Characters with any sort of disability fall into this category. While the disability is outwardly a challenge for them, usually there's something about this unique way of interacting with the world that helps them solve a problem the other characters can't solve.
I would say this is particularly the case with characters who are missing one of their senses. Blind characters would top the list, as they will always have a form of "second sight" that makes them a sort of chosen one, instrumental to overcoming a key challenge in the narrative. But deaf characters, specifically deaf girls, are not far behind.
Why specifically deaf girls? If I'm already making generalizations, I'll say that making the character a girl tends to emphasize the sense of vulnerability you are already attributing to the character by making them deaf. A deaf girl is, broadly speaking, even more fragile than a deaf boy.
Fortunately, this is a good thing in most stories. The deaf girl is sure to be there at the exact right moment to accomplish some goal that would have otherwise eluded our protagonists.
Well, not the deaf girl in the new Amazon Prime movie Pretty Lethal.
That deaf girl is a dumbass.
I'll need to get into spoiler territory for us to continue, so SPOILER ALERT for Pretty Lethal.
So Vicky Jewson's movie deals with five American ballerinas who are traveling through Hungary toward a competition when their bus breaks down in a remote location. There's the tough street one (Maddie Zeigler), the princess (Lana Condor), the goofy devout one (Avantika), the nervous one (Iris Apatow) and the deaf one (Millicent Simmonds).
Now, Simmonds is actually deaf. If you recognize her, it will be either from the Quiet Place movies or from Wonderstruck, though I didn't see the latter so it was only the former for me. And we all know her character had a special sort of advantage by being deaf in the Quiet Place movies.
Not here. In fact, her deafness does not actually factor into the plot in any way, except apparently for making her totally oblivious to things she should have picked up on, perhaps especially because she's deaf.
Now I don't want to make any assumptions about the deaf, but I would suspect they spend a lot of their time on high alert. They don't get the audio cues of danger that the rest of us get. So especially when they're in an unfamiliar place, I would assume, they remain very attuned to the environmental details they can observe, needing other indications of when there might be some sort of shift in the dynamics that might put them in harm's way.
But let's consider what happens with Chloe, the deaf girl in Pretty Lethal, when her four fellow ballerinas and their instructor come across a mysterious Hungarian mansion where they need to shelter from the rain and wait for help to arrive. The place is a sort of hotel/bar, and is peopled with seedy Eurotrash types who have been looking at them with a blend of lust and menace since they've arrived -- which should be enough, by itself, to raise her defenses.
So she and the instructor go upstairs to the bathroom, and while Chloe is in the bathroom, her instructor walks off down the corridor, snooping a bit in an attempt to figure out what she might need to protect her girls from. Turns out it's a lot: There's someone getting tortured in one of the rooms.
The instructor abandons her charge -- we must assume this is some sort of flight instinct -- to run back downstairs and try to gather up the girls so they can leave. It's not necessary to get into what happens down there.
Upstairs? Chloe gets out of the bathroom and sees a cute boy, at whom she immediately starts throwing herself. Hey, no one's saying the deaf girl can't be sex positive, but the deaf girl should, you would think, default to prudence in a situation like this. Instead, she doesn't seem to have any interest in where the woman who was just accompanying her has gone, and pretty soon she's making out with the cute boy.
The story sort of abandons her for a while as the girls downstairs are dealing with a different problem. This alone is pretty much of a disconnect. Due to the urgency of their situation, they sort of forget her. Less explicably, she sort of forgets them, unaware that any of this is going on downstairs.
Chloe might have eventually returned to her group, but she gets waylaid by some more Hungarians and taken off to stay in a room upstairs. I can't recall if this is by force or not, but let's just say Chloe is still going with it. She isn't concerned about what happened to Miss Davenport, her instructor, nor why she is being taken off to this other room rather than being reunited with her fellow ballerinas.
Instead she watches TV in this other room, which is where the other ballerinas find her, after quite a lot more has transpired for them downstairs, leaving them spattered with blood, little of it theirs.
I'm not saying that Chloe is blind in addition to being deaf, but she also doesn't seem to notice that the other dancers are caked in blood. When they first find her, she is resistant to leave because she is waiting for the cute boy to return to give her a tattoo. Huh? It's befuddling enough that the hearing ballerinas ask what they should do, and ultimately decide it's the problem of Apatow's character because she's Chloe's sister.
I guess in the confusion, they have not told the girl what happened to Miss Davenport (spoiler alert, she's dead), and when they finally do tell her, she doesn't believe them. Even though they are caked in blood, freaked out, and in a strange remote location in the backwoods of Hungary, with men who have been looking at them sideways and one woman (Uma Thurman) who doesn't really seem to be a sympathetic host.
At some point, Chloe does get on board and falls in line with the rest of the ballerinas, but she doesn't really contribute anything in terms of an especially high amount of courage, or any unique abilities, for the remainder of the narrative.
Although I've spent quite a few words here going off on these narrative choices, I should stipulate two things:
1) I liked Pretty Lethal. I see just about all of these genre movies, and this one stacks up favorably with them. It's not as good as the last movie like this I saw, They Will Kill You, only a week ago, but that it's even in the same discussion is pretty impressive.
2) Maybe Millicent Simmonds is tired of being the "special deaf girl" with supernatural wisdom or skills that belie her apparent limitations.
If you are a deaf actress, you know that you are going to be cast in a certain type of role, and that role will almost always reflect positively on you. It feels downright mean to take a deaf character and make her a dumbass. (And to be fair, I might be exaggerating Chloe's shortcomings just a little bit.)
But as thankful as you are to have an opportunity in this industry, you probably don't want to be typecast for the thing that makes you different. Just as Peter Dinklage no longer wants to play roles where the character is envisioned as short, maybe Simmonds doesn't always want to play a saint. She'll always have to play deaf -- that is, assuming she's appearing in any film grounded in realism -- but she doesn't always have to be a magical deaf girl who will save the day in the end.
Maybe sometimes, she just wants to play a dumbass.
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