#also!! this is not a series about six autistic men living in one house...... but it's a series about six autistic men living in one house

[blatantprinterpropaganda]

when tee-gun and tee-off are venturing out into the dark because they hear odd noises and there might be a ghost and then they find tee-singto sitting in the dark... i see you, he's coming to me reference!

[alarawriting]

Inktober 2020 #24 - Dig

This comes from the latest incarnation of the very first novel I ever wrote.

When I was 10 I was blown away by a book called “The Girl Who Owned A City”, about a girl my age trying to survive after a plague killed all the adults. This predated the TV/comic series “Jeremiah” by a good bit. The book had a lot of weird shit in it that I now know is libertarian/objectivist bullshit, but at the time I was amazed by it. So, of course, I wrote my own version of the concept, “Below”, which was terrible because I was in 7th grade and in those days, without the Internet, we all sucked when we were young. Then when I was 13, I wanted to enter a contest for teen novel writers, and my mom “helped” me by completely rewriting Below into a totally different, equally terrible work that was terrible in a very different way.

Sometime in my 20′s, I started a rewrite, more or less using the plot skeleton of the original but completely rewriting from the ground up, but I only got, like, two chapters into it. In 2017, I picked up the rewrite again, and would probably have gotten farther with it if not for the 2018 cancer diagnosis. One of the things I did was to add an explicitly autistic character as a counterpart to the main character, who, being that she was originally based on me, is an undiagnosed autistic girl who more or less successfully fakes being NT most of the time. Andy Thorn is a boy, does not successfully fake being NT pretty much ever, and was diagnosed as autistic at some point in his life. He’s also anosmic because my older son is and I wanted to explore how not being able to smell might affect a kid in a world without adults, after a plague.

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The house was like most of the other houses Andy had visited. One window was smashed, but the front and back doors were still locked, and aside from the broken window, there was no evidence anyone had gone inside. “Stay, boys,” Andy told his dogs. They’d led him here, and he didn’t question their noses, but it was good to get independent corroboration.

He used the stepladder he’d been carrying around in the cart attached to his bicycle to climb up to the broken window. Carefully he reached inside, unlatched the lock on the window, and screwed two clamps to the lower rail of the window sash. With the clamps attached, he was easily able to open the window enough to slide inside without hurting himself on broken glass. The front door was deadbolted, but the deadbolt could be opened with the twist of a knob – it didn’t require a key. Andy opened the door and let his dogs in, and then pulled in his cart.

Clifford and Updog immediately began sniffing around, exploring the house. “Clifford. Find the dead thing. Find dead, Clifford.” Tail wagging, Clifford went in search of dead people. “Updog. Heel.” Updog took the appropriate position. “Good boy. Let’s go.” He followed Clifford, and Updog followed him.

They were in the master bedroom, of course. Two of them this time, two men. Their rotting bodies lay next to each other, as if they had huddled together before the end had come.

Andy was here to make a bargain with them. He didn’t need to talk out loud, because they were dead and couldn’t hear him, and because he knew they wanted what he had to offer. Or would have wanted it, if he had been able to make the deal when they were alive on behalf of when they were dead. The dead wanted to be buried. They didn’t want to rot in the pajamas and nightgowns or sometimes naked in the bedsheets that he found them, bringing maggots and disease to the homes they had loved when they were alive. They wanted to go down in the ground and have a stone to mark where they’d been laid to rest. And they would pay him in the bounties of their home, canned goods and medicines and other things Andy could make use of and that they couldn’t anymore.

Stealing was wrong. Andy didn’t like the looters any more than he liked the gangs. The looters stole from people who weren’t alive any more – generally speaking people who had died in a hospital, far away, because they stayed away from the houses that smelled like death – and the gangs stole from the looters. Stealing was wrong, even if you were doing it to survive, because it was wrong. Wrong things didn’t stop being wrong just because you felt like you had to do them. Andy had found another alternative. He performed a service for the dead, and the dead repaid him.

