The day I finished writing this book, the last episode of the television series Game of Thrones aired on HBO. In the finale, Daenerys Targaryen, the Dragon Queen, is killed by her lover Jon Snow. The era of absolute monarchical rule is overturned in favour of a kingdom that looks slightly more like a democracy – a council of nobles votes to install Brandon Stark on the throne, with the next king or queen after him to likewise be chosen by vote.
Bran, introduced as a main character in the first season of the series, is pushed out of a window as a child and becomes paralyzed from the waist down as a result. His many adventures over the course of the series include fleeing to the North and becoming the Three-Eyed Raven, a seer who can access the vision of high-flying birds and can tap into all of history. Initially carted around on a wagon as a result of his disability, Bran is shown, in the latter seasons of the series, in a custom-made wheelchair. When he is crowned king, the wheelchair becomes his throne.
His name as king: Bran the Broken, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Six Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm.
It was a twist that hardly anyone saw coming. Like the twist that saw Daenerys Targaryen light King’s Landing on fire, it was also a plot development that ignited fierce criticism from viewers, not least of all from the disabled community.
Bran the Broken. A man who would be king but must carry the perceived limitations of his disability in his very name; a man who has travelled far from his home and endured a great deal (all, it must be said, with the help of family and friends who support him in various ways through the show) and triumphed over many things, only to be brought back to this question of his body’s inherent flaw right at the pinnacle of his achievement.
It’s worth noting that the moniker of Bran the Broken is given to Brandon Stark by Tyrion Lannister, a character in the show who is a dwarf, played by actor Peter Dinklage. Some discussions in the disabled community in the hours after the finale aired centred on how the use of ‘Bran the Broken’ hearkens back to a line of Tyrion’s from much earlier in the show, where he admits an affinity for ‘bastards, cripples, and other broken things.’ On her Twitter feed, Rebecca Cokley noted that in this context, the name Bran the Broken operates as an instance of cross-community solidarity – one disabled person speaking to another, both of them conscious of how the ‘broken’ label speaks to the physical reality of their lives and also reaches beyond this reality to proclaim that a broken man, as such, will be the one to knit these broken kingdoms back together.
Personally, I was pleasantly surprised by Bran’s elevation to the throne. The use of the name Bran the Broken does seem problematic to me insofar as it operates on the same level as the disabled ‘superhero’ narrative, underscoring the inspirational nature of his ascent to the throne (A king! And a broken one! Look how much he’s overcome!) in a way that would not be done for a king or queen who was able-bodied. No matter Bran’s accomplishments – at the end of the day he is still a man in a wheelchair, king or not.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t also say that I liked how a disabled man – one who remains disabled throughout the show and doesn’t encounter a magical cure despite the fantastical nature of the series – ends the series in a position of such power. I loved the fact that the kingdom necessarily begins to make adjustments for Bran; the famed Iron Throne having been destroyed by a dragon, the wheelchair becomes his de facto throne, and those who gather around him must necessarily make the space that the wheelchair requires. Of course, the treatment of his disability and his ascent to the throne isn’t perfect – the resounding reaction of the disabled community to that episode went along the lines of King’s Landing is hella inaccessible! – but the fact that a disabled body was put in a place of such power at all, and that it happened in a fantastical, fairy-tale-esque universe to boot, in such a wildly popular series – seemed hugely important to me.
The reality of the matter is that nothing is perfect in the disabled stories we tell, or the disabled lives we live out in the world, and capturing these imperfections is a key part of telling our stories properly. It is not possible for the disabled individual and the disabled life to have the happy ending that traditional fairy tales require, but the happy endings that we can have, and that we deserve, are much better. They are intricate and complicated, requiring both individual arcs and community support, individuals who change in order that the world itself can shift and improve to meet them head-on. They aren’t happy endings so much as they are departures of varying degrees of positivity. There is always more work to be done. A traditional happy ending leaves this work entirely out of the picture.
