![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Brought to you by Carry the Ocean by Heidi Cullinan, a book that clearly tries hard to present a positive portrayal of autism but still gets it wrong in so many ways, I had to stop reading every other chapter.
1. Don't "other," or worse, infantilize the autistic teen/adult's dialogue/internal narration.
A verbal autistic teen/adult who doesn't have an intellectual disability is not going to speak entirely in short sentences and simple words like a child. Like, please, I beg of you, go read autistic adults' blog posts and forum posts. We talk like any other person would.
The things that make verbal autistics' speech strange are not grammar oddities, they're more along the lines of:
- Infodumping/oversharing about a special interest—however, this doesn't happen all the time. Think more like short, intense bursts if a special interest comes up (or if an autistic is dying to share).
- Difficulty maintaing a conversation: awkward pauses/lulls and not knowing how to respond to certain things.
- Not understanding certain jokes and/or difficulty with sarcasm.
- Scripted responses in regard to specific social situations.
Please, please, if an autistic teen/adult is verbal and doesn't have an intellectual disability, don't write them as talking like a 5-year-old. It's infantilizing and upsetting. (Even a nonverbal teen/adult isn't going to think like a 5-year-old.)
Another thing: We don't talk like robots. We use slang/colloqualisms. Really. Please stop writing our dialogue as sounding like we're aliens learning a human language for the first time.
2. Autism =/= bad manners.
Yes, autistic people can come off as rude, but it's often an unintentional thing due to either (1) being honest to the point of bluntness and not understanding that that's not considered polite for the situation, and/or (2) miscalculating whether something may come off as rude or not.
For obvious things, such as non-jokingly telling friends/family members to "go away," that's just a result of bad manners, not autism. For the love of God, autistic people can learn basic manners if they're taught (or even if they observe enough real/fictional people).
3. If the autistic character is having miscommunication problems with another character, particularly a love interest, don't make the solution be for another character to instruct the autistic character to pay more attention to body language/emotional cues.
In real life, an autistic person in that situation would probably already be doing their best, but no matter how good an autistic person is, it's never going to be easy or intuitive, and simply asking the allistic partner to just speak their opinion out loud is so much easier and more efficient.
4. Don't write about how your autistic character *categorically* *can't* do X thing, but the difficulty disappears when it's inconvenient for the story (i.e. when the autistic character is around their love interest).
One of my biggest pet peeves with fictional depictions of autism is that allistic people have a stereotype of autistic traits as All Or Nothing. Either you have normal neurotypical skills reading facial expressions or you can't do it at all, etc.
But then, of course, the author is quick to drop that like a hot potato if it would actually cause major problems in the story.
That's not how disability works, though, and besides, there are many autistics whose social difficulties are more of a continuum. And that's really easy to explain, too. "I have a hard time reading faces unless I know the person well" or "I can read the obvious expressions but not subtle/faked ones," for example.
5. If the autistic character does not have an intellectual disability, and other characters know they don't have an intellectual disability, don't...write other characters treating them as though they have an intellectual disability?
I'm not even sure why I have to say this one, but apparently I do.
6. "Social difficulties" does not translate into "lacking mental competence" by any stretch of imagination.
Really, the more I think about it, the more I feel like most of my annoyance at Carry the Ocean has to do with the author writing Emmet (the autistic character) as clearly not being intellectually disabled, but then at the same time writing his thoughts/dialogue so that he sounds like he has an intellectual disability, and it's weird and very uncomfortable.
"Social difficulties" does not mean an autistic character can't understand romantic relationships, or sexual consent. "Social difficulties" doesn't mean autistic people don't understand that humans are complicated beings and relationships can get weird—even saying this out loud sounds so condescending, and I hate that I have to write this because of the book.
1. Don't "other," or worse, infantilize the autistic teen/adult's dialogue/internal narration.
A verbal autistic teen/adult who doesn't have an intellectual disability is not going to speak entirely in short sentences and simple words like a child. Like, please, I beg of you, go read autistic adults' blog posts and forum posts. We talk like any other person would.
The things that make verbal autistics' speech strange are not grammar oddities, they're more along the lines of:
- Infodumping/oversharing about a special interest—however, this doesn't happen all the time. Think more like short, intense bursts if a special interest comes up (or if an autistic is dying to share).
- Difficulty maintaing a conversation: awkward pauses/lulls and not knowing how to respond to certain things.
- Not understanding certain jokes and/or difficulty with sarcasm.
- Scripted responses in regard to specific social situations.
Please, please, if an autistic teen/adult is verbal and doesn't have an intellectual disability, don't write them as talking like a 5-year-old. It's infantilizing and upsetting. (Even a nonverbal teen/adult isn't going to think like a 5-year-old.)
Another thing: We don't talk like robots. We use slang/colloqualisms. Really. Please stop writing our dialogue as sounding like we're aliens learning a human language for the first time.
2. Autism =/= bad manners.
Yes, autistic people can come off as rude, but it's often an unintentional thing due to either (1) being honest to the point of bluntness and not understanding that that's not considered polite for the situation, and/or (2) miscalculating whether something may come off as rude or not.
For obvious things, such as non-jokingly telling friends/family members to "go away," that's just a result of bad manners, not autism. For the love of God, autistic people can learn basic manners if they're taught (or even if they observe enough real/fictional people).
3. If the autistic character is having miscommunication problems with another character, particularly a love interest, don't make the solution be for another character to instruct the autistic character to pay more attention to body language/emotional cues.
In real life, an autistic person in that situation would probably already be doing their best, but no matter how good an autistic person is, it's never going to be easy or intuitive, and simply asking the allistic partner to just speak their opinion out loud is so much easier and more efficient.
4. Don't write about how your autistic character *categorically* *can't* do X thing, but the difficulty disappears when it's inconvenient for the story (i.e. when the autistic character is around their love interest).
One of my biggest pet peeves with fictional depictions of autism is that allistic people have a stereotype of autistic traits as All Or Nothing. Either you have normal neurotypical skills reading facial expressions or you can't do it at all, etc.
But then, of course, the author is quick to drop that like a hot potato if it would actually cause major problems in the story.
That's not how disability works, though, and besides, there are many autistics whose social difficulties are more of a continuum. And that's really easy to explain, too. "I have a hard time reading faces unless I know the person well" or "I can read the obvious expressions but not subtle/faked ones," for example.
5. If the autistic character does not have an intellectual disability, and other characters know they don't have an intellectual disability, don't...write other characters treating them as though they have an intellectual disability?
I'm not even sure why I have to say this one, but apparently I do.
6. "Social difficulties" does not translate into "lacking mental competence" by any stretch of imagination.
Really, the more I think about it, the more I feel like most of my annoyance at Carry the Ocean has to do with the author writing Emmet (the autistic character) as clearly not being intellectually disabled, but then at the same time writing his thoughts/dialogue so that he sounds like he has an intellectual disability, and it's weird and very uncomfortable.
"Social difficulties" does not mean an autistic character can't understand romantic relationships, or sexual consent. "Social difficulties" doesn't mean autistic people don't understand that humans are complicated beings and relationships can get weird—even saying this out loud sounds so condescending, and I hate that I have to write this because of the book.
