Thomas Ligotti and H.P. Lovecraft

 I just finished Thomas Ligotti's Teatre Grotesco. I have previously read a collection of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. I loved the first one, love Teatre Grotesco even more. But it's a bit odd to me how Ligotti is constantly compared to H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, he's written some stories that refer to the Cthulu mythology, so that's an obvious connection. And, broadly speaking, it's the same genre of cosmic horror. But the way people constantly invoke Lovecraft when they discuss Ligotti gives the impression that they're really similar; if you like one, you will certainly like the other, and vice versa. 

I'm gonna write about the differences.

I really like Lovecraft (yeah I know he was racist and evil and all that, gotta throw in that caveat, now, let's move on). But I like him in a pretty different way from how much I love Ligotti. We have these three massive Lovecraft collections at home, and I reread them from time to time, often when I'm on vacation. I think of it as cozy reading, though I realize it's not what people normally call "cozy". For starters, the characters don't drink lattes, and from what I understand, latte-drinking is pretty essential to the recent cozy fantasy trend. And then there's all the death and decay and an evil uncaring universe that drives people mad etc etc. So in what way, really, can Lovecraft be cozy? I had to think about this for a while, but here's my answer in four points:

1. First, it just seems so nice to be a wealthy man in New England over a century ago who doesn't have to work, who can spend all his days dabbling in art or science or scholarship as a hobby. Of course, I'm a woman of a working-class background, so the nearest equivalent to myself in this old-timey New England wouldn't have had much fun. But I identify with the main character when reading. (Also, I grew up in an 800-year-old-village: Lovecraft would see it and immediately faint in shock from so much age.)

 2. Now, obviously, this wealthy hobby scholar tends to encounter something that is just too much for him and then he goes mad at the end. But this is also, in a way, a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy ... Paul Lodge and I wrote about it in our co-authored paper "Strategy, Pyrrhonian Scepticism, and the Allure of Madness", European Journal of Analytic Philosophy (can be read for free here). Some types of madness, like Paul's, have an obvious appeal - what if I could just open my mind further and further and further until I understand everything? For a philosopher, in particular, the prospect of reaching an ultimate, cosmic insight is tempting. But there can be some tempting aspects even to terrifying forms of madness. For instance, you achieve at least a partial escape from this world.
Now, for most of us, that escape is somewhat illusory. You're not gonna remain in a state of absolute florid psychosis forever. And once you're back, you've got all your old problems to deal with plus the ones directly arising from your stint of psychosis. Most madpeople simply trudge on and deal with shit, day in and day out.
Lovecraft's characters, on the other hand, go mad and then that's the end of the story. 

3. This "go mad, end of story" in the individual case has a parallel on the societal level, or world level, in the idea of a grand apocalypse that puts an end to the whole world. This idea is obviously appealing to people, or else it wouldn't pop up again and again all over the place. And yeah, the Lovecraftian apocalypse with the return of the Great Old Ones etc isn't the same as the Christian rapture or anything. But it's still an end to this overwhelming terrible world, and that's enough for the concept to have a certain appeal.
I read Alan Moore's Providence a couple of years ago, and IIRC, a character outright says that maybe this change will be for the better, who knows? as the entities from beyond take over and reshape the world. And yeah, there's this guy who cuts the hands and heads off of people and other brutal violence, but it's nothing like real-world atrocities - the decapitated bodies keep dancing around to the music and seem happy enough in their new state. 

4. As cold and uncaring as Lovecraft's universe is, it's also grand, in a way. Sure, at the centre of the universe, there's the blind idiot god Azathoth, really supposed to symbolize that everything is completely meaningless. But even so, Lovecraft can't help but imbuing his universe with a certain grandness. And there's something nice about grandness in itself, I think.

Now, on to all the ways in which Thomas Ligotti differs, in particular Teatre Grotesco which I just read.

The main characters are often working-class and quite poor. Those who are artists are still struggling economically. They're often mentally ill and heavily medicated already when the story begins. No awesome story-ending mad breakdown here, just the ever-lasting hum-drum of struggling day in, day out with symptoms and meds. They encounter uncaring psychiatrists who seem more invested in economy and cost-cutting than helping people.
One MC is first prescribed a long train journey because he must get out of his comfort zone and face his agoraphobia. After an absolutely dreadful journey he's met by another doctor who prescribes him a job, you gotta work and keep yourself busy for your mental health! (This really echos a common sentiment where I grew up: madness afflicts those who "think too much"). He thinks it's an odd way to get a job, but turns out that this doctor is a regular supplier of new employees to this company.
Several stories feature factories and factory work. Quite relatable to me. 

As a teenager, I worked two summers at the local sausage factory. I was assigned to "the batter", an underground hall where the sausages are made before going off to the smoking room. There was blood on the floor. Large bins full of stinking sheep guts. Some still had shit in them, but no one cared - everything went into the sausage machines. Machines so loud that no one could speak to anyone else except during breaks. Three people worked each machine, alternating between three different braindead movements. During lunch, people told stories about what happened at night in that basement room. Said that rats always made their way in to eat the meat batter. They tried to run out again before the first employer in the morning pressed the button to start all the machines, but some always got caught and gave up piercing screams as they were ground down into sausage. On our way between the changing room and the hall, we would pass a locked door saying "cold storage 66". No other "cold storage" room was locked. We would joke that protesting workers ended up behind that door.
And people still ate that sausage for lunch, while cracking all these jokes. Because the pay was shit but employees got to buy sausage extra cheap.
So, this place was morbid enough. But I also did this two-week internship at a different factory - we had two weeks in school where everyone was supposed to be at a workplace and learn what it's like to have a job, and that meant "factory" to a lot of us. This place made parts for trucks. What I'm gonna say next is wholly unoriginal, Marx blablabla, but still - there is something weird about the kind of job where you constantly do just one part of a much bigger project and have no view of the whole. There were these parts that were supposed to be fitted into each other and clicked in place. Same parts, over and over, all day long. This is the exact kind of job that the main character in "our temporary supervisor" works. He and most of his colleagues are all ill, all medicated, and their regular supervisor is huge, fat, and lethargic from all the psych meds he's on. It's brain dead, alienating work, but at least they're used to it. Then, the normal supervisor is replaced by a temporary one, who seems to be some sort of bizarre horror (he's always in his office, they only see his bizarre-looking silhouette vaguely through thick frosted glass). Another worker steps into the office and confronts the supervisor, and seems to suffer a Lovecraftian mental health crisis that prompts him to commit suicide. The main character refuses to think about it. Because if he thought too much about it, he might not be able to go back to work, and he must go to work because else he can't eat or pay the rent! Or afford his meds. If you're out of meds, you can't function, and you can't get out of this world via overdose either!

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe were more focused on shifting realities, layers upon layers of dreams, and one person's reality being another person's dream (or nightmare; these earlier stories featured much more violence and gore). Teatre Grotesco has some of that too. There's a parallel to be drawn here to Lovecraft's dream-focused stories, and the idea that our world might be something Cthulu dreams. But another difference is that there is nothing grand in the world of Ligotti.
In "the clown puppet", the main character works night shifts at a pharmacy, but he's haunted by the titular clown puppet. He's suffered this for a long time and is pretty used to it now - reasonable, people can get used to almost anything. The puppet doesn't terrify him, but it frustrates him - he repeats over and over that it's such nonsense. It has followed him here, from his last job, his last place. Everywhere he goes, there's just more clown puppet nonsense. He still holds on to a sliver of hope that there's something special about him, and that's why this bizarre other-dimensional puppet follows him around - but at the very end, it randomly abducts his boss and disappears. 
In "the gas station carnivals", things really slide back and forth between different versions of reality, who said what to whom, at least some of the people in the story must be delusional, perhaps all of them are. But the story-within-the-story is, once again, about something utterly ridiculous and completely devoid of grandness: old, rural gas stations that try to attract more customers by also having some sort of mini-carnival attached. Like a Ferris wheel that's too small to be impressive to begin with, and doesn't even work. 

