Characters with Disabilities
A list for characters with disabilities
List items
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Neurodivergent
The Following Quote is from a long post on Tumblr and various users.
"I love that Tommy Shepherd is angry and irritable and violent and easily distracted and self hating and bitter and has constantly fluctuating moods
I love that he’s so completely and obviously neurodivergent and unapologetic about it
It just angers me so much that because of this he is considered too uncomfortable to have in the comics a lot of the time, like you had Gillen saying
“One of the reasons why I had to write Tommy out is that I didn’t want to use Tommy as part of the core team. Tommy’s role is to be abrasive and he was kind of a sociopath in the original Young Avengers team.”
like fuck that tbhhhhh
He also had clear examples of neurodivergency in how his emotions worked and how he interacted in physical ways with other people.
It’s clear to me (especially considering all the other ND traits) that this is because of alexithymia, a common trait of many neurodivergencies (i had to pluralize and i improvised). Alexithymia is also known as “emotional blindness” - he has trouble or cannot interpret emotions. Therefore, “I don’t have feelings…” because he cannot interpret them
“…and I don’t hold hands” is because of touch aversion, not only a common trait of many neurodivergencies but also because he was experimented on to be made a human weapon.
yes absolutely!! I also feel like that scene to me shows his fear of showing any affection tbh?
like he can be flirty and stuff but he’s terrified of emotional attachment of any sort, largely because of his intensely unstable childhood, he’s protecting himself by trying not to get too attached to people because there’s always a lingering fear that they’ll hurt him or he’ll be ‘removed’ from them
I just think there’s a lot of missed opportunities with writing Tommy, even with interacting with Billy or you know, his soul-parents. Like after Children’s Crusade he wasn’t shown with Wanda not once after. Wanda came to save Wiccan during S.H.I.E.L.D #4 from the anti-magician hunter, I have no idea how she tracked him down or knew that was happening.
But in Young Avengers Vol.2 where Tommy straight up gets kidnapped by some inter-dimensional thing, Wanda didn’t know. I mean, I get it, Tommy chose to not hang around Billy or Wanda, that’s his choice. But if Wanda can figure out Billy’s in trouble, I’m thinking she has to have put some kinda basic protection hex or something to tell her when something’s wrong. Tommy getting kidnapped and him being in incredible distress when that was happening (seriously, look at the panels, he’s running full-speed and he realizes it’s not working and he tears up as he gets swallowed up), didn’t that set-off some alarm bells? Anything!?
(we learn later the entity wasn’t evil per se, but Tommy was straight-up gone for the rest of the volume because they didn’t even want to write him in the story)
Oh, and that’s not getting into the very deliberate parallels they put both Tommy and Billy in with their rebirths.
Billy was reborn to a great family a few streets down from Avenger’s mansion. He literally has had the perfect possible life, especially considering the amount of crazy that goes around near the Avenger’s mansion. He even managed to run into Wanda at one point before either one knew who the other really was.
Tommy was reborn to a broken home in New Jersey, which was where Vision and Wanda tried raising them the first time round. Then he gets captured and experimented on while in superpower juvie.
When both of them were looking for Wanda the first time, and Billy said they had to go to Leonia, New Jersey to search the old family home, Tommy was uncomfortable.
They deliberately wrote that Billy got the best scenario that their family once had, and Tommy got every bad thing that happened to them. Billy got reborn where their parents were Avengers, Tommy got reborn where they tried to be a family. Billy has a perfect home life and understanding parents, Tommy’s were divorced and he ended up in juvie for his troubles.
And in the meta-context, Billy gets all the attention because he’s the freaking magical messiah, and Tommy gets remembered as mini-Quicksilver! Even Vision, who barely has any connection with either of them, at least met Billy once, and in the Inferno Secret Wars tie-in he’s actually fighting alongside an alternate older Billy, but Tommy is nowhere to be seen.
In fact, I haven’ seen Tommy in any Secret Wars tie-in (he and Billy are appearing together in House of M, whenever that finally gets published). And most distressingly, I haven’t seen Tommy in any of the new #1s that’s suppose to drop after Secret Wars. Billy and Teddy get to be in New Avengers, but Tommy is freaking no where.
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Paraplegic (for a long time)
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Blind
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Congenitally Blind
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D/deaf
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hearing-imparied from the 80's-90's
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blind sculptor
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Evidence of a Split Personality in the forms of The Magus/The Goddess, once actually met the "Madness Monster" that was the source of all the bad parts of himself and that was responsible for creating the Magus
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Paraplegic
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