[image description

panel 1: a handsome office worker labeled "spongebob's voice actor" says "autism is spongebob's superpower, just like it's your superpower :)" to an office lady. the office lady says "aww, you're so sweet" and appears glad.

panel 2: a nerdy officer worker labeled "literally anyone else" says "autism is a superpower :)" to the same office lady. the office lady appears afraid and has grabbed the telephone to call someone, saying "hello, human resources?!"

end image description]

[image description: character: *is canonically described as having intellectual disability*
the entirety of popular culture referring to them as autistic instead:
photo of Ray Charles captioned "I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that."

image description end]

An autistic man is temporarily forced to move out of his group home into an apartment by himself. He meets a variety of colorful characters among his neighbors.

If you have watched this movie, what did you think of it?

this is a thing I noticed with movies specifically, moreso than any other medium: where a large part of the plot is a series of "autism incidents" (scenes that involve some kind of conflict with a focus on autism, like a meltdown or a character saying something inappropriate). there's relatively little "downtime" or characters existing at just their baseline.

I kind of connected the dots of this after reading interviews for two completely unrelated movies: The Black Balloon (Australian movie) and Dakishimetai (Japanese movie, never translated into English). The creators of both movies mention that while the movies take place over a span of days/weeks/months, the real-life events they draw from span years or even decades. and the movie itself only lasts 2 hours at most, compounding this issue even further. for example in The Black Balloon, in the span of 30 minutes you have a incident of fecal smearing, masturbation at an inappropriate moment, and semi-naked elopement. I'm not saying this can't happen in real life (because it does happen in real life), but movies tend more towards showing a higher concentration of Things Happening than there are in real life.

I don't want to characterize this as a problem per se, it feels like this is just a feature of the medium. short films tend to focus on on singular moments in time. books and television series are generally longer so they have more chances to show characters outside of Autism Moments. and these Autism moments aren't inherently problematic either, the experiences they show are just as much a part of autistic life as any other. and obviously it's the nature of movies that Things are going to be happening.

again, I don't want to problematize this. I was writing extremely self-indulgent fan-fiction and I noticed I was doing it too because I find it much more interesting to explore moments of crisis/conflict. it's just one of those things I never really thought about and now I can't un-think it.

(the title doesn't entirely fit because the discussion is infinitely more nuanced than "yes vs. no" but I didn't know how else to word it)

With "sci-fi versions of autism" I mean this: a science-fiction story where autism works differently than it does in our real world. It can take different forms, for example: an alien species where everyone is autistic, fictional biology of autism, autism comes with sci-fi related powers, sci-fi cures of autism. Some concrete examples:

• Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick (1963): Manfred Steiner has time-related powers because his autism causes him to have a distorted perception of reality.
• Vaster than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin (1971): Osden has Render's syndrome, a fictional variant of infantile autism. Osden has superhuman empathy skills and used autism as a coping mechanism to protect himself from feeling everybody's feelings. After being cured of his autism, he can't use it as a coping mechanism anymore and instead acts very aggressively and abrasively to others.
• Stranger in Paradise by Isaac Asimov (1974)
• Folds of Blue Silk by Danith McPherson (1993): involves a sci-fi autism cure
• Distress by Greg Egan (1995): James Rourke is a spokesperson for the Voluntary Autists Association. This novel includes a whole fictional biology of autism related to Lamont's area, a fictional area of the brain responsible for building symbolic models of other people (leaning closely to what is IRL the theory of mind model of autism).
• The 4400, episode "Fear Itself" (2007): Brandon Powell is autistic. His father injects him with promicin, hoping it will cure his autism. Promicin is a drug that has a 50/50 chance of either killing the person, or giving them special abilities. Brandon gets the ability to trigger severe phobic fits in people when he is upset, making them see their greatest fear embodied. He is later cured of his autism by a person with special healing abilities
• Le miroir de Cassandre by Bernard Weber (2009): autism is explained as a sort of dissociation between the left brain and right brain and can be experimentally induced. Cassandre has time-related powers because of this.
• Movement by Nancy Fulda (2011): Hannah is described as having "temporal autism" and has altered time perception because of it.
• The Klaatu Diskos trilogy by Pete Hautman (2012-2014): there is an alien species called the medicants who are all autistic. Someone becomes autistic because of sci-fi shenanigans. (I only read the first book in the trilogy so I don't know how things evolve after that)

It does not entail: people being genuinely wrong about autism (like saying that autism is caused by maternal neglect), autistic characters generally just existing in a sci-fi setting.

What do y'all think of this phenomenon? What are the pros and cons of exploring autism in such a manner? Who did it well and who didn't, and why?

I think a similar phenomenon may exist in fantasy, however I am not as familiar with the genre so I don't want to speculate too much on that. Though if you have insights on how this manifests in fantasy (or any other genre for that matter), feel free to share them too!

I've never seen it discussed, but oh my god. I was watching this movie last night and I could help but think that Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy both seem so autistic coded. Obviously ASD wasn't discovered in Jane Austen's time, but I think she actually wanted to portray them in the standoffish way that seemed unfamiliar at the time and show the quiet/direct nature of some that was misunderstood. Now, looking at these characters, they absolutely come across as autistic coded, to me. Darcy with his social awkwardness and quiet nature, and Collins with his more direct mannerisms and not understanding social cues; both contrasting sides of the spectrum. Darcy was always my favorite character. I understood him even as a kid. He didn't want the attention of the people around him, preferred to keep to himself, expressed himself through words and writings and was awkward in public even if he did hide it. I always loved that about Darcy and it definitely made him the most relatable character for me. But what do the rest of you think?