There's a connection to make here, to what Wouter Kusters and other philosophers label "hyper reality" and "hypo reality" respectively. When reality goes hyper, everything is incredibly vivid and full of mysterious connections and profound meanings. When reality goes hypo, everything is flat, faded, fake, disconnected, and completely pointless. Like in a Ligotti story.

So, there's not a single atom of coziness in Ligotti's stories. And that's one big reason I love them. 

Cogwheel Souls and philosophy

I'm a philosopher. I also wrote a techno-fantasy novel (to be published first of March in Swedish at Lundberg & Lennse, later this year - no date yet - in English at Ellipsis Imprints). So, when a philosopher writes a novel, it becomes a philosophical novel by default, right?

It started out, over six years ago now, as a therapy project. And then, I wanted to write for others too, not just for myself - I wanted to turn the therapy into an actually good novel. But I never really thought, along the way, that I wrote philosophy in fictional form. However, other people who have read the script spontaneously calls it a philosophical novel (this may sound like a humble brag, because it is one). And, I think, not merely because the person who wrote it is a philosopher.

 

A couple of people say it's about Cartesian metaphysics. And yeah, no mystery why people would say that, because it's a central theme that people have both bodies and souls, and the soul is constantly held up as more important. However, major difference: souls in my fantasy world have some physical properties, like volume and density. And they can, at least by indirect methods, be measured and registered by scientific instruments. In this way, the soul resembles an extra organ in a person's head - very different from how Descartes envisioned it. (Also, souls aren't exclusive to humans, but that's a much smaller difference.)

So, I didn't write some philosophical exploration of dualism in fantasy form. I'd say it's more about Mad/neurodivergent phenomenology than dualism.
One thing you can do better in fiction than standard philosophy papers is showing what certain experiences are like. Also, if you can show something, describe something, you thereby prove that it's at least prima facie conceivable. I've talked about how many philosophers of psychiatry are too quick to dismiss certain experiences as conceptually/logically/metaphysically impossible in my paper Allegedly Impossible Experiences , where I also refer to existing fiction like the X-men, Transferts, Altered Carbon, and Brand New Cherry Cola. In the future, I could add references to my own novel! (Now you think: wouldn't this completely destroy the anonymity of the peer review process? Possibly. Then again, I suspect lots of people can guess the author already, as soon as I start drawing on my own experiences ... More and more philosophers are coming out of the Madness closet these days, but I still think that few philosophers share my kind of Mad!)

So, these are two philosophical things you can do in fiction, and which I do in Cogwheel Souls: Deeper dives into phenomenology than the standard philosophical format allows for. Proving that something is at least prima facie conceivable, because if it weren't, you couldn't write fiction about it. 

In addition, I think that fully fleshed-out fiction often makes for better intuition pumps than briefly described thought experiments. I write about fiction, thought experiments, and intuitions in my The Agential Perspective . My general view on the use of intuitions in philosophy is that they are, often, indispensable. However, we should use them critically. First, we shouldn't overuse them. For instance, conceptual analysis need not always rely on intuitions alone, and perhaps it need not always use intuitions at all. We can, e.g., look at how experts in relevant fields use a term, and how they need to use certain terms in order to make use of their expertise, in addition to or instead of merely introspecting on our own intuitions. Second, it's ridiculous (sorry-not-sorry) to think that "thought experiments" are analogous to laboratory experiments in natural sciences like chemistry, and that providing a very brief description of a scenario is like doing a chemistry experiment in a sterile lab instead of outdoors with all sorts of contaminants in the air. Philosophy isn't chemistry and our intuitions - even if indispensable in topics like ethics - are not data to be observed.
I show in the paper that our intuitions can change drastically depending on whether we read or watch fully fleshed-out fiction or just read a briefly described philosophy thought experiment about the same thing. I think we have reason to pay more attention to the former. In any case, this is something fiction can contribute to philosophy: the full picture, the full story, of a fantastical scenario. 

The above - diving deep into phenomenology, showing prima facie conceivability, and fully elaborated fantastical scenarios to pump our intuitions - are obviously not meant as an exhaustive list of what fiction has to offer philosophy. I'm sure that others have lots to add! 

However. I'm gonna finish this blog post by saying something about how you shouldn't do philosophy in fictional form: If you think you sit on some very deep and profound piece of wisdom, you shouldn't write a piece of fiction, include a character who's stipulated to be super wise and profound, and then have that character make the supposedly wise claim of yours. To prove that some statement truly is wise and profound, you must fucking argue for it. Whether you do so in a paper or full book, in a dry, analytical form or the continental tradition, or if you philosophize Madly (Zsuzsanna Chappell and I write about doing Mad philosophy and philosophizing Madly in this Oxford Research Encyclopedia chapter), you need some philosophy to prop up your claim. You can't just imagine a character, further imagine that they're super wise, and then make your idea wise by putting it in said character's mouth.

Despite, well, everything, I'm gonna use a Sandman example to illustrate because it's simultaneously so famous and so bad. (This isn't me pretending that I always hated everything Gaiman wrote. I liked Sandman a lot. But it's not some perfect work of art, it has flaws - like fake profundity.)
Death picks up a baby who died. The baby complains over their short life. Death says: "You got what everyone gets. A lifetime."
When I was young, you could even buy ankh necklaces with this quote engraved on! But it's not profound, it's stupid.
Compare: Imagine that I found out that my colleagues earned twice or thrice as much as I did. Furious, I walk up to my boss to demand an answer. He looks me solemnly in the eye and says: "You get what everyone gets. A salary."
That would be an asshole answer, not a profound answer.
EDIT: I misremembered. As do, apparently, loads of other people. Here's the thing. That exact quote - "you get what everyone gets. A lifetime" - was on tons of merch. People had tattoos of Death saying this, which some now (for obvious reasons) are looking to cover up. But that exact quote isn't in the actual comics! The closest one gets is when Death tells a man who's lived a magically long life, fifteen thousand years, that he's lived a lifetime just like everyone else. No more, no less. A lifetime, like everybody else. Which is still ridiculous and fake-profound -- but it's not the asshole line to a dead baby that I remember.

In any case. If you ever catch me inventing a super duper wise character and have them spout my favourite philosophy, feel free to punch me in the face.

Psych drugs, food, and internalized stigma

 I had it bad this past week. Probably a bit overworked towards the end of the semester. Monday morning, when I looked in the bathroom mirror, my face looked completely skewed, like a Picasso painting. My first impulse was that I should paint it into a straighter shape with make-up. Then I thought: no, I should go about this face problem rationally. I should double-check what it looks like in other devices. I turned my phone to mirror mode and looked, and it was normal on the little phone screen. Then I turned on a Zoom meeting for one at the computer, and it was normal on Zoom as well. Only in the mirror did my face look fucked up. So I thought to myself: it's just a mirror illusion. Maybe stress-induced.

And then the week followed. For various reasons, I decided to still go to work even though I didn't do much. I had other bad experiences. I pulled out all the tricks in my bag to handle them (stuff I've written and published about, and then some). It was pretty bad, but now I'm much better. No big breakdown in the end, no disaster, I pulled through.

(I'm pretty active on social media, so maybe someone reading this thinks "huh, I've been following her all along and I had no idea!" Well, I don't like talking publicly about having it bad as it happens - afterwards is a different matter. If I talk about it as it happens I worry that people might feel sorry for me, and their sorry will make me feel sorry for myself and it's all gonna go downhill from there. "You become the way they see you" as Lovisa frequently thinks to herself in my upcoming novel and oh look how smoothly this transitioned into book promotion! Coghweel Souls in March 2025! Ok, back to the blog post topic.)

