This is gonna be long, but I implore you to bear with me.
Today’s episode Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was fantastic!
…except for a passive joke Arin made towards the end. You can say I’m being overly sensitive, but at least hear me out before you do so.
NOTE: I fucking love the Grumps and have been watching them for years. I’m not trying to draw hate to them or anything of the sort. I just wanted to take this scenario to raise awareness, because I believe this came from a place of ignorance and not an intent to harm.
In today’s episode (July 2nd, 2017), Admiral Bobbery joined the party for reals this time. For those who watched the episode or have played the game, you’d know that Bobbery is convinced he’s going to die, and thus closes his eyes so he drift off to the afterlife. Except… he’s not dead. He’s asleep. Take note that he closed his eyes of his own volition, purposefully laying back to “die” (fall asleep in actuality).
“Cut to the chase- what was so offensive?” said the Straw Man™ across the room.
Before I put it to words, I’ll first put the quote here as well as its context:
[A Sleepy Sheepy item was used on Mario and Bobbery, though only Mario was affected. Thus, Mario fell asleep while Bobbery remains awake.]
“Bobbery the sleeping fucking narcoleptic bomb doesn’t fall asleep?”
Okay, let me do some explaining. For starters, “narcoleptic” is not a casual adjective. It should never be used to describe someone unless you are talking about someone who does have narcolepsy. The reason is simple: narcolepsy is a serious illness. Throwing around the term as if it’s nothing trivializes a condition that will affect 1 in 3,000 people for their whole life. There is no cure.
As you may have surmised by now, I am someone who has to live with narcolepsy. It’s something that affects me every day, some days moderately and some days extremely.
Someone proposed a possible explanation to the effect of: “Well, Bobbery abruptly fell asleep earlier so maybe they actually think he has narcolepsy.”
That is a good thing to consider, but I earlier explained how he fell asleep of his own volition, not against his will. Not only that, but he was (more or less) easily roused from his sleep. Furthermore, people with narcolepsy cannot be forcefully woken up from a sleep attack; they have to just wait it out until they wake up. That aside, I do not think Arin actually thought Bobbery had narcolepsy. He has made a handful of passing jokes about someone being narcoleptic in past Game Grumps episodes.
The media either never talks about/shows narcolepsy, or when they do show it they show it as a trite stereotype. If that’s all people see, of course they won’t know that it’s not a joking matter? I won’t preach for too long, but I’d like to describe a bit of what narcolepsy is really like.
Narcolepsy manifests differently with each person, so I’m describing what is typically the most common experience. That being said, let’s talk about sleep attacks. You don’t slowly lull into a sleep attack. With absolutely no warning, at any time or place, it occurs out of nowhere. Every time, there’s the risk of being unlucky and causing trauma to the head (I am fortunate for this to not have happened). My body is consistently spotted with bruises from the falls caused by sleep attacks. When it happens in public, it’s mortifying. I become a public spectacle if someone I know isn’t with me to stop them from gawking. For me, these episodes last up to 20 minutes. Some of the worst places I’ve had sleep attacks are the middle of the mall, the grocery store, the middle of class, the hallway… you get the idea.
And that’s just a fraction of what narcolepsy really is. I figured this illustrated my point enough, and the reason that it upsets me so much when people throw around the term as if it’s a synonym for “sleepy”.
Once more: this is not meant to be vindictive or judgemental. Instead, I wanted to use this opportunity to make this post because I’m pretty certain just about everyone reading this also wasn’t aware of why it’s a big deal.
If you’re a Grumps fan and wanna pass some knowledge on, feel free to reblog. I encourage it!
