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Comments on the Autistic!Grinch fic that I wrote for

alexseanchai are really reinforcing the fact that "Disabled person gets their happy ending not by being made to do things the abled way, but by getting accommodations" is a story that really needs more telling. (Important note: For people with chronic pain, for example, "accommodations" is allowed to take the form of a magical cure of some variety, whereas for autistic folks, by contrast, accommodations might be neurotypical people doing things their way for once.) Naturally, my ADHD brain took one look at "happily-ever-after", and, of course, rushed to connect it to fairy tale retellings 😛

My first thought was a Cinderella who can't walk unaided for very long, and for whom climbing stairs can mean being stuck in bed for at least the next day.

Cinderella may have a congenital disability, or she may have been injured in whatever accident killed her father. I'm thinking that, regardless of the origin of her disability, her step-mother tells everyone she actually died with her father, because in this scenario one of the antagonizing forces is the step-mother's ablist dipshittery. Cinderella doesn't have to keep the house clean or anything, but she's not allowed to leave or have visitors. She does have a pair of canes she can use to get around the house, but her step-mother largely discourages her from using them, so Cinderella has to be sneaky about any "not strictly necessary" house-roaming. She relies a lot on books, socializing with her step-sisters, various artistic endeavors, and so forth, but she's still largely bored out of her skull.

Her house escape is aided by her canes getting a magical upgrade. (I haven't figured out how much I want any sort of fairy godmother to play a role in this. Is it better if Cinderella figures this out herself, or if she's just given something, to have life be extra easy for once?) In addition to their typical function, she can now stick them together to form a chair, and, when their magic is fully charged, she can use them to levitate for up to five minutes, thus bypassing stairs. The canes recharge on their own, but only when within, say, fifty feet of one another, which may have been the cost it took to make their magic permanent instead of just-until-midnight.

Cinderella makes it to the ball and has an actually lovely time. Something something with the prince or a different noble or something, eventually Cinderella has to leave, but she loses one of her canes in the process. The magic charge in the remaining cane is enough to get her most of the way home, at least, but she still ends up bedridden the next day or two from overdoing it on her trip home.

Something something with the beau searching for Cinderella, her step-mother tearing her a new one for sneaking out and embarrassing the family, maybe taking away some of her books or something, IDK. Cinderella is able to alert her beau to her whereabouts when the canes get close enough to each other and start recharging; she sends it out to alert her beau to her presence.

Cinderella and her beau live happily ever after, enacting many accessibility options and disability programs and stuff throughout the kingdom throughout their lives.

Other ideas so far are not nearly as well-developed.

* I'm thinking Beauty and the Beast where Beauty is either blind or Deaf? (I'm leaning towards blind, gotta be honest, but Deaf has potential as well.) Her dad picked the rose because it smelled heavenly, and was a very pretty color that he hadn't seen on a lot of roses. (Maybe Beauty has a gardening hobby and her dad stole an entire clipping?) When he tells her what happened at the Beast's castle and that the Beast is going to make him stay there forever as repayment for the theft of the rose/clipping, Beauty's like, Pfft, fuck that! I'll go. It won't matter to me how hideous this beast is, I can barely see more than blotchy colors anyway! While at the castle, she finds out that the castle's magic is very accommodating to her blindness, and the spirits or whatever are great at helping her navigate, and the magic can even read books to her! The Beast catches her attention when he stops being so much of a jerk and starts doing what he can to make it even easier for her to get around the castle, etc. (I'm kinda tempted to make the Beast autistic? But I'm very worried about the whole "Love is a cure for his beastliness!" thing and how to approach it so that it's not gross.)

* Snow White with chronic pain. Maybe the queen gets rid of her because negotiating with the country that supplied one of the chief ingredients for her pain meds was getting in the way of her agenda? Snow White somehow makes it to the home of the seven dwarves, who are pharmacists experimenting with various plants; they've got an apple tree whose fruit is even better for Snow White's pain than whatever the previous thing was. Wipes it completely out as long as she has one a day! ~~And that's how it keeps the doctor away 😉~~ Not sure why the queen would target Snow White again, but she swaps out one of Snow's regular anti-pain apples for one that is supposed to kill her or something, only the dwarves are able to wrangle something at the last minute to put Snow in magical stasis instead. From there they work on a cure, possibly getting into contact with the country that supplied Snow's previous pain meds for help. Snow wakes up and makes the dwarves the official kingdom pharmacists, and makes sure that the anti-pain apples are available far and wide. Maybe also the apples also have a very slow curative effect, so after a few years of eating one a day she might not need them at all? And maybe not knowing to account for that is part of why Snow was not outright killed by the poisoned apple? Hmm.

