#//preemptive remark that these are my own thoughts on autism which are filtered through the lens of my life experiences

[heraldofzaun]

what are your thoughts on viktor and being neurodivergent? though like, obligatory disclaimer that if riot ever did come out and say that "hey! viktor is canonically [something]" that would be catastrophic but i think it is a little bit of fun for consideration

Oh! Well I like to think he's autistic, which is partially because I am too. (Of course in canon it would be catastrophic because haha, oh man, look at how they've treated Blitzcrank's biographies ever since they gave him an updated one. There's some coding in there, alright, and I am... not a fan...)

I’ve posted a lot of long posts recently (this is no exception) and this is also on a kind of tricky subject, so I’m readmore’ing it.

So anyways, while I have to admit that some of the reason why (my) Viktor is autistic is because I am - I think that you can make a general semi-convincing argument. Or I'm so wrapped up in my own interpretations that I can, at the least. Anyways, from here on out when I say Viktor I mean my personal take. Your mileage may vary on applying this to other interpretations.

(Also, thoughts on new lore Jayce's being kind of coded to be like, a stereotypical autistic dude? (If you have any I mean.) I don't like that Riot is doing it, of course, but I've seen a few good rehabilitative takes on it in fandom. @hamartio's Jayce springs to mind, because their Jayce has been developed over the years and also written by someone who like. Cares. Anyways, I have my own personal Jayce ideas that rely on his old lore so he's not really an asshole there, at least in those regards, so I don't really have many thoughts on new Jayce. I think new Viktor is... pretty coded as well, but it’s also insanely stereotypical. The whole “always working, always wants certainty, gets into automation not because he (primarily) wants to help those injured by catastrophes in Zaun but because the catastrophes interrupt his work” thing makes me uncomfortable. Maybe I’ll write sometime on why the rewrite of his lore fails, in my opinion, to hit upon the same themes of his first - would that be of interest to folks? Anyways, this parenthetical is too long.)

I think that autistic Viktor is cool and makes sense, somewhat because of the fact that the ways he goes about solving his problems are, er, unorthodox. (Of course I am not saying that the GE is because he’s autistic, because that’s stupid. This is why I’m kind of squirrely about talking so openly about what I think Viktor’s got going on, and why I don’t really trust if a non-autistic person headcanons him as autistic. There’s a lot of room for that headcanon to just reinforce the “autistic people are supergeniuses with no emotions that work based off of Facts and Logic” trope, and I hate that.) Since a lot of autism is about feeling adrift from/at odds with neurotypical society, I think that Viktor’s general solutions and also his idealistic leanings in the face of everything Zaun is tracks for that. Roboticization makes sense as a way to stop suffering and death, because it’s more achievable than individual feats of immortality through magic or whatever. Viktor doesn’t really get why people would be so opposed to it - he’s made it clear that while he dislikes his own emotions and wants them gone, he doesn’t expect others to cast off theirs. (Maybe he expected that when he was in the thick of his emotional pain, mostly because he couldn’t imagine others choosing differently than he at the time, but not in the current day.)

Of course, externally, when the scary cyborg man who admits to cutting off his own limbs says “no, being a robot is cool, you can keep your emotions even”, any Zaunite (or any person) is going to interpret that as “he is definitely lying”. Viktor doesn’t quite make that leap. (I have thoughts on the whole Theory of Mind concept and I don’t mean to say that Viktor can’t empathize - he does, and does too much - with others, but I think that in this instance he just can’t quite understand sometimes why people don’t believe him.) He also doesn’t quite get why people would be so attached to the bodies that they’re currently in, especially if he can make a mechanical replica. Or why people might want to die and pass into non-existence after a life well lived. (To him, personally, there’s always more to do. Also he’s terrified of death but that’s another topic.)

