\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOkay, we really fucking need to differentiate between \u201cautism-coding\u201d when it comes to characters in media and \u201cthis character is just 100% autistic, even if the creators won\u2019t say it.\u201d
I fucking swear, allistic people really do not grasp that the queer equivalent of 90% of \u201cautism-coding\u201d would be \u201cthese two male characters have had on-screen sex several times, spend all of their time holding hands and calling each other their boyfriend\u201d and if straight people saw that and then went \u201cwell, they\u2019re not actually queer, it\u2019s just queer coding, because they never explicitly use queer identity labels in canon, and actually, the creator is homophobic, so there\u2019s no way these characters are actually gay, so it\u2019s fine for me to make fun of them for being effeminate\u201d everyone would quite rightly think they were being a fucking dick.
Like, I 100% get that some people take \u201ccoding\u201d to fucking extremes, but 9 times out of 10 with autism, this isn\u2019t coding. Allistic writers live around autistic people without knowing it and they use us as inspiration, without knowing they\u2019re writing an autistic character.
That doesn\u2019t 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\u2019d just seen two guys being boyfriends and decided to write about it without the labels. The label is not the important point there.
\nAllistic writers live around autistic people without knowing it and they\n use us as inspiration, without knowing they\u2019re writing an autistic \ncharacter.\n\n
This is \u201cthere\u2019s a pretty good chance the author themself is on the autism spectrum and just never got diagnosed, and it bleeds through to their characters\u201d erasure (aka the David Willis special).
I\u2019m 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\u2019re 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?
The woman whose best-known vision of romance involves a couple demonstrating their worthiness for each other by first destroying his life for several years and then raping her in a quarry?
"}