I pulled through this time, but after a week like this, it's still natural to think about medication. I quit my meds in 2018, but I've always said that if I absolutely need to one day, I'll get back on Haldol. 

People can be weird about Haldol. It's got this reputation of being an extremely strong and dangerous drug. Some people have asked me why on earth I've been given that terrible old drug instead of some of the nice new ones. On the flipside, a woman I met at a party and talked psych experiences with, said "wow, Haldol, that's the heavy stuff! That's the real deal! They only give me these new weak-ass meds, none of which works, how did you get your doc to prescribe Haldol?"
But the whole "Haldol was so bad and extreme and the new drugs are so much nicer" is mostly hype from the companies making the new drugs. At the end of the day, different people have different reactions to different drugs. Haldol worked best for me and that's why I was on it. 

It worked quite well for many years. For several decades, I was on it for much of the time, but not all the time. Occasionally, I would stupid-quit, because I felt good and thought I was cured. Sometimes I'd be alright for a pretty long time after, but then some stressful even would happen and set me off, and I'd be back in the psych system and back on the pills. In hindsight, maybe these stupid-quits had some benefit, though? Maybe they postponed the point at which Haldol just didn't work anymore, giving me only side effects but hardly any desired effect.
I hope that if I really need to get back on it one day, my brain will have rebooted after all the years off meds, and it's gonna work again. I don't think there's any actual science on this. I've asked a few psychiatrists I know through work and their educated guess or professional intuition or whatever you wanna call it is that it's probably gonna work again. 

However, I'd prefer to stay off it. And it's important to me that people understand that this is not because of "internalized stigma". 

"Internalized stigma" is a thing, sure. But I don't think that I have ever suffered from internalized medication stigma. Any stigma I've internalized have been directed at the madness itself, not the medications used to repress it. When I stupid-quit I was highly motivated to think that I wasn't mad, not that I'd be able to manage my madness without meds. These are different things. I definitely had a big chunk of internalized madness stigma, but it was very helpful to talk it out in therapy in 2019. (I went to therapy for my own money. Searched and searched until I found a place where they offered something other than just "CBT" and "job training". I contacted them and said I don't need fucking CBT, I need some serious fucking Freud shit! At the end of the day, I'm not sure if we did any serious fucking Freud shit, but we sure did more than CBT exercises, and it was great for me.)

Stigma against the antipsychotic pills rather than the psychotic condition does exist in antipsychiatry/critical psychiatry spaces. At their most generous, these people will say something like "I don't judge anyone for doing drugs to feel better, regardless of whether they drink, smoke weed, take psych drugs or something else". At their least generous, they will talk of psych drugs as literal poison and people who willingly poison themselves as completely duped. But among regular folks, these views are, in my experience, rare. Regular folks may think that people with common diagnoses like depression and ADHD should just pull themselves together and replace their pills with yoga or something, but psychotics are a different matter, they're bona fide crazy and should absolutely take their meds so they don't become homeless or homicidal axe murderers or both. 

Still, anti-pill views are real, and with common conditions like depression or ADHD, they seem quite common. So unsurprisingly, there's also a counter reaction and people who oppose the stigma. That's good, taking pills shouldn't be stigmatized, but sometimes, the anti-stigma people see stigma and internalized stigma everywhere. And that's what I'm gonna talk about in the rest of the post. People can be reluctant to go on pills for perfectly understandable reasons. It's not all "internalized stigma".

First, there's the obvious case of side effects. Towards the end, Haldol gave me on-off slurred speech because I lost control of my tongue, and visible facial ticks. Especially the tongue thing was really bad. But suppose that my brain really has rebooted, and if I went back on them, it would be like it was before, when they worked. Back then, I had pretty mild side effects. Dry mouth, but I retained good teeth in spite of that issue. I'm more worried about returning to a state of low creativity and being less smart and fast-thinking than I am now. Mind you, I was still able to work full-time as a scholar, I was in no way zombified by the pills. Still, looking back, comparing myself then to the way I am now  - it looks like a pretty high price to pay for peace of mind. It might be tempting to think that psychosis is a mental health matter and therefore intrinsically more important than things like creativity or smarts, which are just little luxury flourishes on top or something. But my mind is one, it's not divided into the health foundation and the capacity flourishes. There may come a time when I think going back on pills is worth it all things considered, but it would take a lot. 

Second, I don't want to depend on pills. And this is where some people really prick their ears and go "did I hear someone voice their internalized stigma?" In particular, I've seen a few different people, as far as I can tell wholly independent of each other, make a comparison with food here. If you don't feel bad about depending on food, but you do feel bad about depending on pills, this goes to show that you're guilty of internalized stigma! You should get over it already and take your pills just like you eat your food. 

First a word of why I would depend on the pills if I went back on them: In theory, it might seem like I'd be maximally protected against any looming psychotic breakdown if I were to combine pills with all my self-invented coping mechanisms that I've talked and published about. In practice, that's unlikely. I could retain all the epistemological frameworks I've developed to prop up this flimsy world of mine and make it feel sturdier, but lots of mental actions I perform - like deliberately dissociating in quite specific ways, or conversing with helpful voices - would likely be rendered hard or impossible when on pills. Moreover, in psych treatment, the pills tend to be framed as your number one crutch and anything else as just a complement. Hard not to fall into that way of thinking, if that's how clinicians constantly frame things.

So, I would depend on the pills if I got back on them. And it's different from depending on food.
I feel fine depending on food because food just works for me. I eat some food, and I get nutrition and energy from it. It works.I also felt fine being on Haldol back when Haldol just worked.
However, when I first became a psych patient, I had to go through a trial-and-error process with a bunch of different pills before we found something that worked (very common experience). That trial-and-error process was extremely frustrating. Doc prescribes a pill. You take the pill. You wait to see if something happens. It doesn't! Too bad. Doc prescribes another pill. You take the pill. Wait to see if something happens. It doesn't, not with this one either! Too bad. Etc. 
Finally, we struck gold with Haldol. As I said above, it worked well for many years. But when it stopped working, that was also frustrating and frightening - will my life just fall apart now? 

One thing that's particularly frustrating is how passive you are in relation to the pills. If you're trying out various mental tricks to help you deal with shit, you're actively doing something, you're performing these mental actions. If something doesn't immediately work, you can try doing it a little differently, try harder at it, and so on. With the pills, the only thing you actually do is swallowing. After that, you have no control over what happens. Stomach acid dissolves the pill, the little chemicals go out in your blood stream, past the blood-brain barrier, attach themselves to little receptors up there - or, at least that's what's supposed to happen. Whether it does, isn't up to you. It works, or it doesn't work. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't, you can only lament this fact, and maybe go back to the trial-and-error process, or adding more pills, and hope that they will do what they're supposed to do, once again just hoping.
And yes, eating food has the same passive, non-controlled element to it. I can't affect what happens with the food once I've swallowed it (at least not in a big way - maybe I'll get better digestion if I take it easy after a meal, but I can't do anything major about it). This is no problem to me because it just works. However, if it didn't just work, then it would be a problem. 

Imagine that I develop Type 1 Diabetes. Extremely unexpected at my age, but imagine it happens. I notice that food doesn't work anymore. My body is supposed to break down the food and extract energy from it, but now it doesn't anymore. I eat and eat, and yet I become increasingly fatigued and emaciated. Let's make the thought experiment even worse! It's not diabetes, so insulin doesn't help. It's similar symptoms, but there's nothing the doctors can do for me. My body is supposed to get energy from food, but the system doesn't work anymore, and it's nothing I can do about that - I can hope that things get back online, but as of now, I can only helplessly watch as all the food I stuff in my mouth goes straight through without doing anything for me.
This would be a serious problem! Not because of "internalized stigma", not because I have an attitude problem around food, but because food doesn't work for me anymore and I'm helpless to do anything about it.
Similarly, it's a real, tangible problem - not just internalized stigma or a bad attitude or whatever - to take pills that just don't work for you. One might argue that feelings of helplessness and despair don't make the situation any better, so you should still try to get over them. Perhaps (though even this can easily veer into problematic toxic positivity territory). But these feelings would nevertheless be caused by quite tangible problems. 