Flawed as it is, it means something to have a show and story as big as Game of Thrones showcase disability in this way. It meant everything to me to see that story institute a new world with disability and the different body at its helm. And the fact that this story has the kind of cultural hold on our modern Western society we once gave to fairy tales seems to me entirely fitting – we may have grown beyond the scope of the fairy tales we once knew and loved, but their structure and their power still have a hold on who we are. They teach us valuable things about what it means to believe in something, to use the pleasure and power of stories to unite our different communities and bring us together.
Several weeks after the Game of Thrones finale aired, the actress Ali Stroker made history as the first wheelchair user to win a Tony award for Best Featured Actress. She won for her performance in the 2019 revival of the musical Oklahoma! Because the stage did not have a wheelchair ramp (despite the awards ceremony taking place at Radio City Music Hall, a venue that has reams of experience in building sets for shows and could thus presumably have built a ramp for a wheelchair-using actress), she had to wait backstage until her name was called out, at which point she wheeled onstage to accept her award.
Later, when Oklahoma! won Best Revival of a Musical, she was the only member of the cast who was, once again because of the lack of a ramp, unable to go onstage to accept the award.
If society is used to not seeing disabled people in stories, society becomes used to not seeing disabled people in real life. If society is used to not seeing disabled people in real life, society will continue to build a world that makes it exceedingly difficult for disabled people to participate in said world, thus perpetuating the problem. In this world, there is no need for a wheelchair ramp because hardly anyone who wins an award will need one to get onstage. But what if we took it for granted that anyone, regardless of ability, might be able to achieve, and built our stages and our environments accordingly?
It is time for us to tell different stories.
It is time for a different world.
Give me a story about a disabled man or woman who learns to navigate the world and teaches the world, in turn, to navigate its own way around the disabled body. Give me power and also weakness, struggle but also reams of joy.
Our lives are made of this fabric – our stories deserve nothing less.
In her short story ‘A Conversation with My Father,’ Grace Paley has this to say about the way our lives move through the world: ‘[Plot is] the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.’ Society has treated the disability narrative as this ‘absolute line’ for centuries – a very specific journey to an unhappy ending. Disability as the antithesis of able-bodiedness; disability as something less and other. Disability, seen with this lens, obliterates the status quo of the able body and demolishes the happiness that society has traditionally associated with health and wellness. Disability, in this sense, becomes the very thing that takes hope away.
But the truth is that the disabled life and the disability narrative can be – and indeed are – filled with hope. Disabled people live lives filled with pain and joy and struggle as much as anyone else. To view literature through the lens of the ‘open destiny of life’ is to understand that the end of a story is not so much an ending as it is a departure – the point at which the audience stops travelling alongside the protagonist and allows them to continue their way through the world. In much the same way, we need to understand that the ‘ending’ of the disability narrative need not come with either a restoration of able-bodiedness or a descent into despair at the removal of able-bodied life. Instead, disability narratives and disabled lives deserve to continue as they are, moving forward equally into the realms of joy, frustration, sorrow, anger, and all of the other elements that make up the complex reality of living. We deserve the ‘open destiny of life’ as much as anyone else, and the stories we tell about disability deserve exactly the same.
Stories have a deep effect on children – and continue, whether we acknowledge it or not, to have a deep effect on the adults those children become. A disabled child who grows up on fairy tales and stories that either do not feature disabled protagonists or connect disability to a variety of impediments and failures becomes an adult who is used to seeing disability shrouded and hidden away from the realities of life. That adult thus comes to equate, whether consciously or not, the disabled life with the journey that stops and does not continue. The lack of positive disabled protagonists or characters in books and movies does not, in such a world, become cause for question or consideration. It becomes, simply, a fact of life. And so too do the unconscious biases that form as a result of being exposed to disability as a character flaw, as we are in many of the fairy tales we know in the Western world. Disability is a negative that is tied to impediment right from the very moments that we begin to understand story.
