#Also yes I got the lyrics wrong it's fine don't worry about it lol

[jack-of-heartstrings]

Aaaah! I can definitely see all of those! Personally, the one that hit me like a freight train the other day was Luka, lol.

To elaborate:

Special interests: Music being the biggest one obviously.

Limited socialization: Based on everything we've seen, he has... no actual friends that are just-his? He gets along with Juleka's friends (though I say this and immediately suspect Juleka could easily be autistic too, lol, but ya know, spectrum, different traits in different people and all), but we've never seen or heard about anyone from his own school, not even a passing name drop or a photo in the background, etc. (Context if necessary: Juleka was held back a year, so she's in the French equivalent of "middle school" while Luka is in "high school", despite them being the same age.)

Even among their shared friends, Luka mostly hangs out with the band for band-related stuff, or just with Marinette. And he's fine with that as far as we can tell! But whether it's showing he might be bad at socializing with most people or doesn't actively desire more socialization or a mix of both, it still lends to the headcanon.

Trouble speaking at times/forced filter: It's obvious he's pretty quiet, but it's worth going back to remember he's literally told/shown us why, and within his first minute ever on screen, at that. He's got a tendency to blurt out the first thing that pops into his head if he doesn't hold his tongue, and it can be offputting to others sometimes. ("Hello Ma-ma-marinette.") He recognizes that, but it's easier to not talk than to be sure he avoids saying something wrong. (We don't see it much after Captain Hardrock, but there's debatably hints of it, like him genuinely worrying he might have said something mean while Akumatized in Silencer.)

Alternate communication: He also feels like he can better express himself and "makes more sense" via music, much moreso instrumental tunes than lyrics at that. And it's not just, oh he can match a mood to a tune sometimes, etc, no. He's deeply serious about it, does it constantly, and will fine-tune a melody over a significant amount of time trying to make it perfectly "match" what he wants to convey, despite the fact that music is literally subjective and there's definitely not actually any single objectively correct way to do that. In his mind, yes there is, and he'll know the correct sound when he finds it.

"Speaking his own language": Even when he does use words, the frequency of music metaphors is very high. Describing things via the "filter" of comparing them to a special interest is pretty common for autistic folks.

Skill at identifying emotions/putting things into words when he's focusing on explaining/etc, actually?: Listen. At a glance, these seem like the opposite of some common autistic traits, but that's actually literally why I'm arguing them as points toward this. I'm autistic, right? And I've been told many times over more recent years that people are awed by my ability to explain things extremely clearly. But literally the only reason I can now is because I was so bad at it for so long. I learned to overcompensate because I was so frustrated by never feeling like people understood my meanings. That Luka isn't just "good" at these things but better than most adults suggests to me that they're things he had to actively teach himself more than most people.

Honest almost to a fault: You don't have to be autistic to hate lying, of course, but the often-literal-minded aspect with autism often lends to extreme honesty, sometimes to a point of lacking discretion, because lying often just straight up does not occur to us. Even when it does, it can be hard both to keep details straight and to feign the "correct" social cues to support the lie when we're already struggling to socialize "correctly" when it's genuine. So this easily leads to an active distaste for lying in many. On the opposite end, "I'm honest so I expect you to be too" can lend to hating lies out of others, and "lying often doesn't even occur to us" can result in us feeling especially betrayed when we realize we assumed wrong.

I could probably figure out more, but this is just off the top of my head. X3 So yeah. Lukaaaaaa~

I've been getting training in ASD and I wanna write about my headcanon that Kagami has ASD but I'm curious of folks have any other characters they headcanon with autism? I've heard about Mari and Max but just curious who else 👀👀👀👀

[bartsugsy]

I hope the use of Seal lyrics was intentional Lo (I mean I'm pretty sure it was lol) cos "my power my pleasure my pain" distracted me from the great meta (to be?) post you were making! But back on topic I feel you on all the unresolved shiz, I just don't think the show think anywhere near as deeply into it as us! I do think more effort is put into Robron (and Coira) then other couples which translates into longer story arcs, so there's still hope.. pleasure and pain... lol!

