Pretty much, I see people referencing things like Iron Man where the disability never presents any actual hindrance to the character, which I assume is kind of the big thing about wanting disability representation: overcoming hindrance.
I see a couple other people raise the same point.
And let’s face it, how would you react to a hero flummoxed by something like, say, trying to put their pants on?
I think what’s getting glossed over here is, going back to the point about hindrance, someone like Edward Elric just acts like a normal-ass person. They may technically be disabled/differently-abled, but “local anime trash boy” doesn’t see Edward Elric as any different or lesser than anybody else, possibly, if we’re going to accuse him of that.
Now, whether “distinct representation” is any better or worse than “this character has a disability but it doesn’t make them different from anybody else” is a question I’d rather personally leave to the wisdom of the crowds, but I think what some people want from “disabled heroes” does not exactly line up with “guy who has a cyberpunk prosthetic that is perfectly functional like a flesh-and-bone arm.”
In fact, rarely will we get very intimate about the personal routines of characters, like, say, their bathroom habits. Little things that could highlight what life with their hypothetical disability is like.
(For what it’s worth, my current problematic fave is an anime boy who presently has lost the use of an arm and an eye due to neural-interface-overload, but it’s not so bad because he gets them back when he plugs into his giant robot.)
