#that got infodumpy fast lol

[butterflyinthewell]

A post in which I tell an ablesplainer anon where to go with a cactus and what to do with it when they get there.

The same message showed up twice and both disappeared when I hit delete. O_o Not sure what was up with Tumblr there, but whatever. I’m gonna make a post instead. I’m howling over this. It was hilarious.

Warning: this gets long and infodumpy. (I’m autistic, it’s what we do!)

I had the best anon ever. By best I mean they were an obviously non-autistic ablesplainer who tried to dictate autism at me. A non-autistic person tried to explain autism to an autistic person. Let that logic sink in.

Now laugh your ass off as hard as I am. HAHAHAHA!!!

This anon said my Groot fics are wrong because (paraphrased to the best of my ability) “I live with a very severely autistic teenager with a 1 year old mind who can’t communicate, wears diapers, screams all the time and is hell to live with! He shows no sign of self awareness or coherent thought that makes somebody a human being. Severely autistic people can’t function in society! You need to shut up and stop writing unrealistic tripe because your stupid headcanon hurts people who suffer with severe autism.”

And I just...

[Animated GIF of Groot (Guardians of the Galaxy) turning to face the viewer while laughing. Yes, anon, he is laughing at YOU.]

Can we have an Ableist Tropes(TM) somewhere? Because this anon hit almost all of the grossest ones about autism.

Anon, I’m gonna assume you’re not autistic, because everybody who describes autistic people like you did tends to be neurotypical. 

First, I’ll plug my Autism Isn’t A Tragedy! series since you gave me an excuse to do so. All the autistic!Groot you could want is right here:

http://archiveofourown.org/series/275382

Now, that said...

I am autistic. I really do know what it’s like to be autistic. I live it every day of my life. I have the same difficulties as people who need a lot of daily help, they’re just distributed differently. I do not live independently and my meltdowns include self-injurious behavior. Being able to speak and dress myself does not mean I have zero struggles. 

Forgive me for being a sarcastic ass here, but I guess that anon has lived with every autistic person ever and has seen how well every autistic person ever can or can’t do things in order to make such a judgment, amirite? 

They must have spent the night with @lysikan, Amy Sequenzia, Carly Fleischmann, Ido Kedar and Emma Zurcher-Long. They are nonverbal / nonspeaking, need lots of daily help and use AAC. There is no such thing as no communication, only communications that are not understood. Anon’s housemate sounds like a nonverbal autistic person who needs lots of daily help and can’t make their communications understood.

(Sarcasm) Anon, you did a nice job of throwing the most vulnerable members of the autistic community under the bus. *Slow clap* Bravo, brava, brav-whatever! What an excellent representative of everything I hate in a caregiver. You could have read my fics and realized you were wrong about the autistic person in your life, but chose instead to push your ideal of autism instead of listening to an autistic person. *more slow claps* Congratulations! You totally missed the point! (/Sarcasm)

Now shut up and listen.

[Groot looking to the upper left hand of the frame. His mouth is slightly open and his expression is sad and pensive as he is processing that his friends are in danger.]

I'm gonna level with you here. If Groot was human, he would need diapers to stay clean. I’m gonna put that out there. He would be urge incontinent and release his waste the instant he felt an urge to go no matter where he was and he wouldn’t even think about going to a toilet because it’s already happening right there where he is. Yeah, oops. 

Since he’s a plant, he gets rid of waste by breathing. Yay, that means no messes, right? Ehh, not quite. If you really read my fics, you would know why. But your comment sounds like you only skimmed, so let me go deeper.

Groot’s only “bathroom issue” is poop smearing, cuz he digs in the septic tank and smears to get rid of a triggering smell in his environment. (Ooh, did I mention his PTSD? Yup, two of the fics in the series, Inner Gardens and It Takes A Forest are about him being triggered as hell and flipping out.)

By the way, if Groot was human and wore clothes, he would need somebody to put the clothes on him or talk him through every little tiny step of getting dressed or else he will stand there holding a shirt and probably try to put it on as pants. Shirts have a lot of holes for body parts to go through, he’ll try them all until he figures it out. Dressing him would be faster and easier for him.

Groot can bathe somebody else no problem. He needs help to take showers himself because they’re so overwhelming that his motor planning goes kaput and he can’t coordinate the movements necessary to wash himself. It’s easier to let Rocket do that. Rocket taught everybody else how to shower Groot because there’s a routine procedure to it, and deviating from it makes Groot go into meltdowns. They go at Groot’s pace. There’s no such thing as “we gotta hurry up” when he’s getting showered.

