#autistic characters in media

[autistic-hc-bracket]

The Winner of the Autistic HC Bracket is: Abed Nadir from Community!

just kidding, but actually i forgot to put him in the bracket and there’s no way i’m putting him against the coughing babies in the second bracket. maybe he’ll get a silly round against Data from Star Trek when he inevitably wins.

[moominpunx]

does anyone have any shows, books, or movies that are about being autistic, from the perspective of the autistic person?

like not focusing on how other people are affected by it and how other people deal with it. just how it is for them. they’re not very common, for some reason /sar

i think the webtoon “sweetheart” is a really good example of this. it’s about a low support needs autistic high schooler and - as a low support needs high schooler - it’s some of the best representation i’ve seen.

same with the show “dead end: paranormal park”, although there are two main characters and only one is autistic. i still found that they showed her struggles and experiences in a very real and meaningful way, and from her perspective.

[bags-of-regret]

If I was smart enough I would properly dissect the Pines family parallels and how it corresponds with how the Stans treated the twins, specifically how they treated the twin that wasn’t like them.

Stan understanding the bond the two have and encouraging them because thats what he misses, while Ford pushes Dipper away from Mabel because thats what he had at the time with Stan and thinks Dipper needs the same. Once Ford rekindles with Stan is when he grows closer to Mabel.

Stan being rough with Dipper because thats how he treated Ford, while Ford takes longer to bond with Mabel because he sees how much she’s like Stanley.

Both project themselves and the other onto the twins(Ford more so than Stan). They love and care for both of course, but seeing their brother in one of them hurts deeply in opposite ways. Stan is angry but longs for his brother while Ford can’t stand him but still loves him.

[sexy-sapphic-sorcerer]

BBC Merlin being about 'magic' for 7 minutes gay

[soullessjack]

not only should any autistic character who’s ever been infantilized by their fanbase kill and maim more people, but they should also fuck as nasty as possible too. as a treat

[pnfc]

i haint watched the dang chibisode and idk if ill actually watch it with sound on sdfjk but i have a hurt feeling about them casually imbuing perry with speech for a one off gag because the idea that he needs to talk to communicate is fake. we had 4 seasons of wacky magic hijinks cartoon where perry never needed verbal speech to communicate. they couldve done this gag at any point in the show but they didn't, and the fact that they didn't felt significant. perry's muteness is such a core part of his character, to me, to the way i conceive of him/write him. i don't wanna overreact to a goofy little side cartoon (even tho i'm doing it anyway) but it's still the characters, and it still upsets me! ok that's it i've said my piece

[eldest-of-katts]

okay because people have shown up in my dms talking smack I'm going to make one blanket statement on the 1000 year loli chilchuck thing.

yes, there has been a problem with young girls being put in suggestive positions in anime with the "uhmmm she's actually a bajillion years old" excuse. yes, other characters don't treat chilchuck like an adult. yes, he is short with big eyes.

However, chilchuck consistently acts like a grown man. he- in both the manga and the anime- straight up just is an adult. He looks like an adult when he is any other race during the swaps in the manga. When the other characters get turned into half-foots they look similar to chilchuck. He is explicitly stated to have more dungeon and general life experience than laios, and he acts like it.

The 1000 year loli trope explicitly functions as an excuse to prey on people who are inexperienced and unable to advocate for themselves. Chilchuck is a parent, is a union organizer, has explicit boundaries that he enforces rigidly, and he is treated as an adult man by everyone who doesn't have a fantasy racism-focused character arc/issue.

I can see how if you haven't read the manga and seen that he has an established life that he later reveals (and haven't paid attention to him in the anime lol) you could get a mistaken impression about him. Marcielle does too in the source material! It's part of her character at the start of her arc that she has issues with longevity!

The thing that irks me a little about this interpretation is that it leans into the child-coded discourse that was prominent a while ago (she's short!!!!! but has boob???? ILLEGAL!!1!) and it does a disservice to the themes of infantilization as a policy maneuver hurting the working class.

I saw chilchuck and his labor advocacy for half-foots both as a metaphor for racism (obvious take ik) and for ageism.