oh, yk i just can’t resist throwing nonsensical song lyrics into things 

the show definitely doesn’t think about this shit as deeply as we do because… well, they’ve got other characters to worry about and we’re all out here like HERE’S 200 WORDS OF META ON THE SIGN IN THE BACKGROUND OF A SCENE WHERE ROBERT AND AARON ARE MAKING OUT 

(i say we but that was me. i did that. I DID IT AND I STAND BY IT)

sometimes i do think though that… even if yes, ok, OK FINE, none of these scenes were made to withstand the level of in-depth scrutiny we put them under and no, i never needed to write a 3000 word essay on the confusing characterisation of rebecca white when she’s clearly, in the crudest terms, more plot device than representative of an understandable human and as such it’s all just sort of futile, but… sometimes, just sometimes, i think the bigger picture ideas aren’t actually necessarily off base

ok and i just got this ask from another anon, so hopefully neither of you mind, but i’m going to put this in here, because this ties in to the point i’m going to attempt to make (that’s really just me validating my inability to be succinct and my love of meta) lmao:

anonymous asked:

but i think - because its a soap - robert and aaron are never going to resolve any of their issues in a satisfying way. because if they were resolved and dealt with then the show wouldn’t be able to use those issues for drama. so i can’t really see their reunion addressing any of the january stuff tbh

on some level, i agree with you. i totally do. on another, broader-picture level, i think that… i think i’ve been surprised by the level of cohesiveness in the storytelling for aaron and robert - like, it’s not the most tightly constucted thing in the world by any means, and this is obviously coming out of me coming from the glee fandom, where we had literally no cohesiveness ever and so i’m probably just over-impressed by even the most marginal attempts to write a meaningfully constructed longer form story, but… but i think, given that it’s a soap and given how much content they need to produce and given the inconsistent treatment of a lot of the characters on the show, aaron and robert’s relationship does get a decent amount of care put into it, on the whole, and sometimes that’s visible in the storytelling - like sometimes, a scene will happen that just sort of… slots a lot of things into place and calls back to meta we’ve been writing the whole time and… idk. like, you really do just need to look at rebecca as a character and compare the writing for her over the past year with the writing for aaron and robert, who have much more consistent traits and motivations.  

i think this is why i like writing meta for this show. because sometimes there’s a pay off, where the show will specifically highlight things we’ve been talking about and examining and make them explicitly canon. it’s super satisfying. the heavy handedness works (for me) for this purpose. it’s like taking our meta and saying to everyone ‘oh hey, that thing you were reading into is exactly what we were going for’. and the general audience will do this as well - everyone will have an opinion on what’s happening beneath the surface of some stuff, it’s just that they might mention it off-hand to someone they’re watching the show with whereas we sit down and spend three hours typing up an argument to support it based entirely on how we’ve interpreted that last three years of canon and then use it to try and convince people to feel the same way lmaoooo. it’s awesome. but those bigger picture ideas that maybe aren’t called out specifically 

like… don’t get me wrong, i don’t believe in the idea that they’re going to call back specifically to the january argument and take a big, in-depth delve into why that specifically happened and why it was some sort of turning point that they ignored in favour of being together and how that ultimately went wrong… i can’t imagine that’s happening lmao, that’s absolutely what our meta is for (which is fine). like… i don’t see them calling back to the specifics in any meaningful way (at most we might get some dialogue parallels bc the show loves those, as we know lmao)

but like… ok, some of this is going to come back to how early on did the show know they were going to break aaron and robert up, in all honesty. we know that iain has been intending to get rid of the whites… probably since the time he started? going by the interviews he was giving at that time? we know rebecca was brought on with some sort of plan in place for her character (to get in between robron lmao). obviously we can sort of… like, chicken or the egg, what came first - lucy announcing she was pregnant and them realising that rob and aaron would have to get married quickly, or iain deciding to go max feeling exploitation and get two weddings out of robron? this is all random extrapolation on events we know, because we can’t pinpoint when it became clear to them that they were going to do a wedding, followed by a big break up, followed by a big reunion and culminating in another, ~~~~real (so to speak)~~ wedding. but at some point, that would have been firmly in their plans. 

