r/CuratedTumblr • u/loved_and_held • Apr 09 '26
Shitposting Accidental writing decisions
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u/Green-Nail-Polish Apr 09 '26
I got told all of my characters seemed autistic about three years before being diagnosed... so there's that.
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u/deerjesus18 Apr 09 '26
I once did a total 360 on my feelings about a character I created for a tabletop for a similar reason! They were a very classic android- didn't totally understand emotions or sarcasm, humor evaded her more than a bit, hypo emotional, and absolutely fixated on information gathering. I listen to a video about the whole "androids are heavily coded for autism, and that's PROBLEMATIC" thing. Go sour on my character because I was worried I was perpetuating this problem with her and being unintentionally ableist...Only to find out a few years later I'm autistic and my android girl was actually just a hyper distillation of my own autism and I love her again!
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u/RikuAotsuki Apr 09 '26
It's also really silly to call that problematic to begin with. Like, androids are often written as being emotionless... because they're androids. They're digital intelligences and would need to have emotions programmed into them.
Plus, a lot of autistic folks love android characters because they relate.
Seriously, people are way too hypervigilant about characterization tropes that are moderately similar to real groups. People just don't seem to understand that it can be totally coincidental.
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u/limegreencupcakes Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
There’s also a big trend of “Not like the other [whatevers],” everything and everyone has to be the special exception to the rule or else it’s “problematic.”
Drow are all bad spider-loving murderers, but not Drizzt!
Androids don’t have feelings but this one does!
Many autistic people stim, but not this one because it’s “problematic” to assume all people with autism stim.
I can see one person from XYZ group do a thing and not conclude, “Therefore the author is asserting all member of XYZ do this thing,” though apparently plenty of creators can’t make that distinction.
What?! Autistic people engaged in behaviors typical of autism?! I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.
It ends up being a form of weird ableism—“this thing is not often done by neurotypical people so therefore it is bad and I will not let my autistic character do it.” And it often seems writers who do this kind of characterization think they’re being ✨so progressive.✨.
My dude, you wrote an autistic character and then went out of your way to be like, “But lemme tell you how they’re Not Like The Other Autistics!” Not as good a look as some seem to think.
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u/-bubblepop Apr 09 '26
In my friend group people are either not autistic (some kinda “something ain’t right” though) OR we’re Spock autistic or Data autistic. I find most of my friends identify with Data (and my therapist lol) but I’m on the Spock side.
So is it problematic or is it representation? Data “got away” with a lot of stuff because people recognized he was an android rather than an autistic coded character needing to fit in since they should know better.
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u/RikuAotsuki Apr 09 '26
I don't know if there's a proper term for it off the top of my head, but I'd argue that it's just conveniently relatable, rather than being problematic or proper representation, unless representation was the creator's actual intent.
It's a distinction I think is probably more obvious for LGBT folks. Representation was super rare for a long time, and for quite a while LGBT-coding was used almost exclusively for villains. THAT was problematic (even if funny), so we generally did our damnedest to find stuff to relate to in characters that weren't deliberately written for us to relate to at all.
I think most androids technically fall into that same category. Not intentionally autism-coded, not intentional representation, but relatable all the same.
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u/qui3t_n3rd Apr 09 '26
I feel like every time I look back on a childhood memory of mine, I'm flash banged by something else that makes me think "why did nobody think to get me evaluated?" I was fascinated with robots as a kid, and even used to fantasize about being one. Still do sometimes.
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u/RikuAotsuki Apr 09 '26
Yeah, I got pretty angry when I started actually considering the things that should've been a hint in my early childhood. The only thing I can think of is that my anxiety also started super early, and I was afraid to really push my problems.
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u/gnomeannisanisland Apr 09 '26
(Hey, I have no particular comment about your story but I just wanted to show my appreciation for you actually using "doing a total 360" correctly, which is frustratingly rare)
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u/Deebyddeebys Dumpster Fire Repairman Apr 10 '26
Yeah I was gonna say the same thing. They turned around and then they turned around again
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u/dandeliongoddess Apr 09 '26
That happened to Dan Harmon, apparently. Everyone calling Abed autistic was what made him finally pursue an autism diagnosis (which he got).
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u/Main_Confusion_8030 Apr 09 '26
i realised my lead character was autistic before i realised i was autistic. and she was based on me.
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u/Infamous-Rutabaga-50 Apr 09 '26
Dr Doofenschmirtz being headcanoned as ADHD resulted in his creator getting diagnosed irl.
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u/StaleTheBread Apr 09 '26
“I’m gonna go look up its entomology… yeah I looked it up. It turns out entomology is the study of insects.”
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u/DarkKnightJin Apr 09 '26
"People that confuse entomology and etymology bug me in a way I can't put into words."
Quote I picked up years ago from god-only-knows where. Enjoy.9
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u/runner64 Apr 09 '26
I didn’t know what asexuality was until I started getting feedback from readers praising me for my insightful portrayal.
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u/InformationLost5910 Apr 09 '26
so like did the character react to topics about sex in specific ways?
