daredevilkink | The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

Uh, I'm gonna be pretty blunt here, because I think perhaps I've been phrasing things wrong and that's why we're not fully understanding each other, but: I don't understand this reply at all. It sounds to me like you're skeptical that language disabilities exist? Or that they could prevent being able to do certain types of reading, or they could make it so difficult and unpleasant people with them would stop trying? Why do you think that?

I think the problem here is that we're both working off of things we know about reading but we know radically different things and different samples? I know plenty of people who can't read what they can hear, for example, or vice-versa. I mean, are you also skeptical about the existence of someone's expressive language being better than their receptive language? Or vice-versa?

I don't understand what you're saying. Can you rephrase?

Not the anon you are responding to, but I don't think they were implying that reading disabilities don't exist or downplaying them.

I think we are all just maybe working off of varying definitions of "comprehension" maybe? Like... there are things that reading levels measure amd things they don't measure as well. The act of reading can encompass a lot of different processes - vocabulary, understanding grammar and syntax, cultural interpretations, specific formal training on types of documents (understanding poetry is different than academic papers vs. legal contracts), etc.

I think what we're all trying to understand here is when thinking about Danny's background, what is reasonable to assume he is or isn't capable of. Especially because the canon itself is too wildly inconsistent and sparing in his backstory for us to properly get a sense of it.

AYRT

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I was trying not to use 'reading levels' terminology, because I find that they don't really measure what they say they do and I don't actually understand the intuitive difference between them.

Yes, that's what I've been meaning. And the canon is so poorly written and thought out that I don't think any of our understandings are actually necessarily 'right' or 'wrong'--we just don't have enough information.

Thanks for standing to my defense :)

It's entirely possible that we're thinking about 'comprehension' differently. I don't think that's the issue right now, though.

Nah. Right now, anon is insulted because anon's friends are apparently disabled (which they decided I'm denying), but anon forgot to mention that. Just out of curiosity, was that part clear to you? Is it just me who hasn't jumped to the right conclusion?

AYRT

My actual offended part is that you seem to be making general statements framed as absolute statements that are factually incorrect. And that you seem determined to condescendingly make it about my ~~personal feelings~~ rather than what I've actually said.

AYRT

Hm. Okay, sorry.

This may also come out as blunt:

You said that *you* have a language disability, and then you said that *your friends* have spent decades before being able to comprehend academic papers. Since you didn't mention anything about disabilities in regard to your friends, I assumed that they don't have any. As far as I know cognitive disabilities of this kind are quite rare, at least in enough severity to visibly affect your life and skills.

"Normal" people, however - healthy, neurotypical, however you want to call them - can still take decades to get around to reading with understanding academic stuff, for many different reasons. Some of them I listed in comment.

What I was trying to say were two things:

1. It might not be, and most likely isn't, an issue of not having received a formal training in academic reading skills, which university students generally don't get (although they might in USA; it's a weird place).

That assessment would change with the knowledge that your friends have language/reading disability.

But if I remember correctly, we were talking about one Danny Rand, and what would your reading skills be like if you spent 15 years in a Buddhist monastery on the edge of the world and didn't go to an English school because of it.

Danny is not disabled. Nor is the hypothetical 'someone' in Danny's place, in my mind at least. I'm sorry, but if your friends are severely disabled (within the area of cognition), their experience is impossible to compare with this scenario.

2. There's nothing particularly wrong with your friends. Lots of people are like that, not everyone needs to be an academic. It doesn't make them stupid or anything.

I guess I failed at communicating that one, because you sound really indignant.

I think this has well escalated past the point of usefulness, sorry.

So to avoid wank, this will be my last point on the subject: my problem was with your generalized statements, and with some of the ones you are still making. You made statements that to me have glaringly obvious flaws in that they say 'x works this way' when quite literally a huge amount of my own life experience says it really doesn't and there's no reason to assume it does for most people, and in this reply further on you seem to have this thing where instead of fixing this overgeneralization you respond by stating that the people who don't fit it don't count for whatever reason. That's why I responded the way I did, in case you were curious.

Sorry, I lied--one more thing:

We also do not know for sure whether Danny Rand has a disability or not. I personally don't headcanon him as having one in the slightest, but it could be very easy to state that he does have one, whether it's NVLD or autism or dyslexia or a bunch of others. Hell, someone in the prompts post strongly headcanons him as having had/having psychotic episodes, and that reading isn't that far out there. Now, it's up to pure interpretation, because especially wrt to autism I personally feel like it's impossible to distinguish between a Danny that is autistic and behaves as in canon and one who is allistic and behaves as in canon, due to how canon in the show could potentially explain p much most of the things that could be autism or could be not. Like it barely makes a difference, except also in fic scenarios.

