On another topic entirely:
While we've provisionally jossed theories that El Goonish Shive characters have autism, Twitter appears to have successfully diagnosed author Dan Shive with autism.
I've read a fic with an explicitly autistic!Sakaki, but thought it put her a bit too OOC. You might be tempted diagnose Tomo with ADHD... but you'd be wrong. She's actually just a person for whom the education system is useless and boring.
The main problem is that autistic characters are more useful to the reader than the author. Readers want characters to identify with -- and that's one of the things that make EGS so great particularly with respect to gender issues. But as a writer, you want your characters to interact, so the introverted form is not helpful. And ultimately, it doesn't tell you much of anything about what the character wants in life. A disarmed character like Yang may want to be rearmed to fight. A sociopath might want power. An autistic person wants largely the same things as everyone else, just in a slightly different proportion.
Atypical on Netflix does a really good job of showing that, though Sam has a relatively severe case. But for high-functioning people, like those I spend a lot of time with at work, they're really not all that different from neurotypicals as characters. In real life, it means certain communication strategies and environments are more productive. But in fiction, do we really want to go into the distinction between a person who wants to work in quiet, or a person who really wants to work in quiet with a single distraction? I mean, maybe, but I'm not seeing how or why right now.
While we've provisionally jossed theories that El Goonish Shive characters have autism, Twitter appears to have successfully diagnosed author Dan Shive with autism.
I've read a fic with an explicitly autistic!Sakaki, but thought it put her a bit too OOC. You might be tempted diagnose Tomo with ADHD... but you'd be wrong. She's actually just a person for whom the education system is useless and boring.
The main problem is that autistic characters are more useful to the reader than the author. Readers want characters to identify with -- and that's one of the things that make EGS so great particularly with respect to gender issues. But as a writer, you want your characters to interact, so the introverted form is not helpful. And ultimately, it doesn't tell you much of anything about what the character wants in life. A disarmed character like Yang may want to be rearmed to fight. A sociopath might want power. An autistic person wants largely the same things as everyone else, just in a slightly different proportion.
Atypical on Netflix does a really good job of showing that, though Sam has a relatively severe case. But for high-functioning people, like those I spend a lot of time with at work, they're really not all that different from neurotypicals as characters. In real life, it means certain communication strategies and environments are more productive. But in fiction, do we really want to go into the distinction between a person who wants to work in quiet, or a person who really wants to work in quiet with a single distraction? I mean, maybe, but I'm not seeing how or why right now.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto