The Complicated Cliché of ‘Bran the Broken’

This story contains major spoilers for the series finale of Game of Thrones.

“A boy born broken, raised to see himself not as disabled, just different.”

That’s how a newscaster described Oscar Pistorius in an uplifting segment on the South African runner before he became the first double-leg amputee to compete at the Olympics (and quite before he was convicted of killing his girlfriend). I came across the clip in a documenting popular media’s obsession with portraying disability as something to be “overcome,” a trope that doesn’t so much help viewers understand people with disabilities as it does turn them into inspirational tchotchkes. There’s even a term that disability activists use for this sort of portrayal: the “.”