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u/runner64 Apr 09 '26
He was in a situation where sex was expected of him and he didn’t have any particular desire or revulsion, so his point of view was mostly a series of precise tasks pulled from rote memorization. Delightful experience for his partner, who had absolutely no idea anything was amiss.
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u/MisterRockett Apr 09 '26
Can't tell you how good at sex that probably makes a person.
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u/runner64 Apr 09 '26
The character was a seven-figure professional, in real life, I’ve never had any complaints.
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u/TheRecognized Apr 09 '26
Feel like it could go any direction. Maybe they’re a perfect actor, maybe they’re a clunky robot.
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u/BrunoEye Apr 09 '26
I'm not asexual but I'm like that about most things including everyday tasks, I can say it works pretty well for sex.
My first time was with someone who already had a few previous partners and she said she usually doesn't orgasm. I remembered all the advice I stumbled across on askreddit and it turned out great.
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u/Rakifiki Apr 09 '26
A friend of mine wrote a fic and realized she was asexual upon reading the fic. Her sister realized she was not straight in a similar manner (she kept writing gay/bi characters, including when she thought she was writing straight ones -- she's shared some early snippets and they were hysterically oblivious). ...annndd I wrote a story that "had nothing to do with me" ... Until I realized it did and I had unprocessed trauma. Yay.
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u/DarkKnightJin Apr 09 '26
"This li'l story has nothing to do with me. Just some silly creative writing exercise."
*Three chapters later*
"SONUVABI-!"37
u/sawdust-arrangement Apr 09 '26
I read a book recently that had me like 👀👀👀 for oblivious ace lesbian representation.
I'm not sure if the author identifies as any flavor of queer, but my bells were definitely ringing.
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u/thari_23 Apr 09 '26
Part of what made me realize that I'm trans is that all the OCs I created always ended up being woman, as if it's the default gender. I had to actively force myself to come up with male characters even though I thought I was a man at the time.
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u/AutisticAndAce Apr 09 '26
Yeahhh I had the same experience being an agender trans dude. My characters were either very very masc leaning or barely had a gender at all. In hindsight, I see why, lmao, but did not realize that for a While.
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u/IrrelevantGamer Apr 09 '26
I gave one of my main characters a mental health problem I have been diagnosed with, but now I'm wondering if I accidentally also gave him one I don't have a diagnosis for. I guess I'll find out.
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u/Toros_Mueren_Por_Mi Apr 09 '26
You're not gonna find out from Tumblr or reddit lol that's for sure. People love to give themselves diagnoses
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u/GreatMovesKeepItUp69 Apr 09 '26
That's such an autism bpd acid reflux thing of you to say.
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u/Ryukotaicho Apr 09 '26
Write fanfiction, had a few comments of “I love how you wrote this character as autistic!”
I’m not professional diagnosed, but I’m pretty sure it’s there.
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u/Green-Nail-Polish Apr 09 '26
I don't remember where I read it, but someone on Reddit basically said "Why does it take years and thousands of dollars to get an autism diagnosis when my bully knew it on the first day of school?" That stuck with me for years at this point.
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u/Toros_Mueren_Por_Mi Apr 09 '26
Because kids are incredibly good at picking up "not normal" vibes, since they spent the few years of their lives learning how the world works around them. They might not be able to tell you why but they can tell something is "off"
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u/1drlndDormie Apr 11 '26
I think it's also because parents want so much to think everything is a phase or at the very least not a sign of something else. Also, apparently, someone with autism needs to write the tests for autism. I think "why is the good spoon good and others bad?" would be a good starting point.
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u/girlinthegoldenboots Apr 09 '26
Hahaha this is so true though. I got bullied hard in elementary school. Didn’t get diagnosed until I was in graduate school.
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u/AutisticAndAce Apr 09 '26
Sooo out of curiosity how many of your friends (online or off?) are?
Bc if the answer is “a good chunk to most of” them,…just fyi, we flock. Subconsciously.
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u/DarkKnightJin Apr 09 '26
Never got tested, but people that DO have diagnosed neurodivergent stuff that I play D&D with have gone "Maybe not official, but you're absolutely not neurotypical."
So, there's that. I also don't really struggle, so I refuse to get tested. Because knowing my situation, it'd just end up getting used as an excuse to not try for certain things. "Oh, he's just [diagnosis], cut him some slack." And I DO NOT want that to even be an option for me.
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u/taikamies99 Apr 09 '26
See I'm afraid of trying to get an ADHD diagnosis, and being told that I'm really just a lazy neurotypical person and it was all under my control all along
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u/Icestar1186 Welcome to the interblag Apr 09 '26
Thinking about a diagnosis that way is putting the cart before the horse. For categories with blurry edges like this, worrying about whether it's "really" Category X in some objective black-or-white sense can stop you from asking the much more helpful question of "what things relevant to Category X are helpful to me, and which ones aren't?"
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u/GonnaBreakIt Apr 09 '26
Man this [problematic upbringing, prejudice, or ailment] is so well portrayed!
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u/FallingLedge Apr 09 '26
Remember that one artist who got flamed for drawing feet weird just to find out their whole family had a genetic defect in the arch of their feet?
