AbleGamers is a wonderful charity with a mission to make videogames accessible to everyone. They work both through technological advancement and advocacy. I've been an admirer of them for quite a while, and this week I'm proud to have published an essay with them.
The essay, Bloodborne: At Home in an Ugly World, is about the peculiarly robust disability rep in FromSoftware's Bloodborne. The game is deliberate gruesome and grotesque, and so you'd expect it to have a few particularly ugly disabled villains. Instead it has a fleshed out world where disabled people appear in every corner. That means many of them are your enemies, but they are every bit as normalized as abled enemies. I'd never experienced this feeling before. I felt like I belonged in the fictional world because it said I could be as monstrous as anyone else, rather than that I was specifically monstrous.
I want to thank editor Brian Conklin, who worked with me on the essay. He's one of the friendliest editors I've ever met.
You can read the full essay for free on the AbleGamers site at this link.