Satisfied with the ending for reasons you won't expect

Quest for Camelot rant:

Guilty pleasure confession. I like Quest for Camelot. Hate the two headed dragon(s), but like the film.

And I know people bitch and complain that Garrett should have had his sight restored at the end. No. I don't think so.

Think of it from the perspective of a blind or visually impaired child. As children we are taught that you can only have the happy ending once you are "fixed." Now granted, sure, having good eye sight is a nice thing but realistically most children with poor eye sight or who are blind will never gain that sight back. It's a harsh but honest reality. And we are more or less told we cannot have the happy ending until what is wrong with us is corrected. i.e. the crippled kid can walk, the mute mermaid can speak again, the blind man can see. You see it all the time in the classic Faery Tales.

In Rapunzel the prince gets blinded then his sight is magically restored at the end. In the Rankin Bass Christmas special The First Christmas Snow, the boy miraculously can see at the end. No one realizes what this does to visually impaired kids. I say this as someone who is blind in one eye / borderline legally blind. We get brainwashed into thinking that if we're good, if we're the heroes, our happy ending is when our bodies are turned to protection, which undermines everything we learn from Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer or Nester The Long Eared Christmas Donkey.

We're taught to wait for these miracles, that for many, will never, ever come, and that until then we should not count ourselves as truly happy with who and what we are yet Garrett in Quest for Camelot got to be a knight and got the girl. He remained blind but still got his happy ending. And to me that was more satisfying than if his sight was restored. Would it have been good for him to see again? Absolutely. But it's nice that for once blind kids aren't being preached to that they can't count as having a happy ending unless they suddenly see perfectly.