Don’t use disabilities as cosplay
There are some things people should not cosplay as.
With FanX and all these other comic conventions, people can basically dress as whatever
and whoever they want. As well as it being blind awareness month I thought I should shed some light on it. With that being said, there are some things people should not cosplay as. The one that I am going to focus on is cosplaying on characters who are blind, and the differences between certain characters or costumes.
The biggest and most common ones I have seen are Daredevil and Matt Murdock.
Cosplaying as the Daredevil is fine, but when you take away the suit and just dress as a blind guy, that is not ok. Matt Murdock is a character, yes, however he is just a guy with a disability and as someone who has a similar disability, I think it is wrong.
A lot of the people I’ve seen aren’t really even trying, they’ll walk with their “canes” in the air. If you are going to cosplay as a blind person, which you shouldn’t, at least try to be respectful about it. Charlie Cox, who plays Daredevil in Netflix’s Daredevil tv show, took time to study how to truly embody someone with that kind of disability. He went to a couple of blind schools and got really into learning to live in that way. That really shows how much he cared, he truly played Matt Murdock very well. He took time to learn how to walk with a cane, he even went to the lengths of learning how to read braille.
People don’t go out and buy a wheelchair and pretend to be paralyzed, and if they do, they get ridiculed about it. Nobody should pretend to have a disability for any reason, especially for a comic convention. It is extremely dumb and disrespectful to the people who actually have that disability. It doesn’t matter if you think the character is cool or not, you shouldn’t pretend to have something that a lot of people suffer from. I would hope that people would have enough integrity and intelligence to know that.
I also fully believe that film and television studios should hire people who either have or are willing to learn about the disability they are trying to portray. Charlie Cox didn’t have to do what he did, but personally, I think it should have been mandated. Ben Affleck also worked with a blind actor to prepare to play Matt Murdock in the 2003 film, which again he didn’t have to do, but again he should have been mandated to do so.
The point I’m making here is, do not under any circumstances pretend to have a disability especially if you are going to do it in a disrespectful way. If you decide to do it anyway, at least take the time to do it right.