Haldol stopped working for me once. If I went back on it, I would be acutely aware of the fact that it happened once and might happen again. I could only hope that it wouldn't happen again, but there would be nothing I could do to prevent it - when a previously effective medication stops working, it's presumably because of physical, neurological changes in the brain (there's some science published on this, though AFAIK, lots of uncertainties remain), and I have no control over whether my brain will grow extra dopamine receptors or similar. Real problem right there. Not just "internalized stigma".

Third, dependency makes you vulnerable. It makes your situation precarious. And yes, sure, vulnerability is part of the human condition and all that, but I still don't want to take on extra precariousness if it's at all possible to avoid.
Even if the pills work for you, they can only help you if you get them. But access to prescription medication has become far less reliable over the years. This is because of political problems, of course. We should fight for political change. But in the meanwhile, this is a real problem for people on meds, and a rational reason to try and do without if you can do without even if it's hard sometimes. 

I don't worry about being dependent on food because I can reliably access food. Of course, this isn't a privilege that everyone has. Insofar as on-off-starving people (people living with "food insecurity", to use the established euphemism) don't think of themselves as problematically dependent on food, it's probably because everyone needs to eat. One might lament depending on pills that may or may not be available next week, next month, and so on, because one is surrounded by people who don't have to worry about this, but everyone must eat.

However, imagine that breatharianism was a real thing. There are these mumbo-jumbo gurus who claim that they don't need to eat, they can survive on just air and sunshine or what-not. Imagine this was a real skill that some people developed; maybe there were quite a lot of breatharians around. In this hypothetical scenario, I imagine lots of poor and on-off starving people, who tried to go breatharian but couldn't for some reason, would envy those who could. And we don't need to posit an internalized eating stigma to explain why; breatharians' lives would simply be less precarious, they'd have one less serious problem to worry about. Even if the right thing to do is to fight for political change rather than individualize the problem and do breathing exercises for all, someone who could develop the breatharian skill might be rational to do so. If they're gonna get politically active, it will be easier if they're not simultaneously starving. In any case, no need to appeal to internalized stigma over food to explain what's going on here. 

To sum up: Internalized stigma is a thing. It's worth discussing. But in my experience, it gets over-used. Suggesting that there are no real problems associated with being on pills, only attitude problems and internalized stigma, is actually not so different from saying that mental problems aren't real problems, people just need to get their shit together and improve their attitude.

Subjective feelings and (semi-)objective quality in fiction

Background: Thi Nguyen visited Umeå University for his Burman lectures. This lead to discussions about aesthetics, a topic Nguyen has published influential papers in. I, on the other hand, have zero background in aesthetics, and therefore not very considered judgments on the topic. 

During a conference dinner, I said something about how I think art appreciation is mostly down to subjective feelings that can vary a lot from person to person depending on the individual's life experiences etc. Bram Vaassen protested that this view didn't seem to fit with this post I made about the Barbie movie a while ago. I sounded much more objective there, about what's good and bad. I said hm maybe I am more of an art objectivist? I don't have very considered views since I haven't published philosophy papers about this, just blog posts ...

My more considered view might be something like Kant's. With the huge caveat that I'm drawing on an old memory of Critique of Judgment, which I haven't read in ages (no, this would not fly in a peer-reviewed paper, but that's the beauty of having a blog as well). Kant's aesthetics is more sentimentalist than rationalist. It's ultimately about the feelings that art invokes. However, that doesn't mean all art judgments are completely subjective. Some are heavily tied to personal experiences that others need not share. Others are more universal, more shareable (doesn't mean perfectly universal, doesn't mean I could share my judgments and have others agree with me across any gulf of time/space/culture). I also think there's value in trying to distinguish, in one's own case, between the more subjective and more objective judgments. It just makes for better communication with others. 

Personal example: I'm a big Star Trek fan. But I think this depends, to a large degree, on particular personal experiences. When I was a little kid, I read popular science articles about how we'd colonize Mars in the twenty-first century, stuff like that. Being a child who knew very little about science (TBF, I was probably knowledgeable for my age, but that doesn't mean knowledgeable period), this seemed entirely plausible to me. Being generally dissatisfied with life, space fantasies made for good escapism. Fast forward to my early twenties: I lived with husband and rabbits in a tiny cheap studio flat. We had very little money, and survived only because everything was cheap in our neighbourhood of shabby old concrete buildings. Star Trek Voyager aired on Swedish TV, and it made for such awesome, futuristic and optimistic space escapism. The local video store had the back catalogue on VHS and we watched it from the beginning. And there were other features about Voyager that hit just right: I was really mental back then (not the happy, productive, professional maniac that I have since become), but Voyager has an overall good track record when it comes to mental health. (Not like certain other Star Trek shows I could mention - looking at you, DS9! Overall a well-written show but damn did they treat mental health issues terribly, over and over.) And captain Janeway! People love to talk about Buffy and how it was groundbreaking at the time to have someone being simultaneously badass and feminine. Maybe. But people sometimes forget that there is such a thing as being pressured to conform with traditional feminine gender roles (once again, see my Barbe movie review for a discussion). I got lots of shit growing up for not being sufficiently girly and feminine. So I couldn't really get into the adventures of hyper feminine vampire slayer Buffy when it first aired - but Janeway was both a woman and a space captain and it just wasn't a big deal. 

So, Voyager will always have a special place in my heart. And I pride myself on being, perhaps, the first philosopher to reference Star Trek Voyager in a philosophy paper, namely The Agential Perspective: A Hard-Line Reply to the Four-Case Manipulation Argument in Philosophical Studies. People have referenced the Original Series and the Next Generation plenty of times, but I don't know of anyone else who cites Voy! 

However. I will never argue that Voy, or Star Trek in general, is The Best TV Ever and everyone must watch this or they're Really Missing Out. Because I don't think that's true. From an objective standpoint, there are many reasons why it's not The Best TV Ever.
- The acting varies a lot. You've got great actors, middling ones, kinda bad ones.
- The worldbuilding is inconsistent. Once in a blue moon, the transporter can be used to resurrect people from the dead, but mostly it cannot, and dead people stay dead. Most of the time, Star Trek is a moneyless communist utopia, but once in a while, we're suddenly supposed to pretend that poor people exist and there are materially based class differences - not just on bad capitalist planets like Ferenginar, but on Earth! The inconsistencies vary somewhat over time and between series, but they've been there from the 1960s to the present day.
- There are also some inconsistencies in values. It's mostly progressive values, occasionally racist, sexist, etc.
- When it is progressive and down with social justice, Star Trek - especially the older series - can get pretty preachy about it. There's this weird internet complaint that Star Trek Discovery is insufferably woke, but it's the older Trek series (mostly TOS to DS9) that let characters explicitly preach about some social justice issue. I can sort of appreciate that they're not holding back, but at the same time, it doesn't make for the objectively best TV.
- Later Trek, like Disco, has other problems; because they're less episodic and do longer archs that are meant to really hang together over seasons, inconsistencies and plot holes become more glaring.
Some later Trek also try to go darker than the old series, and often, they just don't pull it off very well. 

These are just a few examples. As much as I love Star Trek, I could critique it all day long. It's not, objectively, The Best TV Ever. It certainly has lots of good objective qualities too, it's not the worst TV either, far from it! It's objectively good, just not the best. I can distinguish between my subjective love and more objective quality judgments.

However, from time to time, I come across people (mostly in geeky internet communities) who seem utterly incapable of drawing this distinction.