the january argument -

ok. ok fuck it let’s meta the january argument even though i literally said i wasn’t going to and that i wanted to wait until they got back together idc i don’t listen to me she doesn’t know what’s up

the reason i love the january argument so much as a turning point within the larger overarching story they’ve been telling is because it works so well as this big flashing harbinger of doom that the boys both ignore - it’s built up specifically from problems they have been having since right before they got engaged 

and look, i wanna write meta about all the arguments they have firstly from the reunion until ssw and then from in between ssw to the january argument, because i think the stuff that takes place when rebecca is in the village is very pointedly building towards what ultimately happens in january

and i think it’s clever because when you watch it for the first time, the fact that aaron is ultimately driven to violence and puts kasim in hospital and then ultimately gets arrested is what you’re left thinking about - it totally draws attention away from the things aaron and robert are saying to one another and the way that their argument(s) echo previous fights they have had around rebecca and aaron not understanding rob’s bisexuality and rob’s tendency to lie and scheme and rob’s defensiveness around his schemes and how much he has changed and is trying to change vs how much aaron needs from him and just… the ways in which they’ve been slowly falling apart. 

(and ok at some point i will write my actual meta where i actually quote the dialogue instead of making vague references to it, although i usually feel like it’s a safe assumption to think that you guys know where i’m sort of pulling these ideas from when i talk about this shit - specifically, stuff i want to talk about includes the things aaron has said about rebecca and robert’s interactions with her, the moment robert talks about his scheme as something that is no longer about andy and absolutely about the money, aaron’s understanding of the robecca kiss, rob talking about how aaron can’t be happy and that he screws things up (which is horrible foreshadowing for kasim), rob yelling about aaron walking away from arguments and not recognising the change rob has made and the way that rob literally brushes his kiss with rebecca under the table, aaron literally saying that he doesn’t like the person he is around robert because of how things have played out with rebecca ec. etc.)

anyway, they just… i’ve fully written about this before, but the kasim stuff acts as a distraction both for robert and aaron - who, before aaron’s arrest, are having a tentative conversation where rob is gently pushing for them to still go to vegas to try and work things out and aaron is absolutely not convinced. after aaron gets arrested and then gets released, the next scene they have is aaron trying to give robert an easy out and robert point blank refusing - over the course of the three episodes, from aaron getting arrested to aaron giving the police a new statement, rob makes multiple references to fighting for their relationship even if aaron doesn’t think it’s a good idea - literally says that he’s not going to stop fighting for them, which is important but also sort of conveniently skims past the point that this argument didn’t occur in a vacuum and at no point have they faced up to what happened to bring them there between the two of them.

when, during the reveal, aaron says that rob was the one who pushed for this, you can sort of see where he’s coming from in a sense. i think aaron’s impending sentencing also made it harder for them to focus on what the real issue was (or rather, made it way easier to ignore, because they were too busy being terrified of losing one another) - but even then, rob decides to throw a surprise wedding because in canon we know that aaron is panicking about leaving robert and losing him completely - which is ultimately what happens, both exactly in the way aaron feared, but also not at all because rob’s motivation to cheat is, as we all know, entirely about aaron (or rather, about both rob’s feelings for aaron and rob’s horrible decision making/tendency towards lashing out impulsively when confronted with things he doesn’t know how to deal with like a normal human and fucking up his and other people’s lives in the process). aaron’s fears that rob would want someone else were unfounded but those fears also sort of led him to underestimate how much of a toll his getting sent to prison would have on robert and so, in the most perverse and unexpected way, his fears about what robert would do given rob’s behaviour up until that point, ended up being spot on.

