(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to an earlier post called Story, Story, Story, WHAP!. I’m not suggesting that the title of the post become a long-standing name for the phenomenon.)

So for me at the moment it’s any of the many different ways of saying:

“I have this [insert relative here], sort of. But we only visit her [insert ridiculously small amount of time], because she’s got [insert diagnosis here] and she naturally [without us even questioning whether this is okay or necessary] lives in [insert type of institution here].” Bonus points if they don’t treat her even remotely like a part of the family except when they want to make the character in question look sympathetic or like they have a “tragic past”. Extra bonus points if the person has never even met or made the smallest of token efforts to meet their relative but still want to angst about this person’s existence on the planet as far as I can tell. (While never, not even once, thinking of how their relative herself might feel, about any of that, because we don’t have feelings or reactions to not being treated remotely like part of our families.)

I’m not talking about instances where the person is institutionalized for reasons beyond the character’s control, the character has tried to do something about it, and is actively prevented from seeing them for more reasons beyond their control. Like in Lest We Forget (a sort of documentary-on-CD put together by the brother of one of the former inmates of an institution being covered by the documentary), the only times the guy annoyed me more than slightly were for… other things.

It’s more when it’s “This person is barely a part of the family and that’s because that’s how these things work, period, end of story, and this is only ever brought up to manipulate the audience, and the injustice of the situation is never questioned whatsoever.” Or when it becomes all about that one person’s suffering with no comprehension at all that whatever they’re suffering, it’s nothing even close to what their disabled family member is suffering by being in that situation. Or other things along those lines.

That’s not the only thing that pisses me off on sight, but it’s the one that I’ve run into more than once recently, so it’s what I remember right now.

What sort of things (please read the original post so you know what I mean) affect any of you this way? I’ll probably throw more in, in comments, as I remember or run into them.

Edit to add: I’m less concerned with what specific books/movies/etc. people have seen these in, and more interested in what they’re actually doing that provokes this reaction. Although of course people can reply however they want, I just thought there might be some misunderstanding.