• Replies 6 replies
  • Subscribers 32 subscribers
  • Views 331 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related
Hints and tips
  • To quote someone's message, first select/highlight the relevant text, and then use the Quote button that appears
  • To "mention" someone, type @ followed by the start of the forum name, and choose from the list; that person will get a notification of being mentioned

Looking for Advice From the Community

Captain Grover

Hi, all.

I wanted to get everyone's opinion on something. 

I write a Substack about my autism and I've been working on a post which explores fictional characters I have loved over the course of my life and the autistic traits I can identify in them. For example, Sherlock Holmes. Many of these characters were never actually diagnosed within their fictional worlds as autistic. 

Do you think that there is an issue with assigning the label to a fictional character? I wouldn't do this when discussing actual people because, of course, you can demonstrate autistic traits and not be autistic. 

What do you think?

  • Autism exists in the society since ever, so it’s natural that characters in books have autistic traits, or probably could be autistic. Now I laugh, I’m not a big writer or anything, but as I look back at my own stories, I recognize characters that I create do have many of my traits like constant daydreaming, being honest and simple, have difficulties comforting someone, looking for solutions instead of offering emotional support, hating changes in routine, feeling like life is too fast and too much for them, being the loner, being creative etc. so I think it’s very likely that many characters created by the authors do have many of the author’s traits, but not necessarily, they may be also created based on some real stories and real characters who existed and were so different than the majority that authors decided to create characters like them. 

  • Captain Grover said:
    Do you think that there is an issue with assigning the label to a fictional character?

    As they are fictional then you can only count on the author to tell you if they are indeed on the spectrum or just a bit quirky.

    For the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle (for Sherlock) this will be tough as he is long dead but it may be worth contacting other authors to verify this if it is really important to you.

    For anything pre-2000s then there was barealy an autism diagnosis so it seems unlikely many will be written specifically with this in mind. Even JK Rowling probably wasn't very informed about autism when she wrote the character Luna Lovegood but she may have been informed by the time she got to Newt Scamander.

    I would stick with much more contemporary characters where there is a decent chance to verify your suspicions.

  • I think assigning the label of autistic traits is fine for a fictional character but I probably wouldn't label them as autistic. Simply as if the author had wanted to give them that label they would have done. Granted some older characters may have been written before people had much awareness of autism. But it just seems polite to me not to give their character a diagnosis without their say so.

    But as I said I don't see any issues with talking about autistic traits and how characters fit into those traits. That way you are just analysing the character.

    That is just my opinion though, others may see it differently.