Jeffery's Room

In class we talked about how people with disabilities in media have gotten very bad representation. Most characters with disabilities have no personality and their entire character is based off of it. Though people with disabilities are still represented poorly in media, I think we have made progress as a society. Today, as my blog post I would like to showcase the good disabled representation in movies and TV.  (DISCLAIMER: obviously, I as an able-bodied can't determine whether representation is truly good or not, but this is just a list of characters that I think do not revolve around just their disability) The first character I would like to talk about is Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender. To give a basic overview of the show. There are four elements, Water, Earth, Fire, Air and there are only certain people called benders that can control these elements, but only the Avatar can master all four of them. The story follows the Avatar's quest to learn all the elements and sav...

  In the book, the Leavers by Lisa Ko, the stories of Polly Guo and her son Deming Guo are effectively told and allows the reader to be more engaged in the story. Ko opens up the story with DeMing. When Polly leaves Deming, the reader gets to see his perspective of what's happening, but since he was too young to know anything, from his perspective he was lost and angry toward his mother and Vivian. And understandably so. The reader connects with De Ming’s pain as his entire world was flipped around. He had new parents and lived in a new community where had to suppress his Asianness. His frustration is clearly shown when Mrs. Henning's corrects his FuZHounese, a dialect of Chinese that he spoke with his mother, and he lashes out at her calling her stupid. FuZhounese was almost a symbol of his mother to him and he holds it very close. Then after Deming’s story is told, Polly’s is next. Her story is told in first person. This allows the reader to connect with her more, but also ...