To start off, I would like to say… I love Netflix and mostly recently have been watching a series that I think you all should see.
It is called 3%, I do not want to give too much away but think Hunger Games + Portuguese and you got the right idea. In the show, 97% of the population lives in scums and poverty but if you get registered, at the age of 20 years old, you can go through a process called “The Process” (shocking right?) to see if you are the special 3% that gets to live in the island that has everything you can ever dream of, called The Offshore.
All the characters have their own special thing about them but the one that stood out to me was Fernando, would is played by an actor named Michel Gomes (Here is his Instagram, if you are curious).
Want to know why Fernando stood out to me…. I’ll tell you why…
Fernando was in a wheelchair 🙂
You better believe that everyone in the beginning of the show gave Fernando a hard time, tell him that he would never be able to make it through The Process but did Fernando believe them… nope.
So at this point I saw it going two ways…
- Fernando makes it and everyone is all happy because he is in a wheelchair
- Fernando does not make it and no one is really shocked because of the wheelchair
There are 3 major points in the show that I would like to argue allowed Fernando’s character to challenge how our society views disability.
- The moment he found out that there are people with disabilities on The Offshore.
- It was the first time that it was confirmed to him that people with disabilities had made it through The Process, he was pretty shocked. Even himself believed that the “perfect” Offshore did not have people with disabilities.
- The moment he found out that The Offshore medical technology would allow him to walk again
In this scene, I think you see something that a lot of shows don’t normally like to picture. Someone who is living with a disability, that does not want to be “cured”.
- He has a super steamy sex scene with one of the other main characters
Like any good Netflix series, you need at least one steamy sex scene …
and in Fernando’s case, a love story.
Many times in our society and in the media, people with disabilities are seen as having no sexuality.
That scene says otherwise.
I think this show is really good and I hope I have given you a reason to watch it now 🙂
Unruly Bodies 
I was just watching this a little while ago actually! it definetley caught my eye & the first episode was pretty good, glad to know it would be worthwhile to continue watching!
I just marathoned this entire series on Netflix and even though I found some of the plot points cliché, I really enjoyed Fernando’s representation. Although I do not think that his representation is perfect (disabled characters should be played by disabled actors, for example), the way in which his character felt fleshed out was compelling and refreshing. Too often, disabled characters in fiction become solely about the search for a “cure” or what they have lost, but Fernando felt three-dimensional and more fully realized. If the show continues, I’m interested in seeing what happens with his character!