He found bedsheets in the linen closet. Wearing his gloves, which he never forgot because he hated touching anything because everything had germs on it, Andy wrapped the first body in a bedsheet, and then the second one. They didn’t fall apart too much. The skeletons were strong. Some of the meat had rotted enough to fall away from the bone, but it was stuck in the pajamas so it didn’t fall away from the body, and then it was all wrapped up in the bedsheet. Another bedsheet, he carried out to his cart and lined it, and then pulled the cart to the bedroom.

It was hard for a 10 year old boy to move the dead body of an adult man. It involved a lot of pushing and pulling, and eventually, the body fell off the bed onto the cart. Two dead bodies would be too much to carry, so Andy moved the first one first, going back to the front door. “Don’t worry,” he told the dead man. “Your friend comes next. You won’t be alone.”

Outside, he dug in the dirt. Clifford and Updog helped. They liked to dig. For sanitary reasons a grave should be six feet deep, but Andy wasn’t even six feet tall, and there was no way he could dig that much. He dug down about a foot and a half, wide enough for two bodies to lie next to each other, long enough that they could lay mostly straight without having to curl up a lot. It took hours. Not as long as it had taken the first time he did this, when it was his mom and his dad that he was burying; he was stronger now, even if his hands were sore and calloused from all the digging, but it was still hard and it still took half the day.

When he was done digging, he tumbled the body off his cart and into the shallow grave, and then went back for the second body. That one was dumped into the grave too, lying half on top of the first body. Then Andy started putting the dirt that he’d taken out back on them, forming a mound.

He ate two meals there at the house, while he was digging. The cheese that had gone bad in the fridge was covered with mold, but the mold didn’t go all the way into the hard cheese, so he was able to get it all off with a cheese planer. The bread in the pantry was moldy too, but there was an ancient hard baguette that was too crunchy and tough to have grown any mold. Water still ran from the taps, though the hot water was all gone by now. Hard baguette plus water made softer, more edible baguette, and cheese where he’d cut all the mold off tasted weird but satisfied his hunger.  For his second meal he ate cold vegetable soup with milk made from powder, and had a dessert of a can of cherry pie filling.

There wasn’t any dog food in the pantry. They hadn’t had a dog. Most houses Andy visited didn’t have a dog, and the one he did find, the dog had eaten most of the old man’s body, making it very hard to collect all the pieces of the guy to bury them. He’d released the dog; as much as he liked dogs, it was a small yappy dog who barked at him and his dogs a lot and also growled at his dogs, so letting it free to join a wild pack was probably better than making Clifford and Updog jealous or stressed out. Andy did find canned Vienna sausages and canned tuna fish. He liked to eat those things himself, but Clifford and Updog needed meat in their diet; Andy could survive without it as long as he ate things like powdered milk and peanut butter, things with the protein he couldn’t get from most vegetables. So he fed the canned meat to his dogs. It wasn’t very much; they’d need another meal when they all got home.

It was close to evening as he finished shoveling dirt onto the mound. He heard a whistle, and turned. Three boys were standing outside the fence. He was face-blind, so he couldn’t tell from looking at them if he knew them from anywhere. One was a littler kid, maybe seven or eight, but the other two were around his age, 10 or 11 or so. One of the kids his age was white; the other two boys looked like they were from India or Pakistan or something. All three of the boys were wearing hoodies that had some kind of green blob painted on them, that looked as if maybe it was trying to be the same shape each time but whoever had had the can of spray paint wasn’t a good enough artist to be consistent. “Shit, dude,” the white boy said. “Did you just dig a grave for some deads?”

“Yes,” Andy said.

“This your house then? I thought this was the house where the gay guys lived.”

“Is that why they died together?” Andy said.

“Didn’t you know them?” the older brown-skinned boy said. When he talked, Andy recognized him. It was Nish Varma, who’d been in most of his classes with him. “How did you not know they were gay?”

“I didn’t know them,” Andy said. “I looked through all the envelopes in the house to find their names and I wrote them on this rock.” He showed the boys the rock he had written the men’s names on, in crayon because Sharpie markers didn’t stick to rocks as well as crayon did. Andy kept crayons in his pocket for that reason.

“What were you burying them for then?”