Groot needs outside prompts to complete many tasks. He’s got no problem doing tasks that can only start and finish one way, like taking Rocket’s gun apart, cleaning it and reassembling it. One step prompts the next. Things that can go really wrong in several ways are a struggle. His brain gets stuck. Sometimes all he needs is to be talked through a task. Sometimes he needs physical assistance for part or all of it.

Groot doesn’t learn by watching, not easily anyway. He learns better if somebody moves his body through the motions of whatever he’s being taught. Moving his body tells his brain how to tell his body what to do. It’s how Quill taught him every dance move he learned to do once he got out of his little pot post-GOTG. <3

Groot can pilot a ship. You read that right. Groot can pilot a ship. Not in a dogfight, mind you, but he can fly something from point A to point B as long as somebody shows him around the controls of any ship he’s going to fly. Rocket teaches him how to fly by using hand-under-hand-- Groot places his hands over Rocket’s and follows them through all the standard procedures for a normal flight. Then Groot takes the helm and Rocket leads his hands to everything while telling him what it all does. A simulation for all the alarms and warnings helps Groot’s “omg what if I fuck up?” anxiety. Once Groot has all that, he’s fine.

[Still image of Groot flying the Milano. His hands are on the controls and he’s peering intently ahead at a green nebula reflected on the cockpit window. Inside that nebula is Knowhere.]

The way Groot processes his environment means it takes him longer than others. He has to process information from each eye, put both together and then he perceives depth. Movement is the first thing his visual systems pick up, so he can dodge something coming at him before he processes what exactly it is. It goes movement, shape, size, depth, color and details. He uses his peripheral vision first because looking straight on at something new overwhelms him. He’ll skirt his gaze around the edges of something before he looks dead on at it.

Hearing works similarly, though he doesn’t have to process each ear individually. He still has to put what he sees and hears together. This takes about a second or two. That’s slow compared to milliseconds.

Groot is nonverbal by alien standards although he talks fine by Flora Colossi standards. He’s okay with that description. He uses behavior and AAC as communication in my fics because my headcanon has it that only some of his “I am Groot”’s are understandable to Drax, Gamora and Quill-- Rocket understands almost all of them because he’s had more experience with Groot than the others.

Part of why Groot says “I am Groot” is neurological. The other part is his stiff, wooden larynx.

Rocket knows all of Groot’s behavior cues. He can spot a meltdown about to happen a mile away. (Groot gets a blank stare, and about a minute later the wrist biting and head punching starts.) He can tell when Groot is getting overstimulated by observing the tension in his body and how “cranky” he’s acting. Even though he knows, he often asks Groot “Are you getting overstimulated?” before he takes mitigation measures. Because Rocket respects Groot’s autonomy.

By the way, overstimulated Groot can’t navigate a chaotic environment safely. He almost gets himself seriously hurt in Disclosure when he takes traffic laws literally and stops in the middle of a street because the light turned and he thinks he’ll get arrested if he walks when the light says “don’t walk”. 

Rocket usually gets on Groot’s shoulder and he’ll be a navigator instead, telling Groot where to walk. This lets Groot focus on actually walking somewhere so he doesn’t freeze up between “I need to walk” and “It’s too chaotic” and end up going into a meltdown. Rocket uses touch, pointing and short suggestions until Groot relaxes again. If a meltdown is inevitable, Rocket tries to get Groot somewhere less public and helps him through it. And Rocket is never embarrassed by Groot’s meltdowns, he’s more concerned with comforting Groot and keeping him safe.

Groot wants to be bodily restrained by his friends during a meltdown, and Rocket taught the other Guardians how to do that. Being restrained helps him “feel” his body and makes the meltdown less scary because being held onto is a tactile prompt to not bite himself. Even if he struggles, he prefers being restrained over beating the utter shit out of himself.

Plus, if he breaks his bark open, he risks pathogens getting sealed in when he heals and then he can get sick, and that’s about two to three days of almost constant SIB right there. He doesn’t want to have SIB, but he can’t control it once it starts. He needs help to calm down. (Contrary to what you believe, anon, autistic people are self-aware! Probably as much or moreso than NT’s.)

[Still shot of Groot staring at something out of frame. His normally brown eyes look silver due to the lighting. Possibly a nod to Riddick, a character with silver eyes played by Vin Diesel?]

Groot can’t live independently except on his home planet where all Flora Colossi have autistic neurology. Their brains are geared for that environment; it’s when they leave it that they have trouble. They’re innate carers, so they take care of each other. There were Flora Colossi more disabled than Groot who never uproot themselves from where they grow (No-Walkies), yet they were the most revered members of Flora Colossi society. They were the centers of Forests (families) and they got lovingly cared for.

