autisminfiction

[autisminfiction]

Why the Manic Pixie Dream Trope is harmful to autistic women. I will say though that while the author claims the counterpart of Manic Pixie Dream Boy isn’t based in reality, I essentially acted as one in highschool to an undiagnosed autistic girl.

#manic pixie dream girl #article #ramona flowers #autism #female stereotypes #star girl #breakfast at tiffany's #editorial #fault in our stars

[autisminfiction]

#autistic characters #persona 5 #futaba sakura

[autisminfiction]

Knives Out

So I just watched Knives Out, and I think it's worth noting the protagonist Marta's disability, which is an inability to lie due to vomiting whenever she does so. Something I haven't seen discussed though, beyond a brief mention that autistic often have gastrointestinal issues, is that many autistic are unable to lie, giving a real correspondence to the fictional condition. Knives Out is not the film to feature a protagonist being physically unable to lie, with Pinocchio being a particularly well-known example, but I wonder if anyone has played out this trope with a canonically autistic character.

In general, there are two functions of the trope of a character being unable to lie - first is a practical obstacle that acts as a challenge for the character, and second as a statement on the character's moral integrity. Both functions can be justified with a character portrayed as autistic, with the prior coming from an autistic character who is bad at lying due to not understanding neurotypicals, and the latter not lying because of their strong belief in honesty as a rule. Both functions are also present in Knifes Out.

Here are a few things to note about how this trope plays out in Knives Out with Marta and how it could relate to a canonically autistic character filling the same role. First off, she does lie on a few occasions, though it lacks long term effectiveness due to her vomiting soon afterward. This would be consistent with an autistic character who doesn't lie because they are bad at it, but not one who doesn't lie out of moral conduct. Second, there are times Marta engages in effective deception which is technically not lying, in which case the relationship with a potential autistic character is reversed since the one who is bad at lying would also be bad at other forms of deception, while the one following the moral code may be fine as they don't technically see it as a violation. Together these aspects aren't really consistent with the autism specific potential variation of this trope, and both serve as illustrating her disability as a technical challenge.

However, I think the most important thing to note in that in the pivotal moment in the film, Marta doesn't triumph in spite of her disability, she triumphs because she is genuinely good person acting earnestly. Despite knowing her disability this is not something the villain could predict, and thus his plan was foiled. More over, the fact she could engage in some forms of deception earlier emphasizes her authenticity by showing she is not just acting under constraint. This fills the second function of the trope, and I think that's also where there is the most power for an arc with an explicitly autistic character. Autism is defined as a disability, and when working acting from such definitions it only functions as a challenge to be overcome. But autistic people are full people, with their autism an intrinsic part of their personhood. I could see the same arc play out with an autistic character, and it's one I would like to see.

#knives out #marta #integrity #honesty #tropes #pinocchio #autistic characters #speculation #character arcs

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Interview with an autistic author about their book with autistic lead characters which has been made into a tv series.

#autistic characters #fictional characters #autistic female #a kind of spark #interview #elle mcnicoll #neurodiversity

[autisminfiction]

Just watched Avatar: The Way of Water. I for one think it’s much better than the first film because it explores much deeper themes. Among these themes is how different cultures interpret neurodivergence differently. One of the lead characters, Kiri, is canonically neurodivergent - she is diagnosed with a form of epilepsy after having a seizure underwater. Importantly, humans attribute her spiritual experiences to frontal lobe seizures. The fact the movie embeds us in the Na’vi culture causes the audience to take their spiritual interpretation as granted for truth, but there is some ambiguity to it, and many real world cultures regard neurodivergent individuals as sacred. It’s the same phenomenon here, but our perspective is being inverted from what we are used to. This is also the reason I’ve always had some degree of dislike towards the term neurodivergence - it’s a reflection of our cultural bias to reduce personality and other cognitive differences to neurology. By inverting our biases, the film exposes us to them, though people may still overlook them anyway, just in the opposite direction.

