#& also depends on like. what you hc her aspec-ness to look like as well

[the--highlanders]

whenever I think about zoe being aspec it's always like. obviously to an aspec viewer there's a lot about her that's relatable, especially in the wheel in space, where she relates to other people so differently and experiences relationships in a way which she knows is non-normative, but which she can't 'fix' and doesn't altogether hate - she just hates the way she's perceived. and over the course of her travels she doesn't change herself, just becomes more comfortable with relating to others as she is, and that lets her open up more. I'm preaching to the choir here ik ik you get it.

but from an in-universe perspective the way she relates to people is explicitly down to her training, rather than (exclusively) anything about zoe herself:

which obviously doesn't negate the way she comes across to the audience! but it /does/ make things interesting in-universe, because presumably the emotions she's been encouraged to neglect include anything approaching sexual/romantic attraction. she's probably been trained out of questioning that side of herself along with everything else.

so if you want to explore aspec zoe I just feel like that potentially leaves you with a scenario where she starts travelling with the tardis, starts working through all the parts of her humanity she's been missing out on, starts trying to figure out what attraction means for her, and there's just. nothing. which would throw her for a loop, right!! she's trying to reclaim all the parts of her that have been neglected, and she's still left with a gaping hole where other people have /something/. is this something she'll never fully develop, like gemma told her, or is this just an innate part of her? so she ends up coming around to the desperation to feel something and the difficulty of identifying an absence of feeling, and ultimately to having to learn to embrace it not because of her upbringing but in spite of it.