: Re: How can I portray body horror and still be sensitive to people with disabilities? Building on my answer in Proven psychological or scientific means of scaring people?, I'm working on a universal

@Speyer920

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Body horrors that don't dehumanise disabled or sick people:

A disease makes people look very sick and, eventually, kills them. There is pus and blood and vomit. The hero does not shoot the infected in the face. She makes a makeshift biohazard suit out of garbage bags, duct tape and a CPAP machine, and tries to keep her sick mother hydrated. She knows that if she makes even a small mistake, she could get infected and die too.

The man is magically transformed into a disgusting creature that does not at all resemble a sick or disabled person. His skull splits in two, revealing his true face, with eight eyes and hairy mouth-parts. Look out! Here comes the spider man.

A passenger becomes pregnant against her will. She gives birth to a flesh-machine that will never love her; it isn't a person, it isn't even a vertebrate. For a few days, she tries to care for it as if it was a human child, until it crawls away to become part of the spaceship. She grieves the loss of her "baby". (This one was in The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley) (If I was going to write a story about a strange and inhuman baby, I would specifically want to make it not resemble a metaphor for an autistic child who whose neurotypical mother cannot relate to her child)

You wake up in hospital. You can see your own guts. The surgeon carries on, not realising you are awake.

The police arrive at a grisly scene. The mob decided to "make an example of him". There are pieces everywhere. It looks like they tried to play soccer with his head, until the brains started falling out of his fractured skull.

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