* An alternate Snow White option might be Diabetic!Snow White, who gets put into a diabetic coma by the queen. Super Pharma Dwarves stay, though.

* Food Intolerance/Allergies Sleeping Beauty, maybe? In this case, she's not cursed, but the fairies reveal her intolerance at her birth, and the specific foodstuff is banished from the castle. Like Snow White, her sleeping ailment strikes when some appears at the castle and she takes a bite of it. (Assassination attempt, maybe?)

*I'm passingly aware of an actual, extant fairy tale about a girl who is fitted with magic silver prosthetic hands and marries a king, but it's been an age and a half since I read it.

Anyway, lots to think about.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think it might be cool if the stepsisters helped Cinderella. Like, as they grow up they start to realize that the way their mom treats her isn't right, and so because they're allowed more freedom she enlists their help to get her the tools she needs. So she doesn't do it all for herself, but the people who help her do it either because she's asked them to, or because they know her well enough to have some idea of the kind of accommodation she needs.

Beauty and the Beast... what if the Beast was bullied for being different in some way and developed a really gruff/hostile persona in self-defense? Maybe he internalized that being different makes him lesser, and then Beauty shows up and she's confident and nice and clearly thinks she deserves respect, disability or no, and the more time he spends with her the more he starts to think he does too. And maybe she doesn't tolerate being treated badly, but she doesn't mind his oddness because she's always been odd too, so she just sets clear, reasonable boundaries and expectations, which coincidentally makes him feel safer and more comfortable? So he doesn't really get nicer or transform, he just starts to trust her and be more open about who he really is.

(Aside: it strikes me that Deaf!Beauty and autistic!Beast could be neat if he has difficulty being verbal sometimes and sign language is better.)

Ooo, I like it! I was already leaning towards her sisters not liking how their mom treats her but not sure how to do anything about it (possibly lest they become targets as well), and helping in secret fits very well into that! And Cinderella got started making/upgrading her canes because they managed to get her books on magical engineering. I think that the sisters managed to convince their mother to let them study magical engineering as a way to make them more marriageable for some handwave-y reason, so Step Mother thinks that Cinderella stole their books when she finds them in C's room. And part of the happy ending is the sisters switching from helping in secret to helping overtly, by defying their mother and making sure all the doors are open and stuff so Cinderella's cane can carry her to the front door.

The Beast being gruff and angry as a defense mechanism definitely has potential. I do kinda want there to be a magical aspect to the transformation, but maybe it made him incorporeal instead of beastly looking? And Beauty's dad is terrified of ghosts or something? (A part of me definitely wants the magical transformation aspect to be there and to affect the entire castle, so the first thing the Beast does when he gets turned back is vocally freak out about how everything's changed and now Beauty will have to re-learn all the landmarks she used to be able to navigate. And that's when Beauty knows that this is a love that will last.)

(If he doesn't already know sign, that could be an extra problem, especially if Beauty relies to any degree on lip reading: He might not have lips shaped in a familiar way! Though I might get around that by some degree by giving a friend or relative of hers a cleft lip? Hmm...)

Maybe the Beast is transformed physically, or has scarring or something that makes him look different, as well. Body image issues would fit with a general sense of being Too Different. I personally always prefer the Shrek-style B&tB solution where the physical deformity doesn't go away, because their actual problem was never what they looked like, but I can see the potential to have there be a transformation ending where what changes isn't the visuals....

Honestly, there's so many potential layers to the Beast and how to treat whatever he has. I think my current preference after reading this is "Love treated his grumpiness, magic reversed a curse that caused internal damage/pain, and his appearance didn't need changing." Still, precisely because there's so many potential layers and so much nuance that can be worked with here, I'd probably want to write at least two other Disability Fairy Tales first.

Hmm, maybe he had a disability before he was cursed, and the curse made it worse or something, so reversing the curse doesn't get rid of his disability, but it does return it to the pre-cursed state or something.

...I think I should probably let this sit and percolate a while longer.

I also could see trans!Beast and, of course, a Beast with any combination of different traits that make him different... yeah, there's a lot of alternate approaches you could potentially take.

Trying to decide whether it's a good idea to tie in my genderswap-the-prince-and-fairy version or not.

Maybe I should just write an entire collection of B&tB retellings; that would work, right?