Hi Mythcreants!
Over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with a possible design flaw in my invented universe’s lore. Simply put, it’s a universe in which reincarnation is not only a core ideology, but also proven to the extent that it’s just a part of life for those who live there. However, souls are also able to design what kind of physical form they want, right down to the fine details, before they incarnate, and can plan small details about their lives in advance. My question is: how do I make this work when it comes to disabilities? I feel stuck in a Catch-22: if I don’t include, then that’s really not great and definitely not what I want, but if I do, that raises the obvious questions of why would anyone choose that and might even promote harmful ideas.
Thanks!
Tifa
Tifa,
Thank you for bringing up this question. “Why would anyone choose that?” is a question that I’ve heard before and it is connected to the myth that, if given a choice, no one would choose to be disabled. But this isn’t true. For example, if I had access to a magical cure, I would happily take that cure for my back condition, but I would not change how my brain works. For me, being neurodivergent is a core part of who I am, and I would not be me if I had a neurotypical mind.
Let’s step back a bit and talk about why this is so. There are two main ways that people experience disability: as a limitation and as a neutral difference. My chronic back condition is an example of experiencing disability as a limitation. It limits how much I can carry, how long I can stand, and what chairs are comfortable. Accessibility barriers can make things worse for me, but even when they are absent, I experience limitations. This is the mainstream understanding of disability, and it is worth noting that it is connected with the medical view of disability (also called the medical model of disability) where disability is thought of as a problem with an individual person’s body.
Disability can also be experienced as a neutral difference, where it is simply different from what is typical, but neither better nor worse. The way my brain works is a good example of this. My brain is great at handling both the big picture and the details simultaneously. I can quickly think through many possibilities and I’m great at planning and analyzing things. The fact that my brain does this is one of my greatest strengths. However, it is not something I can turn off, and thinking through so many possibilities and consequences at once can easily become overwhelming, which leads to anxiety. While living with anxiety is challenging, it isn’t something that can be separated from my strengths. Taken as a whole, the way my brain works is neither better nor worse than being neurotypical.
For disabilities that are neutral differences, many of the limitations that people encounter come from the access barriers in society, like stressful and inflexible social structures, buildings without ramps, and negative stereotypes. In fact, for these disabilities, it can be said that society creates the experience of being disabled by creating access barriers. This understanding of disability is an important part of the social model of disability. Members of the Deaf and Autistic communities, in particular, have done a lot of work to lead the way in this understanding.
In real life, these two ways to experience disability are more of a spectrum, with different people having different experiences. Two people can have drastically different experiences of the same disability. A person with multiple disabilities can have different experiences of each of their disabilities, as I do. In addition, a person can also have different experiences of the same disability depending on the day or the circumstances.
Regardless of this complexity, any experience of disability that mostly falls into the neutral difference category is something some souls would choose. Given the nature of your setting, it seems like an important form of representation to have some souls choosing disabilities that are neutral differences. If your story has a low-oppression setting, then there really is no reason for a soul to prefer being non-disabled over having a neutral disability. In contrast, a high-oppression setting could create an incentive for souls to avoid taking on marginalized traits, but I recommend against this. It has all kinds of negative implications, and it quickly leads to a setting where the majority of people are straight, white, non-disabled, cisgender men.
Also, please keep in mind that just because a disability is a neutral difference, that doesn’t mean that accommodations, assistive devices, and medical care aren’t needed. For example, I get medical care for my anxiety. I take medication that tweaks how my brain works and that makes daily life more manageable. In addition, I regularly do therapy where I learn techniques for interrupting negative thought patterns, like self-judgment, that are part of anxiety. Realistic depictions of things like accommodations, assistive devices, and medical care are an important part of respectfully depicting disability.
As for disabilities primarily experienced as a limitation, just because a person experiences their disability as a limitation doesn’t inherently mean that they want to get rid of it. They might, but they might not. For many folks, our disabilities are part of what makes us who we are and we wouldn’t be the same without them. This means that some souls might choose disabilities that are primarily experienced as a limitation.
Also, do souls only choose traits that are considered desirable by mainstream society? Do they only want the easiest possible lives? Is everyone super perfect, without any variation or flaws? If so, there is probably a major problem with genetic diversity in this setting. However, if this is a world full of diversity where souls choose all sorts of traits that are considered non-optimal by mainstream society, you don’t have to explain why some souls choose to be disabled. Just don’t make disabilities punishments or learning experiences for souls. Treat disability as normal, like any other trait a soul could choose. Who knows why souls make the choices they do? Why does a soul choose anything?