The working gen z as a cohort are being infantilized and pushed out of job markets due to infantilization, similar to half-foots in the show. gen z is being maliciously portrayed as too young to vote, enter office, know themselves, know their rights, and take advantage of their resources. Simultaneously, child labor protections and protections against workplace abuse are being rolled back in the US. In Japan, young people are being worked to the bone for nothing and are becoming disenfranchised as a generation while simultaneously expected to be the labor faction that supports the postwar generations in their old age.

Chilchuck's being treated poorly I saw as a clever commentary on the ways infantilization allows for protections to be stripped away under the guise that "oh it's just a job for teenagers- they don't need more than minimum wage" or "let the kids rescue the economy! they're always complaining about that job market!" while simultaneously stripping away rights under the guise of protection- "We can't have that on the internet! think of the children!" "to protect these young people we must raise the age of medical consent for hormones/reproductive health decisions!"

Kui's work with this series spoke to me on many levels, and specifically, the infantilization issue touched me in a way that few other pieces of media have. The struggle to be taken seriously in a stem field as someone young, as someone female, and as someone who had a high-pitched voice to the point I did years of voice training to be taken seriously, chilchuck's character resonated. I (kinda) understand your instinct to think "SHORT! CHILD! RALLY THE MASSES AND KILL THE PEDOS!!1!" but in this case, it's misdirected- mostly because the author was trying to use this misdirection to prove something to you, the reader.

Kui consistently makes cutting commentary on modern issues, the show's take on food neutrality as its headliner, but also the author's takes on cultural issues and the environment (with a focus on our place in the food web as animals). I feel that reducing chilchuck's very conscious position as a tradesman and an activist discounted due to his apparent age down to "1000 year loli ewwww let's send this random tumblr user suicide bait" just displays a lack of critical analysis of the show and a level of disrespect towards Kui and the work as a whole.

TL:DR- stop sending me kys messages I'm fucking that old man

[batboopp]

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP

he has a headache :(

[chronoarts]

I've seen people talk about Aziraphale having 'no emotional intelligence' and being a bad person/hating on him for the final fifteen/etc. HELLO? That final scene was all of his religious trauma (or whatever the equivalent is in angel terms) being pushed to the front because of his decision. Also no emotional intelligence??? Okay. Okay. Yeah, the incredibly autistic-coded character has "no emotional intelligence"? Not cool to say that imo. Aziraphale is insanely emotionally intelligent, but also struggles with six THOUSAND years of trauma and yearning and fear. I'm so passionate about understanding Aziraphale's decision and not hating him for it because it was necessary. Sorry this is so ramble-y, but it's kinda late and I needed to talk about something Good Omens related. Also it made me angry as an autistic Good Omens fan who loves that so many people agree Aziraphale is autistic.

[askcometcare]

ooc: how many of the kids did they get diagnosed with autism before they realized they all were?

OOC: I can imagine there was a point where maybe it was 3 of them and they were like "you know what... I think they all might be" and it was true!

[lumi-wumi]

This is just a general post because I need to actually get my ideas in order to talk about this. But I was thinking about how some people say the sapphic ships are "male-gaze centric" in Black Sails because of how "it's focused" in sex or whatever. But then I was watching episode 4x01 (XXIX) with my friend yesterday. And realized... The thing that confirms to us that Silver and Madi have a relationship... Is a post sex scene. Jack and Anne in the beggining? "I wanna fuck". Miranda and Flint also in the beggining? Also confirmed by a sex scene. Vane and Eleanor I guess is the most hinted at before we actually get one of those but... We definitely got one of those as ultimate confirmation. Like... It's a constant theme. It's not something that's used with the sapphic characters only. Matter of factly, the only ship that does NOT have a sex scene in this show is James/Thomas which... I need to think about it a little further to try and understand why. And I don't mean it in a "this show is homophobic" way, but more like... If it's a constant and thematic, why? Black Sails is definitely NOT the show that would have tried to avoid a scene like this between two men - or even something post-sex like with Madi/Silver.

