A visual trope I've noticed popping up more often as of late, is the tendency for artists and character designers to give their physically disabled characters mobility aids specifically made for sport as a daily-use aid. It seems to happen most often with leg amputees, being given running-blade prosthetics or wheelchair users being given basketball, rugby or tennis wheelchairs, but that could also just be because that's what I'm most knowledgeable about and so I just notice it more.

So what's the problem with that?

Well, mobility aids designed for sport aren't like, say, running shoes where they're designed for one thing, but can be used for another. They are designed for one thing, and one thing only. trying to use them for literally anything else will... well it won't get you far.

Running Blades

Now look, I get why people want to draw these on their amputee and limb different characters, they look cool as hell AND they make you fast! I pestered my prosthetist for years to let me get a pair, admittedly, mostly because of the aesthetic so trust me, I get it.

But running blades are made to run, and only to run. Sometimes to jump, but mainly to run. You see, running blades look the way they do, because they aren't actually based off of human anatomy at all.

The original running blade was inspired by the hind-legs of animals like cheetahs, dogs and other fast-moving land mammals. As the furries among us would already know, a lot of these animals have something called digitigrade legs, meaning they don't stand with their entire back foot on the ground. What we see as their paws is actually just the ends of their toes, and their ankle is held up off the ground. The reason so many animal species evolved with this trait is because it makes you really fast (among other things). The entire leg essentially works like a spring, giving the animal more force to push themselves forward, at the cost of the limb being a little less stable to stand on. that isn't an issue when you have another two legs out in front, but it's part of the reason why you don't see many bipedal creatures in nature with digitigrade legs.

Running blades took this general digitigrade leg layout and kind of simplified it, functionally making the athletes run on their toes. The blades are made out of very strong and very flexible carbon fibre sheets, and when the "toe" of the blade hits the ground, the force of the impact causes the whole blade to bend, then rebound, using the runner's own force and momentum to push them forward again.

However, unlike most animals, humans don't have another set of legs out in front to keep us stable, so when the person with the blade prosthetic stops running, they either become very unstable or will fall over. This is because, in order to get that spring-like motion, these prosthetics can't have a heel and the way our body's weight is distributed means we kind of need that. Some leg amputees are able to walk a little bit in these running blades, but its not easy and is generally pretty uncomfortable to do, and for double leg amputees, it's exceptionally difficult.

There's also the fact that the running blades need a lot of force applied to them to actually work. A friend of mine brought her blade to an event we were both at, and you could not get the arch of the blade to bend with your arms. At all. One of the other guys at the event was a Paralympic powerlifter, and even he couldn't do it. even leaning on it with all our body weight wasn't enough to make it bend and push back. The only way to get it to bend was by landing on it while running at full speed - which is no small amount of force. Anything less and it won't budge, making these essentially very poorly balanced peg legs when used for anything other than running and jumping. This was actually the reason my prosthetist never signed off on me getting a pair of running legs, because I had an issue that made my stumps too sensitive to withstand the forces needed for them to work properly.

So unless your amputee character is going to be running everywhere at a full sprint, they don't need and probably won't benefit much from having blades in place of a regular prosthetic foot.

However, if you want some extra speed for your amputee character, without the significant balance issues that come with a blade, hybrid feet do exist! These hybrids are made out of the same carbon fibre sheets as the big blades, but are shaped more like a regular leg and ankle, with an additional piece attached to the back to give you the stability of having a heel. These hybrid feet, often called active feet or high-mobility feet, take the best of both kinds of prosthetic, while also allowing their user to wear shoes, thanks to the rubber foot shell that goes over the top. They aren't as great for running as the big blades, but they're a lot better than most other prosthetic feet.

The one exception to all of this is if your amputee or limb different character isn't actually human.

Quadrupedal mammals like dogs and cats who have their hind legs amputated often get something that looks like a running blade prosthetic as the shape mimics what they'd naturally have without the need for expensive (and completely impractical for animals) electronic parts.

When it comes to furry and anthropomorphic animals, I personally make an exception here as well. Technically, the same rule should apply; they're bipedal, so they shouldn't be able to easily stand on a running blade and it wouldn't be practical. However, that rule should also apply to any furry with digitigrade legs, they should be equally unbalanced on their natural meat legs because that kind of bone structure isn't great for a bipedal creature, but it's just kind of an accepted thing to ignore that within the furry community, as long as you can make it look good. In this case, a running blade is the closest a digitigrade furry could probably come to a functional prosthetic without robotics, so I'm more inclined to let it go in that case.

