IIRC, Bedivere was a Knight of the Round Table who got by just fine with one hand.
Tyr was a Norse god with only a left hand. He put his right hand (“thy SWORD hand, O Tyr!”) into Fenris’ mouth as a pledge that Fenris wasn’t being tricked when being bound by the last chain made by the dwarves, from women’s beards, the sound of a cat’s footsteps, and something else I can’t recall.
Samson was blind when he brought down the Philistines’ house at his death, if that counts.
I thought he was crippled by the fall, when Zeus threw him out for interfering in a domestic dispute between Zeus and Hera.
Regards,
Shodan
Also, “Wolverine the Most Useless X-Man”
Stranger
The Chief turned out to be even more evil than Xavier.
In the 1928 film West of Zanzibar (based on the 1926 play Kongo) Lon Chaney’s character is a paraplegic. He starts out as a villain, then redeems himself at the end.
Does Dr. John H. Watson (1887) count with his gunshot wound?
There’s Pelopes who was granted an ivory shoulder by the gods after his pop pop served him as food.
And there’s, of course, Odin with his one eye.
The Romans retconned him into a swole super-stud who totally satisfied Venus.
As with anything there’s a tvtropes page for this (though not all qualify as “good”)
There’s Poe’s Hop-Frog (1849) [which I recently read but forgot about]
And there’s the Aztec Tezcatlipoca and Inuit Sedna [also forgot]
Mimir, same mythos, minus his entire body. (After the Aesir/Vanir war he exists as a literal talking head).
The two cases in films I can think of where a secondary character is in a wheelchair for no reason essential to the plot are Gina McKee’s character in Notting Hill and Brian Doyle Murray’s character in Modern Problems. In both movies, the character’s disability wasn’t used to show that they were good or evil or that the disability was a metaphor for something. They were in wheelchairs just because a certain proportion of people use wheelchairs and the screenwriter decided that the character should be one of those people.
I thought the reason why Gina McKee’s character was in a wheelchair in Notting Hill was so Julia Roberts’ character could deliver one of the most embarrassing monologues ever heard.
What monologue are you talking about? I don’t remember it. In any case, I think that Gina McKee’s character is in a wheelchair for the same reason that David Bower’s character is deaf in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was also written by Richard Curtis. Curtis thinks it’s important to have disabled characters in films, not because they are particularly good or evil or make nice metaphors but because some people are disabled.
Douglas Bader in ‘Reach for the sky’ 1956. Certainly not a villain, but not fictional either.
I’m surprised no one mentioned Captain Pike in ST:TOS “The Menagerie”. Admittedly he didn’t do much - or indeed anything - in his wheelchair-bound scenes.
Just to throw in a modern protagonist in a wheelchair played by an actor in a wheelchair: Liz Carr who has played Clarissa Mullery on BBC’s Silent Witness since 2013.
Also from the Edda, there was the blind god Höðr.
Wasn’t Hari Seldon (the Foundation series) in a wheelchair. Or did he just always appear sitting in his holograph message thingys?
It’s been awhile since I’ve read Roman myths but I was under the impression that Venus was forced to marry what’s his face as punishment for something.
He beeped with integrity.
And the version I’d heard of the Vulcan-Venus myths was that Venus chose Vulcan as her husband because, as he pointed out, he works nights (and hence, would be easy to cheat on).