#if the text is hard to read (i don't blame you) it says ''The Autism Siblings''

[blimbo-buddy]

[muttfangs]

BARKING INTO THE VOID: GIANT WALL OF TEXT EDITION

lol that transmasc feel when you talk to your supervisor about still getting used to passing as cis 99% of the time and trying to figure out tones that feel less triggering for people who are reactive to loud, masc voices due to my excitement from AuDHD being interpreted as anger due to volume and he says "I can understand how you feel, although I've never had that problem myself. I still get mistaken for a woman over the phone every day" passing as a cis man is one hell of a drug lol it's a double edged sword especially with my AuDHD bc I already have compulsive behavior issues with talking over people by accident / being loud, and having a low-toned voice allows me way more authority subconsciously to yell over people when I get excited and nobody stops me bc as a society we are hard-wired to let cis men talk over us (and this sucks bad and I hate it) a lot of animosity has been stirred up in my work environment between me and a couple coworkers bc they assumed I was cis and neurotypical. I am neither, and they read my gender presentation and AuDHD behaviors as "arrogant cis man condescends and talks over everybody" and uh. yeah. bad feels lol it makes me mad tho on a level bc like... I **HAVE** mentioned in staff meetings before like "hey I know I can come off as rude / aloof sometimes but please do not feel intimidated to approach me or tell me something's up" like... several times. I didn't want to reveal that I had autism / ADHD unless I had to bc I ***DETEST*** being treated like a child. ppl equate autism with like, being developmentally challenged oftentimes (in my experience). I'd rather be hated than be babied and treated like I'm incapable by people almost a decade younger than me, frankly lmaooooooo also. not for nothin but the coworkers who hate me also have a *HUGE* problem with effective communication. not trying to shift the blame here but that is definitely part of it. I've heard them!!!! talk shit!! out loud!!! to eachother!!! about other coworkers not handling cases the way they shouldve been handled and then they ***NEVER*** mention it in bin chat, or to the coworker lmao like!!!!! fuck off. I hate passive aggressive bullshit, it literally gets us nowhere just TELL PEOPLE. there's a way to tell people things directly without being an asshole, and I'm sick of younger ppl thinking that direct communication = anger or whatever. that's where a lot of their hatred for the way I operate comes from as well; I am a VERY direct person and it's interpreted as mean / rude like all the time holy shit I need to get "NOT TRYING TO BE MEAN IM AUTISTIC" tattooed across my fuckin forehead, apparently smfh

also unrelated; I can't tell if people aren't "into me" on dating apps or not?? is it because I'm an acquired taste visually and my personality is off-putting, or is it bc I'm so hot and cool and smart that they're intimidated to talk to me /hj this is why i really want to get off apps and talk to people irl!!!!!!! I can't "sense" a vibe thru text / pictures alone but I don't... know... where to meet cool local ppl to befriend and date :,) sorry I have a fat ass and an award winning personality, sheesh /s

[bettsfic]

Betts, I’m having a really hard time writing my fic. It’s incredibly long which doesn’t help but even updating the next chapter feels impossible. I’m so amazed—not only by how often you’re able to update, but by the sheer quality of your writing. I have a tendency to get too flowery and incoherent, so I’m scared to rush. But this unfortunately means I update every few months. All of my readers have virtually abandoned my story and I can’t blame them. Can I get some advice on how you’ve built the skills needed to update fast with good writing? Any suggestions you might have?

i can't remember if i've talked about this yet, but i was on a med to help with my sensory issues and it really, really fucked with me. and even though i was like, twitching a lot and had restless legs and fatigue, i stayed on it because it was doing what it set out to do: light and sound didn't bother me at all (i didn't even need to put on headphones when the lawn was mowed), and i wasn't snappish and mean like i get sometimes when i'm not masking. i was able to do everything i needed to do in a day with ease, without even making a detailed to do list (a thing i've done nearly every day since i was 18). i could make difficult phone calls. i could change my routine at a moment's notice or go somewhere when i felt like it without having to gear up for it. in other words, it had taken away a lot of my autism symptoms. for six months it was like someone else was living in my body. someone it turns out i didn't like at all.