Sports wheelchairs

The wheelchairs used in basketball, tennis and rugby are all different, but the features I see getting used in character designs are, for the most part, in all three, so for the sake of simplicity, going forward I'm going to refer to them all collectively as sports chairs. "Sports wheelchair" is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot more than just these three types, but I don't think I've seen anyone confuse a racing or golfing wheelchair for a general use wheelchair, so for this article, I'm mainly going to be using it to refer to those three. Likewise, going forward, I'm going to be calling normal, non-sports wheelchairs "day-chairs," which was a popular way of shortening "daily-use wheelchair" when I played wheelchair sports.

Just like the running prosthetic, sports wheelchairs are made to do one thing very well, and only that one thing, which is why people who play wheelchair sports of any kind need to have an entirely separate wheelchair to play in.

The wheelchairs designed for Rugby and basketball are made to go on perfectly flat, perfectly smooth, indoor basketball courts. Likewise, tennis chairs are made to play on perfectly flat and smooth tennis courts. But it's pretty hard to find anything that smooth and flat outside of those specific spaces and these chairs don't handle any other type of environment well at all, even including the entrances and exists to the courts. These sports chairs are so bad at dealing with anything else, in fact, that people who play these sports will usually stay in their day-chairs, right up until they're on the court's sideline, then swap into the sports chair only when needed.

This is because the features that make these wheelchairs so good for their respective sports, tend to cause a lot of logistical problems anywhere else.

For example, when most people think about sports wheelchairs, one of the first things that comes to mind is probably the big, tilted wheels. The wheels on all sports chairs are angled outwards, with the wheels closer at the top, and wider at the bottom - this is called wheel camber. A standard day-chair, though, usually has no, or very little camber - wheels that are not tilted outwards. Giving sports chairs camber has a lot of benefits, with the main one being added stability. When you're playing a game like wheelchair basketball or rugby, which are contact sports, you need to be able to take a hit without falling over, and a wider base of support helps with that a lot. The larger wheels on these chairs also tend to sit pretty far forward, which shifts the chair's centre of gravity, making it way easier to do precise, tight turns. However, this makes the chair much less stable, which the camber also helps with, which is one of the big reasons you see tilted wheels on tennis chairs too. Finally, you also need your hands and fingers on the wheels to move, but if someone crashes into you, having the wheels tilted this way keeps your hands out of the way of being crushed on impact...usually.

As you can see, this feature has a lot of advantages, but you'll notice that having the wheels tilted also makes the chair very wide. So wide that they don't actually fit most doors, except double doors. When I played basketball, to even get our sports wheelchairs inside the courts we practiced on, which only had standard, single doors for some reason, we had to sit in our day chairs and push the basketball chairs in front of us with the big wheels removed, or they wouldn't be able to fit inside.

I'm sure you can see now why this makes these wheelchairs impractical for daily use. It's hard enough getting a normal day-chair through some building's doors, let alone through crowded or tight places like shops with narrow isles or down narrow footpaths.

You will occasionally see a day-chair with a very minor tilt on their big wheels, but it's usually only done on very thin chairs with active or experienced users, and it's almost never more than a 2 - 5° tilt (whereas sports chairs can have as much as 15° to 20°, depending on the sport).

But tilted wheels aren't the only thing that makes them impractical for daily use.

Another feature of these chairs is their anti-tip wheels; little wheels at the back that stop you from falling backwards out of your chair. A lot of day-chairs have anti-tips too, but the ones on day-chairs are usually positioned so that the wheelchair can still be tilted back enough to get up things like curbs and small steps and mildly rough terrain.

However, remember how I said sports chairs have their big wheels moved further forward to help them turn easier? this will cause the chair to tip back way easier, and to account for that, the anti-tip wheels on sports chairs have to be basically touching the ground. If they weren't, every time you pushed forward, you would loose a bunch of your energy and momentum from tipping back slightly. You'd also probably damage the courts after a while too from forcibly slamming your front and anti-tip wheels into the ground repetitively. So they make the anti-tip wheels as close to the ground as practically possible to stop that, and also so you can lean as far back in the chair as you need, without having to worry about falling back but this means the chair is prone to getting stuck on everything and anything if the ground isn't perfectly flat and smooth. Even trying to take one of these chairs down a tiny curb-cut ramp is likely to result in your front wheels getting wedged on the road, while the anti-tips get stuck on the ramp with your big wheels (the ones you use to propel yourself forward) getting stuck in the air.