“That’s what I do,” Andy said. “I bury the dead. Stealing is wrong so when I need food, I go to houses that have dead people in them, and I bury them.  That’s a service, so I take the food they left as a repayment. That’s better than stealing. There’s nothing wrong with bargaining for what you need and working hard to provide a service and getting paid for it.”

The little boy said, “How can you stand how bad it stinks? We don’t go to houses with dead people! There’s flies everywhere and it smells awful!”

“I can’t smell anything,” Andy said.

The white boy said, “Seriously? You can’t smell that? What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me is called anosmia,” Andy said. “It means I have no sense of smell. It’s like being blind or deaf except for smell.”  He gestured at his dogs. “My dogs here find the dead people houses for me. Dogs don’t mind dead people smells.  So I bury the dead bodies. You’re supposed to make graves six feet deep but that takes grownup men a long time to do and ladders so they can get out, so I don’t dig as deep.”  Andy had suspected that the main reason the houses he visited were usually untouched and unlooted – at most, a broken window or a jimmied door, but no food taken – was that people with a sense of smell couldn’t stand it, and as long as there were still houses where the owners had died in the hospital and so there were no dead bodies on the premises, other kids weren’t desperate enough to go to the houses of the dead.  He knew dead people supposedly smelled bad; he just had no idea what a bad smell was actually like, since he couldn’t smell anything.  But this was the first time he’d had it confirmed.

The white boy whistled again. “But still! You can lift dead grownups and you can dig a hole that big? You must be ripped, man.” He leaned on the fence. “Look, me and my dudes here aren’t here to get on your stake and take the food here. I can see you’ve got big dogs, and you look pretty tough.”

That surprised Andy. Most people didn’t think he looked tough. He used to get bullied a lot. “Maybe I got pretty tough from a lot of digging,” he agreed. Or maybe they were fake complimenting him in a sarcastic way and it was really bullying. Andy could never tell if that was what kids were trying to do until they started laughing. But he preferred to give people the benefit of the doubt and take their word for it until they proved otherwise.

“I’ll just bet,” the white boy said. “That’s why we’re here to recruit you. The Green Bears could use a strong dude like you.”

“You wouldn’t have to dig any more graves,” Nish said. “When you’re a Bear, you get fed.  We’ve got access to gas-powered ranges that are still on, so we get cooked food.”

“We had spaghetti yesterday,” the little boy said. “With sauce!”

“Yeah, and me and my brother are vegetarian but the kids who aren’t vegetarian got meat sauce.”

“And you can live in your own house, since the Civic Center got too full for any more guys,” the white boy said. “The Bears are fucking huge, man.”

Andy winced. “That’s a curse word. You shouldn’t say that word.”

“Oh, like my mommy and daddy are around to wash my fucking mouth out with fucking soap? Fucking shit damn on a bastard son of a bitch. Who’s gonna fucking stop me?”

“No one,” Andy said, “but wrong things don’t stop being wrong just because no one can stop you doing them.”

“Fucking hell, dudes, we got ourselves a real Boy Scout here,” the white boy said, and Nish and his brother and the white boy all laughed.

“No,” Andy said. “I was never in the Boy Scouts.” The other boys laughed harder. Andy scowled. He knew they were laughing at what he said, and he was pretty sure it was probably in a nasty, making-fun-of-him way, but as usual he had no idea why they thought what he’d said was funny.

“Andy’s special,” Nish said, leaning on the fence. “If he doesn’t wanna swear I’m cool with that.” Nish hadn’t been one of the kids who’d bullied him in class. He had never talked to him or tried to be friends with him either, but at least he hadn’t bullied Andy. “How about it, Andy? Come join us!”

“No, thank you,” Andy said politely.

The white boy scowled. “Dude. You have no idea what you’re passing up.”

“That’s okay,” Andy said. “I don’t believe in stealing. Gangs go around stealing things from other kids, so I don’t want to join one.  And I don’t believe in hurting anyone unless they hurt me first.”

“Bullshit,” Nish said. “In third grade you hit the teacher with a chair.”

