aziraphale hyperfixation, huh?

lately, i've seen more people in the online autistic community acknowledging the struggles of people with higher support needs, which is of course an important development. but for some, that seems to come with the implicit assumption that low needs autistics "have it easy" or experience no stigma at all, which is just wrong??? people with low support needs are still disabled by their autism and still face discrimination because of it. sure, they are impaired to a lesser degree than those with higher support needs, but that doesn't mean you can just erase their struggles, y'know?

Ever wanna just peel off your skin and give it a big old itch?

i don't want to start any blasphemous rumors but i think that god's got a sick sense of humor and when i die i expect to find him laughing

i accidentally conned my way into an autism clinic referral by offhandedly mentioning that i think i might have it to my doctor last week and this is about how the entire interaction felt

I'm seeing a lot of people with neurodivergency, specially under the autism spectrum say that "Laios is annoying, never shuts up, is insensitive, and I can't stand him"; and the irony is not lost on me lmao.

i did a massive nerd thing to celebrate the nona release. anyways. have a graph of gideons in harrow. insert obligatory sex joke here

A thing I've been thinking about a lot as I've been obsessively re-listening to the Rivers of London books on a loop and putting colour coded bookmarks into my paperbacks (in short, being Extremely Autistic about the series) is just how interesting it would be to explore what it would be like to be an autistic wizard in that 'verse.

Like, take vestigia. It's a whole extra category of sensory impressions on top of everything else that you're picking up on, and you only get more sensitive to it the longer you train for. Peter wonders at one point if Nightingale isn't just straight up listening to the magic of the city in order to find out about cases, and even if he isn't doing that he's still got to be picking up on a Huge amount of sense impressions from the magic around him. Would an autistic practitioner be even more sensitive to vestigia? Just how much of a sensory overload trigger would it be, given that it's not a true smell/sound/whatever? Do really skilled practitioners like Nightingale ever get overloaded by just how much they can sense? Would an autistic wizard have to train themselves to shut out their sense of vestigia so they didn't get overwhelmed?

And then there's how you learn magic in the first place, which is a lot of repetition, doing the same thing over and over again until you produce an effect, and then continuing to repeat it until the effect becomes consistent. And you build spells by learning more and more formae, memorising them in the process. Which sounds to me like Such an autism-friendly way of learning to do anything, I fucking love repetition and memorising huge amounts of information.

Also, it's pointed out a bunch of times that Nightingale has almost scary levels of focus. In Broken Homes he spends ages watching CCTV footage, and then a full half hour just staring at the dog batteries at Skygarden. And it's pretty obvious that his level of obsessive focus is what's made him such a powerful wizard, since he's willing to put in the hours of practice, so autistic obsessiveness would be useful too.

(Sidenote, but I'm not sure if I actually think Nightingale is a character I'd read as autistic. He's definitely got a bunch of traits in the right direction, like the single-minded focus, the scary levels of concentration, the things he's very particular about and the way he can miss Peter's sarcasm sometimes, but in his case I think it's more just his personality and training and age, plus all the trauma. But I do think it would be a fun possibility/what-if to explore.)

And when it just comes down to it, I don't think I've ever encountered a magic system that appeals more to the specific way that my brain works than the RoL one, it seems like it would be So fun to learn. Even, tbh especially, the Latin and all the other studying that's also involved. So it does rather entertain me that I've gotten really autistic over a book series that has such an autism-friendly magic system, it feels Good and Correct.

Although. Ben Aaronovitch. My guy. Give me a list of all the formae and how they work, I am Begging you. I've never wanted an in-universe textbook tie-in book as much as I do for this series and Eventually I'm going to get my hands on the TTRPG book and obsess over every little detail of how they've interpreted the magic for that.

peter pan psa tbh

Hi sorry to bother you but I just wanted to say that as an autistic person Starstruck makes me want to cry. I love her so much let her live the happy life she deserves with people that accept and care about her. That “otherness” or feeling of being “incorrect” and being seen as suspicious/ostracized for it was absolutely NAILED and it HURTS SO GOOD. I just really wanted you to know that. It’s nice to see someone like me in media, especially in something like the Kirby franchise. Thank you.

ohhhhh i am SO thrilled to receive this message because i am autistic, and by extension so is starstruck, and this was entirely on purpose! i'm so happy that you feel i nailed it! thank YOU for letting me know this; it's the highest praise i could have hoped to receive!

this was intentional autistic representation by an autistic creator and i am over the moon that it's connecting with you! her inability to "have the right magical signature" and her "mimicry of the signatures around her in attempt to fit in" is explicitly a (rather ham-fisted, if i'm being honest) autistic parallel, especially towards masking.

there are obviously parts of her story that aren't explicitly parallel (she is still a little alien after all, and there's going to be Fun Dramatic Aspects that my real life autistic experience sadly lacks), but for what it's worth i'm really happy that this purposeful allegory was noticed!

thank you again so much for writing in, it means the world

Autism advocacy YouTubers are cool and all but honestly I find it hard to listen or care about most of them. Like sure, they’re probably very helpful to lots of people in the community, but also NONE of them seem to be able to talk about autistics who aren’t high masking high empathy and low support needs.

They keep going on and on about the social model of disability, that autism isn’t inherently a disability, which is literally SO insulting to medium and high support needs autistics whose lives are severely impacted by autism. Or they’ll talk about how it’s just neurotypicals who don’t understand us when part of AUTISM is not being able to communicate well with ANYONE, other autistics included! We’re not some mythical species, we’re disabled humans with a developmental and communication disability.

Also when it comes to low support needs autistics, they only EVER talk about masking and high empathy and all that. What about the LSN autistics who don’t mask well or can’t mask, what about the hell they go through because no matter how hard they try they can’t fake being neurotypical well enough. What about the low empathy LSN autistics, what about their struggles and how they’re treated as lesser humans for not feeling other people’s emotions. What about the LSN autistics who are still impacted in negative ways by their autism, who don’t see their autism as entirely positive, who see it (correctly) as a disability and not a ‘difference’.

They never talk about any autistics outside of the narrow cutesy and palatable worldview they put online. The world outside of plushies and hyperempathy and memes and beige food and shit like that which while great for some lighthearted content still does nothing for the many, many autistics who aren’t like that. It still does nothing but represent the small percentage of autistics who exactly fit that type of autism in a cutesy, internet-friendly way while leaving the rest of us ‘bad, stereotypical autistics’ to rot.

I want a low empathy low masking autism advocacy YouTuber who maybe knows what it’s like to go through my type of autism. Or a MSN/HSN advocate with a whole different take on autism than what’s being spread online by LSNs. Sadly we’re not cutesy and nice enough for the online world..

A few lyrical moments in HTDIO where they just Get It

"So much can go wrong tomorrow by simply being me." - "So Much in Common"

"When I mess it up, when I mess it up..." - "Butterflies" (my favorite HTDIO song at the moment omg)

"But if it's hard, then its worth doing it right!" - "Butterflies"

"Do I only exist on this planet to make someone else feel inspired?" - "Nothing at All"

"If you stay, which people don't normally do." - "Drift"

“Try to decipher each new impossible rule.” - “Under Control”

“Taking authority, some recognition.” - “Under Control”

neurotypical people when a neurodivergent person is neurodivergent and doesn’t understand how to navigate every social situation perfectly

if adding facts about the real racer that a character in cars 3 is inspired by was a job i would be absolutely rolling in the dough

the sheer amount of headcanons i produced while i was drawing this is insane

My problem isn't that I don't like work. My problem is that I have to sacrifice fun relaxation time for the sake of getting work done. The work is fine, but put me on a schedule and I will bite you