Katawa Shoujo

There's this one game that my brother has recently gotten into. And it really surprises me how glad I am that he's playing it.

Katawa Shoujo's premise doesn't sound promising. A dating sim where you choose between several disabled girls could very easily turn out as an objectification of disability and girls, with a freakshow tone to it. But surprisingly, it's not like that at all.

Firstly, each of the girls has a unique personality, with many having traits that are completely unrelated to their disabilities. The blind girl Lilly, for example, is a very cultured half-foreign girl; and the armless girl Rin is an artist with a very unusual perspective on things. While many characters have angst, all of those characters have reasons other than disability to angst (Hanako, who has a bad facial burn, lost her father in the fire that burned her). The protagonist also has a disability as well, a heart problem which almost killed him and resulted in him being sent to the special school where the story takes place. This heart problem can actively impact your character during the storyline, especially if you end up with Emi, the legless track star.

And secondly, the approach to dating these girls is a very healthy one. As a visual novel, it has a structure similar to Choose-your-own-adventure books, so a few choices in the beginning determine which character you'll end up with - if you get a good ending (you can also get bad endings, one example being falling off a roof and dying). Then, you proceed to befriend the girl you chose, get to know her well, and only then does the relationship become a sexual one. It's usually the girl who initiates this shift, incidentally.

There is some explicit content, which you can choose to turn off if you wish. My brother has played it both ways. But the explicit content in Katawa Shoujo is far better than any porn you can find, because it's depicted in the context of a caring, healthy romantic relationship. You know the girl well and care about her deeply long before the sexually explicit interaction with them. They also provide a model for how to handle the sexual aspect of the relationship as well. With one girl, the second time you have sex with her, the two of you decide to try something unusual, which it turns out the girl really doesn't enjoy. She honestly communicates this to you and you both make the decision never to engage in that particular sexual practice again. (Also, every instance of sex in Katawa Shoujo includes condoms.)

My brother is a heterosexual teenager. Someday, he will be sorting out these questions for real, when he gets over his shyness enough to start a relationship with a girl. And if he follows the model of Katawa Shoujo, I think he'll make a great boyfriend for whichever girl is lucky enough to have him. And if he ever gets involved with a disabled girl, Katawa Shoujo will have shown him that there's a lot more to that girl than her disability, and that having a disability need not be a barrier to having a relationship.

Visible and Invisible Disabilities

A commonly described divide among disabled people is between 'visible' and 'invisible' disabilities. The way this difference is described is that some disabled people are readily recognized as disabled, and others can be mistaken for normal.
What many people don't recognize is that you can be invisibly disabled one moment, and visibly disabled the next. It all depends on context.
One way that a normally 'invisibly' disabled person can become visibly disabled is by who they are with. When I was volunteering with an ABA program for autistic kids, I saw one example of this. In one part of the program, there were both autistic and NT kids doing an integrated gym class (this was for the higher functioning kids). Anyway, one kid came out of the gym at the end while I was chatting with one of the therapists, and she greeted him. I knew immediately that he was autistic. Not because of his appearance or behavior, but because of the way she spoke to him. She used the same tone of voice as she did in ABA sessions, just with better grammar.
You can also be visibly disabled by being with other disabled people. In my disabled youth group, when we go on outings, it's evident that at least some of us are disabled. And we are clearly a group, without the kind of divides that often occur between disabled and nondisabled people, so those of us who aren't visibly disabled are assumed to be disabled as well. Note that this can mean mistaking nondisabled people for disabled people. Hearing children of Deaf parents, when out in public with their parents, are often assumed to be deaf because they're signing and with people who may be more obviously deaf. Even though they aren't actually disabled, in that setting they're visibly disabled.
Some people are visibly disabled in certain settings but not in others because those settings involve skills that they lack. Apart from with my disabled youth group, the only times I've been visibly disabled is when I get lost - especially on the bus. I don't know things most people are expected to know. I act more eccentric out of stress. In general, I seem developmentally disabled. Similarly, a dyslexic child in a class discussion may not be visibly disabled, but when reading aloud in class they are.
On the Internet, many 'visibly disabled' people become invisibly disabled. At the same time, although they may not actually be recognized as disabled, some 'invisibly disabled' people become more visibly disabled on the Internet. Higher-level language problems, receptive or expressive, are the most visible disability on the Internet.
This brings me to another point. You can be in between visible and invisible disability. There are certain stereotypes of people that are 'almost' disabled, such as geeks, stupid people, 'wackos', etc, who are generally assumed not to be able to help being like that, but aren't really considered disabled. Some people who actually are disabled are recognized just enough to fall into those categories. Also, some disabled people are mistaken for people who are drunk or high on some substance, such as people with balance problems or people who show visible signs of perceptual abnormalities. Actually, this is among the most obviously disabled you can be without being recognized as disabled.
So it's a whole lot more complex than just visible or invisible disability.