#tbd llll

[mustloveshera]

this is pretty disorganized and bizarrely phrased cuz i’m in a Mood but hey here are my 4am long-winded thoughts anyway i guess.

recently i watched an animatic that featured an autistic-coded character from another series in which said character expressed concern for another character. one of the comments expressed disbelief because, “omg she doesn’t care about anyone tho!”

i had just watched one of the episodes where she was freaking the fuck out and considering abandoning her plan because her friend was in trouble, and i just... like that’s not even, “i fail to recognize someone else’s way of expressing that they care.” that’s, “i ignore examples of a character expressing that they care in a way that i would otherwise recognize as being such because they act so autistic most of the time.”

recently i also watched a show with my roommate and speculated that an android character (whose type often ends up seeming autistic, even if entirely unintentionally) might be expressing different kinds of emotions that wouldn’t be recognized because they didn’t express other more dramatic reactions...and my roommate said that thinking about that was basically like projecting feelings onto animals. now, in this case, i wasn’t familiar with the Deep Lore, so maybe he was right, i don’t know. regardless, it just reminded me of the previous incident. take into account the pervasive idea that “low-functioning” autistics are basically wild animals, and, well.

i’ve written about how en/trapta shows that she cares, and i don’t need to go into it again. but, frankly, when i reread it, i can’t understand how so many people overlooked all of that and wrote her off as a heartless monster fulfilling the “amoral mad scientist” archetype in the first place. if an allistic character did any of those things, it wouldn’t be so easily dismissed.

unfortunately, for some people in this fandom, the only compassion that they can identify in ent/rapta’s actions is directed at h/ordak. like, he’s the Exception, and she never cared about anyone else before~ y’know, if you only bothered paying any attention to her character once h/ordak started paying attention to her, that is. (if you ship them and you do acknowledge that ent/rapta exists outside of him and cares about people who aren’t him, then i’m not talking about you, obviously.)

all of this led me to a theory of sorts--maybe, as soon as ignorant allistics, subconsciously or not, identify a character as autistic, they ignore/reject any examples that contradict their own view of what autistic people are like...until...romance, i guess?? maybe this extends into real life too.

so like, once they decided, “haha en/trapta is like that guy on BB/T!”, nothing she did would seem like she was a Person with Feelings. it would always be forgotten or written off as something else. like, for fuck’s sake, in season 1, she gets separated from the princesses because she tries to rescue emily, and then she cries when she thinks they abandoned her--but so many people literally argued that she never cared about anyone at this point. like, what??? i just can’t understand how else you could come to that conclusion.

[koleyorke]

monday 6:45 am and i’m already Done with this week