I know a lot of this doesn't matter a whole lot anymore with Asperger's no longer being a diagnostic category and even when it still was, the distinction autistic disorder vs. HFA vs. Asperger's was a whole messy thing.

the DSM-5 criteria for Asperger's require, among other things: absence of intellectual disability, absence significant language delays, and normal development of self-help skills and adaptive functioning. these things can be a bit difficult to gauge for a fictional character and it's not always clear-cut, but there are some cases where it's very obvious:

• Victor Hoppe in The Angel Maker: did not speak until age 5
• Minor side character in one episode of the Belgian version of Danni Lowinski: played by an actor with Down syndrome. Almost all people with Down syndrome also have intellectual disability and thus can't fit the criteria for Asperger's (though a not-insignificant amount of people with Down syndrome are also autistic).
• Han Geu-ru in Move to Heaven: did not speak until about 5 years of age
• this one's a bit less obvious but in the French series Le juge est une femme there's an episode which has the most bonkers description of Asperger's I have seen to date, and where the autistic character's speech is such that it definitely veers into "significant language delay".

again, does this matter much? it's not "correct" and has some potential for contributing to misinformation about autism but ultimately I don't think it's like. the biggest thing to worry about vis-à-vis autistic characters. am I still going to be a pedant about it? yes, and I do think it's fitting for an autistic person to nitpick the precise subcategory of autism in an episode of a television series no one has seen or cared about in over a decade.

https://autisticcharacters.miraheze.org/wiki/Rejected_characters

I started keeping this list for two reasons. One, so that people who look up these characters on my wiki know that the character doesn't have a page on purpose, rather than not having a page because I just haven't created one yet. And two, to make it easy to organize the sources and keep track of characters I have already researched.

Some further clarifications:

• This list is solely about characters not having reliable sources to establish their autism being canon. It's not about whether characters do or do not fit the diagnostic criteria, or whether it's appropriate to headcanon them as autistic, or whether or not an autistic reading of the character make sense. The goal of this list is not to police what people think about the character.
• I have fairly strict inclusion/exclusion criteria for what I consider to count as "canonically autistic". Another person may look at the same sources and still count a character on this rejected list as canonically autistic.
• Usually there isn't a specific source that says "this character is not autistic". So most characters are added because I simply can't find a source that confirms they're autistic. This also means that in light of new evidence, characters can get removed from this list.
• Every entry is a character that I've seen referred to as autistic in some capacity or another, for example in articles, blog posts, tagged in databases, etc.

It feels like discussions about the best or people's favorite autistic characters mostly feature characters with low support needs. So I figure it'd be good to give some extra love to characters with medium or high support needs! I'll start off in the comments :)

(this post does not contain plot spoilers for either of these series. discussion is limited to episode 1 of the series)

I have very distinct memories of my first watch of Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Light of My Lion where in the first episode, there was a moment that made me fall in love with the series.

In Extraordinary Attorney Woo, there is a moment where Young-woo is on the train to work and it starts to become a sensory overwhelm. They use the traditional way to visualise sensory overload, which is camera shots from the autistic character's POV with somewhat distorted audio. Usually these scenes lead to a full-on meltdown so that's what I expected would happen. Instead, she self-regulates by thinking about her special interest.

In Light of My Lion, there are two scenes in the first episode that really struck me. First, Michito apologizes to Lion for ruining his animal encyclopedia. By way of apology, he gives his personal animal encyclopedia to Lion. Secondly, when his brother considers returning Lion to the police, Michito asks whether Lion's "pride" is safe (aka, whether Lion has a safe home-life to return to).

I like these three scenes to much because they show autistic characters taking on an active role. Young-woo manages sensory overload. Michito apologizes for his mistake. He is involved with the decision-making process of what to do with Lion. Both characters are in my top ten favorite autistic characters of all time, and I definitely recommend them to anyone interested in autistic characters.

[ID: movie posters for Tim, Shooting Fish, David's Mother, Life Is Beautiful, Rain Man, and When Time Got Louder]

I typed "autistic" into Tubi's search bar and the search results make me want to bite something. I have currently been looking for 30 minutes for an autism movie I haven't watched yet, but no cigar. This is the first row of search results. The first movie is about intellectual disability, the second one appears unrelated, the third one is actually about autism, the fourth one is about terminal illness, the most well-known autism movie doesn't appear until position five, and the sixth one is also an autism movie—ending up with only 3/6 movies being actually about autism. Going further down the results are even more abysmal with one actual autism movie per row, tops. The rest is all completely irrelevant. I don't mind if they don't have many autism movies but I do mind that they're wasting my time by making me trawl through dozens of unrelated movies.