Okay, we really fucking need to differentiate between “autism-coding” when it comes to characters in media and “this character...
Okay, we really fucking need to differentiate between “autism-coding” when it comes to characters in media and “this character is just 100% autistic, even if the creators won’t say it.”
I fucking swear, allistic people really do not grasp that the queer equivalent of 90% of “autism-coding” would be “these two male characters have had on-screen sex several times, spend all of their time holding hands and calling each other their boyfriend” and if straight people saw that and then went “well, they’re not actually queer, it’s just queer coding, because they never explicitly use queer identity labels in canon, and actually, the creator is homophobic, so there’s no way these characters are actually gay, so it’s fine for me to make fun of them for being effeminate” everyone would quite rightly think they were being a fucking dick.
Like, I 100% get that some people take “coding” to fucking extremes, but 9 times out of 10 with autism, this isn’t coding. Allistic writers live around autistic people without knowing it and they use us as inspiration, without knowing they’re writing an autistic character.
That doesn’t make the character any less autistic in practice, in the same way that the queer character described above would still be a queer character, even if the author had literally never heard of the concept of being gay, they’d just seen two guys being boyfriends and decided to write about it without the labels. The label is not the important point there.
Allistic writers live around autistic people without knowing it and they use us as inspiration, without knowing they’re writing an autistic character.
This is “there’s a pretty good chance the author themself is on the autism spectrum and just never got diagnosed, and it bleeds through to their characters” erasure (aka the David Willis special).
I’m convinced that Ayn Rand met an autistic man once, thought he was super hot, and then proceeded to write a kinda misunderstood, kinda fetishized autism in her heros repeatedly.
We’re talking about the woman who wrote epic novels about heroes living their heroic, train-based lives and loves in accordance with the coldly logical philosophy that she also published at length and built a Yudkowsky-style charismatic sex cult around and you suspect she once met an autist?