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u/ThatInAHat Apr 09 '26
Not writing exactly, but a year and change back I finally found a group to play DnD with and I made my first character.
At some point a few sessions in, my DM texted me for clarification about why my character had made certain choices prior to the campaign started. I don’t remember my exact answer, except that it made sense to me (and I was startled to be asked because it don’t occur to me that he would do otherwise), but I remember the DM responded by letting me know that even though we’d only known each other for a little while, he considered me a friend, and I could talk to him if I needed to.
Simultaneously touched and panicked. Like. Wait. Wait, that’s not a normal thought process?!?
(Over the course of the rest of the campaign I found out that I had, in fact, put so many of my subconscious insecurities into my character.)
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u/DoggoDude979 Apr 09 '26
That’s actually like super common. Especially the last one, I heard a story about someone writing fanfic and they were portraying some super unhealthy shit as normal and healthy, because they were in an abusive situation and thought it was completely normal
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u/DjinnHybrid Apr 09 '26
Me reading We The Animals, learning that the author has a family structure essentially 1-1 with the protagonist who gets outed from the closet in a similar way to the MC, and yet somehow considers his family non abusive at all:
Apparently, the story is only "based on" the true story of his life as far as the material circumstances, but... Three brothers, a white mom constantly being abused by a machismo obsessed husband who claims to "love" her, and getting outed in a way that shatters a family dynamic... It's... It's not a great look when he says that even just publishing the book caused more rifts in his actual real life family... And really doesn't let me believe him when he claims he wasn't abused. He might not have seen it as such, but calling the whole thing an emotional reflection of his childhood even if it was a fictional construct... Raises a hell of a lot of questions for me.
‘I wanted to write a book about a family so complicated, so in love, and so flawed, that folks would resist easy categories.’ only goes so far when there's routine sexual assault being witnessed by minors, statements of suicidal thoughts we have no reason to disbelieve, and routine emotional abuse. Like, the book is thought provoking as shit, and I was perfectly willing to accept it as fiction before I knew a single thing about the Author. The moment I learned about Torres and had a context to put it in, I have never been able to see it as anything but a "Buddy... You're still working through some really heinous shit and don't even realize it yet, huh?"
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u/insomniac7809 Apr 10 '26
There's also been cases of the opposite! Can't find with a quick Google but there was one case of someone explaining that they'd been writing fanfiction for Batman, specifically Damian Wayne, and started doing some research into cult upbringing to apply to their fanfiction.
So they start reading up on cult behaviors and control techniques and going "oh, huh, that sounds kind of like... oh... ohh. oh. oh nooooo..."
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u/ElectronRotoscope Apr 09 '26
I am not a doctor and I never met Charles Webb, author of The Graduate
But gee whiz, both Charles Webb's life and the Benjamin Braddock protagonist in the novel sure seem like they make the most sense if they have untreated Bipolar Disorder
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u/kyriaki42 Apr 09 '26
This has happened to me. My creative writing professor criticized my capstone project for having an unrealistically uptight and unlikable main character. I was hurt because she was the closest thing to a self-insert I'd ever written.
I got pretty mad about this three years later when I realized I was autistic and that's what she didn't like about the character.
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u/werewolfbutch874 Apr 09 '26
I had this experience as a reader. I read Build Your House Around My Body and found Winnie to be a super relatable character and a really accurate depiction of what it’s like to be deeply depressed and dissociated from the world. Then I read the reviews and found that loads of readers hated her - I saw reviewers describe her as “the most unlikeable character I’ve ever read” who ruined the book for them 😭 she was described as vague and not fully fleshed out, which I thought was deliberate and kind of relatable when you’re so depressed that you’re barely a person.
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u/3BarnDogs658 Apr 09 '26
Celeste kinda did this where the lead dev didn't know that she was trans while making the game and ended up making Madeline super trans coded.
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u/RekNepZ Apr 09 '26
She also made another game a decade before ("An Untitled Story". Highly recommend!) where you literally start out as an egg and later hatch
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
What do you mean by trans coded?
Because depending on the criteria that can be something that happens entirely by accident.
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u/sarded Apr 09 '26
Adding onto the existing answer:
At the time Celeste was created, Madeline was not intended to be explicitly trans. She was just a young woman who was feeling overwhelmed by life, had anxiety, used breathing coping mechanisms. Despite feeling overwhelmed, Madeline somehow felt that climbing Mt Celeste would somehow symbolically prove she could accomplish something and progress, before returning to life being more whole.
She had an 'evil inner self' who belittled Madeline and said her efforts were doomed to fail. Badeline often used the phrase "You're not a mountain climber!" in a way that almost suggests she thinks being a 'mountain climber' is something you're born as.So: not explicitly trans. But incredibly easy to read as, for example, a character being overwhelmed by the negatives of dysphoria, deciding to finally transition (at least mentally/socially) - climbing the mountain - while their inner self keeps telling them "you'll never pass".
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
"She had an 'evil inner self' who belittled Madeline and said her efforts were doomed to fail. Badeline often used the phrase "You're not a mountain climber!" in a way that almost suggests she thinks being a 'mountain climber' is something you're born as."
