Society loves autistic coded characters more than they love actual people with autism

Depictions of autism in media very rarely focus on anything other than what's perceived as the upsides.
Like all other forms of entertainment and marketing, it's not realistic, it's designed to present something appealing to a mass audience.

Flash news people like fiction not as a representation of reality but as a stylized, idealized versión of it, that's why you see beautiful people, not fat, ugly or old. So it's autistic quirky and not every day autistic.

I'm aware it's an impopular opinion but that doesn't make it less true. And you can gauge it by how popular it is.

I don't understand the confusion here. Yes, it's interesting and entertaining to watch people on TV deal with issues that don't affect me and that I don't have to accommodate, and it's not interesting, entertaining, or fun to watch my brother deal with those issues in real life, or that we have to walk on eggshells at family holidays so my brother in law doesn't have a meltdown. Duh. It's also entertainment to watch a show where an important character dies, but extremely difficult and uncomfortable when your actual friend loses a spouse or child.

Society loves things that are difficult on TV, and in real life society prefers things that are easy.

Wednesday from The Adam's Family and Eddie Munster are nuerodivergent?

In general, I like all people more as a concept than in person.

Wait you think Wednesday is supposed to be neuro fucking divergent? The Addams family are macabre. They enjoy inflicting pain on themselves and others. They're obviously creepy and quirky. They're bizarre. They're morbid. They're antiheroes, maybe. They could even be argued to be sociopathic, sadistic, cruel, or just mean. But that's their entire shtick, you absolute massive twat. They're an antithesis of a typically-portrayed family, the one with the white picket fence and the golden lab. What they are not, nor has anyone involved with their creation ever claimed they were, is neurodivergent.

But sure, just randomly make something unrelated to you completely about you, cause that screams neurodivergent, not narcissism.

My favourite character is Abed from Community. Wondering what other autistic people think of him?

That's okay. They prefer nondivergent characters more than their real counterparts as well. We really just should all develop catch phrases like Hidily Ho, Neighborino! or Your pitiful rebellion is no match for the power of the dark side.

I don't believe any of these characters are meant to be coded autistic. People just like wacky characters who say things without filtering themselves because we aren't actually able to do those things and get away with it in normal society.

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.

I recently made some fellow ND friends and I can't honestly say that I don't blame the normies.

People used to tell me that I reminded them of Sheldon from tbbt as though that was a compliment.

I mean to be fair a lot of characters like that get popular because a lot of autistic people identify with them and there are a lot of autistic people in fandom spaces.

What is often described as autistic in Hollywood is usually an advantage, such as determination or a razor-sharp mind and good memory. However, the truth is different for many of those affected, as they do not have pronounced insular talents and often experience disadvantages with their tics and social problems. It is harder for others to overlook such flaws when there are no obvious advantages.

Taking photos of my autistic hand gestures to show people on the internet.

Then maybe try being a fun person to be around instead of blaming everyone else for not wanting to hang out with a whiny narcissist.

Readers are enamored of Stephen King's Holly character. Yeah, she's cute to read about, if your ex-wife didn't act like that. Not so fun IRL.

I believe Holly is supposed to be autistic, and me ex isn't that I know of, so I do NOT mean to offend. Just saying, I get the point of the meme.

My daughter is autistic, eat up with ADHD and sensory processing issues on top. She's 10 and I just got her and my son back after a 4.5-year court battle. That little girl is extraordinarily difficult to deal with, even with her meds.

I've probably hurt someone's feelings with my poor attempt to empathize and I'm sorry if I did. 😓

This is honestly painful to become aware of

Be pretty.

Who is Eddie?

pretty soon people on the spectrum are going to realize what the rest of us know: we're all cunts. bastards. shitbags and utter ass pimples of humanity. we're all shite and the ones that get loved are the rare fraction of the 1% of humanity, and they're rarely worth it either.

Personally I'd rather avoid people entirely.

As We See It was good. The autistic characters each had their own issues, strengths, difficulties communicating with neurotypical people and finding their ways to fit in (or not) in the world, and were actually played by people on the spectrum. Everyone I know who's seen it really enjoyed it. It's a shame that they didn't get picked up for a second season, because the writing, story arcs, acting, and character development were all great.

It is nice to see autistic characters develop in a fantasy setting. I think it is not so much about the character as it is about its circumstances.

Yeah over the years I've watched Autism go from millennials' joke of the century to genZs' new fad... and yeah it's making me lose even more respect in people.

It's weird how often internet comments are doing diagnosing. At least this time it's just diagnosing fictional characters but still

People hated Wednesday? What?

does this mean I should stop wanting to fuck edgeworth? /j