A leash in the guise of kindness: the glove situation in E.5

[sunlit_skycat]

Title: A leash in the guise of kindness: the glove situation in E.5
Major Warnings: Ableism
Summary: By the end of Pale, Kira-Lynn is a disabled teenager kept in an isolated cell in Kennet Found. Though the narrative presents this as a sad but necessary method to keep others safe from her, the conditions of Kira-Lynn’s imprisonment in Kennet Found are significantly harsher than should be required to meet that goal. This is most apparent in the method that Kennet Found chooses to accommodate Kira-Lynn’s lack of hands, which unnecessarily reduces her autonomy.

By the end of Pale, Kira-Lynn is a disabled teenager kept in an isolated cell in Kennet Found. Though the narrative presents this as a sad but necessary method to keep others safe from her, the conditions of Kira-Lynn’s imprisonment in Kennet Found are significantly harsher than should be required to meet that goal. This is most apparent in the method that Kennet Found chooses to accommodate Kira-Lynn’s lack of hands, which unnecessarily reduces her autonomy.

To recap the situation, Kira-Lynn has double upper extremity limb loss, where “her left hand [is] gone, her right arm destroyed to the elbow.” (Pale 24.13) [1] Her arm stumps require bandages that must constantly be replaced, and the Abyssal taint requires that these bandages be disposed of in a special way to avoid contaminating the area. This cannot be healed with the resources Kennet has. (Pale e.5) [2] In addition, Kira-Lynn used spirit surgery to remove her ability to feel certain emotions, which alters her behavior.

Kennet considers Kira-Lynn a security risk, so she is held inside a jail in Kennet Found. Kira-Lynn is denied the use of prosthetics because of that security risk. Instead, she is given a pair of magic gloves that act as an assistive device run by an outside team of foundlings who receive “every request for a use of the hand, intent, and meaning, and [have] to sign off on it.” (Pale e.5) [2] With foundling approval, the gloves will perform tasks for Kira-Lynn that she cannot in her current environment, such as picking up a glass of water to drink. (Pale e.5) [2]

Let’s look at this situation through the lens of disability. There are two frameworks that are commonly used to think about disability, the medical model and the social model.

The medical model of disability focuses on the individual and the ways that they deviate from normal traits and characteristics. By this definition, Kira-Lynn is clearly disabled — she has no hands! Often when the medical model is used, the emphasis is on curing the individual so that they can gain the capabilities of someone without that disability, which is seen as a standard to aspire towards. This is what Kennet tried, to heal Kira-Lynn’s injuries or to give her a replacement that would be just like having biological hands.

The social model focuses more on the environment around the individual, and the ways in which it inconveniences or stops the individual from acting how they want. By this definition, Kira-Lynn is still disabled — she cannot drink water without assistance. However, the social model says that this is the fault of the environment around Kira-Lynn, and that the tools and space she is in should be modified so that it is usable by someone with no hands. Kennet does not appear to have tried this route, which is a failure by the social model of disability.

Now, this may seem harsh. After all, Kennet is trying to keep themselves safe, so Kira-Lynn cannot be given too much freedom. In addition, they put a lot of effort into making the gloves function for Kira-Lynn, which can do any task for her as if she has hands. Isn’t this enough? Shouldn’t she be grateful?

The answer is no. Kennet wants to bring the Practitioner world to modern standards, by setting an example and using their influence to encourage others to follow. Looking at those modern standards, the Accessible Canada Act of 2019 says, “laws, policies, programs, services and structures must take into account the disabilities of persons, the different ways that persons interact with their environments and the multiple and intersecting forms of marginalization and discrimination faced by persons.”[3] By their own standards, they have much room for improvement in their treatment of Kira-Lynn. Even if Kira-Lynn is as dangerous as Kennet fears, there are multiple accommodations that Kennet can make to increase Kira-Lynn’s dignity and agency without increasing her chances of escape.

(I will not discuss to what extent Kira-Lynn can be considered responsible for her actions after her spirit surgery, as that is outside the scope of this piece. Regardless of how Kira-Lynn got to this point, by E.5 she is unambiguously a disabled prisoner of Kennet Found, regardless of the reader’s interpretation of her mental state.)