I also think that Viktor’s empathy is of the hyper- rather than hypo- kind, partially because I feel like outside of self-advocacy groups the mere concept of autistic hyperempathy is seen as like... impossible? It’s also because he generally seems to be kind of an emotional guy in canon before Stanwick, what with the lore saying that “almost no trace of the original man remained” in reference to Viktor reemerging as someone without emotions. That, combined with the fact that he was described as having a “hope to better society” before everything went down, kind of makes me believe that he was a naive idealist type. (Again, not that autism makes you naive, but...) But yes, hyperempathy. Hence "no pain, no wars, no suffering, no death” being part of his ideology for the Glorious Evolution. He gets pretty ripped up about people being hurt, and it’s really only gotten worse over the years as he’s grasped the full scope of pain in the world.

Personally, I write pre-Stanwick-incident Viktor as someone who is still somewhat awkward with expressing emotion, but it’s not due to him not having them. It’s due to the fact that the ways in which he naturally expressed them and in which he interacted with the world were just... seen as odd/different/etc. (I don’t think Runeterra has an autism diagnosis or particularly excellent psychology, even in Piltover and Zaun, so he just gets the “you’re a weird dude” treatment for his entire life.) Stimming or smiling a certain way or talking a lot about his interests or, you know, the general autistic existence is weird to most people around him, as it unfortunately is in real life. So he’s more reserved until you actually know him, because he’s just masking all the time. (Fun fact about my Viktor: he’s pretty expressive under that actual mask of his. It helps to not have to micromanage expressions all the time when he isn’t experiencing a bout of flat affect due to [gestures vaguely at everything else going on with his mental state], although he sometimes feels poorly about not being able to manage himself. But that’s his issues, and I think it’s good for him to show emotion.)

Side note - Stanwick was able to do such a number on Viktor due to: a) Stanwick being very charismatic and manipulative, on top of being an actually smart man and scientist - he’s really a great example of a “good Zaunite”, in the sense of being good at being what the culture rewards, b) Viktor actively dealing with the death of his parents and Stanwick being an older adult who’d treated him kindly and had never seemed put-off by Viktor’s oddities, and c) Viktor not realizing that he’d get backstabbed, because yes he knows that that happens in academia but Stanwick’s nice. Whether or not the outcomes would have been the same if Viktor were more competent at being “a good Zaunite”... well, probably not. Viktor ended up where he did because of who he is.

(Secondary side note: Viktor has a very strong and very black-and-white sense of what’s right and wrong, as well as general black-and-white thinking. You can see how that would have... not helped in the situations he was put through.)

This is getting kind of rambling, but I guess the point of this is that Viktor’s wanting to remove his emotions may be cloaked in the language of them being “inefficient” or “unhelpful”, which would feed into autistic stereotypes, but it’s really more of a matter of them being too painful and raw for him to process. He feels too much and hurts too much, and no amount of positive emotions in the world will (in his mind) make up for the pain he’s felt and will feel. So it’s better to not feel anything at all, isn’t it? At least then you aren’t overwhelmed by it all.

Viktor just hasn’t fit in with Zaun for all his life, really. Not as an odd child who can tell you all about science-fiction and techmaturgy, not as an odd and reserved teenager/young adult, not as a bright young doctoral student still dealing with grief but trying to make the best of it, and... not as the Machine Herald. But now he’s given up on trying to fit in, for better or for worse.

(Other miscellaneous and less serious autistic thoughts on him: generally a pretty fixed diet, partially due to being autistic but also due to what’s easily available in Zaun + what agrees with his stomach. A fan of weight and pressure - I like to think that the reason his outfit is like that is that he finds it comforting, and also that he has a weighted blanket or two around. Special interests of general techmaturgy, robotics, and science-fiction. He can talk for hours about any of those, and has. Both his parents were mildly spectrum-y, his mother a little bit moreso, so they just kinda assumed that him being him was out-of-the-ordinary and a bit strange but not something “horribly wrong”. Oh! And his third arm, which is under a little less conscious control than the rest of him, still stims sometimes when he’s working or otherwise not paying attention to it.)

This was very long and jumped around a lot, because I find it hard to give a convincing paragraph-by-paragraph argument about exactly why I think that Viktor is autistic, or rather why I headcanon him as such. But hopefully it was interesting! I just have a lot of thoughts on him, as well as the general state of autistic-coded or perceived-as-autistic-by-individuals (both allistic and autistic) characters in media and so it’s very hard to do anything concise without branching out into discussing other topics.