In addition to being born with disabilities, accidents and other major life events can cause physical and mental disabilities. They cause disability in the real world, and it makes sense for them to cause disability in your setting (assuming your setting includes free will). I wouldn’t call these major events one of the “small details about their lives” that a soul could plan, so these types of disabilities aren’t something a soul has the power to choose or not choose.
Because many chronic illnesses are a combination of things people are born with (genetics) and life circumstances, they might be a bit tricky to handle. One approach that might help is to use a simplified understanding of genetics. While genes do have a big effect on someone’s life, genes aren’t destiny and they don’t operate in isolation. For example, genes alone don’t determine someone’s height—environmental factors, like nutrition, also play an important role. So, if a soul is choosing a specific gene, that gene could have multiple effects, one of which is an increased risk of getting a specific chronic illness. It won’t be until the circumstances of that specific life unfold that it will be determined whether they actually get that illness or not. Handling things this way gives souls less control over whether or not they get certain disabilities. Whether that is desirable for your story depends on how you are using this specific type of reincarnation.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your storytelling project!
Fay Onyx from Writing Alchemy
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I can imagine a character who chooses to have fins and gills living in a world where most people have wings. While they would have their own strengths, they would struggle in a society that was built to accommodate people who could fly.
That is a very interesting response. The questions asked here often give me new ideas and views for my own story.
Could you post a list of questions that you haven’t been able to reply yet? Perhaps as a starting point for discussions? Some readers might have good replies as well, e.g. talking from experience.
Maybe you could get some inspiration from Plato’s ideas about the afterlife, which he lays out towards the end in The Republic?
When it’s time to be reborn, there’s first a kind of lottery, determining which souls get to choose first and which go last (but there are more lives than souls, so even the last ones have a few choices). Then, what you choose is an entire PACKAGE. You don’t get to make your own body, birthplace, talents, destiny etc the way people put together role playing characters, you choose between whole packages. (Also, some souls are more impatient than others, and might grab a package that looks good at first glance without reading the fine print…)
I’m Mad, and this is something I have a complicated relationship to, which has also changed and evolved over time. But I’m also near-sighted! Being near-sighted isn’t stigmatized in our society, and it’s not a problem for me, really. STILL though, if I could choose to design my body exactly the way I wanted to, I’d surely have given myself perfect vision. Being nearsighted still has some small downsides (I’m dependent on glasses or contacts, and those things do require a little bit of maintenance and I have to remember to bring them along), and no upsides. Like, being nearsighted doesn’t mean that you approach the world in a different and potentially interesting way, it doesn’t give you access to a new culture, ALL it means that you need devices and gotta maintain and remember to bring them.
If you imagine people choosing and picking their traits one at a time, you’d have a lot of work to do figuring out which features would realistically not exist in this setting. For reasons mentioned above, no one would likely be nearsighted, for instance. But if you imagine people choosing entire packages, it’s immediately a little easier.
Since Jeppsson mentioned the Republic, there is an excellent recent English translation by C.D.C. Reeve. Accurate (as far as I can tell), flowing (!), and actually fun to read, for certain values of “fun.”
Since we’re on the topic of disability, though, perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Socrates pretty casually says that of course all disabled babies should be killed… The question just reminded me of the afterlife stuff.
Even if people “created” their new persona like an RPG character i doubt most thought of inmune system, genetic predisposition and neurodivergency as a trait to chose. I doubt most would be even aware of their own neurotype, i would want to still be me, maybe under another form, but without changing my core personality (unless i’m aware of an addiction, for instance). People would want to be taller, or shorter or thinner or more musculated; or man or woman or neither, but having all the parts that make a person would be a given in my opinion (plus wings or tails if they are on the menu, i guess).
Maybe, some would want to be “smarter” but that is not an objetive trait, as unless there is a disease, everyone is capable of learning and are the enviromental traits that allow people learn things faster. It helps nothing being the brigthest mind in your time if noone is able to teach you in a proper manner. IMHO
I’m near-sighted, and I’ve found one advantage; I can focus on objects a few inches from my eyes, which comes in handy for painting small details on RPG miniatures!
