rpanons | You sound fat

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anyone have tips on playing deaf/mute/blind characters? how would they deal with networks? general stuff? tropes/ableist stuff to keep away from?

no offense, but i'm wondering if you should play a character like this if you're questioning stuff like this. are you new to dwrp in general? i can understand this more if so, but...

deaf characters can read text/ask people to use text, or use a subtitle function on the comm which more than likely exists. blind characters can use screen readers. mute characters can just text forever.

"ableist" stuff to avoid is, again, common sense like not making the blind character trip over everything lol how clumsy!! they need help with everything! etc shit like that. pretty basic, anon.

anon

are you seriously criticizing someone on trying to make sure that they play disabled characters respectfully and realistically

For blind, there's a YouTube channel you may want to look at. It's TommyEdisonXP. He talks about his experiences, answers a lot of questions.

When I was playing Toph from ATLA, this Youtube channel was an awesome resource!

have a lot more going on in their life than their disability. pervasive ones like blindness and deafness will affect everything they do, but they should still be able to do most everything.

try to settle into a conversational flow in your tags where you're not re-mentioning their disability in every tag, because people will be like OMG THEY PLAY THEM AS NOTHING BUT THEIR DISABILITY (whether it's true or not)

they'll make mistakes with networks, obviously. a blind person might hit the wrong button. a deaf person might make an alarming noise on video because they can't hear themselves. but do your best to really minimize these, for the same reason as above.

don't make them into inspiration porn, either. they're just a person.

resources link in top post > general character advice > scroll down

I played a character that was mute for awhile! Network stuff is pretty much exactly the same as with any other character, so that's fairly straightforward. It is a bit trickier with in-person threading, though. You want to put a lot of detail into body language and movement, and make sure you're always giving your partner something to respond to even if you're not using any dialogue.

The character I played in particular didn't even have an alternate way to communicate like sign language at first, but I still managed to get by and have a lot of fun with them despite that. There was a lot of charades involved. Good times.

I haven't played a mute character before, but I've threaded with someone who has to great success. For one, when they first threaded with someone new, they'd go into detail about how their character was communicating: in this case, with a small device that allowed him to type and display text to his conversational partner. After that thread, the mute character's player would assume the other player understood what was going on and would not go into such detail about their character's use of the device or only mention it briefly. This avoided creating the impression that they were beating people over the head with the character's disability; after the first thread, it became more of a background element rather than the central focus of every tag.

In cases where their character either could not or did not wish to use this device, they would describe his body language, but also include a "translation" in their description. This sounds a bit unwieldy, but in practice, it came across pretty naturally. For example: "He tilts his head at her. What does she want?" (not a direct quote, but you get the idea). In this way, the player was allowing their thread partner(s) to decide how much their own character understood, not forcing them to guess along with their character.

Really, as long as you don't beat people over the head with it and don't let it become the center of every thread, I doubt people will mind!

a couple of random things i came across about sign language while playing a deaf character:
- british and american sign languages are NOT mutually intelligible
- lots of / flashy jewellery can make signing difficult to follow
- deaf people who grow up without someone to teach them signing and where writing is impractical can end up essentially isolated in their own minds
- lots of things don't actually have a specific word in sign language and are instead fingerspelled
- it's not uncommon for signs requiring two free hands to be adapted to use just one if the person is holding something at the time
- puns in sign language are absolutely a thing, e.g pasteurised milk, the word 'understand', etc

You sound fat

general advice

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+1

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