#autistic!davey

[1nm806]

autistic spot conlon but his special interest is just newspapers so no one realises. autistic spot conlon but when he goes non verbal people just think hes intimidating. he keeps his sleeves rolled up so his arms aren't restricted and this is "so he can punch easier" but its actually because he hates the feeling of it. he has one (1) conversation with davey where he just talks about newspapers for an hour non stop and davey's just like. Oh you're like me! and they are friends because of it and without that context no one can understand how or why they're friends.

[fansiesmemes]

Davey: Jellyfish have been living for over 600000 years without brains

Jack: A ray of hope for Race then

[chimeofthecomet]

A little something for a fic i love, and a scene that hasn’t left my head @pigeonwit p.s. everybody get in here

[honeyywoods]

I looooove projecting onto Davey Jacobs. Davey Jacobs is left handed and he has raynauds syndrome so his hands r freezing all the time and he has really awful posture. he absolutely hates school but perseveres out of spite and he is a HATER. he loves flowers and botany and sometimes drops the most unsettling facts simply because he finds them interesting. that’s just me if I lived in 1899

[mummelthecryptid]

autism 4 autism javey. you agree

[ur-fav-is-autistic]

Davey Jacobs from Newsies :]

Davey Jacobs from Newsies is Autistic!

[faefox9]

I’m too lazy to figure out how to do links right https://www.tumblr.com/faefox9/765811456636829696/my-phone-storage-is-getting-full-the-others

[asexualenjolras]

It is one week until Newsies London closes in Wembley, and I got to see it again the other day, so I want to talk about Ryan Kopel and his beautiful portrayal of Davey Jacobs one more time.

I love how Ryan portrays Davey to be autistic. Ryan has said that he plays Davey in a way that exemplifies his quirks, and it really works in this production. It’s what I am going to miss the most. I’ve never felt more seen.

As an autistic person myself, I have always headcanoned Davey as being autistic – in every format of Newsies previously. Ben Fankhauser’s Davey was always autistic-coded to me – his portrayal was one of my favourites. And I was nervous about seeing another actor take on a character that means so much to me ... but Ryan took Davey and made him even more autistic and I am so, so grateful and in awe of his talent.

Let’s talk about Davey Jacobs and his autistic traits, as portrayed by Ryan Kopel in West Endsies:

- Stimming:

Davey is stimming the WHOLE SHOW. And that’s not an exaggeration. He is shown to bounce on his toes, he is constantly fidgeting with his fingers (and standing with those stereotypical t-rex arms) and he runs his hands along his newsie bag, and he does a few little spins when he's excited, and he jumps up and down at one point.

- Difficulty with social interaction:

From the first moment that Davey is on stage, he is shown to be incredibly uncomfortable talking to other people. He is shown to stammer over his thoughts and struggles to coherently converse with the other characters on the stage. He is portrayed as someone that is reluctant to speak, and he stutters and rambles and struggles to maintain eye contact, looking down at his fidgeting hands a lot. Ben Fankhauser made Davey more confident in his ability to share his thoughts, but Ryan’s Davey struggles - both internally and externally - with this.

He is also shown to have a one track mind in conversations. He struggles to see why Jack is having doubts after the rally because he, personally, thinks it was a success. Davey is bouncing around and his tone is so light and he is so confused by Jack's doubts. It's so autistic. It's so relatable.

- Relationship with physical contact:

Davey is shown to struggle when people suddenly touch him, he flinches and wipes the touch away whenever he is uncomfortable. BUT he initiates touch with those that he trusts. He's so physical with Les, constantly holding him and giving him reassurance through taps. He is shown to hug Jack and he hugs Crutchie and it's nice to see.

- Strong moral compass:

Unlike Ben Fankauser’s Davey (who I LOVE), Ryan’s Davey is shown to be more reluctant to join in on the strike – he is a lot more sheltered, and is completely isolated on one side of the stage in that scene. Davey looks down to his feet and looks to be at war with himself. He looks completely defeated when Jack asks if his father would be in the mess he was in if he had a union, because he knows that Jack – this boy that he has just met – is right. But he is so conflicted because he knows that this is going to be difficult, and he’s so worried and so anxious and so questioning about what the right thing is. It’s such a minor part of the show, but it’s there and I love it.

- Autistic joy:

I don’t know how else to word this but the way that we see Davey unmask throughout the play makes me so smiley. We see him go from this uncomfortable, awkward, masked version of himself in the beginning to someone that genuinely feels accepted and like he has a place in this strike and in the Newsie family. The excitement in his voice when he is talking to Jack in Medda’s is UNMATCHED. He’s so bouncy and light and he’s STIMMING and he’s so happy. I love it.