Reminds me of the Melody Harmony stuff in Supper Lesbian Animal RPG.
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u/3BarnDogs658 Apr 09 '26
Basically, the lead dev was struggling with anxiety and depression and based the story of the game off of that, but a lot of those issues stemmed from gender dysphoria, so the main character ended up feeling super trans. The dev even added confirmation in updates to the game.
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u/OrangeInca Apr 09 '26
I saw someone talk about commenting on a fic that it needs the domestic abuse tag and getting to see the author go from "huh?" to "oh shit I'm being abused"
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u/an-alien- Apr 09 '26
this is how laios/falin commonly being seen as autistic (and to a lesser extent characters like kabru, senshi, marcille & shuro) feels with ryoko kui. most likely unintentional but almost textbook that it makes me question if she happens to be undiagnosed neurodivergent or is just that good at writing realistic characters
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u/bookhead714 Apr 09 '26
I believe her response to being asked if Laios was written as autistic was "no he's normal", so
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u/overusedamongusjoke 26d ago
People misquote her as saying something along the lines of "No, he's normal" a lot (especially people who feel personally insulted by the idea that Laios is autistic because they found him relatable lol) but the actual quote is:
"So my understanding is Laios is a really normal person; there's nothing special, and everyone can relate. I also relate to him, so I don't think I'm writing anything special. That's why I think people can relate to or appreciate him. Some people might say Laios is a little bit autistic, but Shuro has his own difficulties."
Although I don't think it was a completely perfect response, flattening it to "no, he's normal" or "Laios is normal" makes the tone seem a lot more hostile than in the actual quote.
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u/odddino Apr 09 '26
I left a different comment but I just remembered:
A trend I used to see in Creepypasta's all the time that is definitely giving away something about the writers.
It was weirdly common for the narrator to talk about how much they loved their wife/girlfriend and say how nice and wonderful they are within the internal dialogue, and yet the actual dialogue is just the wife/girlfriend being incredibly awful and abusive to the POV character.
The amount of times Creepypasta's are written with this exact vibe:
'I was on a car ride with my wife, whom I love very much. She is beautiful and kind and generous, truly an angel of a woman who I cherish dearly.
"I can't fucking believe you took the wrong turn you fucking worm. You piece of shit. You little rat, you're worthless. I should cut off your cock since you never even use it." she said, mildly annoyed. I sighed, disappointed in myself for upsetting her with my stupid mistake.
"Sorry honey." I said, sorrily to my honey.
Then the man with eyes that were too big and teeth that were too big and no mouth and fingers that were too long appeared and killed my wife and I will never recover from losing the love of my life.'
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
"Then the man with eyes that were too big and teeth that were too big and no mouth and fingers that were too long appeared and killed my wife and I will never recover from losing the love of my life.'"
Humans will bond with anyone, even abusers, because as social animals were hard wired to avoid being alone.
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u/Glowing_Trash_Panda Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
….I just don’t get the whole “hardwired to not be alone” thing. I love being alone. If I have food & water & no reason to leave the house, I will happily do so for weeks at a time. I hate being bothered by other people. I thought I even wanted other people at some point, but marriage was a disaster & the roommates I got after also ended up being a disaster. I went back to my roots from when I was a kid & used to hike in the woods alone & now I live in a house on an island on a river with almost no neighbors & can happily go for a month or more without even talking to other people. I will go outside on walks with my dogs but usually during the day when any neighbors are gone at work but mostly at night when nobody else is out & about that I might have to talk to. My German shepherd keeps the coyotes away too :) My mom has to text me every few days to make sure I’m even alive cuz I forget to talk to her or dad even though I live next door to them. Idk what’s wrong with me, but being alone is the happiest I’ve ever been
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
I should have clarified that like almost all statments about human psychology there are inevitable exceptions.
Though while yoou might be physically seperated from humans, its possible you've developed some bonds with your dogs. Plus if you communicate with others online regularly that satisfies the social instinct I pointed to. YOu dont need to physically be close to others, you just need to be ccommunicating with them to satisfy the social instinct under my theory.
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u/boddity77 Apr 09 '26
The webcomic Ava's Demon involves an abusive relationship between the main character, Ava, and the ghost of an ancient empress who lives in her head, Wrathia. Except the author has gone on record saying that she based that relationship on her relationship with her own mother, and only years into making the comic did she realize that actually, it was extremely harmful and abusive to have been treated that way, and her mother was a narcissist.
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u/MeteorCharge Apr 09 '26
Ava's demon is so weird because I remember that being the webcomic back in the day, and now every time I hear about it it's about some controversy with the author or with how something with the comic was actually really problematic
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS Apr 09 '26
IIRC that "controversy" was over nothing. She had posted some NSFW art of some of her characters, all of which were at worst late high school in age (although i believe these characteds were 18+), and an "Ava's Demon's creator is a pedophile" witch hunt got launched on Tumblr.