Beyond her explicit neurodivergence, Kiri has other elements to her character which are neurodivergent-coded. I hesitate to say autistic-coded specifically at this point, but I have seen other people make the claim. One particular moment that stood out is when Kiri is bullied for her neurodivergent behavior. She also belongs to a different culture and subspecies from her bullies, but her neurodivergence was the impetus for their harassment, and the reason she was targeted over her siblings. This is a common experience for neurodivergent children, especially autistic children. While she struggles socially, she exhibits autistic hyper-empathy where she is closely connected to animals and aspects of nature. She also appears to visually stim frequently as she observes her environment, which is reflected in the movies visuals, and has a close attention to detail. These features lend to the impression that she neurodivergent, and possibly autistic - should also point out that epilepsy is a common comorbidity of autism as well.

The last thing I’m going to note about her character is that due to the circumstances of her birth some people believe her to be a Christ figure. The plausibility of this is increased by how circumstances of her mother’s death could both provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for how her mother could have underwent parthenogenesis and a spiritual explanation for how she could be the child of the god of their culture. This is fine and all, but I hope that if this is the direction the show ends up taking that they don’t skew so hard in that direction that her nuances as a relatable neurodivergent character are lost. It’s clear that there are going to do with more her character in the future, and I hope she remains the most interesting character in the franchise so far rather than a plot device as we see more of her.

#speculation #autistic empathy #epilepsy #avatar #waves #the way of water #bullying #spirituality #ambiguity #cultural perspectives #indigenous #neurodiversity #kiri #fictional characters #autistic coded character #Christ figure

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Facebook page for novel I’m working on 

#octophagia #autistic characters #Novel #work in progress #facebook #octopuses #cephalopod #cephalopods #autistic female #fiction #scifi i guess

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#autistic women #fictional characters #please stand by #autistic characters #spectrumly speaking #becca lory #katherine cody

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#my little pony #autistic women and nonbinary network #awn #pinkie pie #extroversion #maud pie

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Presentation from the “Understanding Autism through the Actually Autistic Lens” conference this week about representations in media. 

#autistic representation #disability in media #daria #sheldon cooper #atypical #pinkie pie #ms frizzle

[autisminfiction]

Thoughts on My Little Pony: A New Generation

The show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is special to me for it’s portrayal of autistic coded characters, and I’d argue it was a pivotal phenomenon in autistic culture. It has since completed it’s run, and the pilot for it’s successor just aired yesterday in the form of the movie My Little Pony: A New Generation. Let’s make it clear from that from get go it’s apparent that this show is not going to be as significant to the autistic community as the previous show was as all it’s characters have less autistic traits than those in the original show. We’ve had our time in the limelight, so it’s fine that now the focus is placed on a different, but I’m still going to miss what we had.

It makes sense that this show is different from the previous one in this regard, as thematically this show focuses on cross-group relational problems rather than in-group ones like the previous show, which is more of a concern for neurotypicals than it is for autistic people since they have a much stronger in-group bias. We can see this change in theme from the first scene, where we see Sunny Starscout, the new lead who kinda feels like a neurotypical version of Twilight Sparkle, interprets Twilight Sparkle as being sent to make friends more as a diplomatic mission between pony races that a personal assignment to develop her social skills. Sunny longs to befriend other pony races (unicorns and pegasi, since shes’s an earth pony) and is only ostracized because such beliefs are considered to be heterodox in her community, contrasting with Twilight who never say the point in pursuing friendship with anyone. While intelligent, well-educated, and a little bit geeky, she lacks Twilight’s intensity while maintaining a social intuition that Twilight lacks, and so on.

There is one character though appears to be neurodivergent, if not autistic coded. That is Izzy Moonbow, the unicorn who Sunny befriends. What intrigues me about Izzy Moonbow is that despite being the comic relief she may actually be the most complex character in the movie, with her deeper character appearing almost as an inversion of her superficial presentation. For example, she appears oblivious to her surroundings, but proves to often be the first to come up with a practical solution from their environment, while bubbly she was socially isolated, and while her descriptions of other pony’s “luminescence” (aura) suggests a New Age archetype, she actually contrasts with other unicorns in the show in that she is NOT superstitious. In particular, she also initially appeared to be the opposite of autistic, but it was later shown that she finds it difficult to relate to her peers because she processes the world around her in a different way then they do.