Andy winced. He had done it because she took his book away while he was reading about dogs, even though he was already done with his assignment, because it was math class and he wasn’t supposed to be reading in math class. It had been totally unfair and triggered a complete emotional meltdown. He’d been suspended for three days and had had numerous Talks with his parents during that time. “I have a bad temper,” he admitted. “That doesn’t mean I think what I did was right.”

“I think you’d better reconsider,” the white boy said. “Carrie doesn’t like it when we report to her that some guy didn’t want to join the Bears. She’s psycho, man.”

“Who is Carrie?”

“Carrie Mulhaney. She’s Rich’s younger sister and second in command. When guys say they won’t join the Bears, she burns their houses down.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Andy said.

“I’m not fucking with you, man. I’m serious. She will burn your fucking house down.”

“With what?” Andy said. “Gasoline? Wood that’s on fire? Alcohol?”

“Are you serious?” the boy said. “With whatever! What does it matter?”

“My dogs are trained to smell dangerous things for me,” Andy said. “Fire is a smell they’re trained on. Gasoline is a smell they’re trained on. Natural gas is a smell they’re trained on. I don’t know of anything that can be used to burn down a house that isn’t a smell they’re trained on.” He smiled, with all his teeth, because a couple of kids in his class said that when he smiled with all of his teeth he looked like a psycho and he should stop doing that, except that right now, these boys were threatening him so looking like a psycho so they would leave him alone was a good thing. “I have guns upstairs in my house. If my dogs alert me that someone is bringing a dangerous smell to my house, I’ll take my dad’s rifle and I’ll shoot whoever is on my property. And dogs can smell a dangerous thing from a long way away. I could tell you all about how good dogs are at smelling, if you want.” Most kids never wanted to hear him talk about dogs. Occasionally adults would listen to him, but there were no adults anymore.

“Don’t let him get started,” Nish said. “If he starts talking about dogs he never shuts up.”

“Your funeral, man,” the white boy said. “If you’re saying no, you’re saying no, but I betcha Carrie isn’t worried about your guns.”

“That’s good,” Andy said. “If she’s not worried about them, then she won’t take precautions and it’ll be easy to shoot her if she comes into my yard.”

“Whatever,” the white boy said. “Come on, dudes, let’s go. We don’t need this loser anyway.”

“Weirdo,” the little boy said. “Creepy weirdo. We don’t even want him in the Bears.”

They left. Andy brought his dogs back into the house, sat down on the dead men’s plush, soft sofa, and called his dogs up on to the sofa with them. Then he hugged them while he cried. Emotional confrontations upset him, a lot. He’d gotten better at controlling his temper since third grade, and he could hide the fact that he wanted to cry until he was alone or with a safe grownup, but he couldn’t keep himself from crying indefinitely. Updog lay his head and paws down on Andy’s lap, which was heavy but comforting anyway, and Clifford snuggled close so Andy could hug him and cry against his fur.

After he was done crying, it was time to take his payment and go home. His dogs needed food, and he had candy bars at his house that he was saving for stressful times like this. He loaded his cart with the powdered milk and all the cans he could fit, as well as a bunch of fitness food replacements like energy bars and protein powder. Maybe tomorrow he’d come back for the rest of the cans; he didn’t know how fast dead smell cleared out of a house, though, so it was possible that other kids would hit the place before he had a chance to.

It was dark, and Andy had a hard time finding his way in the dark, but he trusted his dogs to know the way. “Home, Clifford. Home, Updog,” he said, and they trotted in front of him, pulling just hard enough on their leashes to lead him forward.  Really, he was only holding their leashes to make them feel secure, because they were trained with leashes; he knew they would walk with him if he let go of the leashes, and it was hard to pull his heavy cart with one hand and hold onto two big dogs’ leashes with the other, but he did it anyway because his dogs expected it and he know how upset he got when things happened that he didn’t expect, so he imagined his dogs felt the same way.