Finally, there's also the size. Even without tilted wheels, these chairs are often quite a decent bit larger than a day chair, mostly to protect their user. Most sports wheelchairs have a protective bar in front and around the sides of the chair, and the anti-tips add quite a bit of extra length to them in a lot of cases. The bar protects your feet in the event of a collision or fall, and makes the chairs more bottom-heavy to prevent them from tipping over whenever you make a sharp turn, and the anti-tip wheels need to extend a decent way out of the back of the chair or else they can't do their job.

These things don't matter too much on the court, but once again, out in the real world, it makes a big difference.

There are a few other little differences too that can, in some cases, make them less practical. things like the fact breaks are never included on sports chairs (anymore) because they just weren't needed during the games and increased the risk of hand injuries - I lost a few thumbnails from snagging them on my day-chair's breaks when I was pushing fast. Sports chairs also can't fold down, as making them able to do so is a safety hazard since it weakens the frame of the chair. So that, combined with their larger shape means they can really only be transported by most people by putting them in the back trunk of the car, whereas even day-chairs that can't fold are designed to be able to be placed on a car seat, meaning they're easier to get in and out of a car when you don't have anyone to help you.

I speak about all of this from experience, by the way. As a teenager, my first wheelchair basketball coach intentionally didn't explain the above points to me when he lent me my first ever sports wheelchair. He knew the first thing I was going to do was try to take it to school, and he knew I wouldn't listen if he just told me not to try it, so it was just better to let me figure it out on my own. My old English classroom's door still has a big chunk of paint missing from where I tried to force this extra-wide sports chair through almost 10 years later, and I was late to every single class that day because the school's elevator had a small lip by the door I kept getting stuck on. Not to mention the several times I got stuck on the curb cut just trying to leave our local courts the day he gave it to me.

Sometimes kids just have to learn through trial and error, and I definitely tried, which is why it's so funny to me when I see wheelchair using characters in fiction either using just a straight-up sports wheelchair as a day-chair, or who's day-chair was designed by someone who very clearly just googled "cool/sporty/fast wheelchair" and slapped a bunch of features they saw onto a more standard wheelchair without understanding what those things actually do.

Conclusion

Honestly, as far as disability tropes go this one is mainly harmless. Personally, I find it more funny than annoying or harmful like most of the tropes I talk about, but it does come across to those of us who have used these mobility aids that you haven't really done much more than superficial research.

A few weeks ago, I had a weaver in my home warping before a class. She was using multiple cones of cotton, and the colours were getting tangled as she warped. So, being the helpful sort that I am, I went to grab my cone holder. But before I could get it, I heard a slightly panicked, "NO!! Then I’ll need to buy more equipment, and I can’t do that right now!"

The panic might have been in my head, because I totally get it! There are so many tools we can buy, so much yarn to collect, and then, of course, the additional looms...and suddenly, a relaxing hobby becomes a huge budget item—and not quite so relaxing.

This is my internal conversation while out shopping:

💖 Heart: Sees random beautiful thing… or something I actually need.
*Oh! This is beautiful, I love it, I could buy this!

🧠 Head: Would you like this… or more yarn?

💖 Heart: Sigh Yarn. Always more yarn. Puts random beautiful object back on the shelf and continues to wear 15-year-old jeans.

So, I completely understood her hesitation. I don’t want to be tempted to buy things I never needed—until I tried them! That meant it was time for a little creativity:

A laundry basket and a dowel.

I’m sure this isn’t a new trick, but if you haven’t tried it: Slide the cones onto the dowel, then rest the dowel across the handles of the laundry basket. You can even use small baskets from the dollar store and dedicate one to each colour.

This setup worked beautifully—except for one small issue. If she picked up any speed, the cones kept spinning when she stopped, and the cotton would fall off the cone, wrapping itself around the dowel. That stopped the dowel from turning and meant we had to keep unwrapping yarn mid-warping.

To fix it, I grabbed a couple of plastic lids, cut an “X” in the centre of each, and slid them onto the dowel on either side of the cones. Problem solved!