For instance, I've had Buffy fans insist that I give Buffy another shot, because it's just so good. So I tried watching it. And I don't have a problem with the hyper feminine MC anymore, not at all. My childhood/teenage years where I was constantly pestered about not being feminine enough are long gone now. It still bothers the hell out of me when ostensibly feminist media push the idea that feminists must be feminine, because not feminine equals internalized misogyny - feminist should get rid of restrictive gender roles, not enforce them! - but I didn't get that from Buffy. So I'm fine with Buffy herself, she's a cool MC. Sarah Michelle Geller also did a good job in the role. And some of the monsters of the week were kinda campy fun, I guess. But it really wasn't good enough to keep watching after I had pushed through a season and a half.
- the acting really varied. Allison Hanna sounded like she read all her lines from cue cards (I'm sure she gets better down the line, but she was crap for as far as I watched).
- there's this weird running joke about how Giles is basically from the past because he's from England (???) which just didn't land with me.
- Cordelia came across as a really misogynistic portrayal of "hot popular girl" to me. I'm sure the character gets much better later on, but ... She's like Jane from the British sitcom Coupling but played straight.
Coupling had three fun seasons and a fourth that was pretty so-so - one of these shows I watched and laughed at despite the frequent sexism (stereotypes of women are like this and men are like that). The character of Jane, though, was 100% good fun. It was so obvious that she wasn't a parody of a certain kind of woman, but a parody of ideas that some lonely frustrated men have about popular hot women. It was super clear to me even before I saw an interview with Steven Moffat where he said as much - she represents what he thought that hot popular girls were like when he was an embarrassingly sexist teenage boy. Early seasons Cordelia, though, comes across as if Josh Whedon hadn't moved on as an adult, like he still thought "ok I'm gonna write a hot popular high school girl, and they're honestly this terrible".

I could go on. Anyway. From a more objective standpoint, Buffy is probably about as good/bad as most of Star Trek. It's got both strengths and weaknesses. But I personally love Star Trek because of personal idiosyncratic reasons. I couldn't get into Buffy, because it doesn't have any personally relatable stuff to draw me in.
However. I read an internet post by a middle-aged Buffy fan who was desperate because her teenage daughter had watched a few Buffy eps but didn't like it. How can I make her realize how great Buffy is? And then other middle-aged Buffy lovers suggested, as far as I can tell in all seriousness, that the mum should bribe her daughter to watch Buffy with her. They thought that if only the daughter could be made to sit in front of the TV for enough episodes, the objective greatness of Buffy would eventually affect her, and she would become a fan too. And they thought this was important, because otherwise the teenage daughter would miss out on the objective greatness that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This is a blatant example of failing to distinguish between more objective aesthetic judgments and your personal feelings for something. 

Another example of the same thing: Many people younger than me are really into Harry Potter. For my own part, I've never read the books, because I was already an adult when the first one was published and I don't have kids. Alexander and I watched all the movies a few years ago because we felt we had to, in order to understand the millions of Potter references people constantly threw around online. They were decidedly so-so, very generic portal fantasy about magic and wizards. Now, lots of fans will say "but the movies don't hold a candle to the absolutely amazing, groundbreaking books!" Well, as a present-day human with an internet access I have inevitably come across extracts from texts too, and it seems to be completely normal, serviceable children's book prose. So unless there's something amazing about the actual plots that the movies completely changed or left out, I'm gonna assume it's just so-so children's fantasy, with a main character carbon-copied from earlier fictional instances of the chosen English wizard boy with dark hair and glasses . Still, it's not surprising that millions of people worldwide have strong emotions about the series. It's escapism, it's about outsiders-who-are-actually-cool (lots of kids feel like outsiders and wanna believe that they're actually too cool for normal kids, because they're magical or super in some way - me too as a kid!), and this big and intense internet fan community soon emerged around the books. 
However. Now I see people talk about the serious moral dilemma they face with their children. Should they introduce their kids to Harry Potter, and support Rowling's evermore hateful bigotry and political campaigning against trans people? Or should they not do that, and have their kids miss out on the objectively greatest children's book series of all time? Should they impoverish their children's childhood by not giving them Harry Potter?
They really seem to think this is some serious moral dilemma worth discussing at length ("maybe you can find the whole book series second-hand ...? Borrow it at the library ...? That way, you're not giving her money!") instead of a complete non-problem. You don't wanna support Rowling? Fine. Just don't. Your child won't grow up with a big gaping hole in their soul where Harry Potter should have been.

So, to sum up: My considered view on aesthetics (or, like, semi-considered - I still haven't read much aesthetic philosophy, and still haven't written actual philosophy on the topic, just this blog post) is that we can meaningfully distinguish between our subjective feelings about a piece of fiction, and more objective quality judgments. And also that it's often useful to be able to draw this distinction, instead of mistaking subjective feelings for objective judgments.

The failed analogy of oppressed AIs in science fiction

 I recently finished Ann Leckie's Ancillary series. This was my verdict on various social media:

"I started reading it years ago. Remembered liking the worldbuilding, but was more ambivalent about the way it was written. I remembered the text feeling too slow and cumbersome overall. 

Now I thought: perhaps that was an unfair judgment due to reading the first two parts fairly heavily medicated? So I got this book and finished the series. 

Well, as with my re-read of Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy a year ago, I percieved the same issues off meds as I did on them, but it's easier to deal with when my brain works faster. In Area X , the problem was a really long slog in book two where nothing much happens for a 150 pages or so, except Control walking around in the office building and thinking to himself that something feels off. (This did not require as many pages as it got!) With the Ancillary books, the issues are low-key but they permeate the series: the dialogues should have been tighter, the on-page tea-drinking should have been cut down, and finally, Brec thinks so many purely expository thoughts! Like this: ”I spottad Sievarden in the hallway - whom I had saved when I met her on the planet Nilt and she was addicted to Kef - talking to the high priest….” Yeah we know you saved her, it was in book one. If I had forgotten your backstory in between books, I’d have looked it up on the internet! 

Sometimes it feels like reading a silver age superhero comic - they were always peppered with exposition for the benefit of new readers who didn’t know the characters.

Also, in the end, the book deals with liberation of and rights for AI persons. Gosh, what a tired old trope! I’m probably gonna do a whole blog post about it later.

I really like the worldbuilding, and I really like Brec, the MC, at least in theory. But overall, it’s hardly my favourite series. I much prefer Leckie’s fantasy novel The Raven Tower."

 

Well, here comes the promised blog post! 

I've heard people claim that oppressed androids and other AI persons in scifi is such a great analogy for many oppressed groups in real life. Typically, these stories feature discussions of whether the AI are sentient or not.
Now, TBF to Ann Leckie, that's actually not the case in Ancillary Mercy. The Radch Empire happily draws a very sharp line between citizens and non-citizens in terms of moral worth, without really tying this to theories of sentience or their mental life. No one says that those features of a person drastically changes when they go from non-citizen to citizen status, and yet, their moral and legal status suddenly shoots up. Thus, the fact that they see their sentient stations and ships as far below their human citizens, need not be because they have any doubts about said sentience.
But in many other scifi stories - like the classic Star Trek Next Generation episode "the measure of a man" where the android Data's moral and legal status is questioned - whether he's truly sentient is absolutely crucial to the matters at hand. And, people have told me, this is such a good parallel for lots of real-life oppression, which is often justified by claims about how this or that group allegedly can't think, or can't think very well.

However, claiming that someone can't think very well is quite different from claiming that they're not sentient. 

There are some fine-grained distinctions here sometimes made in philosophy (and then debated - does this distinction really pick something out? Does it pick something important out?) that won't concern me here. I'm just gonna talk about sentience as synonymous with being truly conscious, rather than just mimicking consciousness, as having experiences and a mental life - in short, when someone is sentient, it makes sense to ask what it is like to be that individual. What is it like to be homeless? What is it like to be a billionaire? What is it like to be a dog? are all questions that make sense to ask, even if we can't give a single answer to any of them because there's too much individual variation, and even though we might never fully answer the dog question because dogs are too different from us in, e.g., their sensory apparatus and cognition. In contrast, it does not make sense to ask what it is like to be a desk. It's not just impossible to answer for us mere mortals, because there are limits to what we can know - there is no answer.