Are you more likely to be able to focus very close to your eyes if you’re near-sighted? I mean, I can also focus on objects very close to my face, but I thought this was part of having normal vision too. (Note that it’s possible, and very common in older people, to simultaneously be near-sighted and far-sighted.)
In any case, if I could design my own body down to the smallest detail, I’d just pick eyes such that I could focus well both on long distances AND very close to my face. No reason to only have one of these.
I love it when a question is asked in such a way that the person being asked can really engage with it, rather than advising “don’t do this”. It’s so fun to see the interchange of ideas when they start from a good premise.
I would not mind trying that world out — I can think of a few “fixes” for me!
Something you might consider, though, is that design of anything is fraught with the unknown. I was a programmer then software engineer and then software architect. Lots and lots of bright people worked together on projects, yet there were always bugs or defects of unexpected consequences. If you have enough “moving parts” it becomes nearly impossible to predict how they will interact with each other as well as (practically, but not theoretically) impossible to test. Since the characters in your story are not omniscient, that “law of unintended consequences” might come into effect. Sort of an application of Chaos Theory.
So, for example, as I am selecting the best thyroid system for myself, do I know how that will interact with, say, my kidneys forty years down the road? Will those two interact and mess up something? Etc.(Hah! Like my vision…)
I wouldn’t put neurodivergency into the disabilities bin (but i would put alzheimer and epilepsia in it, for example). I think that since we are talking about souls, how you think and feel is part of that.
i bet a blind person o someone that lost a hand would chose to have it back if given a chance, because there is no downside on lack those disabilities, nor any advantage in having them. On the other hand, for example, things like Synestesia, even being labeled as a disability, don’t have any downside and provide some benefits.
I think that getting used to live with a disabilitie don’t equal being happy with it. In the context of a world with a magic cure available for such things, i can’t think on any reason to endure them.
I agree that not every trait are harmful, but i think that if a non harmful trait derive into exclusion is society’s fault and is it what should change. I also agree that since accidents are plentiful, one can get rid of disabilities worldwide (unless everyone commit suicide to be reborn “flawless” the moment they stop being perfect, but i see flaws on thet plan).
I think there are social communities of blind people/people who are blind and people with missing or amputated limbs! I think it’s very difficult to guess who would want a specific condition or disability unless you are that person. :)
Also, sometimes I think my synesthesia gets annoying! It can be distracting when others don’t use the same colors for words or categories that better match the colors my synesthesia has tacked onto them, or it can be awkward or frustrating to explain to others certain concepts or associations that I only remember because of a mental color-coding cheat. Coming up with character names is actually pretty stressful, because not only does the name have to have the right sounds and cultural connotations, but it also has to have acceptable colors!
And the reason for that communities is to help eachother taking the most of the situation or to enjoy being that way? i’m positive most of people would take the “magic cure” given the chance. We are not talking about hair colour here, but the lack of bodily functions. There should be a really strong reason for someone to choose to stay blind, for example. If for some reason an ex-blind would want to stay in darkness, they will have the means to do it and choose when they will see and when they wont.
I think we all are on the same page as to having a disability is bad on itself (not getting in ableist ideas or anything, just that enduring a disability objectively sucks, because if it was “good” it would be an advantage).
Regarding the synestesia i would label it as a pet peeve, as it don’t have a direct harmful effect on you, nothing comparable to being blind in my opinion.
“…but the lack of bodily functions.”
We all lack bodily functions. I mean, our sight is pathetic–we have only 3 types of cone cells in our eyes! We can’t detect electricity produced by muscle movement. We can’t really detect pheromones. We have no built-in compasses. Yet most of us would not feel disabled due to these lacks. We have never experienced the sight of a mantas shrimp, and therefore do not experience the inability to do so as a lack.
What you’re describing is more in line with my experience losing a sense (smell in my case). Losing something you have is significant. It alters how you interact with the world–which has implications that people who haven’t experienced such a thing probably don’t realize. For example, smell is tied to memory, so many nostalgic experiences are very flat to me. The decorations are nice at the holidays, but I lack that visceral sense that the smell of holiday cooking invokes in so many people (and used to in me). I’ve also experienced a sense of disconnect from reality, like I’m experiencing reality at one or two removes. It’s especially bad if I’m wearing hearing protection, since now I’m down one sense and severely reduced in two others. It’s an experience I’ve heard others describe as well. but the lack of bodily functions. For another thing, the issue here is hardware not software–the nerves died–which means that I can still experience smells, just not real ones. Migraines often involve hallucinatory odors for me, for example.
