#FROM victor

[catastr-sophie]

That poor traumatized man loves peaches because they remind him of the wallpaper in his childhood room…

[endiness]

victor saving jade in the season 3 trailer

[lore-gore]

Victor is an Age Regressor

So for those who don't know, age regression is when someone mentally regresses to a younger age, and it is sometimes used to cope with trauma. Age regressors will act childlike during the time period where they are regressed. Some of those behaviors include an inability to self soothe, whining, and rocking. Things that Victor can be seen doing.

Regression can in fact be triggered by memories of past trauma. It strikes me that whenever Victor remembers something he doesn't want to remember, the way he acts is very childlike in nature. Especially in the tunnel when he saw the puppet. He went from leading Tabitha to rocking on the floor frightened, having to be comforted by her.

Whenever I feel he has regressed I imagine a child speaking his lines, and guess what? His lines fit perfectly.

The way he gets grumpy feels more like a child pouting. Not to mention him having Jade play him a lullaby his mother used to sing to him.

Now, a lot of people have explained his behavior as him being autistic, which I can definitely see, but I feel it in my gut that he is also an age regressor.

And honestly it's kinda sad because he doesn't really have a safe place to regress. Sure, he has his room, but the monsters are still out there. Whenever he regresses he never feels safe. I remember seeing him crying in the cave and Tabitha comforting him and going 'get that poor boy a caretaker!!! Tabby, PLEASE he needs a caretaker rn.' Hopefully with the return of his dad he will be able to feel safer when regressing.

[takkytakk]

Maybe in some fucked-up way, this could be the key to getting the hell out of here.

[reasoncourt]

[philosophicalmisuse]

Victor from From and Autistic Coding in media

Just finished season 1 and a couple eps into season 2, enjoying it lots so far! Only spoilers for season 1 I think, maybe mild for season 2

Just seen a couple of people discuss Victor and Autism and neurodivergence in general and wanted to add my two cents

I reckon he's autistic-coded (and I think the distinction between is autistic and is autistic coded is important) -

- trouble socialising (esp with other adults, but having an easier time with kids - socialising well with people below and above ur peer group is fairly common)

- restricted interests (the peaches being the one thing he liked to eat jumped out to me - thought it was so sweet how donna made sure that he had some and that she was rationing them for him specifically, both so others wouldn't have them and so that he could have them regularly for as long as possible and genuinely took seriously how important it was and attempted to hold back other supplies in case they ran out to provide an alternative but was aware it likely wouldn't work - she looked at why he liked the peaches and accommodated his needs not just in terms of well this will keep him happy but in a caring way for him as a person, such a little thing but damn made me like donna so much)

- the visual language of how he's presented - wearing his (casual flannel) shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck and pants cuffed, just like how he did as a kid, holding onto an object from his childhood, posture that is overly "correct", slightly shambley walk, 'evasive' body language that avoids eye contact etc - ! important to specify here that I'm not saying all autistic people dress or move like this, I for one hate things touching my neck so you wouldn't catch me dead in a button up all the way to my neck, but this visual language/costuming/physicality is super common for male autistic-coded characters as a visual shorthand to express restrive patterns of behaviour/outsider from social norms of dress, so it jumped out at me right away. Two other examples that spring to mind are young Sheldon and elementary Sherlock Holmes

- the language/tonality he uses - often repetitive to express the rules while not always explaining why (example being when jade takes his violin and ransacks his room, he doesn't explain why jade shouldn't go into his room or how it made him feel, he visually shows distress and repeats the rule that jade violated, even when jade explains his pov - victor responds in his face to the comment I thought you were dead, seemingly understanding that that's reasonable, but it's not relevant to the rule as he isn't dead so he repeats the rule) - he's often fairly monotone/expressionless as well - I don't know how to explain this but some of his inflections/patterns of speech are very familiar to me in terms of how I and other autistic people I've met talk. There's something about how and where the voice goes up and down in a sentence that I can't really explain

- disliking change (eg. peaches)

And I'm sure there's more but these are the main ones I remember

NOW!!! onto my broader points

I have seen some people online argue that:

he's not autistic he's just traumatised

This is rational and I get it! He's presumably been alone since a very young age so not 'socialised', he's had to learn the rules of this place and stick to them or die and so on. The behaviours of cPTSD and asd have a large amount of overlap.

However, my first point would be that a traumatised autistic person (which is most autistic people tbh) look/act different from traumatised non-autistic people. Most autistic people that you meet are traumatised, and there's a lot of traumatised people who aren't autistic. Having cPTSD and having a trigger to a specific sound, for example, is different from having SPD and getting tired/stressed/having a meltdown from most sounds being too loud and your nervous system being unable to distinguish between a relevant loud noise and an irrelevant loud noise and giving you all noises at the same level and stimulating your nervous system to react to them the same, for example. In cPTSD your nervous system is likely also inflating lots of noises, because lots of noises were relevant to your survival in a traumatic environment - but in SPD (something many ASD people have and some argue may be a major facet of the disorder that has, until recently, been unhelpfully diminished in diagnostic resources) this would happen whether or not you were traumatised.