I also think you severely underestimate the prevalnce of language disabilities and also don't seem to know much about how academic reading in the US is taught (variably, hugely dependent on region--my high school very explicitly taught a bunch of academic reading skills along with writing skills, from reading to detect credibility of sources to how to read papers in fields you aren't in to separating out jargon uses of ordinary words from ordinary uses of ordinary words, and some basically teach nothing on the topic).

Okay. Feel free not to respond.

As long as a character is not being portrayed as being disabled, it's not disabled. That's just how fiction works - unless stated otherwise, whatever is "the norm" is implied. That's canon. Your headcanon can be vastly different, of course, but I wasn't under the impression we were discussing anybody's headcanon.

My statements are generalized because we're talking about principles of human cognition. Or in other words, *general rules* of human cognition. Do consider the word "general". There's many specific scenarios in which people's cognition may differ from how it *generally* is, but I have no need to discuss them all in a dreamwidth comment thread. This is not a psych encyclopedia.

*You* seem to have a need to prove something, but what, I am not sure.

People's experiences "don't count" if they can't be applied to the matter at hand. You can't discuss Luke Cage's experience of prison by recalling the experience of youth detention by your white teenage friends. Too many variables are changed.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that if you want to discuss how human emotional development works, and what it would mean for this or that character, you can't use your autistic cousin as the main example you're extrapolating from.

Emotions work differently for autistic people, and reading works differently for people with severe language disabilities. There's nothing particularly terrible or insulting about that.

I disagree with the idea that you can randomly exclude people in a discussion of how humans work. Sure, if you were to say 'normally/in general, humans have ten fingers' that's obviously true, but even statements like 'humans have ten fingers' aren't actually true, because not all humans do. And yes, if you were to discuss how human emotional development works, you would have to discuss autistic people and other people who might not fit a random ~~generality~~, because autistic people are also humans.

Mod, please freeze? This is stupid af.

Oh boy, yes, please someone freeze this.

And while we're at it, let's freeze all of our sayings, proverbs and general statements, because it's not like there is an understanding that when you say "people have ten fingers", "generally" goes unsaid.

And yes, you would need to discuss autistic people when discussing human emotional stuff, *if* you were writing a monograph on it. If you're developing a base out of which you'll be jumping to understand a particular person/character/type of people/whatever, you only discuss what is relevant and similar.

Do you even remember what we're talking about? Or did you just fixate yourself on this notion of being excluded, and went to war for it?

Okay, to bring the discussion back to where it was originally about: we were discussing different interpretations of what kinds of reading comprehension levels Danny Rand could feasibly or likely have, you said some things I think are bullshit (and I admit it's a grammar thing more than an idea thing, though you're also incredibly condescending if we're being honest and wanky here), and you're the one who brought up ~~personal feelings~~ into it and decided I was just hysterical and oversensitive, or something.

Now I think we can both agree that neither of us is strictly speaking totally *right* about our own interpretations and feelings of plausibility in terms of what Danny Rand thinks or understands, if only because Iron Fist was written by a bunch of people who didn't bother to patch half the damn holes in the plot or worldbuilding and also because he's incredibly incurious and weird. Or maybe we're both right. Or maybe S2 will decide to show this motherfucker reading James Joyce because MCU lives to torment its fans, or something.

I'm out of here. It's funny how you play the offended party while also throwing insults around.

Have a nice day. Let me know when you write your PhD on human psychology, mine is almost done.

You realize you're an anon on a kinkmeme discussion? Lol I can pretend to be getting a PhD in psychology too. In fact, the lurkers also support me in emails, and I'm now also a billionaire monk.

Actually, my PhD is in transcultural psychiatry. But I figured "human psychology" was a description enough. Thank you for reminding me that I'm an anon on a kinkmeme discussion, but I have a life besides that, too.

I'm not gonna lie, it is goddamn hilarious that you think claiming to be a psychiatrist somehow a) is believable at all when you're anon and b) lends credibility to your arguments and/or automatically makes you right. I'm gonna start snapping that I'm also a psychologist when I flounce in the future. You have a very nice day :) :) :)

I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm writing a PhD in transcultural psychiatry, but I'm not an MD, which means I'm not a psychiatrist. Also, if I considered this important to my arguments, I would have mentioned that earlier. That's just simple rhetoric. Or logic, if you prefer.

If that's all, yes, have a good day. Let's not repeat this.

DA - I will flag the mod on the Mod Post about this thread, but for future reference, calling for the mod here is generally not effective. The mod doesn't always lurk, especially on the Discussion Post in particular.

Thanks. I was quite surprised when the other anon did that. I don't think it's necessary anymore - the conversation has ended.

Thank God for that.

The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa

(frozen comment) Re: MODCALLRe: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and educa