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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?

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  • 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.

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