas spirit, but then for disabled people. We are allowed to exist, we should be allowed to exist, because we are people too.

Too often still, we see media portray an old grouch, like in Detective Pikachu, or a younger grouch in Mobius, the spiderman villain played by Jared Leto, still to be released, or my focus in this blogpost: the villain in the Marvel Avengers game.

I know that the Avengers game has seen some controversy already. I am not going to bash it anymore deeply into the ground than necessary. I absolutely love the single player. Love how the characters are done. I love the story (up to a point) and love how the characters are each seperated and reunited again… the only thorn in my eye: the grouch that needs to rid everybody of superpowers because he himself hates it.

We have had that in the first X-men movie already, we had it in the above movies. Detective pikachu got a lot of press devoted to it, as I read a lot about it on Twitter, but the Avengers seems to slip through the net, even though it is still a popular franchise that is now tarnished by such a stupid, ableist mistake that could easily, easily be made more interesting. More compelling.

Marvel has a rich history of interesting villains of interesting plotlines, of interesting settings. This doesn’t come into the game as they focus on the exact same villains we already saw in movies. For example Abomination, which we saw in not one but the 2 standalone Hulk movies (both of dubious quality… but still).

This is not a review of the game, just that I really hate the cure culture trope. They should invite disabled people into their writing, create a diverse writing team so that things like this don’t get through, don’t get made again.

Every post is written first in scrivener 3, which you can get a 30 day free trial of here at literature and latte.

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