Basic Trope: A disabled person does not want to give up their disability for one reason or another.
- Straight: Alice is blind from birth. When Bob offers to heal Alice's blindness, she declines because it's an integral part of who she is.
- Exaggerated: Alice is a quadruple amputee who is deaf, blind, and autistic. She wants none of these cured.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is colorblind. When Bob offers to cure her colorblindness, she doesn't want it cured because she thinks it's cool.
- Alice is offered risky surgery that might cure her disability. While she doesn't actively want her disability in her life, she turns down the surgery because she's fine with her life as it is and worries about potential complications leaving her worse off.
- Alice didn't want to be cured, but accepts Bob's offer to give her the power to turn her vision on and off out of necessity for certain situations.
- Justified:
- Alice does not wish to be cured of her blindness because in her universe, blind people have few barriers to a happy life and there is a thriving blind community.
- Alice goes to a school for the blind. If she were suddenly cured, she would have to change schools and never see her friends again.
- Alice knows that the adjustment to being sighted after being blind for so long will be difficult and decides it's not worth it.
- Alice is The Atoner and sees her disability as a fitting punishment for her crime(s).
- Alice would prefer to keep using her cool Disability Superpower.
- The cure involves highly risky surgery, and Alice has adapted well enough that the benefits to her would not justify the risks.
- Inverted:
- Alice would like nothing more for herself than Throwing Off the Disability.
- Alice wishes she was blind and Bob offers to blind her permanently. She accepts Bob's offer.
- Alice wishes she was blind, but Bob declines to blind her permanently.
- Subverted: Bob has a cure for blindness. He assumes that Alice doesn't want it because it's part of her identity. It turns out, she is very eager to be cured.
- Double-Subverted: However, when she is cured, she discovers that being sighted is difficult and has unforeseen consequences that she did not anticipate.
- Parodied: Alice doesn't want her blindness to be cured because she is frightened of seeing herself and thinks she might be Hollywood Homely.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice is proud to be a blind person, but then Bob offers to cure her. At first, she doesn't want it. But, then she decides that it would be wonderful to be able to see. But, she finds being sighted so overwhelming that she finds a way to blind herself again. She regrets this, and begs Bob to give her sight again, but then she changes her mind when she learns to accept herself the way she is.
- Averted:
- Alice is offered a cure for her blindness, accepts it as if it were no different from having a doctor reset a broken bone, and enjoys her new eyesight.
- The prospect of curing Alice's blindness is never raised.
- Enforced:
- The show needed An Aesop about accepting people with disabilities as they are.
- The show is a prequel to a story where Alice is blind, and Bob's ability to cure blindness can't be written out. The solution was having Alice choose to keep the disability.
- The show's fans have been touting Alice as a quality example of disability representation, and the writers don't want to throw that away, but the show had also established the existence of medicine which could cure her. Again, the only logical solution is to have Alice choose not to be cured.
- Implied: The setting is shown to have advanced medical technology or magic which should logically be able to cure Alice. There is never any discussion of whether or not Alice would want to be cured, but she remains blind.
- Lampshaded: Bob explains that he can't cure Alice's blindness because every party needs a Blind Seer.
- Invoked: Before deciding whether she would like to take the purported cure for blindness, Alice educates herself about it. She learns it is either a hoax or a Fate Worse than Death, so she decides not to take it.
- Exploited: Bob threatens to cure Alice's blindness with magic if she doesn't behave.
- Defied: "Are you crazy, Bob? Of course I don't want to be blind! Cure me right now!"
- Discussed: Alice and Bob, who are both blind, discuss if they would like to be cured of their blindness.
- Deconstructed:
- The work examines the question: "To what degree can Alice expect society to accommodate for the blindness she refused to get cured?"
- Alice is struggling to get by being blind, and is at first excited to have Bob cure her. But then Charlie, who is also blind, tells her that she should be proud of herself as she is, and she lets herself be talked out of the cure. Alice goes right back to struggling, questioning just what it is she's supposed to be so proud of.
- Reconstructed: Alice explains her quality-of-life concerns to Charlie, and he helps her improve her situation to where she no longer feels a compelling need to get cured.
- Played for Laughs: Alice decides against having her blindness cured, and on the way home she suffers a series of Amusing Injuries from hazards she didn't see. Alice still remains convinced that she made the right choice.
- Played for Drama:
- Alice turns down an opportunity to cure her blindness, only to regret it.
- Alice decided not to have her blindness cured. She's happy with her decision, but still suffers because other characters react with bafflement at best and disdain at worst.
- Played for Horror: An ableist Serial Killer decides to go after people like Alice.
I don't need a link that goes back to the main page. I can simply use the "Main" button at the top.