I’d gladly give up my left eye to be able to smell again. No question.
In contrast, none of that applied to my inability to see out of one eye. I’d never experienced the world any other way, so I didn’t know there was anything missing. 3D vision was the weird experience, and it took me a while to adjust to it. Life didn’t seem hard or easy to me before I went through years and years of therapy; it simply was life. I didn’t have anything to compare it against; it was normal for me. It was neither good nor bad in the same way that your inability to detect the electrical currents generated by muscle movement is neither good nor bad. I’d never considered fixing anything; it was my parents who determined that my vision was a problem and made me go through the effort of fixing it. I’m not making any moral judgement here, just saying that the choice wasn’t mine.
Gaining use of a sense is not a return to normal functionality. It is a drastic change in one’s lived experience, a fundamental shift in how they interact with the world. Any discussion of gaining use of a sense that doesn’t acknowledge this fundamental fact is in error, and a denial of your own lived experience (the point of my first paragraph).
“…because if it was “good” it would be an advantage…”
A misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Changes are only good or bad for their local, changing environment. Further, because humans rely far more on cognitive abilities than other organisms (with some possible exceptions) defining fitness space is tremendously hard–we change our fitness space to fit our capacity. Plus, remember that everything in biology is a trade-off. Most organisms are at local fitness maxima, meaning ANY change–even apparently advantageous ones–are disadvantageous, often due to unforeseen trade-offs.
“I think we all are on the same page as to having a disability is bad on itself (not getting in ableist ideas or anything, just that enduring a disability objectively sucks, because if it was “good” it would be an advantage).”
We aren’t on the same page about that.
The idea that having a disability is “bad” is an ableist understanding of disability.
I can understand why thinking of disability as a limitation would seem similar to thinking of disability as bad, but they aren’t the same. Being bad is a value judgment. There are multiple statements you have made where you assume what disabled people feel and want. Many of these statements are ableist. I don’t think you intend this, but it is happening and I believe it is all founded on this belief that disability is bad and everyone agrees about that.
We don’t agree on that. A lot of work that disability activists have done has been about changing from value judgements, like disability being bad, to a more neutral way of thinking that focuses on accessibility.
Disability can be a neutral trait. It isn’t for everyone, but it is for many people. In addition, a lot of the negative experiences that disabled people have come from ableism or are made worse by ableism.
You can’t assume what disabled people feel about their own disabilities. You can’t assume what we want. You can listen to us. There are plenty of disabled people who don’t want a cure, including blind people and others who you’ve assumed would definitely want a cure. Everyone is different. Some disabled people want cures and some don’t. You can’t make assumptions about these things.
I am going to conclude by saying that I don’t have the capacity to read any responses to my comment above or make further comments. I know that I haven’t explained everything in detail. This happened because my time and energy are very limited. I have done what I have the capacity to do.
However, you seem like someone who does care, so if you have questions, I encourage you to read some articles online. You might start by reading what different disabled folks have to say about magical cures as many of those articles will get right into this stuff and you will get to hear from multiple different perspectives. Also, as Oren suggested, there are some are some awesome Deaf activists who have a lot to say on this topic.
Best wishes,
–Fay
Hey Erynus, editor’s note:
The argument you’re making here is effectively that people with certain disabilities wouldn’t exist in a setting like the one described, which is an argument against representation. That isn’t something we allow.
I’m not deleting any comments for now because I don’t believe you’re doing this maliciously, but I am telling you to stop. Your arguments depend on huge generalizations about what real people would or would not choose, which isn’t something any of us can know with just our gut instinct.
For an example of why people might make a different choice than you about their disability, I recommend researching Deaf Culture. To them, deafness is far more than a loss of function.
This remains a complicated topic, and there won’t always be easy answers, but we won’t make things better by trying to argue certain people out of existence in fictional worlds.
“…i can’t think on any reason to endure them.”
That’s because you’re answering a different question from what you’re asking. The question you’re asking is “Why should anyone endure a disability?” The question you’re answering, however, is “Would I be willing to develop a disability?” You are, in other words, taking your experience as the norm against which we are supposed to compare our experiences. But the reality is, we each compare our lives against our own experiences.
I can only speak from my own experiences; everyone will be different. But I think I can answer some of your questions from the perspective of someone with a fairly mild disability (more or less blind in one eye).