I could go on and on but I won’t. I just really love the artistic differences between Ryan and Ben’s Davey Jacobs’. I love both of their adaptations, but Ryan’s Davey feels so authentically autistic. And I am PRAYING we get to see his Davey immortalised in a pro-shot?! PLEASE?!

Ryan Kopel, thank you so much for giving us this wonderfully autistic Davey Jacobs on stage.

[totesmgoats01-published-author]

KinitoPET, Doki Doki Literature Club, Pony Island, and The Beginner's Guide: Some Autistic Gamer Thoughts

This is gonna be a long post and not exactly my usual kind of post but I hope some people like it anyways and are able to read the whole thing. I'm kinda just infodumping some thoughts but still.

I really like all of these game. I really like them. And I sort of relate to them in an unexpected way that I think most of them (with the exception of The Beginner's Guide) did not intend.

I think the link between the first two is easiest to explain so I'll start there.

KinitoPET and DDLC are both games about computer program, who has a singular, hard-coded purpose, becoming sentient and taking that purpose to an extreme. And similarly, they both harbor no actual malice as characters. And that's what I find so compelling. Kinito just wants to be the perfect best friend, and as a computer program, all he knows is gathering data, so that's the means by which he tries to do it. He doesn't fully understand what it is to be human. He doesn't have a grasp of free will, especially because he doesn't really have free will the way humans do, even though he's sentient. He's a computer program. He has a singular purpose. So he uses that purpose as a means to the end of being your best friend, which to him, means trapping you in a world he made just for you, using all the information you gave him. Computer programs don't die. They don't have a concept of "eternity" or "eternal torment." To him, "forever" is just a length of time.

And most of the same things can be said of Monika. She was designed to be a character in a dating sim. The singular purpose of dating sim characters is to fall in love with the player. That's what they do. So she does it, and she does it the very best she can. Of course, being sentient means that she can think outside the box. She wants to be the one you fall in love with and she uses her ability to manipulate her world and the people in it to try and make that happen. At their core, both of these character harbor no malice whatsoever. They don't want to hurt you, they don't hate you, it's the opposite. They love you, they just don't understand human love.

Think about these ideas led me to Pony Island, which once again has that same idea. An Entity(tm) in a computer wants to trap you in/at the computer forever. Only in this case it's The Actual Devil who wants you to playtest his silly pony game forever. The main difference being that The Devil does, in fact, have an understanding of human concepts like eternity and torment. In fact those concepts are kind of His Jam. He is the primary symbol used to convey those ideas. But even still, he never seems to show much malice for the player outside of situations where the player is actively breaking and manipulating the game and subverting his goals. And honestly I can understand that. If I gave my game to someone to playtest it and they refused to play it the way I'd intended, I would not be happy with them. Now, The Devil KNOWS that what he is doing is morally evil. Trapping souls in Gamer Purgatory and all. But in a way I feel like that's not so different from Kinito and Monika. Evil and eternity and torment are the only things he knows. Is that his fault? We have no way of knowing for certain that The Devil has ANY agency over his narrative. We don't know that he knows any other way to live(?) outside of trapping souls and tormenting them and all that jazz. In fact if you really wanna get meta with it in this game that's already a metagame about game development (which is a phrase that describes most, if not all, of Daniel Mullins' games), we can say for certain that The Devil DOES NOT have any agency, because he is a game character designed specifically to be...well...The Devil. He's evil and torments people eternally. That's what a The Devil does. He is NOT self-aware. If he were and he had a choice, maybe he'd just put pony island on itch.io and try to get feedback lol.

All of these games, at their core, are about a character that desperately wants some kind of human connection, but doesn't fully understand how to get that, and in turn makes the human they reach out to feel trapped and uncomfortable.

Do you know what game also does that? The Beginner's Guide.

Even thought it's a massive leap in form from the aforementioned examples, The Beginner's Guide has that same core concept. It's a game about games, in which someone doesn't understand how to be human.

When I first played The Beginner's Guide I totally missed the point. I thought it was just a game about games, and I thought the Davey walking us through it was The Real Devey and Coda was A Real Person who made weird games. I totally bought into the narratives that Davey was telling us the whole time instead of actually thinking for myself. I'm older now, though.

This at-least-somewhat-fictionalized version of Davey is the socially awkward weirdo. Coda is Just Some Guy who likes to make creative games. He's not A Developer(tm), he's a guy with a hobby. The Beginner's Guide is about Davey and how he sees himself in Coda's games but thinks that what he sees is Coda. And Davey never once talks to Coda about anything other than his games. Davey never once mentions having an actual, real conversation with this person that he's coming to consider a friend. Davey is a well-meaning but misguided person, and in some of his games, Coda is actively trying to tell Davey that in his own way. I think a good line that represents this is "If someone had just told me he just likes making prison games..." because it shows how Davey never even asked. There's countless examples of this. Like when Davey says Coda was "weirdly happy all the time" during a specific time period. He doesn't know why. Maybe Coda got a new job he's excited about, or a romantic partner, or maybe he started taking antidepressants, but the point is that Davey doesn't know, and he never asks Coda directly. He just makes wild assumptions about Coda by playing his games.