The collection of traits in the DSM is descriptive of a way of processing the world around you - and when people argue that Victor is autistic, they're saying that he is behaving in a way that appears to be characteristic of a certain combination of traits. Additionally, he was old enough to experience some socialisation, and had enough resources to experiment with other ways of dressing - there presumably have been other people that have come to the village over the years, as well. What I see in the character is a very traumatised autistic adult using patterns of behaviour that are explicitly autistic in order to survive in a terrible situation, HOWEVER I would argue that it doesn't matter very much

Regardless of whether he is or is not autistic (he's a fictional character and we can never have enough info to really know unless the characters or creators of the show explicitly say it, ofc) what is relevant in my opinion is that he is CODED to be autistic.

The way the character is presented is similar to a lot of tropes in media about how autistic characters are presented. Whether you think that the character in and of himself is or is not autistic, I think it's fair to say that the way he is characterised is similar to a lot of other male autisic-coded characters in media

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

It's important both in terms of how we analyse/interpret the specific media, and how this can impact social understanding of autism more broadly

First of all, it may tell us something about how Autism is portrayed in media. An autistic character in another piece of media who has not experienced the same levels of insane trauma in a horror setting is thought to behave similarly to a character who has experienced these things.

Secondly, it tells us about how the other characters in the world relate to Victor. Why do they instantly see him as being weird, when initially the only thing he does is simply have a conversation with a new resident? He's instantly seen as a threat by the dad, explicitly seen as weird by everyone else, where the young girl who murdered someone is seen as someone safe, and positive for taking care of the child and distracting them from the horrible new situation they find themselves in.

Honestly, he's initially presented as a sexual threat to both children - I've seen some ppl online refer to him as 'paedophilic'. Why is this?

I would argue it's because autistic traits, down to the way autistic people move and speak, are seen as inherently threatening and other. I don't even blame the people who do read him as predatory, as it's so common in media to be presented with people who look/behave like Victor ending up being creepy and weird. Autistic people are infantilised, seen engaging with children, and the audience is told they're weird - even the dad was so strongly hostile to Victor harmlessly talking to his child BEFORE he took him into the forest (something that I completely agree any parent would be reasonable for responding to extremely hostily). It was clear this was something Victor was used too as well.

This is a common trope. A weird, socially inept older person forms an unlikely friendship with an open-minded child - who is often discouraged from being friendly with this person, as they are viewed as sinister and a threat from adults in their life. This is used as a double-bluff - the real threat to the child is actually the young woman who the adults are fine with spending time with their child, as they view her as fundamentally non-threatening.

This enabled me, as a viewer, early on, to discount the information that was alluding to Victor being a threat - but its also a really frustrating trope, because it relies on the fact that audiences do see autistic patterns of behaviour/speech/movement as fundamentally other/threatening. Even if you subvert this trope by making the threat come from somewhere else, and tell the audience that really they're bad/foolish/wrong for thinking Victor was a threat, you're still using the same tropes that make real autistic people be viewed with suspicion simply for existing in the world. Victor is still portrayed as creepy, and still has to earn the protagonists trust in a way other characters don't. He, and other autistic coded characters, still start off in a deficit, at a negative, where other characters start off with a neutral or positive. This really does impact real life people as well!

Another trope that is used that is relevant is the 'weird' character having a special amount of knowledge about the problem at hand that other characters discount because of their weirdness (knowledge often initially only shared with an open-minded child character). This is so frustrating! I even remember this coming up in The Dressmaker, when the intellectually disabled character (I think? It was one of those very generalist disabled character presentations, to my knowledge) witnessed the crime but no-one thought to ask them who did it till the end, and initially presumed he had done it or something (I still enjoyed the movie tho). Its bizarre to me that none's asking Victor what he knows - he even expresses early on to the kid that noone listens to him or cares, from memory. I find this so frustrating, and is again really common - and is also a part of the othering of autistic coded characters - they're 'not of this world', but are part of both and none at the same time.

While this is something that many autistic people feel and experience, it's partially because we're ostracised from our peers because we're so 'weird', so it's really frustrating to see this replicated time and time again in fantasy, horror and thriller genres especially - it sort of reenforces a social standard that's causing the problem. Rather than create understanding and support the elimination of notions of 'weirdness', even if the character is important and initially creepy but not a threat, they're still not of this world. It's still reasonable to see them as weird, because they are weird. The characters are rational for responding to the autistic coded character as if there's something off, because there is - even if they're ultimately on the same side.