[saint-severian]

Dune - Chapter 1

Worldbuilding presents a challenge for fiction-writers whose worlds go beyond the familiar. The problem is this: how to flesh out a fictional universe with realistically deep and realized background and details without constantly dumping information on the reader as if in a textbook. Although it would be hard to say that Herbert totally avoids this kind of long-form description, he does gracefully justify it. We, the readers, learn in the first chapter about the political intricacies of the universe of Dune because those intricacies are directly relevant to our protagonist right from the outset. Paul Atreides, our guy, is an elite. His parents are elites, and everyone he interacts with in the introductory is an elite in their respective field. His existence is centered, with no ambiguity to him or us, around his future career as a political elite. But he is not a politician, and though, as we will see, his father has to take on a role comparable to a politician, this is quietly a distasteful necessity, an offense to what Paul would call his “sense of rightness”. More on that later. 

The Atreides family are not elected politicians. They are aristocrats, who, as we learn in the second paragraph of the text, have lived in “Castle Caladan”, which takes its name from the planet itself, for twenty-six generations. Paul’s ancestors have ruled over an entire planet for more than five centuries. He’s old money. And despite the fact that we learn later that his House is not great by the standards of the galactic Imperium to which it belongs, his father, Leto Atreides, is a widely popular man among the other elites. In this one fact much of the plot is derived. First, we realize that Paul is not the hero of a rags-to-riches story. He is not an underdog, not a challenger in the grand scheme of things. Just the opposite- he is a fifteen-year-old boy who is placed and prepped to become an extremely powerful man. As we will learn, it is more than his external environment that puts him in this position. The second implication of the high status or popularity of his family is that, as Herbert says, “a popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful”. The jealousy of the powerful for Paul’s family will put in effect events that determine Paul’s fate and the fate of the human race. 

Under the (assumed) pretext of the Duke Leto Atreides’ rising popularity and competence, he is assigned a new charge. The ‘Padishah’ Emperor (a word meaning “lord of kings”) has chosen Duke Leto, his feudal vassal, to govern a poor, provincial planet in his name. The planet, called Arrakis, is known for two things: it is extremely harsh for human life, being a world entirely of desert, and it is the sole source of a precious resource that is required across the Imperium for everything from space travel to life-extension. This important substance, “mélange”, is usually called simply “spice”, and much of Dune will revolve around it. Already the obvious real-world parallel must be observed: the precious resource required universally in the gigantic economy which is found in a poor desert country - it’s a metaphor for oil, of course, and Arrakis, the desert planet, is a stand-in for the Middle East, and its primitive and Islamic-influenced inhabitants, the Fremen, represent the wilder elements of the Arab world. Not to waste any time - yes, this parallel is legitimate and not at all a secret. But Dune is not an allegory for one particular time and place. It is, like all myth and fiction, applicable to many times and many places. 

Although we do not yet know exactly why, a strange woman who is regarded highly by Paul’s mother Jessica, has come to visit Paul and administer a brief test. The test lasts only seconds, perhaps more than a few minutes, but Paul’s life is in the balance - if he fails the test, he will die. Knowing this, his mother nonetheless consents. Paul is assured that she passed the same test long ago, and just before she leaves the room, Jessica tells her son to “Remember you’re a duke’s son”. We quickly see the relevance of this reminder when the nature of the test is revealed. The old woman tells Paul that she is testing him for humanity as he is threatened with a weapon that kills only animals, a “gom jabbar”. Paul is disgusted that she would suggest he - the son of a duke, as his mother just reminded him - would be subhuman. I’ve always loved her response to his outrage: “Let us say that I suggest you may be human”. 

Upon my first reading, I interpreted the fact that the tiny, needle-like gom jabbar was poisoned with a substance that was lethal only to the subhuman. This is not the case - it’s not the blade itself that is lethal only to animals, but instead the weapon would only be used on an animal, because only an animal would fail the test and receive the punishment of the poisoned blade. And what is the test? Simple: delayed gratification. Put your hand in a box and don’t pull it out, even while the box gives you excruciating pain. If you fail the test and pull out your hand, you will be stabbed and poisoned and immediately die. Control your urges and pass/live, or give in to your instincts and fail/die. Already we’re on a great track: Herbert has, in the first chapter of his book asserted that not all humans are human, that some are just animals, and that the real dividing line between these two is self-control. This judgement does not bode so well for the innately uninhibited members of the sapient population. Herbert declares, through the mouth of the representative of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, that those who are incapable of restraint are subhuman. Let’s take a look at this fascinatingly fascist matriarchy of manipulators. 