Let’s talk about the gloves. The gloves require constant surveillance by foundlings to function, and must have their every action approved of. It is tempting to think of these as prosthetics, because they are hand shaped when Kira-Lynn is missing her hands, but the gloves are more like having a remotely-operated carer who is constantly watching and must be continually persuaded into attending to Kira-Lynn’s needs. At any moment, the gloves may stop working without warning, and Kira-Lynn will have no way to control this. As a form of accommodation, this is extremely infantilizing. Kira-Lynn is dependent upon an outside party to want to help her, respond every time she asks for help, help her in the way she wanted, and repeat this process countless times per day, every single day, without fail. Even assuming that all the foundlings involved truly wish the best for Kira-Lynn, what happens if the foundlings want to sleep, or the current foundling in charge is slow at interpreting a request, or incorrectly thinks that a safe request is dangerous? Alternatively, what if Kira-Lynn has a request that she is too embarrassed to ask the gloves to do? She is still a teenage girl, and teenage girls have to use the bathroom.

This is a setup ripe for exploitation. Kira-Lynn is reliant on whoever controls the gloves to take care of her needs, and cannot leave the situation if that is not happening. A malicious actor can use this power differential to coerce Kira-Lynn into doing things she doesn’t want to, by threatening to make the gloves stop working if she doesn’t comply and promise to keep silent. There is too much possibility to take the gloves away for petty reasons masquerading as legitimate, and as far as we know there is no oversight over the foundlings to prevent this. Indeed, within E.5 we see use of the gloves deliberately cut off in order to prevent Kira-Lynn from making a rude gesture.

In real life, many disabled people are abused by carers that they rely on to help perform the necessities of life. Various disabilities can make it more difficult to physically escape violence, communicate the situation to other people, or understand that someone is abusing them. A disabled person who needs a carer may feel that they have to accept the directions and preferences of other people or be at risk of losing that care. [4] In Kira-Lynn’s case, she cannot leave the jail as long as Kennet feels she is a security risk, and she cannot make rude gestures without losing the ability to interact with the environment around her.

It should be clear by now that the gloves are an insufficient accommodation that open up unnecessary avenues for abuse. But Kira-Lynn is still a prisoner who is considered a danger to Kennet. Giving her real prosthetics increases that danger. Is there anything that Kennet can do without letting her go free and murder Lucy’s family?

Yes! Going back to the social model of disability, instead of trying to restore Kira-Lynn back to baseline so she has some poor approximation of hands that are controlled by other people, Kennet should alter Kira-Lynn’s environment so that she can interact with the world and fulfill as many of her needs as possible without hands. There is an entire breadth of assistive devices intended to make life easier for people who cannot use their hands.

Take the example of drinking water. Instead of having glasses that require being picked up by hands to be able to use, Kennet can provide drinking methods that do not require hands to use. Options range from the common straw, [5] to mugs that can be lifted with wrist stumps, [6] to cups that come with specialized flexible necks and holders, [7] to an accessible water fountain. [8] None of these will make Kira-Lynn more dangerous to other people.

We don’t have much information on the rest of Kira-Lynn’s setup. However, the water issue is so extremely basic that we should assume that there has been no effort to make Kira-Lynn’s environment accessible at all. Here are some other things that Kennet can safely provide to Kira-Lynn: automated feeding arms to scoop up food, [9] voice control for her TV instead of a remote, [10] a knee-operated sink, [11] clothing designed to be easy to put on with limited hand control. [12] There are many, many more options than I can list. And that’s not taking into account the possibilities that Practice offers.

Some of these options will take labor to install, or money to buy. However, the gloves are massively labor-intensive to make functional too. In any case, Kennet does not seem to be short of labor, resources, or time, so it seems like it can make these things happen if it wants to.

Even assuming that Kira-Lynn really is this dangerous, and must be confined for the safety of others, Kennet can do significantly more to let Kira-Lynn maintain what agency she can than what has been shown. This level of negligence is a complete failure to accommodate a disabled person that Kennet wants to rehabilitate, and a betrayal of the modern values that Kennet wants to show the world.

We could leave things there, if we wanted. This entire piece of writing has been talking about the hypotheticals of a passage that is 800 words long, that Wildbow probably spent less than an hour writing. However, there is value in going one level deeper, and exploring why Kira-Lynn has been written this way from a narrative standpoint.

Kira-Lynn is first introduced to the story as a teenage girl who is deeply dissatisfied with life, with parents who are failing to meet her needs due to their poverty. She is perceptive, talented in Practice, and recruited to a war by mentors who seek to exploit her as a disposable child soldier. (Pale 20.f) [13] She ends the story as an antagonist in an extremely humiliating situation where she is stripped of her previous power and punished for her previous actions. Somewhere along the way, it seems as if Kira-Lynn drifted from a foil that showed what our protagonists could have been if they had worse mentors and causes, to someone who is inherently stubborn and uncooperative to her detriment for no real reason.