all this is to make a point that the january argument played a massive role in robert and aaron getting married the first time round and also led them both down a road where they were distracted from what should have been the ultimate sign that things weren’t working and thus didn’t take the opportunity to fix it, rather let things get dangerously and disastrously out of control. i remember a lot of the meta around the time of the jan argument pointing out that things hadn’t been resolved and that they would be resolved at some point - i saw a lot of people talk about an immediate resolution. i think my instinct was that it would take them a little longer - maybe a month max, but that things would be worked out before the wedding. the fact that the wedding wasn’t legal was like this big red herring - it made us all believe that the only reason they’d have a second wedding would be to legalise things. but oh, oh no, no - little did we realise at that point that the whole first wedding was just another distraction (a very beautiful and romantic distraction, but a distraction nonetheless). the first wedding wasn’t a random break from the misery they’d had between that point and ssw, it was a symptom. once again, robert finding a way to push through their issues, to make it more about their love and the fact that they want to be together, and aaron following because that’s what he wanted too - neither of them wanted to deal head on with any of their shit.

uh, taking things right back to my original point of ‘how much of this will we actually see resolved when they get back together’ - i mean, it’s difficult to say? because on the one hand, it depends on what story the show wants to tell with them next and on the other, it depends whether they want to sort of just brush their issues under the carpet and pretend they never happened (worst case lmao). i think, though… i mean, i don’t know, i actually genuinely don’t want to speculate at all on what we’ll ultimately see because down that road leads madness and also an inevitability that we’ll all get it wrong, as we did before with both the jan argument and the purpose of the first wedding, for instance. i think, particularly because it is something i’m looking forward to, i also don’t want to put any expectations on it, really? i’d rather just watch it as open-mindedly as possible. which is also why i want to wait until after i watch it until i really write my meta around this break up, because then i can sort of shape my opinions about what we’ve been shown and where they’ve taken things. i don’t want to try and assume they’ll deal with x or they won’t deal with y or they’ll have them do this or whatever.

having said that!!! that doesn’t stop us from looking at what’s been done so far - the wedding, prison and the ons happened over six months ago now, so we’ve got enough distance from it to say that… look, rob and aaron had so much misery and so many problems from ssw onwards and they ended up going through a massive break up. so big-picture wise, it’s logical that all that misery was intentional. it wasn’t just fuelling the andy plot or whatever, it was there as a build up to ultimately splitting aaron and rob up and making it last a while (even if they hadn’t decided at that point to actually break them up - it’s chicken and egg, they would have known what they’d put them through up until that point and understood that this could realistically ultimately lead to a break up). the january argument wasn’t resolved because it couldn’t be, because that would be counter-productive to the eventual plan of separating them. the first wedding was rushed and not legal and the reason for it being held was literally LITERALLY bc aaron was afraid rob would cheat - because again, that wedding wasn’t going to be the one that lasted. there had to be problems there.

basically - yes we absolutely put more thought into this shit than the show does but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the thought we put into it is… wrong? or will lead to us not feeling satisfied? because the way that things have gone wrong with robron so far have led to a break up. it feels like a safe assumption that they’re not going to go through a massive break up again after they get back together at the beginning of 2018, so on some level somewhere, it seems like a safe assumption that we’re not going to have rob kissing his ex to get money, or aaron doing a miserable 6 week prison stint, or robert knocking someone up etc. basically, i guess what i’m saying is… the pain wasn’t for nothing? it was there to play a function in the story and while i doubt that aaron and rob are gonna get back together and the show is gonna be like ‘ok well their problems are fixed now so that’s nice’, they’re going to be writing with a different eventual goal to the one they’ve had this year?

this wasn’t even ur original question i just took this to an entirely different place lmao. sorry. i guess what i’m trying to say is i’m not particularly concerned about getting a final resolution on rob and aaron’s issues, but the writing for them will change as the direction of their story changes, so. the reason i’m waiting is more because i’m waiting for that direction to stop being “keep them apart” and start being “get them back on track and prove they can be together”. which is sort of… the next step? i guess? regardless of whether or not they have problems (and it’s a soap so u know they will), the story needs to shift from a break up to a big second wedding - the one that you assume will last more than a month (because they’re not stupid - they know there’s only so much you can wring out of a thing and they’re already pushing it). so… yeah. that’s what i mean when i talk about this particular storyline wrapping up.

i could just keep that last paragraph and delete the rest and you would still have your answer but im obviously not going to do that.