If you grow up with a disability it’s part of you, part of how you experience the world. You don’t even think about it, any more than you think about balance when walking. There may be some people who bemoan their sad and sorry fate being born with a disability, but the folks with disabilities I’ve met are just…people. They don’t view their experience of the world as defectives, any more than you view your inability to see deep ultraviolet or redish-green as a defect. (The cells that register red and green are either/or except in extraordinary conditions, making redish-green nearly impossible to see.)
Learning to view the world a new way, on the other hand, is something you DO need to think about. It’s HARD. You’re not returning to normal, you’re learning to experience reality in a fundamentally different way. The amount of time and effort it takes to do this in even a small way is tremendous. You need to train your brain to process new information, to filter out information in new ways, and to do so so quickly that you don’t experience the process, just the results.
Think of learning a new way of writing. An entirely new alphabet. How much effort would it take you to learn to read a new alphabet with the same speed and precision as you can read the one we’re using now? Now multiply this effort by a few orders of magnitude. And that’s for a fairly minor disability. Adding an entirely new sense is something else entirely, something I don’t think most people can really understand.
Maybe magic lowers the level of effort, but to what extent? The issue with me was never hardware, it was software–the eye was physically fine. There’s nothing to heal. Even if there is a physical issue to address, that’s only the start of a long, long process. And remember, this isn’t to fix something, not from the perspective of the person who has the disability; it’s to gain something they had been getting along fine without.
There are a lot of other reasons as well. The perspective of someone with a disability is necessarily different from the perspective of someone without one, for example–not just “They can’t see” either, because there are ripple effects. But that’s a long, complicated discussion I’m not sure anyone is qualified to explore. My intent isn’t to give you a definitive or exhaustive answer, but merely to show that you’re asking the wrong question, and that when you ask the right question the issue isn’t as simple as you make it appear.
Maybe one of your characters chooses no disabilities, but, say, loses their arm or eye in combat. Disabilities can be acquired!
If you’re asking about mechanics, there’s an easy answer from biology and engineering: trade-offs. Every change is going to cause other changes, ranging from macroscopic to microscopic to metabolic. To improve one area by some metric necessarily means reducing capacity in another area in some way. It’s not always obvious, but it’s always there.
You can also show people who are injured or otherwise acquire a disability, as Byakugan said. It’s rare in our society (not unheard of, however–I acquired anosmia due to chemical exposure, for example), but in the past it was an accepted part of life. Read any 19th century story with any amount of realism and they discuss people missing arms and legs and the like as just part of the population, not anything shocking (unless it was a friend that had a leg last time you saw them). Or, look at our own culture’s night vision. By the standards of our ancestors many of us are functionally disabled for half the day! Computers, electric light, and indoor plumbing have reduced our need for acute night vision, so most of us don’t even realize it.
If you’re wondering morally, the question becomes much more interesting. What, ultimately, IS a disability? The answer our society accepts is roughly deviation from the norm past a certain point (that point being variable, depending on what system we’re talking about). A society like you’re proposing won’t have a norm, or at least not one that means anything to anyone. And whether something is a disability or not is context-dependent. I have no idea if you’re deaf or not, because it is so irrelevant to our interaction (that being text-based communication via computers) that the thought likely never crossed your mind. And in a society where basic physiology is highly variable, differences would be accepted as a matter of course. If anything, we should expect a high variability in what people can and can’t do and experience, as tastes and needs vary from person to person. So people we consider disabled today wouldn’t be unrepresented; it just wouldn’t be abnormal for someone to have different capacities than the main character the way it is for us.
If it’s possible to design a body without ‘disabilities’, why stop there? Why not design bodies without the limitations of the standard human body, such as the inability to produce Vitamin C, or eyes with a limited angle of vision (considering how many fights, battles, and even wars have been lost due to the enemy creeping up from behind, it’s amazing that no culture in history ever designed a helmet with rear-view mirrors), or self-sealing blood vessels, or…
Once you stop accepting the limits of the standard human body as the norm, all sorts of possibilities open up!
If people retain memories of past lives, there could even be characters who want to try out every variation of body and circumstance possible. Almost like how people use multiple game systems and like collecting vintage things – it could be an excersise in empathy becuase they realise this is limited by their own experience so they want to experience more things. This one could end up a little creepy and fetishy if you aren’t careful, though.