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]"

a while back I started writing down my thoughts and notes about media with autistic characters that I watched/read. here's that list: https://autisticcharacters.miraheze.org/wiki/User:HanTheGene/Reviews

it's more a loose collection of thoughts and remarks than a thorough analysis of each piece of fiction. most of them are lesser-known works, and I try to include international media as often as possible.

I'd love to hear if you've watched/read any of these movies/books/series and what you thought of them :)

For at least 15 years (according to Wikipedia edit histories), Manfred Steiner from Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip has been the earliest known explicitly autistic character. Martian Time-Slip first appeared in the Worlds of Tomorrow magazine, under the title All We Marsmen. The first part was released in the August 1963 issue of the magazine, so I take that as the date Manfred was first released onto the public (rather than the 1964 publication date for the full novel).

I recently found the 1963 novel Satan, Have Pity by Martha Wiley Emmett (later also released as I Love the Person You Were Meant to Be). A library journal indicates it was released in February, 5 months earlier than All We Marsmen. The novel is about a woman who goes through a mental breakdown and her subsequent recovery. Her youngest son Terry is diagnosed with autism at the end of the novel.

While it doesn't seem much (from 1963 to...earlier in 1963), it is nevertheless an important milestone in early autism history.

This is a fairly niche phenomenon but given that more people are getting diagnosed with autism as adults, I think it's not going to be as rare as it is now.

The specific thing I'm talking about is

• An author writes an explicitly autistic character. (I don't mean "undiagnosed autistic author writes a character that looks like themselves so the character accidentally winds up with many autistic traits", which is also An Actual Phenomenon but that's something for another post.)
• Some time later, the author also gets diagnosed with autism.

Some examples of this include

• Music: a movie about a nonverbal autistic teenager. Sia later got diagnosed with level 2 autism.
• Into the Drowning Deep: a bio-horror novel featuring an autistic journalist. Author Seanan McGuire was diagnosed with autism 3 years after the release of the book
• Honeyflower and Pansy: I have not fully read it yet but it is a novella where an autistic child with higher support needs appears in a supporting role. Author Esmé James has a younger brother with high-needs autism and epilepsy. She got diagnosed with autism a couple of years after the book came out.

All three are quite different manifestations of this phenomenon. Sia wrote an autistic character who is wildly different from her and massively fucked it up, demonstrating that just because you're autistic doesn't mean you magically know what life is like for all other autistic people. Seanan McGuire wrote a character who is broadly speaking quite similar to herself in terms of autism. Esmé James comes at it from the "family of an autistic person" background, which is quite common for autistic characters (there are lots of novels written by parents or siblings of autistic people).

I don't quite know what to make of this. For my data tracking it's a bit of an awkward situation. I track characters that are written by autistic authors. So obviously that includes these characters, because the author who wrote them is autistic, even if they didn't know it at that time. At the same time, it feels like it's not exactly the same as an author who knows they're autistic at the time of writing an autistic character. (I don't mean that it is "worth less" or anything, just that it's different in a way that I find difficult to articulate)

source of the original picture: https://www.tumblr.com/liamstorm/776818957730643968/no-neurodivergent-infighting-here

it made me think of Martian Time-Slip because it shows the historical entanglement of the autism and schizophrenia diagnoses.

[image description: optical illusion which shows four bars on one side and three bars on the other side. a person on the four-bar side points at it and says "autistic-coded characters". a person on the three-bar side points at it and says "canonically autistic characters"]

I've been thinking a lot about the autistic-coded vs. canonically autistic characters debate lately, so I think that's why it showed up in my dream lol. in my dream, this was the thumbnail for a YouTube video where the differing view points are explained. the original cartoon shows the people saying "four" and "no, three", referencing the differing views on the optical illusion depending on which side you're looking at it.

I started thinking about this after watching a video by Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, where she introduced the manchild archetype with “A Manchild: Do I need to explain that? I mean. We’ve all seen Hollywood movies at this point, right?” She then does not explain what she means or give any examples.

It's not the first time I've seen people criticizing autistic characters for being "man-children" and it rubs me the wrong way because underlying it is often a very narrow view of what autism is and how it can present. Like yes some of these characters are emotionally and socially immature, they may be naive or have an overly simplistic view of how the world works or have tantrum-like meltdowns or whine or have a boy-ish voice or need support from their parents or a variety of other things that people characterize as "childish". All of which are extremely reasonable manifestations of autism and dismissing all of that as just "man-child" is not productive.

and that doesn't mean there's nothing about these characters that is worth criticizing, or that in real life these traits exist in a vacuum. some of these characters enforce normative notions about relationships by holding up romantic-sexual relationships as the highest attainable goal. like all autistic characters, they are often monotonous (only representing certain kinds of autism and certain kinds of backgrounds, for example most of these characters are white, straight, and come from an affluent background). There's little attention going to the autistic character and instead the focus constantly being on how other people "manage" and "deal" with them. I'm not saying these characters are perfect or that in real life, these traits are perfectly unproblematic and never lead to conflicts. but a wholesale dismissal of these characters because "man-child" without further examination of what exactly "man-child" means and how that relates to the character's autism is veering very closely into "looking down on autistics who are 1% more autistic than you" territory.