this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Autism

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A community for respectful discussion and memes related to autism acceptance. All neurotypes are welcome.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I’m not with “coding”. It’s like a backronym, the characters are written, the actor and director interpret them, we see them and apply our own interpretation. Our interpretation tries to reverse engineer all of that and then put the character into a known box. Helluva game of telephone.

A character written to be autistic (or have gay affections, or whatever else) is not “coded”, they’re written to be gay or autistic.

Now, that’s not to say that writers, directors, and actors don’t all have biases and may have chosen certain traits knowingly or unconsciously and applied them to a character. There are definitely characters that do appear to have non-normative traits like BBT’s Sheldon, but the show left his character hanging. I can imagine why. If they said he was ASD the ASD community would vilify the show with “That’s not who we are!!!” and “Don’t mock people with ASD!” Justifiably.

But the wiki on the show says this:

Co-creator Bill Prady has stated that Sheldon's character was neither conceived nor developed with regard to Asperger's, although Parsons has said that in his opinion, Sheldon "couldn't display more traits" of Asperger's syndrome.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The ASD community would be right. There's no bigger insult than being connected with Big Bang Theory

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

Big Bang Theory is nerdface.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

It can become a caricature of stereotypes rather than a "real" person who is one of these things because the show makes it their primary trait. It's like designing a gay character in the 00s, especially realty shows, it was like "this person is the gay character, they have to look very gay, what do gay people look like? They're silly and talk gay and get overly emotional, there's our gay character." The racialized character can be even more overtly offensive for obvious reasons. When it comes to neurodiverse its the same, it's always a primary trait that is very intentionally crafted to be "quirky" or whatever.

Funny enough I think it's actually kids cartoons that depict these characters in the most realistic way,