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. 

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.

Wish-fulfilment fantasies and real life

 The following scenario is widely recognized to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy: The heroine in some YA novel mostly read by girls has two hot dudes competing for her affections, and she must choose between them. It's such a common take now to go "they should just go poly and they could all be together", and sure, it would be cool with a wider array of relationships in fiction, but let's set that aside for now. The people involved don't want to have a poly relationship, and the heroine must choose.

Why is this a wish-fulfilment fantasy? After all, it's not a fun situation in real life. She cares about both boys, and when you care about someone, you don't want to see them sad - but inevitably, the one she turns down will be sad and disappointed. Also, even if they try to be all mature about the situation and stay good friends, this is often difficult in practice.
The reason it's still an escapist fantasy that many like to read about (or watch) is that fiction need not treat the situation very realistically and really dig into these problems. Instead, it focuses on how desirable the heroine is. Girls learn from an early age that it's extremely important to be desirable to boys/men, and if you've got two guys who are hot themselves competing for your affections, that means you're super desirable! 

Once we realize that fictional scenarios need not be any fun in real life to provide wish-fulfilment and escapist fantasies to the audience, we can also see that there's so much more fiction that fills this role than just "YA heroine must choose between two hot guys".

Major clarification before I move on: It's possible to really enjoy some piece of fiction and still recognize that it has problematic elements worth criticizing. We don't need to choose between rejecting something, or embracing it while vehemently insisting that it's perfect. I'm gonna talk about Rick and Morty, and I love that show! I've enjoyed the hell out of it from the start! I can still criticize it! "This is perfect" and "this is problematic and therefore terrible and must be rejected" is a false dichotomy!

Okay, here goes: Rick and Morty is a great show but a substantial chunk of the fanbase are made up by terrible people. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since the titular Rick provides wish-fulfilment for nasty people.
Rick is a huge jerk himself, but he's simultaneously the smartest and bestest person in the world (at least in early seasons - later on, he sometimes looks stupid and pathetic, and he doesn't always come out on top anymore). Even when he completely fucks up, like that time he turned the world into a "Cronenberg nightmare" and had to hop over to a different dimension, it's the kind of grand fuck-up only the smartest and the bestest could make. As terrible as he is to other people, their ability to stand up to him and talk back tends to be limited by how inferior they are.
Now, if you're a terrible jerk-ass yourself, this likely has negative consequences for your social life and life in general. But if you're nasty and hateful, you don't want to fantasize about some shiny happy scenario in which you're popular and nice with tons of friends, because you don't like other people, so you don't want to be nice to them or friends with them. Instead, you'll fantasize about being as shitty to others as you like, but they must put up with it, and you get away with it without negative consequences. 

Now, I've seen people argue that douchebags for whom Rick is a wish-fulfilment fantasy haven't paid sufficient attention to the show, because we actually see that he's also lonely and depressed, and even contemplates suicide at one point.
And sure, being depressed or even suicidal isn't fun in real life (duh!). But it can still serve as wish-fulfilment in fiction that doesn't dig into a realistic portrayal of these terrible feelings, but instead just use them as a kind of jerkass license. When Morty feels that he's had enough of Rick's shit and it's time to stand up for himself, Birdperson explicitly says that he mustn't do that. You see, Rick feels bad, and therefore, everyone should keep swallowing all his shit and never talk back. He must be allowed to vent and shit on everyone else as much as he feels like, because he's depressed.
People can fantasize about being the smartest and the bestest in the world, but it's usually obvious that this is never gonna happen to them. But a situation in which everyone around you goes "oh, now I finally understand how hard things are for you! How grand your suffering! I will never again complain about your behaviour - from now on, I will show you nothing but compassion, understanding, and admiration for how well you bear your grand suffering, regardless of what you do or say to me!" might seem like something that could actually happen. So people can absolutely fantasize about, not suffering in itself, but having their suffering recognized as a valid license to be shitty.

This also goes for tragic backstories like murdered parents or a fridged girlfriend. Of course this would be terrible in real life. But if those dead loved ones only fill the narrative function of making the hero cool, dark and brooding and giving him a license to be shitty to others, such deaths can definitely serve a wish-fulfilment purpose. 

So why does any of this even matter? Well, I'm not gonna claim it's super important to be able to spot wish-fulfilment fantasies when you see them. But off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons:

1. If you're a writer, you might want to know whether you write something that works as wish-fulfilment, and if so, for which demographic. That way, you can make conscious choices instead of being taken by surprise by what kind of fans you attract.

2. Also, if you think wish-fulfilment stories are bad and should be criticized - you shouldn't just criticize stuff like Twilight, but stuff like Rick and Morty as well.