The Beginner's Guide is about someone who doesn't know how to socialize and is unaware of it. Someone who doesn't know how to foster a relationship with a human, and tries his best, but whose attempts are seen as uncomfortable. When you interpret some of Coda's games through this lens you can see it more clearly. That game about being on a stage in front of someone you admire, that's Davey talking to Coda and Being Weird(tm). And then, when he feels weird, he doesn't actually talk to Coda at all. He recedes back, feeling trapped and distant from someone he wants to be around. Observing only from a distance, through a bunch of prison bars.

Seems familiar.

Of course I could be pulling a Davey by forcing my own interpretation of the game onto you. And so the cycle continues. I encourage you to consider your own interpretation if you haven't ruined by mine, unable to see it any other way (whoops, there's Davey again).

To me, these games are about autism. I am an autistic woman, so of course that's the lens through which I see things. You don't have to be autistic to be socially awkward or misunderstand people. Again, you can have your own interpretation.

But I've felt these things. Being distant from someone, wanting to foster a relationship but not realizing that what it means to foster a relationship is sometimes entirely different from what I think it means. What "a relationship" even is can be totally different from what you expect. And I've been on both sides of this dynamic. Being approached by someone who Comes Off A Bit Too Strong or Too Weird or just Different. And I'm patient with those people. I know what it's like. I know they've been through it with less patient people, or people who only pretend to foster that connection out of pity or some other misguided attempt to make someone feel better. Obviously a relationship founded on pity and one-sided affection is doomed from the start. And in most of these games that "one side" is the other side of your computer screen.

Communicate with your friends, your partners, your family, whatever. If they don't know how to love you right, it's up to you to help them. If they're not receptive to that, that's when the responsibility is on them, at that point they knew the risks, and if they don't respect your boundaries you cut them off. If you don't know how to love someone else, it's up to you to ask them. Nobody wants to be Kinito, or Monika, or The Devil, or Davey, and nobody wants to be their players, either. Be patient with each other, and talk about it.

[shatteredlamppost]

drunk drivers/killer whales, the ballad of the costa concordia - car seat headrest / the beginner's guide - davey wreden

[everyonesonthespectrum]

Today’s Autistic character of the day is:

David “Davey” Jacobs from Newsies (2011 musical)

Requested by @ravenpuff-charlie

[ya-what--ya-erster]

Mistake, Regret, or Something to that Level

PROOF-READ CREDIT TO: @waiting-makes-me-antsy Thank you!!

Albert/Davey UNREQUITED, prequel to Goodbye Don't Last Forever

kinda angsty, enjoy.

David was lost. Completely and totally lost. How was he supposed to carry on when the center of his world just up and left without a word to him?

He didn't really know how to cope long term, but he knew that a visit to his best friend's house might just help.

Ever since Francis left David (a year ago), David and Albert had become the closest of friends (except for Race and Albert, but Race was off in Australia being an impressive dancer). The two were almost inseparable. Seeing one or the other alone was a rare occurrence which was usually met by some sort of joke about how joint at the hip the two boys were.

So David was on his way to Albert's apartment in January, wearing flannel sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a cute snake drawing on the front (Albert gave it to him). It was cold, and snowy, and he regretted not putting on a coat or a hat or anything, but it wasn't far to Albert's place.

By the time David knocked on the door, he thought he was going to die of the cold, but Albert saw him and immediately pulled him into the apartment and handed him a blanket.

"Dave, are you alright?" Albert asked, taking a seat next to him on the couch.

"No." David leaned sideways onto Albert, burying his face in his shoulder.

"Oh, come here." Albert put an arm around David. "You need to get drunk."

"Yeah I do."

...

Several hours (they think) later, the two are flat-out wasted.

David got honest when he got drunk, and never remembered anything afterwards, and Albert just got crazy (and maybe a little more confident).

"What if she was the only one I was meant to be with?" David asked.

"She wasn't." Albert laughed like it was the silliest thing he'd ever heard.

"But nobody could love me like I thought she did."

"But I love you." Albert's smile spread across his face. "You're my best friend."

"But don't people in love kiss? And boys can't kiss boys."

"I've kissed boys."

"Oh."

The boys fell silent, and then Albert burst into laughter again.

"What's so funny?" David asked (but he was smiling).

"Would you kiss me if I was a girl?"

"I would kiss anything if it were Francis."

"So pretend I'm her, then. It'll make you feel better to kiss someone."

"But-"

Albert cut Davey off with a deep, drunk kiss on the mouth.

And Davey liked it.

Davey wanted more of that feeling.

So he kissed back.