Idk, now I wanna rewatch it AGAIN and try to look at this from a thematic pov bc I don't think it's the kind of thing that you notice unless you stop and think of it. It only hit me bc I was bothered by how some people talk about the f/f ships in this show.

Just wanted to put that out there, I definitely wanna make a more detailed post about love and sex in this show when I put my thoughts in order with something more than WAIT A MINUTE, IT'S A THEME.

[maevesweirdart]

i hate hate hate having PDA (pathological demand avoidance/pervasive drive for autonomy). at work. at school. at home. everyone is like “do the thing” and i’m like “…… k” because i *want* to be able to do the thing, and i know everyone *expects* me to do it, and *all i want* is for people to see me as a trustworthy adult and not flaky or lazy, and i just. can’t???

i’ve been told i’m “making excuses” so so so so many times. eventually i started to internalize it. i tell myself that now. it doesn’t help.

[weirdgirl92]

Is it just me, or are Megamind, Lilo & Stitch, Invader Zim, and Steven Universe all part of some niche subgenre of alien media that mostly appeals to autistic people? (Not that I’m complaining.)

[atrophiedemotion]

Castor how do we. How do we convince everyone in the whole wide world that Ivan isn't a masochistic individual that only wishes to gratify himself. How do we convince everyone that he wasn't trying to kill Till in round 6. How do we convince everyone that he didn't want to do anything to Till in that casino-karaoke-bar and was just trying to comfort Till and himself from what they just had to gone through. How do we convince everyone that Ivan is actually just very mentally ill and has trouble when it comes to interacting others and Till

Good anaylsis posts btw

*cracks knuckles* you came to the right place, fellow ivan understander. that's honestly the main reason i make my analysis posts, to try to express the humanity in ivan. because he is an incredibly written character and all of those mischaracterizations you're describing are so far from the truth it hurts.

at a base level, there’s a whole thing to be said about the way people treat/view mentally ill individuals (especially those with stigmatized disorders) that plays into this (ivan has undesirable traits due to mental illness that many just decide to write off as him “being a freak” and romanticizing/sexualizing it instead of trying to understand) but i won’t get it into that here

i think the thing with ivan is that because he can't experience emotion or express himself in conventional or "normal" ways, it takes proper reading into (cough. media literacy) to understand his character. you can't just watch the content and immediately get his motivations and personality, it takes multiple watch throughs, knowledge of the extra content, and taking his past into consideration to get a clearer picture.

this is true for every alnst character and video ofc, but the reason it's such a big thing for ivan is because his outward personality post meteor shower incident is a fabrication. the entire point of us getting glimpses into ivan's mind is so that we can see that he ISN'T what he portrays himself as. and this goes for more than just his charismatic personality- it goes for the unusual ways he expresses himself.

we see ivan as a contradiction. we see both the 'perfect' person he wants people to see and the extremely flawed person he sees himself as. neither are completely accurate. ivan's view of himself is so skewed it's unreliable. the only way to truly understand him is to put the work in to find out why.

this isn't exactly an answer to your question/plea, but i've been asking myself the same thing for months. ivan is a really complicated character, more complicated than most people care to fully dig into. in fanon (from what i've seen) he seems to fall into two categories: the persona he puts on, and an "obsessive insane freak". both are very baseline things we see, because that's how ivan sees himself. fake on the outside and a 'shitty' person on the inside.

to me, the point of ivan's character is to look past both of those. to question them and his actions, to wonder what his motivations are. once you get to the point of "oh wow, this was all either for the purpose of survival or because he literally has no idea how to interact with people", things become a lot clearer. we just have to hope people can make the effort to read into things, i guess.

(thank you! great ask, i've been rotating it around in my head for like an hour lmao)

[mikenesmithmpreg]

kidding. love is stored in the tork. its in the bible. please adhere or you will die and go to hell immediately where i’ll be there waiting for you

[soullessjack]

yea miraculous sucks but honestly they kinda popped off with a magical cat boy whose special magical weapon against evil is a lead pipe and the special magical power of stage 4 necrosis