Old Gaius Helen Mohaim, the old crone in question, tells us after Paul passes his test with flying colors that her sisterhood is a surviving descendant of a series of “schools” that were founded a very long time ago, after an event that left humanity without the use of “thinking machines”, and thus with a lot of responsibility on our hands to make up for the absence of what had become the crutch of computers. Here is another key concept of the Dune universe - the idea that computers (and many other things) are crutches that allow human beings not to think or act for themselves, but instead to rely upon external systems and tools that do their work for them, and as a result leave them vulnerable for “other men with machines” to make slaves out of them. 

Although there is another, apparently all-male school that focuses on “pure mathematics” (an autistic and male pursuit), the Bene Gesserits’ focus is politics, as Paul surmises on “remarkably few clues”. He had to guess that the Sisterhood’s business was politics, despite the fact that he is a political elite, his mother is a member of the Sisterhood, and she had been training him in their ways. The strategy of the BG is covert manipulation of political elites (this should conjure up a list of real-world parallels) ... by, for example, assignment of a sister to become the consort of a duke and the mother of his child, for example. They are an all-female sect that engages in a feminine form of politics, a passive form of politics based around manipulation and deceit. The fact that they are a purely feminine organization in their essence and substance justifies their desire for a masculine version of their power, hopefully a masculine element they can control like anyone else. This masculine version of the Bene Gesserit is called the Kwisatz Haderach, the “one who can be in many places at once”. While the Bene Gesserit can access the “feminine avenues” of their ancestry via blood memory, they can only access their feminine ancestors. The males, and by extension the male perspective, is forever closed to them. But not to the Kwisatz Haderach. The real biological link to these concepts are that, while women have an XX chromosome, and are thus entirely female, men have XY, and are really only half ‘pure male’. Males have something females don’t, but not the other way around. Although males have the capacity to be passive, and thus to take on the aspect of the Bene Gesserit, whose existence is passive despite its great importance and power, they are also endowed with the active element, forbidden to the feminine. This pure male essence is not only unknowable to the female/BG, it is terrifying to them. 

In this several myths are invoked. First there is the Dionysian image of the male leader surrounded by female sycophants in the Kwisatz Haderach as the male apotheosis of the Bene Gesserit coven. Second there are the various themes of the Great Goddess of the feminine, and the conquering aspect of the masculine, embodied in the myth of Apollo among many others. Notably missing from the story so far is a snake motif- an element central to the Apollo myth and to Great Goddess figures everywhere. But there will be, so look out for it. 

However, many are called but few are chosen to become the Kwisatz Haderach. And, although Paul has passed the first test, those who try to fulfill this role and fail are not forgiven. 

[mullercells]

I have never been a big fan of television or movies.  The thought of encountering new ones, in particular, filled me with palpable dread. And I avoided people’s TV or movie recommendations at all costs – the time from the first recommendation of Firefly to me to the time I actually watched it was twelve years.

(Recommendation: Don’t wait twelve years to watch Firefly.)

For most of my life, I passed this off as a pretentious sort of hipster disdain.  In fact, the mere mention of new TV or movie media filled me with a real and unnameable dread.  I couldn’t understand how other people consumed screen media so casually.  How did they even know what was going on most of the time?

I was in my thirties before I discovered that the reason it’s so hard for me to follow television and movie plots is that I’m faceblind.

Specifically, I have associative prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize familiar faces out of the context in which I usually see them, and only a limited ability to recognize them in-context.  In practice, this means that I don’t recognize my own students outside our classroom – even in the corridors.  I have failed to recognize members of my own extended family when I encountered them in the grocery store.  When my husband trims his beard too short, I have several days of “augh! stranger danger!” in my own house until it grows back out a bit.  And when I look at old family photos, I look for clothing I remember owning as a kid, not for my own face.  That’s right: I cannot recognize my own face in family photos.