If this is intended to be a thought experiment on the most humane way to hold a dangerous enemy who refuses to cooperate, testing the ultimate limits of rehabilitative justice, it misses the mark. This is not the type of environment that promotes deep soul-searching and owning of one’s actions. Instead, what is emphasized is Kira-Lynn’s personal helplessness, and the power that Kennet holds over her. This does not make prime rehabilitative condition for anything.

An alternate reading of the scene is that the humiliation of Kira-Lynn’s situation is intentional, and that this whole situation is meant to be the viscerally satisfying punishment of an antagonist. The lack of accessibility is the point. Its placement in E.5 serves more as moralizing gloating over the defeated, broken remains of the enemy than truly engaging in what it takes to rehabilitate a child soldier. That’s a shame, because it feels like a simplification of the issues Pale wants to dig into.

Kira-Lynn meets an ignominious end as a raving lunatic whose disability is used as a source of humiliation and control, with no more time to explore this due to the scene’s placement in the story’s epilogue. Even taking into account at face value the possible danger she poses to Kennet, there is significant room for improvement in the accommodations provided to her. Ultimately, this handling of Kira-Lynn as a character creates a conundrum that is difficult to reconcile with the values that Kennet is supposed to have. Though it only takes up a short section of the epilogue, the implications of small details loom large in what it means for Kira-Lynn to be treated in such a way as Kennet strides into the future.

 

Citations

[1] Wildbow. Pale, Finish Off 24.13. https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2023/07/22/finish-off-24-13/

[2] Wildbow. Pale, Loose Ends E.5. https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2023/09/30/loose-ends-e-5/

[3] Government of Canada. S.C. 2019, c. 10. Accessible Canada Act. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/A-0.6/index.html

[4] Alberta Human Services. “Abuse of Persons with Disabilities.” https://www.humanservices.alberta.ca/documents/PFVB0541-abuse-of-persons-with-disabilities-booklet.pdf

[5] Center for Disability Rights. “Grasping at Straws: the Ableism of the Straw Ban.” https://cdrnys.org/blog/disability-dialogue/grasping-at-straws-the-ableism-of-the-straw-ban/

[6] Curvd. https://curvd.com/

[7] Giraffe Bottle. https://www.giraffebottle.com/

[8] Pro Drinking Fountains. “ADA Drinking Fountains.” https://www.prodrinkingfountains.com/ada-barrier-free-drinking-fountains-ada-water-coolers/

[9] Obi Robot. https://meetobi.com/

[10] Electronic Hub. “The Six Best Smart TV with Voice Control 2023.” https://www.electronicshub.org/best-smart-tv-with-voice-control/

[11] Advance Tabco. “Knee Actuated Hand Washing Sinks.” https://advancetabco.com/handsinks_details.asp?title=Hands-Free%20Knee%20Operated%20Hand%20Sinks&prodis=HS-HFKV

[12] Amputee Store. “What to Look for When Buying Adaptive Clothing.” https://amputeestore.com/blogs/amputee-life/what-to-look-for-when-buying-adaptive-clothing#anchor-2

[13] Wildbow. Pale, Let Slip 20.f. https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2022/09/25/let-slip-20-f/



 

Comments

Fic Idea

[silverdappledwolf]

Innovative fix-it/future fic idea here I see! With citations. I do like citations. I suspect that the average person, while declaring themselves quite civilised, doesn’t really understand what modern days means… mostly paperwork. There are benefits to paperwork, who knew?

On a side note, do you use a reference manager for other matters? Mostly wondering because mine allows me to copy paste all the fancy bibliographic formatting out of it directly, when I’m not using LibreOffice or Word so I can just do it automatically.

Re: Fic Idea

[sunlit_skycat]

I use google docs to type things up. The problem is that google docs copy and pastes to Dreamwidth very badly, so I need to convert everything to HTML. Google docs allows footnotes, but that relies on having pages as far as I know, and DW doesn't do pages.

Re: Fic Idea

[silverdappledwolf]

Oh perfect, my reference manager can be useful here. Zotero has a Google docs add-in, which is… why I swapped over to it in the first place. I’m not sure how it interacts with html conversions, granted, but it’s not page reliant.

My un-asked for attempt at helpfulness: concludes!