Looking for Advice From the Community

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?

Parents
  • 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. 

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