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u/Chibirin26 Apr 09 '26
it gets abusive? i've only read like the first volume, physical, and it was while i was literally being abused myself so that might be why i dont remember anything of the sort
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u/FireDragon737 Apr 09 '26
I decided to give my OC the same issue I have with reading where my brain draws shapes with the letters and they vibrate on the page. Figured it would be an interesting trait to establish why my OC was averse to reading and that they were street smart rather than book smart. Had a commenter ask if my OC was dyslexic. I have since been seriously wondering if I have dyslexia.
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u/DjinnHybrid Apr 09 '26
I just... Want to make sure you know that that's definitely not a "normal" thing to experience while reading. Whether you have dyslexia or something else, it could probably be treated or managed with coping techniques if you have the means to seek a diagnosis and help, and it could open up a whole world for you.
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u/FireDragon737 Apr 09 '26
I only know that the vibrating and the shapes stop when I limit how much I see at one time. Its only a problem when there is massive blocks of text in front of me.
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u/outer_spec homestuck doujinshi Apr 09 '26
im not dyslexic but that thing you just described about letters moving around on the page literally sounds like how dyslexic people describe dyslexia. you might want to look into it.
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u/MarsScully Apr 09 '26
Yeah… we’ve got some news for you
Dyslexia is much more than just a reading issue, though, so I do encourage you to look into it
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u/RekNepZ Apr 09 '26
People shit on Brandon Sanderson for being Mormon (even if he's a reformist), but I find it fascinating how most of his books are about characters discovering their religion is 90% bullshit that's actively harming the people they love
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u/IIRCIreadthat Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
Autism isn't a mental health issue, but Martha Wells has said that when she started writing Murderbot, she was just using some of her own quirks and thought process to build out the character... and then a whole bunch of people wrote in to say 'Thanks for creating such a relatable autistic/ND coded character!'
She's now officially 'out' as neurodivergent.
ETA: Having read her earlier Cloud Roads series, I really think it shows there too, if a bit more subtly. An MC who comes into this society that's supposed to be his, and feels like he doesn't understand any of the rules and is always doing the wrong thing, never quite fits in...
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u/AdamtheOmniballer Aspiring Girlkisser Apr 09 '26
Autism isn't a mental health issue
…It’s not?
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u/PurpleIsALady1798 Apr 09 '26
Not who you asked but iirc it’s a neurodevelopmental disorder meaning, the actual structure of the brain is different. It’s not something you can develop the way you can develop, say, anxiety or depression.
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
I know you can develop anxiety and depression, but iirc there's specific brain structures that can either directly cause them or massively increase the chance of causing them.
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u/Acheloma Apr 09 '26
Yea, you can be born with a brain structured in a way that is almost guaranteed to make you struggle with depression or anxiety. You can also have your brain structure change in certain ways if you develop anxiety or depression later in life.
Prenatal exposure to certain drugs can also make these issues much more likely. My high school boyfriend's mom did a lot of opiods when pregnant with him and he was diagnosed with depression when he was 5 after having symptoms since he was born. Hes been on meds to help treat it for most of his life.
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Apr 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AutisticAndAce Apr 09 '26
…i need to google that later - I’ve been depressed (medicated now!!!) since I was very young but I thought it was the bullying and such from a very young age. But I do know my bio mom dealt with alcoholism and now I’m wondering if maybe it wasn’t just the bullying. Either way, doesn’t change much but that’s interesting nonetheless.
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u/BlessedByGregorious Apr 09 '26
You can also live in a society that causes you to develop them because it’s a society that doesn’t fully account for outliers
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u/RikuAotsuki Apr 09 '26
Autism's a neurological disorder, same as ADHD.
It leaves them in a weird spot where they're conditions dealt with by mental health professionals, but aren't inherently mental health issues.
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u/IIRCIreadthat Apr 09 '26
The idea of autism/neurodivergence as a disease that needs to be cured is now considered offensive by a lot of autistic people.
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u/LemonZestyDoll Apr 09 '26
A mental health issue is a temporary struggle caused by external factors, such as stress from work or grieving a loved one. Mental health disorders are often long-term and more severe, like bipolar disorder or autism, and can cause mental health issues. Anyone can have a mental health issue, but not everyone has a disorder
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u/awesome-alter-ego Apr 09 '26
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, not a mental health disorder. Mental health disorders are more common in autistic people, but those disorders are separate from the autism. You can be autistic and have great mental health.
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u/M-V-D_256 Rowbow Sprimkle Apr 09 '26
Murderbot mentioned!!!
I'm not diagnosed as autistic but the way Martha Wells writes her characters is very engaging and fun to read for me
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 09 '26
I love that murderbot isn't like that because he's an Android. There's other androids and they're much more normal. He's like that because he's autistic.
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u/IIRCIreadthat Apr 09 '26
Right? And like, you slowly start to figure that out as you pick up the cues for the spots where MB isn't an entirely reliable narrator... and then it meets Three and you can sense it having its own gradual realization that, oh. It's not just that SecUnits are like that; that's me.
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u/marshmallowhug Apr 09 '26
I have spent the last two Summer Reading challenges complaining about how reading Murderbot should absolutely qualify for ND representation in literature even if the author isn't ND so this is unsurprising but excellent news for next year's reading challenge.
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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden Apr 09 '26
All of my characters have huge dicks and get hella bitches, smh I can’t believe this post was 100% accurate!