This also has real-world impacts. People discount likely threats in favour of fear of unfamiliar behaviour. For example, the whole predatory thing - autistic people are more likely to be victims of predatory behaviour, not perpetrators of it (for example, autistic women are 3x more likely to have been sexually assaulted than non-autistic women). However, there's these stereotypes in media where an autistic character is so weird that they're viewed as threatening - and, in some crime genre tropes, for example, the threat is confirmed. Even though most predators are stand up members of the community (compensating for their misdeeds via good acts) and people are surprised that they were perpetrators of horrific crimes - crime is often so horribly mundane - the media focuses on portrayals of mentally ill loners, utilising coding that is similar and sometimes the same as the coding of autistic characters. Not saying that no autistic person comments a crime of course, they demonstrably do, but utilising a media shorthand for violent/predatory criminals that is also used for autistic characters - as it is much more conforting for audiences to feel as if they would be able to tell from someone's weird behaviour if they're likely to be a threat - can have some really troubling real world consequences. Also not saying that no autistic coded character can possibly be portrayed as a villain - I really enjoyed Zac's plotline in Bones for example, especially the relationship that the two characters had - but it's the focus on these 'weird, socially inept' villians, over the far more common absolutely totally 'normal' person/family member/ local upstanding citizen that makes people disproportionately fear/stigmatise autistic ways of being

Then, other shows play off of this coding to 'subvert' it, reenforcing the connection along the way

All this being said, I really like Victor, I loved his relationship with Donna, and I'm really enjoying the show more broadly. However, I could defs see a lot of the narrative of s1 coming because of the shows use of autistic coded behaviours for Victor

I found it interesting that some fan theories have actually centred Victor's neurodivergence, and suggested that other characters are also neurodivergent and that might be why some of them are here/chosen - I find that interesting, especially because of the use of 'psychosis' in the show being a conduit for seemingly real voices of people who have passed away there

It will be interesting to see where they take it, and I'm excited to see what else happens in season 2 and even more excited for season 3 - but yeah, Victor is defs autistic coded, and some of those tropes do have negative knock-on consequences. Defs something that will impact my enjoyment of the show, depending on where they take it! It could be awesome and exciting and could be devastating or eye rolling etc but still excited to watch

[psychocharlie]

– Victor says we can’t go to sleep.

[kennys-friend]

Three different ways adults speak to Ethan.

[ofswordsandpens]

I fear that "fire bending didn't come easy to zuko" and "zuko isn't a prodigy" (both true) has somehow snowballed into "zuko is a bad or at best average fire bender".... which simply isn't true, especially by the end of book 3

[another-goblin]

[catastr-sophie]

So the Boy in White is evil I think.

We see him only making friends with children, who are easily trusting.

When Boyd and Sara were close to the Lighthouse he brought them to the Faraway tree to get them away from it.

He pushed Tabitha out the window to stop her from freeing children.

(SPOILER FOR S3E8 under the cut)

And he told Victor to hide the special items of the deceased so Victor wouldn’t be able to remember and warn new arrivals or get the grownups to help the children.

He also tried to get Christopher to go through the Faraway Tree to get rid of him.

He tells how the sacrificed children were told a story that gave them hope and they poured their hope into the symbol and it turned into the Tree.

In Season 2 a vision of Abby told Boyd that this place feeds on hope.

I think the Boy in White befriended the children and got them sacrificed, only to later feed on their hope.

Aternatively the kids got wise after the betrayal and somehow contained the Boy in White so he wouldn’t be able to hurt more kids on the outside.

[panthermouthh]

I’ve seen this comment a few times on my art here and on insta and I’m genuinely curious— WHERE did people get the idea that the Creature “just had creepy eyes”?? That Victor only ran away because the Creature’s eyes freaked him out?

I’ve seen people say this repeatedly and it couldn’t be further from the truth like. He is explicitly described as an eight foot tall cobbled together corpse with skin that barely covers his veins, yes his eyes are creepy but that would probably be the last thing anyone would notice about the Creature tbh 😭

[lore-gore]

Victor is an age regressor. No you cannot change my mind.

[takkytakk]

She used to play it when I was afraid. And I'd sit up here, just like this, and she'd play. At night, when we hid, when I heard the people screaming, she'd tell me to think about the twinkling stars. And then… I wouldn't be afraid anymore.

[reasoncourt]

dear from creators,

if victor doesn’t reunite with his father at some point, i’m killing myself in front of each and every one of you and changing the trajectory of your lives and the nature of ur relationships forever

[kurozu501]

genuinely how do you fumble something like yuri on ice. the show was so popular all over the world. tons of actual ice skaters were talking about it, iirc one professional ice skater even did a routine to a yoi song, it was wild. all they had to do was lean into it, make the movie and then a season 2. and instead they announce the movie, go radio silent for years before limply trotting out a "oh btw the movie's cancelled" today. just pathetic.