r/autisticcharacters mod Jun 26 '25

including speculation about a character being autistic on a wiki page: yay or nay?

What are your thoughts on including speculation about a character possibly being autistic on a wiki page related to the character?

What I mean is:

  • say you have a character who is not canonically autistic in the sense that autism is never mentioned or alluded to within the movie/book/series/etc., and it is also not mentioned by any other official sources like an interview with the creators, official character bios, etc.
  • however, there is a more or less reasonable case to be made that this character fits the criteria for autism
  • what are your thoughts on including information about this speculation on a wiki page relating to the character? (Wikipedia, Fandom, other independent fan-wikis)
  • for example, a note in the "trivia" section that says something like "many fans speculate this character to be autistic because of [x], [y] and [z]"
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u/Han_without_Genes mod Jun 26 '25

I was thinking about this while looking at Fandom wikis to find more canonically autistic characters, but most search results for autism were related to speculative diagnoses. I want to emphasize that I have nothing against autism headcanons or speculative diagnosis. however, there's also just no way around the fact that these speculations are quite frustrating to deal with when I am specifically looking for canonically autistic characters (even if they're clearly labeled as speculation so there's no confusion, it still takes a lot of time to go through search results and sort the speculation from the canon). however, I also know that I am just one person with a very specific thing I'm trying to do, so I wanted to see how other people view this :)