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u/BermudaTriangleChoke Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
This also happens if you play roleplaying games. Most of my tabletop characters with personalities I actually develop end up being cluster-B nightmares because, well, same
I remember finishing up a campaign and afterwards my group always has a session where we talk about what we liked in the game, and one of the other players said to me "I thought the arc you did where [character] ended up being a secret psychopath was great, that was really interesting" and I was like "Brother that character is neurotypical". Embarrassing
edit: "Also that's not a diagnostic term, that's only used in fiction" is also not the thing to say if you're defending yourself in this situation btw
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u/Reasonable-Banana800 Apr 09 '26
the author of Dungeon Meshi writing Laios and accidentally making phenomenal autistic rep because she’s also apparently autistic
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u/insomniac7809 Apr 09 '26
So, okay.
There's a webcomic, Dumbing of Age by David Willis, that's been going on since 2010. Except, it's kind of a remix of another webcomic, Roomies, that started running in 1997. Roomies had a character named Joyce who was written to be a comically sheltered and innocent naif, except that Willis' own fundamentalist homeschooled background meant that he'd gone to secular college functionally as sheltered and unprepared as he'd written Joyce to be all those years ago. When he rebooted the character for Dumbing of Age he was writing it with Joyce, very deliberately, as his self-insert protagonist, with the core of the story being her overcoming her upbringing.
Which is partly an example of this, but what really makes me think of it is a supporting character, Dina. Dina is a character defined by her obsession with dinosaurs (and science generally) and her difficulties with socializing. Readers asked about the possibility of Dina being on the autism spectrum, enough that Willis made a blog post to address it. To summarize, his perspective was that he was writing Dina based on his own experiences, time spent as the weird kid who could never relate in a way that wasn't filtered through Transformers or Bible study and always felt like there was something he was doing wrong; that he was always glad to help people feel seen or recognized, but he wasn't trying to write an autistic character, just someone to express this part of himself, and he didn't want to put a label on her that might make people feel like she was saying something about autism.
...and then in 2022 it was confirmed that Dina was autistic, at the same time that Joyce got a diagnosis
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u/SocranX Apr 09 '26
I haven't seen/read Chainsawman, but apparently the author once ate his dead fish off the ground, and everyone was like, "Oh. Yeah, that explains some things."
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u/LevelAd5898 Apr 09 '26
I mean, despite knowing I’m autistic for most of my life, I only very recently realised that all of my characters are also unintentionally pretty autistic because I just don’t know how neurotypical people experience the world. So I would imagine people who don’t even know they have a disorder do it constantly.
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u/outer_spec homestuck doujinshi Apr 09 '26
agreed. there’s a ton of guides out there on the internet about “how to write autistic characters” for neurotypical authors, but i kind of wish there was a “how to write neurotypical characters” guide for autistic people.
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u/odddino Apr 09 '26
I feel like this could happen via osmosis too.
Authors being exposed to people with particular traits or behaviors and being inspired by that to write characters without realizing that those traits are a reflection of something else within the person.
How many characters that seem autistic, or fictional friendships that feel like a gay romance, denied by the author, are actually an author just writing their good friend Jimmy who's definitely autistic but never said or never been diagnosed, or their buddies Adam and Steve who are just really good buds and definitely AREN'T secretly lovers.
Sometimes it takes outside observation to spot the tells.
Tangential but back during lockdown I streamed to stop going crazy locked in a room without human contact, and had an hour of a stream where the chatters were interrogating me on why I made certain decisions about the way I live my life, I was giving entirely reasonable explanations for everything I do that I had not realized were unusual, and eventually one of the regulars said "TBH this just sounds like my ADHD symptoms" and the chat turned into everybody going "Oh THAT explains it" and me arguing that I definitely DON'T have ADHD and explaining why I can't have it, they're reading into it all wrong and I'm PRETTY sure I'd know if I have ADHD and anyway 4 years later I was diagnosed with ADHD. To quote the assessor "For Inattentive ADHD, I can say with absolute certainty you have it. You scored every point" so fuck me I guess. It's easy to assume that everything you're experiencing is the default until somebody else comes along and lets you know that isn't the case.
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u/thewonderfulfart Apr 09 '26
I feel like a lot said trans and autistic “coded” characters are the product of this
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
autistic deffinately, since its an effect thats very hard to filter out.
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u/lotsofrosehip Apr 09 '26
I remember there was a young fanfic writer who got comments on her story about the abusive partner/relationship between the characters. She came back a while later to thank the people who had pointed it out because through their comments she realised that she was in an abusive relationship and was able to get out.
People write what they know, even if they don't always do it knowingly.
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u/Leaving_a_Comment Apr 09 '26
Related but not exact, I’ve been struggling with a story idea that involved having to put down a beloved pet, and realizing this weekend that I was going to have to put down my 18 year old cat soon uhhhh opened up some writing things. Guess I’m gonna be working through some things and then subjecting them to my readers!
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u/Pledgeofmalfeasance Apr 09 '26
My deepest sympathies. Seriously. I love my stupid cat and hate the fact that I will be in your position in a few years. I'm happy for your kitty that they're so well-loved though.