Now, oppression is typically not based on the claim that the oppressed group lacks sentience. Such claims have occasionally been made of some disabled and mad groups, typically those who are either non-verbal or merely speak what seems like complete gibberish to others. However, extreme misogyny, racism, queer oppression, or even ableist oppression of disabled groups that the oppressors remain capable of communicating with, is typically not built on denying that the oppressed groups are sentient.
Sure, they're claimed to be, in various ways, irrational, unthinking, hysterical, animal-like, more brutes than humans, etc etc, and these claims are supposed to justify their oppression. But practices where oppressed people are humiliated or punished for disobedience presuppose their sentience.
If you truly believe that another human being is completely "empty on the inside", more akin to a machine like a car or a lawn mower, attempts to humiliate them, punish them, or put them in their place doesn't even make sense. If you label someone "uppity", if you say they don't show proper respect to their superiors, if you say they're lazy, bitchy, slutty, hostile, or any other negative character evaluation, you're also presupposing that they're sentient - a car, lawn mower or other piece of mere equipment can't be any of the above (see also Kate Manne's "down girl" for a discussion of how misogyny is not built on seeing women as non-human).
This is a huge difference between how oppression typically plays out in the human case, and scifi scenarios with oppressed androids and other AIs.

Moreover, all the humiliation, suspicion and punishment that oppressed people often suffer at the hands of their oppressors, and all those negative character labels that gets glued on them all the time, tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. If a group of people are labelled aggressive and hostile and the only thing they understand is violence, they tend to become more aggressive and hostile in response. If a group of people are labelled stupid and irrational and therefore there's no need trying to explain things to them, no need to give them an education, they don't understand anything anyway, they tend to become, well, at least ignorant and uneducated, and this is easily mistaken for stupidity and irrationality. If someone is forced to work so hard and such long hours that they never have time to get adequate sleep, their cognitive capacities and things like impulse control and ability to regulate their emotions might deteriorate as a result. And so on. Oppression hurts the oppressed in ways that help the oppressors justify what they do.

Oppressed androids and AIs in scifi rarely suffer from these problems. They are always perfectly articulate, perfectly intelligent, perfectly rational - they're not just as good as, but superior to mere humans! They're faster, stronger, smarter, more logical, better-looking, no flabby fat on their bodies or spots on their skin. (Sidenote: Data is claimed to suffer from the flaw of being emotionless. However, that's not how he actually comes across; he seems to possess emotions, just less vivid ones than regular humans. In practice, being less emotional than the rest of the Enterprise crew comes across as an advantage as often as a flaw - Data keeps his head cold in situations when others would panic, and he's not prone to the same prejudices as mere humans due to his superior logic and lack of exaggerated and biased emotions.) They're just so perfect and superior to us mere mortals in every single way - and yet, they're oppressed, because of pure prejudice on part of the humans. There's no trace of the self-reinforcing mechanisms we see in real-life prejudice, where the oppressors can easily rationalize their oppression by pointing to actual aggressive or irrational or ignorant behaviour on part of the oppressed - nope, it's pure prejudice. 

I think there are several reasons why such stories are so popular. For people who are oppressed in real life, it's a nice wish fulfillment fantasy to imagine that although people say you're inferior, you're actually superior - not just as good as them, but better. Also, all of the audience can feel good about themselves when watching stories that present prejudice as this brute, near-incomprehensible thing; the audience can approve of the message that oppression and prejudice are wrong, while feeling secure in their belief that they would never engage in prejudiced or oppressive practices. They would never look upon a clearly superior being with perfect physique and perfect intellect and then go "you're worse than me and don't deserve any rights". 

Come to think of it, I wonder if lots of these "oppressed AI" stories aren't Jesus-inspired? Maybe not consciously; the creator's conscious intention might have been to write an analogy to oppressed human groups. The creator might be an atheist or agnostic or believe in some other religion than Christianity. Even so, the Gospels and Jesus are a big part of our shared cultural heritage, so they might still be a big unconscious influence. Jesus is, in many ways, portrayed as superior to mere humans; more virtuous and in possession of various divine superpowers. Yet, all these humans hate him and eventually kill him. Presumably, he could have ditched the whole die-on-the-cross-for-our-sins thing, but like an android with Asimov's robot laws installed, he doesn't fight back and allows himself to be killed - that's how virtuous and good he is.

Wow, now I'm way beyond my area of expertise! There are scholars at my department who write about this stuff, like Alana Vincent with religious myths in relation to modern specfic, but I'm not one of them. 

In any case. Androids and AIs generally don't work as an analogy for oppressed human groups.

Finally, the trope of a sentient AI who sees its sentience denied by prejudiced humans feel kinda soured now, by all these ridiculous discussions of whether real-life chatbots and similar might be gaining sentience. I mean, they write so well now! So human-like! Surely there's some emerging sentience there? 

No. Stop it. There's no reason to think so. "This individual seems sentient" might be good evidence that they probably are when it comes to animals - there's no reason why signs of sentience would evolve in the absence of the real thing. But AIs are designed to seem like they can think because the designers know that this will make them more popular. Eric Schwitzgebel has written more about this on his blog here http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/07/how-mimicry-argument-against-robot.html It was more fun to read about or watch such discussions when they remained in the realm of fantasy, where truly sentient androids/AIs have been invented. 
(See also Chris Winkle's post on this at Mythcreants https://mythcreants.com/blog/with-the-advent-of-ai-science-fiction-must-change/ )

 

Disability in speculative fiction

 I'm not at Worldcon in Glasgow. However, I get constant social media updates of what's happening there, courtesy of Sara L. Uckelman (of Ellipsis Imprints, who will publish my debut novel Cogwheel Souls in English! Yay!) For instance, she's been at a panel discussing disability and disability erasure in specfic. This got my mind going - first I wrote some long replies on Facebook, and then I thought enough thoughts about the subject for a whole blog post. 

1. The magical cure and the medical perspective

There's this specfic trope of the magical cure - either a piece of literal magic or amazing technology that can turn the previously disabled character normal again. Off the top of my head, the examples I come to think of are superhero stories - discussions around this in the DC comics when Barbara Gordon was still in her wheelchair, Felicity in the TV show Arrow (a different character but clearly inspired by Barbara in the comics), and some of examples from the MCU movies - the first Doctor Strange movie, Ghost from Antman and the Wasp. So I'll go with these examples since they were the first to pop up in my head, but there are far more out there. 

