crwby's ableism towards yang.
when yang became disabled at the end arc of volume 3 by adam, the oncoming arc of exploring her new disability & trauma from the event was important for a lot of fans, especially her fans who were disabled or had ptsd themselves. before yang we had only had secondary characters who were disabled, most of who were villains or antagonists.
while v4, in my opinion, suffered from a lot of teething pains due to the change to a new engine, the loss of monty taking root as this was a new volume written without him, etc; it also had a lot of potential to explore the girls characters now that they were hyperfocused. yang was one i was most excited for in my first watch of rwby because i’m disabled, i have cptsd amongst other mental illnesses & i was eager to see this representation. they had actually given their main character a disability; a lot of creators won’t do that.
the arc we actually got was passable. there wasn’t much focus on other symptoms of ptsd besides the cliche / default ones of trauma flashbacks being triggered & nightmares. i even personally think that they gave yang her prosthetic far too early in her journey, to me it felt like they couldn’t write her as “capable” without giving her a replacement arm that was far better than the original. but i waited, i thought that they might surprise me & unfortunately they didn’t. yang in the past few volumes has had her ptsd all but erased in the narrative since her flirtations with blake arose, & the way they’ve handled her disability & prosthetic leaves so much to be desired. & considering the implicit & sometimes outright ableism laden mentalities from the crew behind the scenes, we should’ve seen the warning signs.
- the sexualization of yang’s prosthetic.
sexualization in regards to disabled people is so often a “two sides of the coin” situation. we suffer both desexualisation & hyper sexualization in regards to our disabilities in different avenues, usually in relation to our race, gender, conventional attractiveness in regards to eurocentric norms, etc.
a major example of this is the question posed in the 2014 rtx convention; “does yang’s new arm have a vibrating function.” on the surface, not an outright offensive question but it doesn’t take much introspection to realize that this feeds into some really gross mentalities around disabled people.
- it doesn’t even make sense considering that the arm was commissioned for her by ironwood, a grown ass professional man who knows her father. jokes are jokes but the insistence by certain parts of this fandom that a ship between them is pedo behaviour, this comes off as odd & only that these things are okay when they can be used to sexualize yang.
- barbara’s enthusiasm about this opportunity to sexualize her character, which she’s done since the beginning of the show; also comes off less than flattering when barbara & miles in commentary for volume 4 said that there wasn’t a lot of focus on yang’s arc with her prosthetic because it was “boring.” so the actual in depth exploration of yang’s emotions as a newly disabled person can’t be explored because two able bodied people don’t think it’s interesting enough, but the ability to sexualize her prosthetic when there is already a long & loaded history behind that is okay? this just reeks of them not actually caring about crafting a story representative of irl disabled peoples struggles but instead settling for a lukewarm, shallow reflection while furthering tropes & mentalities that only further dehumanize us.
in these jokes, yang isn’t a disabled person any longer, she’s not even a person who’s reclaiming her sexuality as a lot of disabled people struggle with — she’s an object. a joke. & it reeks of fetishization, especially since this is a part of yang that comes from incredible trauma & should be used to help her heal, but instead the writers, barbara & the fandom are mostly content to do anything but allow that & instead further harmful tropes of disabled people.