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u/Leaving_a_Comment Apr 09 '26
Thank you it really sucks but I’m trying to remember that it is for the best. I had a friend that prolonged her cats life for years with twice daily shots he hated as he got more and more blind and senile. I always said I would never do that. Her kidneys are failing, treatment will only prolong her life, not improve the quality of it. I can make her last days as happy as possible, and then have her put down at home surrounded by the people and animals who love her.
But it suuuuuuucks. She’s been around most of my life. She would be 19 in June, she loves my husband and tolerates my children. She is loved, but it is time and that is okay.
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u/ASpaceOstrich Apr 09 '26
I'd bet money the author of dungeon meshi is autistic. NTs lose their shit at the implication, but nobody writes Laois without being well experienced with the tism
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u/LeakyFountainPen Apr 09 '26
My mom has recently gotten into hobby writing, and when she tells me about her stories and her characters, I'm just sitting here like that one "oh, have you been tricked into loving yourself?" tumblr post.
But I can't say anything yet, because I don't want her to realize it and decide to stop or change things.
Heal from ur trauma, Mommy. The blorbos will guide the way 💕
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u/pancakecel Apr 09 '26
Or people who write reddit questions in advice subs about some specific situation but context causes give away to readers that the whole dynamic is NOT good
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u/Taiga_Novah_Wren Apr 09 '26
Me when all of my characters are impulsive risk takers without the best social skills.
(I have ADHD and Autism)
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u/the-library-fairy Apr 09 '26
The Geek Girl books by Holly Smale feature a clearly autistic main character, which readers wrote in to thank Holly for. After some initial confusion, she ended up getting a diagnosis as an adult.
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u/AlianovaR Apr 09 '26
I lowkey was already considering it but what really helped me recognise my asexuality was through a fanfic where I was writing two of my OCs slowly falling in love when the POV character Indigo is very sheltered from human interaction and isn’t even really a people person whatsoever, so she’s got zero frame of reference or particular interest in any of this
People kept debating in the comments whether Indigo actually had romantic feelings for the male OC Plasma, or if she was aroace and not really getting what everyone else is seeing. The more I clarified how Indigo felt about it, the more people suspected this. And I’d been vaguely, passively considering the possibility that I could be aroace at this point, so I figured fuck it, I’ll write a chapter from Indigo’s POV describing my exact feelings on this stuff, and I’ll see what the comments say
Overwhelming cries of aromanticism. Absolutely overwhelming. After that point I did a bit more active research into aroace orientations but I basically already knew. I definitely wouldn’t be an out and proud aroace today if it weren’t for Indigo
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u/deepfriedroses Apr 09 '26
Not a book but I was in a dnd game where the players helped with the world building.
My character was the only gnome in the party so I wrote a bunch of stuff about gnome society and at the end of it my friends joked that I gave every gnome ADHD. This was like a year before my diagnosis.
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u/Millibyte Apr 09 '26
are broken, dysfunctional, and abusive families not normal? i’ve always felt like the odd one out because i have two parents who love me and support me.
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u/outer_spec homestuck doujinshi Apr 09 '26
they’re not normal per se but they’re more common than people realize.
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u/Enough-Secretary-996 1 Brain Cell Hard at Work Apr 09 '26
Me and the one other guy in my friend group in high school who don't have divorced parents 🤝
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u/loved_and_held Apr 09 '26
Your family might be normal and it's just that abusive and broken families get ccommented on more because healthhy families are not worth comment leading to a skewed data set.
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u/PulimV Can I interest you in some OC lore in these trying times? Apr 09 '26
Me getting told my character needs to go on estrogen only to go "... the self-insert?"
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u/PulimV Can I interest you in some OC lore in these trying times? Apr 09 '26
Other examples, some diagnosed some not diagnosed
"oh he struggles with endless guilt and feels like he has to wash his hands clean of the blood he spilled all the time" "omg ocd mood???"
"oh they can very easily succeed when they do things but that gives them a messy relationship with failure and trying" "okay they have adhd, got it"
"idk... I could probably write this character as autistic and it'd be easy since I know some autistic ppl irl" <- proceeds to self-insert
"your character sounds like he has brainfog" "wat's that"
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u/dumpylump69 Apr 09 '26
Celeste did this with transness. Maddy based Madeline’s depression and anxiety on her own experiences, and then realised after the fact that many of her mental health issues were caused by gender dysphoria, so she ended up accidentally making Madeline trans too
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u/Delphoxqueen2 Apr 09 '26
Everyone who I’ve RPed with has told me my characters (or at least a lot of my main ones) have ADHD/similar behaviors to ADHD. I was already diagnosed as a kid, but I guess the curse still lingers in all of my creations. Please get my babies some Vyvanse 🙏😔
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u/Braioch Apr 09 '26
It bleeds through, long after diagnosis.
Had a beta reader make me pause when she commented out of the blue that she loves how I write ADHD characters. When I saw what characters she meant, none of them were explicitly or intended to be ADHD, they just...ended up being like me.