He could do whatever he wanted, he decided. It wasn't like there was anyone to tell him no, except for Albert who had initiated the kiss.

Very quickly, the kiss turned into more. Shirts unbuttoned, hands in hair, and the possibility of several purple marks to appear in the morning.

"Should we keep going?" Albert asked.

Davey blamed it on the fact that he was drunk that he said yes.

...

David woke up not in his bed. Albert's bed, he knew, from the many times he'd slept over.

David immediately felt guilty wash over him. Had he seriously kicked Albert out of his own bet just to fuck some girl that was not even there anymore? He didn’t really know, he couldn’t really remember, but it was fairly obvious in his mind that he had fucked someone. And Albert didn't do well with change in routine, Davey knew that. He was feeling worse and worse about it the more he thought, so he made a move to get up and go apologize.

The headache was not good as he stood up out of the bed and headed into the kitchen area of the apartment.

“Sorry for taking up your bed last night Al.”

“Doesn’t bother me.” Albert smiled. He handed David a glass of water and two ibuprofen pills. “This might help a bit.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

“So. Uhm. Happen to know the identity of the girl I slept with in your bed last night or…”

Something flashed across Alberts face. Hurt. But he picked up quickly with a laugh.

“You should be asking who the guy was.”

“The… A guy?”

“Yessir.”

“Okay so uh who was this potential guy that I-“

Albert pressed a quick kiss to the tip of David’s nose, quieting him.

“Hi there.” He said with a little smile.

(Albert was dying inside. He wasn't this forward. He wasn't this confident. He wasn't this person who was flirting shamelessly with his best friend.)

“Oh.”

“Is that… is that okay?”

“Al, I… I didn’t even know- But I don’t even remember it so how am I supposed to know what it felt like? I don’t-“

“I could kiss you again.”

“What?”

“I said I could kiss you again.”

David didn’t respond, so Albert just cupped his face in his hands and kissed him.

Pulling away after a moment, David blinked. “Is that what that’s supposed to feel like? I never- it was never like that with her.”

“Good way or bad way?”

“Good.”

“Well, Dave. It must be really confusing for ya, all this. But… I’d like to help you along the way, if you’ll accept?"

"I don't think... Al, I don't think I can. I don't think I love you like that and I'm sorry-"

"That's alright, Davey. It is what it is."

...

Albert kept a smile on his face for two more hours while Davey hung around in his apartment awkwardly, too tired to walk himself home yet.

Albert, who was majorly stressed out, would have offered to walk him home. But, he didn't want to seem rude, and he didn't want to face the outside world with its flashing lights and loud noises and people bumping into him every five seconds.

As soon as Davey left, though, everything came crashing down.

Albert was stupid. Stupid to have done what he did. Stupid to have hoped that it would work out.

Mostly, though, he was stupid for falling in love with his best friend.

It wasn't fair that Davey was that effortlessly pretty and glamorous and nice and smart and perfect. Albert never even stood a chance.

So who could blame him, really, for crying? He had wrecked his perfectly routine life and possibly his relationship with his best friend.

He called Race in a desperate attempt to feel better, but it didn’t help much because then he just missed Race too. Why couldn’t Race be in the United States? Why did he have to be so far away?

Albert closed his eyes as he sat down on the couch, trying to make the tears go away. Crying made his head hurt.

But, despite that, Albert cried himself to sleep that night.

[fansiesmemes]

Davey: I made tea

Albert: I don’t want tea

Davey: I did not make tea for you. This is my tea

Albert: Then why are you telling me?

Davey: It is a conversation starter

Albert: That’s a lousy conversation starter

Davey: Oh, is it? We’re conversing, Checkmate

[daveysbones]

"I'm autistic & my friend is autistic and we do not have that issue you experience"

Please understand that I'm not saying you're not autistic. I'm saying our autism is not the same

[honeyywoods]

give me Davey who is wildly obsessed with Victorian flower language and Jack who begs Medda to teach him about it so that he can save money to make Davey the perfect flower arrangement

(or, alternatively, Jack going to the flower district to sketch certain flowers he wants to use to learn their shapes and then painting the arrangement later when he gets to Medda’s, because it’ll last longer)

and when he invites Davey to the theatre one night, Davey isn’t expecting much. then Jack tells him to close his eyes and he waits there dutifully until Jack tells him to look, and when he does whatever snarky quip he had been about to say dies in his throat. because he’s looking over the arrangement, eyes flitting between pinks and reds and purples as he processes each of their meanings. he cries. bawls like a baby and Jack gets worried that he fucked up and accidentally insulted Davey or something in flower language but then Davey kisses him and when he pulls back he’s finally found his voice again, saying that it was the sweetest thing anyone had done for him. anyways.

[rewrite-this-story]

Not me deciding that every character I relate to is queer and neurodivergent just because.