Izzy Moonbow does not appear to be autistic coded as she has been shown to be quite responsive to the emotions of other ponies. There was at least one gag where she directly reacted to another pony’s facial expression, and she appears to describe other’s emotional states and personalities using can colorful metaphors. However, she also demonstrates limited understanding of what is appropriate behavior in various social contexts, so maybe autism is more plausible than it initially appears. One wonders if maybe her descriptions of luminescence is not a metaphor, but her attempting to describe how she experiences the emotions of others, which she is unable to describe in the way neurotypicals do because she doesn’t experience them in the same way.

Let’s get to the essence of her character. Officially her gimmick is that she likes crafts. However, her crafts are shown to be of remarkable mechanical complexity. She is not just an artist, but a tinker, and the only reason that aspect is masked is because her presentation is more feminine than the stereotype of this archetype. The tinker archetype is closely associated fictional depictions of autism, often under the guise of being more interested in machines than people. That description certainly doesn’t apply to Izzy, but it also isn’t an accurate description of autism, and in many depictions of the autistic tinker they are shown as emphasizing with machines as a result of being rejected by their organic peers despite longing to be accepted by them. Izzy is a bit a different, instead desiring to show her contraptions to friends she never had, but there is still a common thread of social desire persisting after rejection.

There is another link between the tinker archetype and autism that also applies to Izzy. The tinker is highly intelligent, but they find it difficult to express this intelligence through words, and instead demonstrate it through their ability to work with their hands. This certainly applies to some autistic people, though others are the opposite. As for Izzy, her comments tend to confuse others, but she has shown to be very competent at solving problems when she can go straight to using her hooves and horn, such as when she created a bridge from a tree while the rest of the group was complaining about being unable to cross a chasm. I think this is most of all what gets to the essence of Izzy’s character. She does not see the world like others do, but it cannot be denied that her perspective if just as valid because she proves it is through what she does.

Many people have compared Izzy Moonglow to Pinkie Pie, both being social comic characters who are very obviously neurodivergent, but I find Izzy Moonglow to be a much more realistic depiction of someoen who is neurogivergent, while Pinkie Pie is more just a comic character without depth. Both would be difficult to label with any real-world disorder, but while the reason for Pinkie Pie is because there simply is nothing beneath the surface connecting her diverse behaviors, with Izzy it’s because she’s meant to be a individual with personal depth rather than checking of a list of traits. I also wonder if some of the difficulty in identifying what is going on comes from the path that she has a very feminine presentation, but her way of processing things has traditionally been associated with males, and thus sexism in the psychiatric community would lead to them failing to identify her underlying thought processes. That’s certainly the case for many autistic women, and it could very well extend to someone like Izzy.

That’s all my thoughts about how autism and neurodiversity relate to this incarnation of My Little Pony for now. There is going to be a full series following the movie, so I’m looking forward to watching it, and particularly seeing more of Izzy. Depending on how she’s portrayed in episodes I may even decide to give her an actual profile. As for now though, I just think it’s really interesting how both Izzy Moonglow and Twilight Sparkle are purple unicorns who can ambiguously be interpreted as being autistic, but have completely different personalities. Izzy is breaking new ground, as while Twilight Sparkle’s personality was pretty common for fictional depictions of autistic males prior to her being a female instance of it, Izzy’s is one that hasn’t been depicted much at all, and I wonder if any autistic girls relate to her in a way they haven’t related to characters before. So even while the show has a whole is less neurodiversity focused then the previous one, it still has something in it for us, and that can be enough.

#my little pony #new generation #my little pony: new generation #Sunny Starscout #neurodiversity #tinker archetype #feminine presentation #Twilight Sparkle #izzy moonbow

[autisminfiction]

I’m a bit over half-way through the series myself. I found her to be very obviously autistic as a child, but as an adult she masks so well you’d almost think she couldn’t be autistic except for the brief moments when her mask slips. She’s a very interesting character.