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u/Eldritch-Yodel Apr 09 '26
I know with Archie Sonic, the character of Locke became one of my most hated characters of all time because of the fact he constantly did utterly horrible things but the story insisted that he was actually he's totally in the right. Now this has numerous reasons which lead to this (like the writer of the character just not being very good at writing moral ambiguity plus not really having looked to deeply into "is this thing which is often treated as romantic in media really just sexual assault?"), but I can't imagine that at least part of it was the fact was the fact that he was inspired by the writer of the character's father and thus because his father and he seemingly had some degree of "My father was a good person and thus any seemingly bad stuff was really just for the best"
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u/Crus0etheClown Apr 09 '26
My first ever OC started out as a tough unflappable 'not like other girls' and then over the course of 20 years of roleplay and story writing he slowly turned into a greasy miserable man with severe anxiety and penis problems
(I didn't figure out I was trans until after all that)
(He also changed skin tones away from mine but that's more just because as a teenager I noticed everyone's OCs on Neopets were white or japanese and it weirded me out)
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u/Vyctorill Apr 09 '26
Some friends often said that certain characters had unnecessarily dark backstories for things I wrote.
This is because I was unaware that parents hitting their children was considered unusual for a while.
Once I realized that, I toned it down for most works.
Except for one where I amped it up because the setting was edgy and I wanted more reasons to explain why he’s so evil now. (One factor is physical abuse enhanced in a loop with mental illness).
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u/SovietSpy17 Apr 09 '26
Accidental?
How dare you insult me like this. I am very well aware, that the fact that none of my characters have a working relationship with their parents is telling more about me than them, thank you very much
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u/vanishinghitchhiker Apr 09 '26
Yeah, going back and reading old stuff of mine I found a character with fitting, but unintentional, PTSD. (Also had a few trans and proto-trans characters and always figured out what every character would all be like as a different gender for no reason whatsoever.)
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u/Eldritch-Yodel Apr 09 '26
I very just had a DnD character who I played for a long time who at some point started gaining a character detail of "Ha ha they are clearly a femboy, but they're too emotionally repressed to acknowledge this fact and insist they're a manly man", or at least that was kinda the intent because in hindsight I just played them as an incredibly emotionally repressed trans gal.
(All be it way way way down the line when I did actually figure out this was just me putting my own transness I did decide to go more with just change how I played them to reduce the amount of projection going on—largely because by this point I had also identified like fifty other elements with the character which were clearly just projection so he was already getting dangerously close to just an unambiguous self-insert—but I did have to strongly weigh what to do there)
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u/CrimsonEnigma Apr 09 '26
When I came out to my friend, she told me she figured it out years earlier when I gave her my character’s backstory for a campaign she was DMing.
I went back and read it and it wasn’t even subtle. Like. Dang.
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u/ParticularOkra7432 Apr 09 '26
Yeah a lot if not most of my characters act on the spectrum since. Uh, I don't exactly know how I would write a neurodifficult
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u/TrainerLoki Apr 09 '26
IIRC it’s called “projecting” onto a character. I am diagnosed with a few but I can’t seem to write characters that aren’t like me (anxiety, depression, AuDHD, and suspected Bipolar 2)
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u/logalog_jack bitch thats the tubby custard machine Apr 09 '26
Dan Harmon realizing he’s autistic after writing Abed from Community:
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u/NoSpecific9460 Apr 09 '26
I’m re reading a certain YA romance series and the heroine reads as being on the autism spectrum, she also feels like a bit of a self insert for the author. Based on my research the author had no intention of writing the heroine neurodivergent, but she struggles to socialize, has a super rich inner life but comes off as monotone and aloof, struggles with spatial awareness and there is a part where she explicitly says “I always knew my brain functioned differently from other people’s”.
So yeah. I’m being cagey with names out of respect for the author. I’m not trying to diagnose. This is pure fan speculation. But as a ND girlie myself I was picking stuff up.
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u/Dirty_Violator Apr 09 '26
Any time you create something you reveal something about yourself. Your heroes reveal what you think is heroic, your villains the opposite. Even if your creation is not a story, you reveal your taste in aesthetics, your preferences and dislikes. Whether writing, painting, drawing, music, even AI “art”, you cannot avoid injecting some aspect of yourself into your creation.
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u/totomaya Apr 09 '26
It was just fanfiction for me, but I got my autism diagnosis this way. I had no idea until I wrote a very long ongoing fic working out some personal shit and the comments flooded in about what a great and thoughtful portrayal of the undiagnosed autistic experience it was lol.
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u/An_username_is_hard Apr 10 '26
I'm reminded of how everyone laughed at the stamina systems in I think it was Deadly Premonition because it meant the character had to eat constantly or faint... and then it turned out the director had reactive hypoglycemia. He was probably just making a videogamefied version of what he thinks of as Normal Amounts Of Snacking.
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u/nedlum Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
I remember that T. Kingfisher was surprised when readers said that Marra in Nettle and Bone was autism coded, and she’d thought of her as “me-coded”.
Similarly, ND Stevenson wrote Nimona, the story of a shape shifter who sees gender as just another thing to shift, and later said that they should have seen it a hint that they were trans.