If you consider how people play D&D, some people min-max and meta game to be the “best”, but other people go for story. If there are people chosing to play half orc wizards in our world, why not “this life, I will live without fingers and see how I do” in your world?
Sorry, not a comment on the representation/erasure of people with disabilities, but a thought on your worldbuilding.
You didn’t specify if this reincarnation is magical, divine, technological or any combination thereof, but it reads as if this is a central premise of your story and its world. Is there any trial period involved?
Do the people get an opportunity to experience what it would be like for them in these new bodies they’d choose, or is there some kind of mandate that the choices be made without knowing what it would be like to live in the new form?
Or do people get reborn/remade into an infant stage and then have to grow into their new bodies as those bodies finish growing and maturing, a second childhood if you will?
If there is a trial period, whether by VR or an empathic person doing a mind li k, or a prayer being answered, or whatever, you could make a reasoned argument that people would choose to retain whichever condition they have. A person who is deaf from birth might find these new noises suddenly assaulting them to be awful and choose to keep their condition, despite pressure from friends, family or society.
On the flip side, the utter lack of such a preview capability might make people choose to be as similar to their previous selves as they had been, fearing they’d wind up going through life in a completely different way than before. Fear of the unknown is a powerful (de)motivator for humans.
In either case, whether through the power of capitalism, or more altruistic motives, there ought to be a trial service available pre-resurrection, if it’s possible. If it isn’t, have a character bemoan its lack to patch up what would otherwise be a big flaw in worldbuilding.
The reincarnation is both magical and divine, as the cosmic beings who oversee the universe have set up a system where the souls start at the top of the world tree, and sort through the ideas of what their life will be like, and then go through the branches, and map out the relationships could be, and family connections, and then at the roots they pick out what kind of body they’d like, and get a Heartstone [their main and only internal organ], and then their soul is fused with their body, and then it’s time to jump into the pool of reincarnation and slide off the waterfall into an incarnated state [as a newborn; babies are made by energy fusion].
The universe runs on a combination of free will and semi-scripted events [though some believe in hardcore fate], by the way. So, in other words, some important things are meant to happen, but how and why they happen depends on everyone’s choices and decisions.
Then it seems to me that flowing down this tree and seeing how their lives would interweave with others’ might be all the reason you need to have disabilities chosen by the souls in this world you’re writing.
If a soul could see their family coming together to support them through their disability (where otherwise it would fall apart), or if they could see that a loved one would wither away into depression without someone to care for, they might make the choice to forgo a limb, or some such.
Just a thought.
That’s a really neat idea! Thank you for sharing. :D
I ran an RPG in a world where people chose their bodies, and we had actually more disability representation that usual, sort of, for three reasons:
1)Souls expend energy on maintaining every feature of your body, so you’re on a budget. If you don’t think you’ll need a bodily function, you cut it and use freed energy to grow something you like more. That was the main reason why not everyone is super strong, fast and healthy(Yes, the whole thing was me basing worldbuilding on the point-buy character generator)
2)Acquired problems that people don’t have time or resources to solve. It was an explicit rule that every condition can be healed with enough effort, but some people didn’t have the opportunity yet, and some just didn’t think it’s worth it. This one is particularly realistic – many disabilities aren’t that big of a deal to make your life about curing them for a time, even when that’s fully possible.
3)This one is a bit more alien than what you’re going for, I think, but: different communities had vastly different views of what “normal” body looks like. You walk on legs and see with eyes, your neighbors float on tiny wings and navigate by heat sense. Isolated communities may assume local kind of body, but major cities have to cater to every possibility.
I think 2) is a thing which should be considered far more often in storytelling as well. Depending on the disability and how much it impacts you, you might not really rush to a cure, but wait until you get around to it.
I’ve been short-sighted for decades now (started wearing glasses around the age of 9) and I’ve never felt the need to get it cured, even though laser treatments have been around for quite a while now. Wearing glasses is hardly hindering in my day-to-day life and I’ve grown used to it. I’m also not on a ‘Velma’ level where I can’t see anything without them – the world just goes fuzzy when I take them off. It’s fine. I probably shouldn’t go outside without my glasses (and I never do) and definitely not steer a car without them, but I’ perfectly fine with wearing them. I don’t even ever wear contacts – I prefer my glasses.
What RPG system is that? That first reason sounds interesting to me for an RPG system.
Heyyy! My question! *very happy*