#the queens gambit #beth harmon #autistic women #drug addiction

[autisminfiction]

This is a zine looking for submissions from autistic people about their experiences with characters that may not be explicitly designated as being autistic, but they still relate to. In particular, they are interested in the perspectives of minorities within the autistic community - women, people of color, LGBT+, nonverbal ect. , but anyone who identifies as autistic is welcome to submit, and the content of the submission could be in any form the submitter likes. If you’re interested, just open the link for more information, the deadline for this round of submissions is July 11th.

#matilda #matilda 2 mag #zine #autistic characters #autistic coded character #submission #call #intersectionality #deadline #busybeingdisabled #autism_in_pop_culture

[autisminfiction]

I’m working on writing my own profile for her, but in the meantime you can read this. Despite her relatively minor role in the plot, the character Isabelle also had a strong impact on me, to the point I wrote a song about her and it’s currently the song I’ve written that I’m the most keen in actually producing. 

#aspergers #to the moon #river wyles #isabelle #autism spectrum #autism in women #masking #video game

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-grapples-with-autism-portrayals-onscreen-this-is-a-responsibility-you-need-to-take-really-seriously?fbclid=IwAR2BELXCG-Cl01bmjq4uOI2zwi4XRIqTJo-4JOzuHselKE-IxsvP5MD1JZM

I’m currently working on a profile for Rene, let’s see if it gets completed.

[autisminfiction]

https://time.com/5942094/sia-music-disability-representation/?fbclid=IwAR2ZJJDluVciEyCsdZRbxX0ArlOHzuYiDUA2NTmEr9BOoWCQOxSRkalC4dc

[autisminfiction]

This is the first case I’ve seen of a popular autistic character who was designed in part by someone who is also autistic. The fact the character was confirmed as autistic after fans noticed it instead of having it be shoehorned is a hallmark of the current age of autism representation.

#she-ra #entrapta #autistic characters #actuallyautistic #sam szymanski

[autisminfiction]

Let’s Talk About Umbrella Academy And Other Things

First off, I’ve only seen the first three episodes of the second season (and none of the first season), so I’m not really in any position to talk about the series, but what I did see in those few episodes inspired me to talk about things. First off, there is a nonverbal character who is very obviously autistic, Harlan Cooper. He hasn’t appeared much so far, but from what I have seen he does seem to be more of a character than Renee in Pixar’s Loop, another nonverbal autistic character who I plan on writing a profile on soon. Overall his characterization is sympathetic and realistic, though I’m picking up some red flags with implications that his parent’s marital trouble’s center around him, which is problematic due to a widespread myth about autism and divorce. I have heard that as the arc with him concludes well, here is two autistic writer’s praising the character: 

https://themighty.com/2020/08/review-netflix-umbrella-academy-autism/

https://themighty.com/2020/08/umbrella-academy-season-2-nonverbal-autistic-character/

That’s not what I want to talk about though. It’s a different character who inspired me to write a post, Lila Pitts. I’m not saying she is autistic, as this point really has nothing to do with autism specifically. It’s about the portrayal of mental illness in general, which includes autism. An old trope is having a sane person be in a mental asylum, and while there are some like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where the inmates are also real characters, for the most part they are not, and this is no exception, with Diego being that character. For a moment it looked like they were going to avert it with the major character “crazy woman” Lila actually being “crazy”, but I guess she actually isn’t? Then again, maybe both Diego and Lila both have mental health issues even if that’s not why they were committed. I was excited to learn that Gerard Way is not only the author of the original comic series, but also a producer of the show, as I know him to be a champion of mental health issues, so with his over sight I’m sure whatever the show ends up doing with it’s continual handling of mental health is competent, but the show never was the issue. 

What I was surprised to find was that so far I’ve been unable to find any disabled commentary on this trope in general. I was able to find lots of complaints about haunted asylums, but this is a much more prevalent trope. As such, I just want to get people talking about it - people who have been in-patients in mental health facilities are just as much people as any one else, regardless of why they were such, and they need to be recognized as being such.  

#umbrella acedmy #harlan cooper #the mighty #tv tropes #gerard way #lila pitts #mental aslyums #mental health in fiction