@natalunasans shipped me 10 lbs. [?!?!?!?!?!] of 1:6 scale stuff the other day, including a Big Chief Studios headsculpt of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor mounted on an early BCS body. Since I have a crush on David Tennant as that character, I was very happy…at first.

Then I tried to find him some pants. The BCS body, being a slender sculpt, did not fit any of the standard male pants I tried on. Just for the hell of it, I tried a pair of sparkly Barbie leggings that Nata had included, and he managed to slither into them! Of course, he can’t sit down, as his pants will fall down, but sitting’s overrated when you have stuff to strut.

While I originally planned for this doll to be a jerk anti-PWS politician in Zville, he and his pants apparently did not want to be a jerk politician. He would rather be a fuckin’ fabulous guy. Okay then. I couldn’t think of a name for him, so he went by FFG for about 24 hours until I used those initials as a starting point and came up with Farrier Frederick Giroux.

Farrier’s in his 30s, ABD in something mathematical. He spent an inordinately long time on his thesis, only to have a recent crisis in the realization that he has pretty much limited his career prospects to academia, and yet he hates academia. Still reeling from the feeling that he’s wasted most of his life, he’s working as a cashier in an upscale grocery store and trying desperately to figure out what his next move is.

Farrier both runs on anxiety and doesn’t give a fuck. He tried to blend in when he was younger; he was beaten and sexually assaulted in the boys’ locker room in high school on account of being a “fag.” In college, he changed his style to more of the one that he wanted. The first night he dressed the way he wanted, he was mocked and sexually assaulted by a bunch of sorority members. He then decided that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, so he might as well be himself as long as he could before the next time he was attacked. So that’s how he dresses, and that’s why he has a gun in his purse [and under his pillow], and that’s why no one ever touches him unless he lets them. [Plus he has Reynaud’s syndrome, and his hands are always cold, and he’s excruciatingly self-conscious about that.]

Regularly assumed to be gay and/or a drag queen and/or flamboyantly sassy, Farrier is actually none of these. He swallows his annoyance everytime someone makes one of these assumptions, but he feels like he’s been eating bombs. One of these days, he thinks, he’s not going to be able to be polite anymore, and he’s going to explode.

EDIT: Farrier’s head, body, pants, and magenta sweater details come from @natalunasans. The sweater is, of course, one of my notorious novelty sock sweaters, modded to be a crop top turtleneck [to hide the Long BCS Neck of Doom]. I’m pretty sure that the BCS Facebook group would really love these pictures. >:}

Continue reading Farrier Frederick Giroux, looking suspiciously like David Tennant

While I’m making little shirts, I need to produce the following for Zombieville:

• I BITE
• I’d rather be hunting zombies [and ensuing controversy]
• I eat brains. [Don’t worry — you’re safe.]

I’m pretty sure Lumberjack wears the last one. :p

With all the laudatory reviews surrounding the recent release of Star Wars Part 4 Million and 2 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, I notice a distinct lack of discussion [at least in published reviews] about Chirrut Imwe [Donnie Yen], one of the dudes who joins protagonist Jyn Erso [Felicity Jones] in her attempt to steal plans for the Death Star. Namely, Chirrut is a horrible mishmash of stereotypes.

Chirrut Imwe, according to Lucasfilm President and Rogue One producer Kathleen Kennedy, is a classic “warrior monk.” This in itself is a trite beginning, but it worsens because Chirrut’s not just any warrior monk. He’s a blind warrior monk. The fact that he has no functional vision apparently forms an integral part of his character, as Entertainment Weekly summarizes him as someone who “has used his spirituality to overcome his blindness and become a formidable warrior.” We’ll return to that nasty term overcome later…

I don’t need to see the movie to know that Chirrut Imwe embodies a crapload of romanticized bullshit tropes associated with so many fictional depictions of blind/visually impaired people. Let’s count them, shall we?

1. Visually impaired people can’t see at all. Statistically speaking, this is not true. People who are visually impaired have wide ranges of vision capability and loss; in fact, a WHO stat sheet estimates that 285 million people worldwide have visual impairments, with about 14% of them being blind, or completely without vision. Thus the vast majority of visually impaired people can see to some extent. Vision isn’t a binary trait, though popular culture portrays it as such, and visually impaired people don’t just have their eyeballs switched to OFF.

2. Blind and visually impaired people look weird. Though played by a Hong Kong Chinese person, member of a group in which blue eyes are very uncommon, Chirrut has blue eyes. His blindness is literally written in his eyes, but this is actually not the case for all blind or visually impaired people. Surprisingly, you can’t always tell by looking at someone if they are blind or visually impaired! It’s also noteworthy that Chirrut apparently has no pupils. With lack of pupils commonly used in pop visual media as a visual shorthand for Something is really wrong with this character!, Chirrut’s pupillessness thus makes him seem strange and inhuman.

3. Blind and visually impaired people are, like, so deep, man. The trope of visually impaired person with great spirituality goes back at least as far as Ancient Greece, in which Tiresias, prophet of Apollo, was blinded by Hera when he said that women enjoyed sex more than men. He’s a seer, but he had too much insight, so she took away his vision — get it? People have a longstanding tendency to turn people with visual impairments into figures of speech. Sight is equated with intelligence and competence, while visual impairment and blindness are equated with ignorance and poor judgment. And yet a character’s lack of physical vision is almost always an opportunity to develop some metaphorical [religious, spiritual, prophetic] vision. This trope turns characters with blindness or visual impairments into Important Thematic Symbols, depriving them of opportunities for robust representation.

4. Blind and visually impaired people need to get over their disabilities. Entertainment Weekly, clearly picking up on the messages in the promo materials, describes Chirrut as “us[ing] his spirituality to overcome his blindness,” whatever that means. His disability is shown as a problem, but fortunately he has “spirituality” to cancel out this little obstacle. The world doesn’t work like that, though. People have disabilities and live with disabilities. They don’t do things despite their disabilities; they do things while being disabled. Their disabilities affect their lives, and a blind character who cancels out his disability with his “spirituality” isn’t really a character with a disability at all. He’s a stereotypical superhero whose romanticized depiction of blindness does a dehumanizing disservice to actual blind and visually impaired people.