So I’m on chapter 8 of Into the Drowning Deep, and I have a question: did you mean to code Olivia as autistic? I’m autistic and I see so many of my own little ticks and quirks in her it’s astounding.

seananmcguire:

acanofwyrmz:

seananmcguire:

I didn’t mean to code Olivia as autistic, no: Olivia is autistic, full stop.  She says as much a little later in the book, when she’s talking about her relationship with her parents (mostly her father) and some assumptions they made about her future before she was old enough to shut that shit down.

This was so important to me reading this book. As someone with Asperger’s, it happens so often that a character is speculated within a book/show/movie to be on the spectrum but the character denies it/other characters deny it/or later the writers/actors deny it. And it hurts. Like when people speculated Cumberbatch’s Sherlock was on the spectrum and Benedict said no, because he’s met people with autism and they can’t hope to be that advanced. Or how Will Graham literally says on the NBC show Hannibal that he is on the spectrum but actors/writers later say he isn’t and other characters say he isn’t because he has empathy, playing into the myth that people on the spectrum lack empathy. It hurts to think you have representation and then have that jerked violently out of your hands with the erroneous claim ‘people on the spectrum can’t do this/be like this.’

having a character explicitly and uncontestedly being on the spectrum was so important to me.

That is honestly why I try not to code people unless they’re at a place where diagnosis is not available to them, and then to be upfront about their neurological state when asked.  (Example: Jack Wolcott, from the Wayward Children series, has the same kind of OCD I do.  But she’s never been diagnosed.  She was too young when she left for the Moors, and when she got back, she had better things to worry about.  So she’s technically coded OCD rather than explicitly OCD, but I talk a lot about translating my own experiences onto her.)

Olivia is autistic.  Everything about her was written with that in mind, including the fact that she’s a very successful media personality who dresses as Emma Frost for conventions, and these are absolutely 100% things that autistic people can do, because I have met real, live, non-fictional autistic people who do them.