A scene from Ransom by Lois Duncan

Written fifty years ago. I'm morbidly curious what a modern audience would make of it.

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"You're sorry for me, is that it?" His voice began to harden. "You don't have to be. If you think you're going to play the fairy princess, going around kissing cripples to turn them into-"

"What an ugly thing to say!" Jesse interrupted. "What a perfectly horrid, mean little thing to say!"

The anger in her voice startled Dexter into silence. He lay gazing up at her, amazed by the violence of her reaction.

"Just because I haven't dated a lot, because I'm not the popularity queen that Marianne is doesn't mean that I'm going to settle for any halfway kind of man, Dexter Barton! I wouldn't take a cripple on a silver platter! I'd rather go through my whole life without ever loving anybody than be stuck with somebody who wasn't fine and strong and solid! Maybe I haven't spent my life doing jitterbugs and watching movies and mooning over football players, but I have known people, fine, interesting people. I knew a Russian countess who had her land and her jewels and her money taken away from her, but she was still every inch a countess! I knew a man in Switzerland who was an amputee. He lost a leg during the war escaping a Nazi concentration camp. And do you know, he skis! On one leg, using the poles for balance!"

Her normally pale face with flushed with emotion.

"I've heard symphonies written by blind composers and seen cathedrals designed by dying artists, and none of them was a cripple, none of them! It's bitterness that makes a person a cripple, bitterness and meanness and smallness! It's an emptiness inside them, not anything to do with their bodies!"

I'm liking A Plague Tale: Innocence

Horror stealth games always seemed weird to me, because the monsters are associated with shadows, but you hide in the shadows to avoid them. I thought shadows = safety would make much more sense with light-themed monsters.

In this game, you hide in the shadows to avoid bloodthirsty inquisitors, and you hide in the light to avoid millions and millions of hungry rats. Whether light or shadow = safety depends on whether you're around inquisitors, rats, or both. Inquisitors make fires and lights that drive away rats, and conversely, breaking an inquisitor's lantern when he's surrounded by rats won't end well for him. It's an interesting push-pull.