I didn’t know this, as a kid.  Nobody ever asked me if I could identify faces; they just made fun of me or punished me for the “behaviors” that resulted in my failing to recognize them (like not saying hello to people I was supposed to know, or not opening the door for the “stranger” who was actually my aunt).  Like so many other things in my undiagnosed and undiscussed childhood, I assumed everyone had this problem and that I was the only one who was hopelessly inept at coping with it.

Not-knowing, unsurprisingly, led to a lot of anxiety while out in public and the eventual development of several workarounds, including paying attention to voice and body language.  I even came to love live theatre, because voice and body language are actually accentuated over faces: I may not be able to see the faces from my seat, but I can still tell characters apart.  I hated, feared, and dreaded new television and movies for the opposite reason: uniform sound mixing, camera angles and cuts, and the ever-increasing homogenization of actors’ “looks” made it nearly impossible to tell people apart.

Here’s what it’s like to watch a new television show or a movie while faceblind:

1.  I have no idea who is supposed to be whom.  It takes me about 15-20 minutes to figure out which characters are which – longer if they change their clothes at any time in that first fifteen to twenty minutes.  By the time I figure this out, I often can’t remember who did what in the first ten minutes of the plot.   (On the other hand, the moment any actor speaks, I can tell you who the actor is and every time I have heard them speak before.)

I gave up on Arrow after an episode and a half because at that point I still didn’t know who was who or who had done what.  Not only did everyone look the same, they all had nearly identical wardrobes, voices, and movement libraries.  Agents of SHIELD, by contrast, has my undying loyalty because from the start, their core cast had recognizably different faces, heights, and styles of movement and dress.  AoS also introduced its core cast person by person, making it much easier to keep track of who was on the bus for what reason.

2.  Plots that rely on disguises, or on “not knowing who the killer is,” don’t make much sense to me.  Plots involving disguises make no sense to me at all, actually.  If the person in disguise speaks, I know who they are.  The voice is as blatantly obvious to me as I assume the removal of the disguise would be to a non-faceblind person.

I can’t stand a single entry in the entire Superman franchise because I end up yelling at the screen, “Oh please, how do you not recognize his voice?!”  I had to watch the X-Files episode “The Walk” (S3E7) three times before I realized that the general doesn’t know who the killer is because he does not recognize the killer’s voice, something that was obvious to me in the first ten minutes.  (On the other hand, I had my back to the screen when Netflix pulled up the following episode, “Oubliette” – but I said “hey, that’s Jewel Staite!” without even turning around.)

One of the reasons I love Netflix’s version of A Series of Unfortunate Events is that it turns this problem on its head: the kids can see through Count Olaf’s disguises, and the disguises themselves are well-done enough to mess with the non-faceblind temporarily, but the adults in the show don’t see it at all.  That must be what it feels like not to be able to hear the killer.

3.  Plots with “identical” characters make no sense.

A plot that relies on two or more characters looking identical? Forget it.  Even if they’re all played by the same person, I won’t see it.

The X-Files episode “Colony” was a leap of faith for me.  The plot revolves around the murders of multiple doctors, all of whom are identical to one another.  Or at least, that’s what the script told me. What I saw were six photos of balding white men taken at different angles, wearing different clothing, and some of whom were wearing glasses and some of whom were not.  I took it on faith that the men did in fact have identical faces.

As a kid, I hated The Parent Trap for the same reason, even though both twins were played by Hayley Mills, whom I recognized.  They just never did look identical to me, even though they had identical voices and movement patterns.

“Are they supposed to look alike?” is a phrase I have never actually uttered, but I’ve thought it.  A lot.

4.  Plots with police sketches?  Okay, if you say so.

I also never see the resemblance between police sketches and the actual person.  I don’t even understand why police sketches exist, except in the superficial academic “well, other people actually recognize faces and so find them useful” sense.  Let’s hope I’m never asked to describe a suspect to a police artist, because I won’t know what to describe and I will have no idea if the resulting sketch looks anything like the person.

5.  On the other hand, animated series are great.

On the other hand, I have never once had any of the above problems watching animated series, which is probably why I was so engaged in my college anime club at exactly the same time I was dodging recommendations to watch Firefly.  Animated characters are, after all, just pictures – and pictures are far easier for me to tell apart from one another than human faces.