What makes a cool, disabled villain?

This weekend, local disabled writers are speaking at Verb Wellington to explore the topic of villains from literature, theatre, and screen.

The disabled villain trope has long been used to portray or explain a character’s evilness or immorality. So we challenged the writers to reframe this narrative and asked them: What makes a cool, disabled villain?

Alice Mander

I want a badass disabled female villain. She’s sick of misogyny, ableism, and the tyranny of violence against her community. It turns her bitter, twisting her insides, and she turns into a villainous creature whenever the sun goes down. Something supernatural - a vampire, werewolf, or witch. Does she take things too far? Maybe. But we love to hate her, anyway.

Erin Donohue

I want a villain who has BPD and migraines with a brain stem aura. They are hyper-sensitive to light, sound, smell and other people’s emotional states. During migraines, their sensitivities are heightened. They experience visions of other people’s emotional fears and vulnerabilities, and they experience it fully – physically and with all of their senses – and therefore understand it deeply. They can do with that what they will… (Though they likely just use it to cause the downfall of oppressive leaders and systems and turn out to be the hero all along.) 

Anna Kirtlan

I think a cool villain would be one who was disabled but could choose which disability they had on any given day. Their evil powers could be the ability to make anyone who treats them in a     disrespectful or ablest manner experience their disability for a day to teach them a lesson in empathy. Actually, that’s not really ‘evil’ – let’s add uncontrollable nose hair growth for 24 hours to the victim’s ailments! 

Andi C. Buchanan

The coolest disabled villains are those pitched against disabled heroes. Most works ignore disabled characters altogether, so give us stories crammed full of them so they can play every role: hero, villain, annoying but jovial sidekick, angst-filled love interest, solitary adventurer, garrulous innkeeper... Give me stories where there are so many disabled characters that the creator can explore experiences and ideas without making any of them the one true commentary on How Disabled People Are. Give me works like Ada Hoffmann's Outside trilogy - autistic hero and autistic nemesis - or Mira Grant's Into the Drowning Deep where there are heaps of disabled characters on a boat, some sympathetic and some not at all, which means if someone dies it's not a commentary on disabled lives being inherently tragic, it's because there are evil fucking mermaids in the water and they've got to kill someone.

* Rem Wigmore and Casey Lucas are also speaking at the event, but were unable to contribute to this piece. 

Hear more from these authors this weekend at Verb in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can check out the full Verb programme here, including Crip the Lit's second event Disability Literati: Writing for children on Sunday 10 November.

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