The supercrip is a powerful and an old stereotype. Its maudlin self-help applications are seen when para-athletes, for example, are treated as saints. If people with disabilities can excel, goes the logic of such treatment, able-bodied people should be able to push themselves even further (“Who would you be if you were born broken?” the newscaster rhetorically asked viewers in the aforementioned Pistorius segment). Broken is the sort of terminology many people with disabilities find offensive for implying that they are less-than—and it’s the sort of terminology that reduces their lives to simple tales about being defined by difference.

There’s also often a mystical component to images of disability. The line of characters whose physical difference goes hand in hand with supernatural power stretches from modern examples such as Marvel’s Professor X and Daredevil back to the blind seer Tiresias of Greek mythology. In 2016, after the death of Hodor on Thrones, I spoke with the scholar Lauryn S. Mayer about medieval attitudes on disability. She told me about the “idea that the state of the body reflected the state of the soul. If you were suddenly disabled, it might be considered a punishment from God because of some sort of aspect of your living.” But disability “also might be considered … a privilege because you were living your penance on Earth rather than going to purgatory. Going back to the idea of Christ suffering on the cross, it’s like, Here’s your test.” The legend of King Bran twines these two threads—the overcomer and the wizard.

Read: Bran Stark and the problem of omniscience

If that legend is simplistic, it has to be considered in relation to Game of Thrones’ generally diverse and nuanced take on physical difference. Tyrion, one of the primary characters, is a dwarf; Bran fell from a tower in the very first episode. Whereas other heroic sagas have characters emerge unscathed from their highly violent adventures—or undergo one defining wound, such as Luke Skywalker’s amputation—injury was commonplace on Thrones. Tyrion received a facial nick in war; Jaime Lannister lost a hand; Beric Dondarrion had multiple lives’ worth of battle scars; Hodor had his brain short-circuited in a supernatural calamity. These developments countered pop culture’s comforting fantasy of corporal invulnerability for heroes, and debunked the notion of a fundamental distinction between people without disabilities and people with them. In an instant, anyone can move from the former category to the latter.

Throughout its run, Thrones paid attention to the body as a social marker. Tyrion was put on trial all his life, as he explained in Season 4, simply for being a dwarf. The Hound’s childhood burn wounds made it so that strangers perceived him as a monster. Melisandre used magic to hide the physical effects of centuries of aging so as to better seduce and inspire. Even in the cases of Brienne’s tallness or Arya’s childlike stature, being physically different shaped people’s lives—but largely only because it affected how others treated them.