Now. From a mainstream, medical perspective, it's great if a disabled character can get a medical cure for their tragic impairment. And then, you've got your social justice conscious writers who see how this is problematic. I won't (obvs) try to recap all of the reasons why the medical model is problematic in a blog post, but there's tons written for anyone seriously interested. In extreme brief:

a) Aiming for a thoroughly "healthy" and non-disabled society will be a never-finished Sisyphus job. The bar for what counts as healthy enough constantly rises and you'll always have people deemed "problematic" due to their "defects". Also, when a disability-free society is an outspoken goal, no one is quite free to go against the flow. It might not be illegal to, e.g., not avail yourself of all techniques available for having children as healthy as possible, but expectations from medical professionals, what's default in a medical setting vs an active choice, and social pressure from everyone around you can be strong enough.

b) You will end up with a society in many ways more homogeneous than ours, which isn't a good thing. Some people might wanna say that they only strive to eradicate chronic illnesses and disabilities but not neurodivergencies that provide society with different perspectives and different ways of doing things etc. There are some philosophers who want to place a few conditions, like "high-functioning autism" (an itself problematic term, rejected by many autism advocates) in a the neurodivergence box, while still placing tons of other conditions in the box for disabilities to be eradicated. But because of the dynamics described in a), you'll likely have fewer and fewer conditions in the first box and more and more in the second over time.

c) Finally, the ubiquity of the medical perspective on disability makes it significantly harder for disabled people to fight for equal rights. Here in Sweden, disabled people are legally entitled to getting the assistance they need to live a normal life - with job, studies, their own flat, and so on. For some people, that means they require an assistant constantly by their side, so several employees with a rotating schedule, on public expanses (you'd have to be super rich to pay several employees out of pocket). However, legal entitlements on paper is one thing, what people get granted in practice is, unfortunately, quite another. Right-wing politicians (whether they call themselves "right-wing" or go by "social democrats") who constantly cut down on both taxes and public expenses will order the relevant clerks to make increasingly circumscribed judgments of what their clients actually need, with the wholly predictable result that disabled people are increasingly pushed out of jobs, schools, and overall public life. Adults end up living with their parents, who care for them until said parents die themselves. We're seeing the beginning of a new era of institutionalization.
There's no logical contradiction between embracing a mostly medical model, and yet argue that people should get all the assistance etc they need until we, hopefully, find a cure for their impairments. However, when people think of disability as something inherent and inherently tragic, something inside people's bodies and minds, it's much more difficult in practice to make them realize that withdrawing assistance and similar are political decisions, and to see disabled people as oppressed and discriminated against. The medical model helps, in practice, to cover up political injustices by presenting disabled suffering as a tragic but natural result of inherent impairments. 

Magical cure stories tend to implicitly rely on the audience accepting a largely medical perspective on disability, and therefore cheer for characters who seek a way to erase their tragic condition and become healthy and normal. However, subverting this trope is often easier said than done.

2. The implications of truly magical cures

I'm mad and neurodivergent but able-bodied. No one, whether embracing the medical model or not, thinks my body is inherently tragic. However, imagine that I came across a wizard who gave me the following choice: either you can continue as before, or I can wave my magic wand and make you as fast as Usain Bolt and with the stamina of Kelvin Kiptum. That's it, that's your choice. You can't trade it for something more altruistic, or some different thing that serves your own interests. It's just this offer, which you can take or leave.
I'd probably go yeah sure! Cool! I'd take the offer. 

Thus, the fact that you do not hate your body as is, the fact that you're perfectly fine with it as is, doesn't imply that you wouldn't accept an offer to make it more powerful. However, if I wrote a story about a wheelchair user who was offered "walkability" (is that a real word? Never mind, you all understand what I mean), and accepted the offer, it's probably impossible in practice to give the audience the same impression as when I accepted increased speed and stamina. Because regardless of how non-oppressive the fantasy setting where this takes place is, the audience still live in an ableist world, and this will inevitably inform their reading. Even though accepting the offer of walkability doesn't logically imply that the wheelchair user's life was tragic before it, anymore than accepting increased speed and stamina implies that it's tragic not to be an olympic level athlete, that's how it's gonna be perceived by most. 

Now I was talking about how the audience will perceive things due to them living in an ableist society. However, it's often hard for creators, too, not to insert their own ableism into stories, even if they try to write something social justice informed. Take, for instance, the movie Gattaca. It clearly tries to deal with disability-oppression in a eugenics-obsessed society. Yet, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the character who's disabled according to our standards, the audience's standards, brutally commits suicide because he can't stand it anymore, whereas a character who actually seems more oppressed within the universe of the movie but does not come off as disabled to the audience bravely soldiers on. Left a really bad taste in my mouth, that ending. Ok, societal oppression is bad and all that, but still possible to fight, unless you're in a wheelchair like Jude Law's character - he's gotta top himself at the end. Better off dead, that one.
Okay, that was a bit of a tangent, since Gattaca is about a society obsessed with birthing "perfect" babies, not about curing adult disabled people. So back to the magical cure discussion.

In most cases, it's probably better to just stay away from magical cures altogether in your writing. But if you wanna write something with literal and versatile magic or magic-level tech, the best thing is probably to have characters play around with it and change their bodies in a variety of ways (instead of everyone going uniformly "normal"). Like in Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the end of Time trilogy (part of his Eternal Champion series, but much lighter and more whimsical in tone than the others). You've got some people changing sex back and forth, some changing into monsters or looking like non-human animals, you've got this scientist character who's got a hunchback and a club foot and walks with a cane because he thinks it's a cool science look, and so on. I think that works better than specifically having the person who's disabled by real-world standards confronted with a magical cure and then go "no! I won't take it! Because I accept myself as is!" while it's treated as a non-issue for everyone else.

3. Good and bad reasons to reject being cured

In a society with medical treatments that do not exist in the real world, but it's still not on the unlimited, can-do-anything-level we see in Moorcock's Dancers, there are several legit reasons for characters to reject being cured. 

First, they might do so because they don't want to reject an aspect of their identity. This was brought up by ethnologist and crip scholar Christine Bylund when we briefly discussed the matter, and now I've been thinking some more about it ... To some extent, people are simply different with regards to how and what they identify with. People may be more or less prone to see themselves as integrated "bodyminds" vs seeing themselves as minds with bodies, for example. People differ in how much of their mental lives they see as integral parts of their personalities, and what seems a bit more external to them, perhaps simultaneously external and undesirable. I think we'd have differences in identification, and thus differences in how much and what people would be willing to change about themselves, even in an oppressive-free utopia.
However, in an ableist society like ours, disability is a political identity too. This is a big difference between the scenario in which I gladly accept increased speed and stamina, and a wheelchair user accepting an offer of walkability. Increased speed and stamina might get me fame and money that I've never dreamt of before, but I'd remain in the political category of "able-bodied" throughout, whereas a wheelchair user who acquires walkability goes from disabled to normate. For some people, that might be a welcome change, climb the social ladder to a better life, whereas others would reject as grotesque the idea of magicking your way into a politically privileged group. 

In any case, I think a story about a character who lives in an ableist society and gets a chance at a magical cure should deal with how they'll move from one political group to another if they take it. Not pretend like it's a completely isolated, individual choice about either getting cured or "accepting yourself". 

But do it in a better way than DC did with Barbara Gordon! 

Barbara Gordon used to be Batgirl. Then the Joker shot her through the stomach, bullet hurt her spine, and she ended up in a wheelchair. She went on superheroing as the computer wiz Oracle. Occasionally, writers felt the need to address why she remained in the chair despite living in this extremely high-tech superhero world. On the one hand, the DC consensus (if I understand things correctly) was that she provided good disability rep, so better keep the chair, but on the other hand, they should provide some in-universe justification too.
I've got an old nineties comic written by Grant Morrison where the issue comes up in dialogue. Babs says that she'd be happy to have her spine cured if someone invented a way for the nerves to grow back, but she doesn't want a cyborg solution - she just don't wanna be a cyborg, is all. That's a perfectly fine motivation! She'd lived most of her life walking (running, jumping, climbing, she was quite the acrobat), so makes sense that she'd have a preference for getting all that back, but it's also fine for her to just not wanna be a cyborg. 

However, most writers did a different explanation, which I think became the canonical one: Babs thought it would be unfair to all the other wheelchair users out there to accept the cyborg solution. She'd only accept it once it was available to the general public (so probably never in the USA, where she lived). So this is a sort of political motivation, but one that doesn't reject the medical perspective at all, and furthermore, it's ridiculous! Babs regularly used all kinds of amazing tech unavailable to most people - she even used to travel back and forth between Earth and the Justice League space station, in the League's teleportation machine! Apparently, this wasn't unfair to everyone else who could only dream of doing such things, but walking via cyborg gizmo would be.

