#shaun murphy is ‘cringe’ bc he talks weird and has meltdowns | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

brittlebutch · 3 months ago

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realizing that it sounds kind of mean for me to be referring to this fic as the “cringe loser” fic if you don’t have the extensive lexicon i’ve created in my head for the lengthy opinion essay i haven’t written about how most people don’t actually want “good” autist-rep, they want “cool” rep even at the expense of ‘accuracy’. just believe me i say “cringe loser” with the highest degree of absolute affection

#N posts stuff #brief overview is: abed is generally one of the only characters i see lauded as Good rep #but there’s no way to quantify his representation in a way that successfully singles him out in the convo #ie; people claim it’s Good bc Harmon is autistic — doesn’t hold up bc post-music sia now touts a diagnosis #so either you think she’s lying for obscure internet clout OR having an autisticwriter in the room isn’t The Thing that makes it work #‘if they would hire autisticactors tho’ but that doesn’t hold up either bc abed is portrayed by an allistic man #and when that MH cartoon with the autistic character dropped people immediately started mocking the voice acting #even tho she was played by an autistic actress. so that also doesn’t hold up #so what differentiates abed?#shaun murphy is ‘cringe’ bc he talks weird and has meltdowns #and wendy please stand by is ‘bad’ bc she lives in a group home #and attorney woo is ‘embarrassing’ bc she has motor skill issues and makes odd facial expressions #and the MH girl is ‘childish’ bc she talks weird #etcetera and so on. so why is abed different? i don’t know if his portrayal Is significantly different #i think he just ‘looks cooler’ than these other characters so people like him more #the deficits he has are usually throwaway jokes instead of things that are given narrative weight. so you can ignore them if you want #and if you wanted to argue that the Narrative of the show is what makes a difference then i would also disagree with you #bc abed is pretty extensively mocked in the show. a lot of his autistic traits are just the punchlines of jokes about his characters #(i mean every character on the show is so at least abed isn’t single out but i wouldn’t exactly call it Respectful)#and if you argue that it’s good bc it’s ‘unintentional’ bc harmon didn’t know he was autistic at the time #then i’d point out that abed is made the punchline of an autism joke within his first five minutes on screen #so they knew Enough about what they were doing to make him the joke. so i don’t believe that holds water either #anyway the argument doesn’t cumulate in the opinion that any of these shows are definitively Good Rep #bc the notion of Good Rep is so shakily defined that it’s hard to quantify and also a lot of the examples i chose aren’t like #‘good’ narratively even if i like the characters so im not arguing that they’re better or worse than community or whatever #it really is just an argument about people wanting things to look ‘cool’ more than they want it ‘real’#and that’s why you see autistic influencers literally bullied off social media by other autistic people for acting ‘cringe’ by.. stimming #and that’s it. bc they didn’t look Cool Enough when they did it #so i think we desperately need to embrace Cringe Losers bc i think the Cool factor is a bad one to measure by

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