Once upon a time, I was a hobby farmer, and I heard the phrase:
"You know you’re a real farmer when you learn to make do with what you have."

Well, I think most hobbies are like that too. We can buy all the tools and all the things, but there is something delightfully satisfying about seeing a problem, coming up with a solution, and not spending a penny.

I’m curious…what are your creative solutions to weaving problems? Please share them in the comments.

Because this might be useful: here are the resources from the National Lawyers Guild (certified badasses) about protesting in DC: www.dcnlg.org/resources http://www.dcnlg.org/resources

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All this Kurtzman/Section 31 stuff reminds me that not enough people have seen (or understood, I guess) Star Trek:Deep Space Nine.

Because it gets described as “it made the Federation a morally gray society instead of a utopia!” or “it fought back against Roddenberry’s vision for the Federation and Star Trek!” and it’s like… did you watch the same show?

DS9 didn’t think the federation was any less of a utopia, than TNG or TOS or VOY, it said EVEN IN A UTOPIA, THERE WILL BE CHALLENGES, THERE WILL BE USURPERS, THERE WILL BE SNAKES IN THE GARDEN: THAT IS WHY WE MUST FIGHT!

Homefront/Paradise lost are about how even in a utopia, authoritarians will sell fear and get people to give up their freedoms. Fascists will burn the Reichstag to create a crisis they can exploit.

Doctor Bashir, I Presume showed that for a society without money, people still worry about success, and their legacy, and they’ll do horrible things to their children to make sure they can be that legacy. And the episode CLEARLY DISAPPROVES OF THIS! The man responsible realizes the error of his ways and submits to punishment to save his son.

I don’t want to list examples all day, I have other stuff to do, but DS9 very much didn’t say “utopias aren’t real, every so-called utopia has evil somewhere in the foundations”, it said that utopias are something you have to fight to maintain. You can’t take the easy answers, listen to the fascists promising safety, and avoid examining the faults of your society. Sorry. But the good news is that you can, you can win, and you aren’t alone.

DS9 was aiming for more of a “realistic utopia” than other Treks, it’s true, but despite that realism it still said a utopia was possible. It used that realism to show that a better world must still be fought for. And it warned against anyone selling easy solutions to those battles.

Because as has been pointed out recently, fascists don’t sell eternal war and oppression to the in-group: they promise safety and power and belonging and prosperity. They’re gonna oppress them to save us.

DS9 said those men are not to be trusted, and must be opposed. It won’t be easy, there will be struggles, but they will be stopped. The world will get better. We can do this, together.

I don’t know about you, but I find that more optimistic than if they hadn’t, and just said The Federation is Perfect Forever.

TNG takes utopia for granted so much, it barely notices it.

DS9 is a love letter to paradise. It wants the Federation to be heaven, and to make that happen, it shows us all the ways it isn’t, or threatens not to be. It implores us to not take it for granted and shows us what will happen if we do.

It’s not a “haha, the Federation is bad, too” gotcha; it’s a “do you want this? work for it. do you have this? make sure you keep it. do you love this? try to make it even better”.

DS9 is a gardener overlooking a beautiful garden and telling us stories of slugs, drought, and how much upkeep it takes to keep the garden as beautiful as it is. It’s a parent telling us of their child’s difficult puberty and instructing other parents to first, love unconditionally, and second, be prepared to spend late nights talking with their child about their problems because no amount of love can change the fact that life is often complicated but that doesn’t mean the love isn’t required anyway. DS9 is a lover coming back after a nasty fight, hurt but not disillusioned, to sit down and talk about what went wrong because the relationship is good and matters to them and they believe it’s healthy enough that troubles can be talked about and resolved.

DS9 is fucking perfect and I will fight anyone to the death who tries to paint it as the edgy Trek that opened the door for kablam pew pew Trek.

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All this Kurtzman/Section 31 stuff reminds me that not enough people have seen (or understood, I guess) Star Trek:Deep Space Nine.

Because it gets described as “it made the Federation a morally gray society instead of a utopia!” or “it fought back against Roddenberry’s vision for the Federation and Star Trek!” and it’s like… did you watch the same show?