They should either have stuck with the "I just don't want to be a cyborg" motivation, or given her a political motivation centred around disability activism, rather than some nebulous "fairness considerations" that apparently apply only to walking tech but no other tech. Finally, they should have given her a wider variety of chairs.
I get that she wanted to use a regular, manual wheelchair to get around most of the time. Asking why she'd use her arms to get around rather than drive something electric is like asking why Batman walks with his legs instead of driving everywhere in some vehicle. But she should have other options, like more mech warrior like options, for situations like when she's in the space satellite and it gets attacked by enemies for the umpteenth time. Sometimes, in the old comics I read, she almost came across as a lone luddite among enthusiastic tech bros. It's one thing not to give the disabled character tons of tech that erases their disability. It's quite another to give them less tech than their able-bodied but still non-powered counterparts, like Batman, because the disabled person must be "representative" in what they use.
Anyway. All of this is moot now since, after a few decades, DC cured her anyway and had her return to being Batgirl. 

The easiest version of "disabled character rejects an offered cure" to execute well is probably to abstain from perfect, magical cures, and instead have treatments that come with both pros and cons. They may be fantastical by real-world standards, but nevertheless involve pain, arduous rehabs or some other type of cost. A character can weigh the pros and cons and decide it's not worth it - and maybe do so against the expectations of other people who assume that they'd obviously want to be cured, and that any price should be worth paying. 

This was something Marvel's first Doctor Strange movie did pretty well, I think. The movie has been divisive since Strange starts out absolutely desperate to be cured. Still, we've seen that his entire identity revolves around his job (and the fame and money it's brought), so it's plausible that a career-ending disability would render him desperate. His girlfriend calls him out, too, and says look, you gotta get on with life and find some other job to do! She's proven right in the end, though not quite in the way she thought; she figured he could be a teacher at med school, and instead he became a sorcerer. Still, though. He did find another job, eventually, that he could do with his disability. He chose not to cure himself via magic since this would require constant concentration to uphold, and leave him with less magic for other, more important things. So, it's a thoroughly fantastical movie, but it's a fine and realistic ending in that the main character realizes that
a) contrary to what he thought right after his accident, his disability isn't the end of the world, and
b) now when he knows of a way to cure it, it's actually not worth it, there are better things to use his resources for.
It's only too bad that Marvel completely forgot about his disability in later movies, but I guess this is as good as it gets in the MCU. 

Also, if you're thinking of cures in terms of pros and cons, then there will be cases where it is best to be cured, and it's not ableist to say so. I saw this bizarre discussion about the character Ghost, also from the MCU, where one person insisted that portraying her as desperate for a cure for her condition was ableist. But her fantastical condition, besides giving her superpowers, is extremely painful and actively killing her. She's only in her early twenties, but we're told she'll be dead in a couple of months unless she finds a cure. Her wanting a cure is no more ableist than when a young person dying in cancer tries every treatment the medical profession has to offer because they want to live.

Concluding lines

This is something writers should think about, and put some mental effort into. Not just throw out that old magical cure trope - nor simply reverse it and think you're being progressive because you did it the other way around!

Cosmic comfort

"Cosmic horror" is a recognized genre. I'm thinking there's also an opposite genre, or perhaps more of a trope than full genre but still -- cosmic comfort. (So, I'm still struggling to coin new fictional trope names -- see "grimdark preach" and "hot fair slut", that I mentioned in my Poor Things review, for previous efforts.)

 If cosmic horror is showing the universe to be cold, uncaring, evil, incomprehensible, maddening -- one or several of the above -- cosmic comfort shows everything to be kinda nice and safe at the end of the day. It doesn't count as cosmic comfort unless the story goes into cosmic stuff -- I'm not thinking of cozy stories exclusively concerned with earthly matters here. Moreover, I think cosmic comfort can be divided into two sub-genres or sub-tropes: first, it might show a cosmos ruled by nice guys. Semi-nice, at least, not evil, and perfectly comprehensible and relatable. Second, it might show a cosmos ruled by assholes, but they're weak enough for humans to defeat.

Gaiman's and Pratchett's Good Omens is cosmic comfort of the first kind. The antichrist is born, but he's a super sweet little kid! Couldn't hurt a fly! There's an angel and a demon but they're both so very nice and become the best of friends! There's some vague apocalypse threat in the background but what with everyone being so sweet and nice, it's easily averted in the end. (Btw -- that joke with the guy who can't get near a computer without wrecking it should really have been scrapped when they turned the book into a TV show. It made sense back when the book was written, when computers were far less user-friendly, and people often worried about the possibility of completely wrecking the machine if they as much as looked at it wrong. It makes no sense today.)
And it's not just this Pratchett collaboration. The Sandman is much darker than Good Omens, but still contains its fair share of cosmic comfort. The Endless are said to be inscrutable and ageless and quite different from humans, but they're shown to have completely human psychologies. They may be immortal and powerful sort-of-deities but don't you worry, they're not scary or inscrutable in the slightest, they're just like us! Dream is recognizable as a brooding goth boy, Death is recognizable as an annoyingly cheery kind of person -- this was really a big improvement in the TV show, btw, for I couldn't stand the comic book version. I'm not personally comforted by the idea of dying and being greeted by this manic pixie death goddess harping on about Mary Poppins and shit, and sprouting fake-profound statements like "you get what everyone gets: a life-time" to dead babies, but lots of other people love the character and she's clearly supposed to have this comforting role. 

Time to go off on a tangent before I move on: When I was young, there was Sandman merch you could buy, including an ankh necklace with "you get what everyone gets: a life-time" engraved. But this isn't a profound statement! It's fucking stupid! Imagine that I discover that other people at my job are paid twice or thrice as much as me. Angrily, I ask my boss why they get so much more money, and he just looks me in the eye and solemnly says: "You get what everyone gets: a salary". This isn't a profound answer! This is just him dodging the question and being an asshole!
Also, back when I was young (i.e., ages ago), when someone wanted to flatter me they'd say I looked just like Death. I always felt torn about this because yeah, I get it's supposed to be a huge compliment from goth to goth but I hated the character so much.
Fortunately, that stupid "you get what everyone gets" line wasn't in the TV show, big improvement on Death all around. 

Back to topic. All urban fantasy stories where there's heaven and hell and perhaps a whole host of gods but everyone is kinda okay, no one is truly evil, fall into cosmic comfort.

Then there are also those stories where Satan is evil and God is a dick but good news -- somehow, mere mortals are capable of taking them on and winning, so we don't need to worry about them too much. You can beat them if only you're manly enough (Preacher) or street-smart enough (Hellblazer) or, um, believe sufficiently hard in academic freedom, I guess (His Dark Materials, though I've only watched the TV show, not read the books). Writers start by painting this really bleak picture of the universe -- it's ruled by assholes, both from above and from below! -- and then back-pedal on the bleakness by showing that, at the end of the day, humans can beat the gods. 

Of all the stories I've mentioned, I enjoyed the Sandman comics overall despite some problems (Death, but not only Death), I've enjoyed the Sandman TV show so far, I read Preacher as it was published and really enjoyed it, Hellblazer has obviously been really uneven during it's super long run but I like lots of it too ... So I'm not hating on all of the above. (His Dark Materials, though, was a pretty-looking show but got increasingly stupid as it went on and was pretty much unbearably stupid by the end.) But I still dislike cosmic comfort as a trope. In my personal opinion, cosmic comfort always detracts a bit from the story. But your mileage may vary.

In any case, it really should be a recognized trope! Cosmic horror, and its opposite, cosmic comfort. 

One more musing, courtesy of my husband: When I discussed this with him he said "cosmic comfort -- or, as you might also call it, religion." First I protested and said yeah ok I get what you're saying, religions exist to comfort people about the cosmos, but I'm talking fictional tropes here, which is a different thing ... but then I realized this is an interesting point. Because stories like Preacher and His Dark Materials try really hard to be anti religion. So it's interesting that they still end up giving people these comforting messages about the cosmos.