I guess you completely missed that Groot’s brain and “everywhere not planet X” clash. I show it the most in Disclosure, where Groot barely makes it through the city alone (guided by a prompting program on his datapad) and can’t get back to the hotel because his datapad doesn’t have a return trip programmed in and the hotel doesn’t have a homing beacon like the Milano does. 

So Groot can’t and doesn’t live independently, he lives interdependently.

Also, Groot is very well-supported by his friends. They are friends who understand his needs and work with them. They swerve into his lane instead of forcing him to swing into theirs because he’ll probably crash. He can’t help how his brain works, but his friends can adjust things so they’re less of a shock to his system and ask him what works best.

Rocket advocates for Groot, though he doesn’t pretend to know Groot more than Groot knows himself. He can admit when he’s not sure what to do. Groot’s ability to communicate understandably goes kaput when he’s in distress. If he’s flipping out, the other Guardians’ immediate goal is to soothe him, get him calm and see if he can tell them what’s wrong. 

His behavior talks. His self-injurious meltdowns chill right out if he’s just overstimulated. If they keep going, something else is going on and it takes literally everybody in the ship to control Groot’s SIB until the problem gets worked out.

Groot can’t localize pain unless he sees what causes it. A cut off arm, yeah, he’s gonna know what hurts. An abscess in his cambium tissue? His entire body will throb and the SIB gets vicious. Sick Groot is not fun to be around, and he knows how hard he is to handle when he’s sick or his PTSD is triggered.

Drax was nonverbal as a child and learned to speak on his own. His input is highly valued, even though Rocket will be a snarky asshole about it sometimes. Rocket understands that Drax being autistic too means he has a better innate understanding of how Groot experiences the world around him. Even though Drax thinks purely in words and Groot’s thoughts are sensory information, they share similar sensory issues. Drax sometimes suggests things when Groot is having a SIB storm and those suggestions are always listened to. His advice helps the Guardians help Groot in It Takes A Forest.

Groot is 100% competent, but he can’t always show it. He is exactly a realistic representation of a nonverbal autistic person who needs lots of daily help and sometimes can’t make his communications understood if his communication aids aren’t present (be it Rocket or his AAC datapad).

More importantly, Groot is an autistic person with a lot of support needs who has those support needs met. Autistic people with a lot of support needs function well if they are accommodated where they are instead of expected to meet a standard beyond what their brain can cope with.

Rocket sees Groot as the best friend he has and will ever have. (I write them as a queer-platonic pair. Watch anon’s head spin!) Groot’s quirks are what make him Groot, they’re not problems to be trained away. 

Rocket absolutely adores how caring Groot is-- and honestly Groot takes care of Rocket as much as Rocket takes care of Groot. Rocket has a lot of support needs himself due to mental illness (c-PTSD), chronic pain (cybernetic implants cause it) and an invisible disability (epilepsy). Rocket and Groot’s needs are like teeth in a zipper, so they support each other. It’s not one sided at all.

[Profile view of Groot looking directly into Rocket’s eyes (a rare, intimate gesture for him) as he is wiping Rocket’s tears away with a vine. They are surrounded by Groot’s greenery and Groot’s golden glowing spores hang like stars in the background. Gamora is also visible behind them, albeit blurry.]

Rocket loves Groot with all his heart, just as much as Groot loves Rocket back. And while Rocket gets frustrated with Groot sometimes (just like Groot sometimes is frustrated with Rocket), he wouldn’t change him for the world and he’ll blow the head off anybody who suggests otherwise.

Anon, you live with accommodations every day. You don’t think about them because they’re the “normal” kind. You got phones so you don’t have to run to someone’s house to tell them something. You’ve got cars, buses, airplanes and trains to get places faster. You live in a house somebody probably built years ago. Somebody built the computer or phone you’re using to send me your nasty ableist tripe. And those accommodations are acceptable.

But, in your mind, anyone who needs more than that is taking too much and “omg no fair!!!!” That seems to be the running theme of every ableist person who won’t accommodate a disabled person. They don’t want to be inconvenienced.

Disabled people CAN live great lives if their support needs are met.

And if you don’t believe me, just look at Stephen Hawking. Different disability, very similar needs. Take his computer away and he’s nonverbal, needs lots of daily help and can’t make his communications understood. He has all the support he needs to do the things he wants with his life. He is a man who revolutionized how we think about black holes and the universe.

[Stephen Hawking and his entourage meeting Queen Elizabeth.]

Ablesplainers are annoying. I hope my “autistisplanation” sinks in through their ableist skull, but I ain’t gonna hold my breath. Ablesplainer anon, please go fuck a cactus on Uranus and have a nice day. :)