My own disability has been a fact of my life since I was three years old. I spent a great deal of time trying to ignore it – to pretend that my limp and other difficulties weren’t there. I did this because I did not see myself reflected in the stories I read or the movies I watched. When Ariel walked, she walked gracefully, and everything turned out all right for her in the end. Where were the stories or the fairy tales about little boys and girls in wheelchairs, or girls who limped when they tried to dance in ballet class? They didn’t exist. Happy endings were only for the able-bodied. And so, since I most definitely wanted a happy ending in my own life, I set about pretending to be exactly that.
But my own fairy tale, the one that began with that first step into the hospital, has always gone a separate way. I came out of that hospital into a different life, and though I move through the world now in a mostly able-bodied way, I can’t help but wonder how my life might have gone had I seen little girls – and yes, even princesses – in wheelchairs and on crutches early on in my years of development. How might my own view of myself as a disabled woman have grown in an environment like that? If I had read stories that encouraged the celebration of disability as just another element of life, how might my teen years have unspooled?
I might have been more vocal. I’d certainly have been more apt to include disability in the stories I was beginning to tell – more apt to see these differences as cause for celebration, yes, but also more apt to see these differences as normal.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, the stories we tell ourselves as children shape the world that we encounter. Fairy tales and fables are never only stories: they are the scaffolding by which we understand crucial things. Fairness, hierarchy, patterns of behaviour; who deserves a happy ending and who doesn’t. What it means to deserve something in the first place; what happy endings mean in both the imagination and the world. As a writer, I have only just begun to understand how all this shaped my sense of fairness and equality – as a disabled woman, I have only now realized the power inherent in claiming that complicated happy ending for yourself even if the stories tell you otherwise.
When we tell stories, we look for happy endings as a way of reckoning with the unfairness of the world – with its injustice, with its cruelty, with its staggering ability to wear us down minute by minute. And yet a happy ending is made of a million things. Perhaps, for some, it is made of romantic love. Perhaps, for others – for myself – it is made of the kind of love that comes from that wellspring of the self, from the acknowledgement that what I’ve encountered throughout my life is not something to overcome on my way to happiness, but, in fact, the very fabric of my life’s joy in the first place. I do not walk through the world like anyone else – but I’m proud of that now, even as it comes with its challenges, and I’m eager to see how the stories I tell can help others to uncover this same joy.
Once upon a time, a dark-haired little girl walked into a hospital and began a journey that came to define the way she saw and experienced the world. It was not the happy story she wanted as a child. Even now, as an adult, there are parts of the story that can hurt, and there are still times when I catch my gait in the mirror and feel a whisper of those voices that spoke so cruelly when I was a child.
But this is the fairy tale I get to tell. This is my complicated happy ending – my complicated, happy life. To pretend that any of this is something to overcome – as the world so often does – is to do myself and my community a disservice. Disability is something I live with, not something I’ve vanquished as if it’s a villain. The stories I tell now try to show this. The stories we all tell now should try to make space for this truth in some way.
Give me a princess in a wheelchair. Give me a man who outwits an evil sorcerer not because of magic but because his mind sees the world differently, a condition that allows him to see outside himself and recognize that difference in other people. Give me stories where disability is synonymous with a different way of seeing the world and a recognition that the world can itself grow as a result of this viewpoint.
Give me fairy tales where disabled characters not only triumph but also change the world. Because disabled people have already done that countless times over, and in a world that continually tells them another story: one where they have no place at all. What might we accomplish, instead, in a space where the disabled body is front and centre in our stories?
When I tell stories now, when I use them to interrogate the world, I think of that girl from thirty years ago whose life went down a different path into the woods. Hers was a story that went sideways from what she’d imagined, but in doing so it became a story that could reach for a different, more difficult kind of happiness. When I read fairy tales now, I think of this.
I do not want a story that ends with an arc into the sea, but neither do I want a story where difficulties vanish and everything is perfect. None of us should want those things. Instead I want a story where a prince – where anyone, really – might find a way to communicate with a woman who has no voice. Where we understand and reach out for each other and are left, together, to confront the open destiny of life.
These, to my mind, are the fairy tales worth telling.