DS9 didn’t think the federation was any less of a utopia, than TNG or TOS or VOY, it said EVEN IN A UTOPIA, THERE WILL BE CHALLENGES, THERE WILL BE USURPERS, THERE WILL BE SNAKES IN THE GARDEN: THAT IS WHY WE MUST FIGHT!

Homefront/Paradise lost are about how even in a utopia, authoritarians will sell fear and get people to give up their freedoms. Fascists will burn the Reichstag to create a crisis they can exploit.

Doctor Bashir, I Presume showed that for a society without money, people still worry about success, and their legacy, and they’ll do horrible things to their children to make sure they can be that legacy. And the episode CLEARLY DISAPPROVES OF THIS! The man responsible realizes the error of his ways and submits to punishment to save his son.

I don’t want to list examples all day, I have other stuff to do, but DS9 very much didn’t say “utopias aren’t real, every so-called utopia has evil somewhere in the foundations”, it said that utopias are something you have to fight to maintain. You can’t take the easy answers, listen to the fascists promising safety, and avoid examining the faults of your society. Sorry. But the good news is that you can, you can win, and you aren’t alone.

DS9 was aiming for more of a “realistic utopia” than other Treks, it’s true, but despite that realism it still said a utopia was possible. It used that realism to show that a better world must still be fought for. And it warned against anyone selling easy solutions to those battles.

Because as has been pointed out recently, fascists don’t sell eternal war and oppression to the in-group: they promise safety and power and belonging and prosperity. They’re gonna oppress them to save us.

DS9 said those men are not to be trusted, and must be opposed. It won’t be easy, there will be struggles, but they will be stopped. The world will get better. We can do this, together.

I don’t know about you, but I find that more optimistic than if they hadn’t, and just said The Federation is Perfect Forever.

TNG takes utopia for granted so much, it barely notices it.

DS9 is a love letter to paradise. It wants the Federation to be heaven, and to make that happen, it shows us all the ways it isn’t, or threatens not to be. It implores us to not take it for granted and shows us what will happen if we do.

It’s not a “haha, the Federation is bad, too” gotcha; it’s a “do you want this? work for it. do you have this? make sure you keep it. do you love this? try to make it even better”.

DS9 is a gardener overlooking a beautiful garden and telling us stories of slugs, drought, and how much upkeep it takes to keep the garden as beautiful as it is. It’s a parent telling us of their child’s difficult puberty and instructing other parents to first, love unconditionally, and second, be prepared to spend late nights talking with their child about their problems because no amount of love can change the fact that life is often complicated but that doesn’t mean the love isn’t required anyway. DS9 is a lover coming back after a nasty fight, hurt but not disillusioned, to sit down and talk about what went wrong because the relationship is good and matters to them and they believe it’s healthy enough that troubles can be talked about and resolved.

DS9 is fucking perfect and I will fight anyone to the death who tries to paint it as the edgy Trek that opened the door for kablam pew pew Trek.

I’ve seen so many shit takes blaming DS9 for S31 and all of them have completely failed to understand the most fundamental thing about DS9’s original take on Section 31:

HE WAS THE FUCKING VILLAIN.

Sloan himself is repeatedly demonstrated to be dangerous, unhinged, violent, and utterly without any moral compass. In basically every episode Sloan appears, Bashir only goes along with his bullshit to find out what he’s up to and stop him.

Bashir and O'Brien literally go inside the man’s warped ass, dying brain, risking their lives, not to “carry on his legacy” or any bullshit, but to find out as much as they can about what he was up to so they can stop it.

And also, another point about S31 in DS9? Pay attention to my choice of pronounds, because it is deliberate, in service to another very important point:

HE WAS ONE FUCKING GUY.

It is deliberately ambiguous as to whether there ever even was a real “Section 31”, and not just the product of one paranoid rogue agent running around the galaxy murdering people for his own personal agenda.

S31 only gets canonized by later writers, under showrunners like Berman and Abrams and Kurtzmann who by their own admission do not and never have given a fuck about the utopia. Berman thought Gene was a kook, and kept the Fed’s principles only so far as was necessary to preserve brand value. Meanwhile, nuTrek shit is terminally 9/11 and BSG/GoT brained, totally unable to even conceive of the utopian ideal of old Trek.

The only exception seems to be Lower Decks, which got abandoned to its own devices save for one ill-concieved SNW crossover … which is why the utopia is consistently front and center, because it’s written by people who know what Trek is even about.