i wasn't writing. i couldn't write. normally my brain is so full of words, if i don't get them down it can sometimes become physically painful. i've suspected for a long time i have hypergraphia, because the words don't even have to be coherent, they just have to be out. before i started writing fiction, i wrote a lot of flat-out nonsense. when i was a teenager, i kept long-running notebooks with friends. i was on AIM all the time. i religiously journaled and kept a blog detailing my daily life. and then when texting became a thing, my life got immeasurably better. i have always, always preferred writing to speaking, and i feel like i can't actually know a person until i've read their writing. i remember when i first got an email address and my dad sent me an email, i was like, ah! i can finally see you! and you're way weirder than i thought!

anyway it took a long time but eventually i found fanfic and now everyone who's ever known me can breathe a lot easier since i'm no longer texting them a million times a day with totally banal thoughts.

which is all to say, when i was on that med, my brain was utterly silent. it was terrifying. it felt like i'd had a major piece of me cut off and there was a time i was honestly so scared i'd never write again, that whatever spark i had was gone. i was so bored i contemplated going out, like actually leaving my house, for fun, and i was like, oh so this is why people do things.

because there were no words happening, when i did sit down to write (which was the one thing i still had to schedule, the opposite of how it usually is, and by that i mean i'm writing all the time by default and have to schedule everything else like eating and running errands), it was tedious, because i had to make them up on the spot instead of them just being there. it's the difference between buying apples and picking them yourself. when you buy them, there's a whole little mountain to choose from. you don't have to take a single step. but picking them yourself, you've gotta go out and find them, and it takes a lot longer.

there were other things i couldn't do either, like conflict and scene crafting. i couldn't really see the future of a given story, whereas before, i didn't even have to think about it. it was just all there waiting for me and all i had to do was put it on the page.

of course, there is a horrific downside to this, and that is that i'm virtually unfunctional in day to day life while i'm in the process of writing something. that's why i love residencies so much. they're made specifically for people with maladaptive behaviors like mine, like, here's a room, here's a desk, here's a hundred bucks for groceries, have at it.

i signed my apartment lease in april and i still haven't unpacked. some days i sit down at my desk at 10am and i blink and it's 2am and i don't know what happened, but i have 10k new words that i had absolutely no control over creating. thankfully i've developed good habits to make sure i get all the work done i have to get done, but it's always a struggle and honestly i can't see myself ever being able to work a full-time job again, unless i go back on that awful med.

the point is, for six months i wasn't writing, and because i wasn't writing i fell into a very deep depression. coupled with the fact nothing was in my brain, i wasn't talking much to anyone, wasn't engaging much online, wasn't reading, wasn't cooking, wasn't cleaning. all i could do was sleep and watch youtube videos. the highlight of my day was my coaching calls and the work i was doing for ofic, where i could feel a little like myself again.

as you can see from this very long post, i got taken off that med and put on a new one that's rendered me once more a ball of words and nothing else. my psychiatrist, bless her, didn't even question me when i said i preferred to be an obsessive maladaptive daydreamer who doesn't live in reality than...whatever i'd turned into. a task-doer i guess. i think what i'm going through now, the 200k in a few months thing, is all the build-up of being on that med.

anyway, everyone's brain is different and therefore their relationship and approach to writing is different. i think we have far less control over these things than we think. or at least i do. i certainly know some ass-in-chair 8am writers for whom writing is genuinely work like any other, and they have daily word goals and once they hit them they go outside and run a marathon or whatever.

other than those few people, i don't think any writer is happy with the pace at which they write. i would love to have the patience you do to get flowery with my writing, but my sentences have always been spare and simple. i've learned to make that work to my advantage i think, but it still remains: i am never going to be a writer of pretty things. and that made me sad for a long time, but it also makes me appreciate a beautiful, complex sentence so much more, because it's something i can't really do.

i don't think writing slow is a weakness and i don't think writing fast is a strength. our minds move at the pace they move and there's not much we can do about it. i think a lot about a girl i used to know in the MFA who wrote microfiction, and her daily word count goal was six. six words. i think about donna tartt, one of my favorite authors, and how she's published one book a decade, three books in a career. and i also think about those writers who churn out book after book after book and even if they're good quality, they're all kind of the same, and that's because writing speed is directly related to the speed at which you make decisions. if you're always falling back on the same story structures, sentence structures, scene pacing, and character archetypes, yeah, you can write pretty fast. writing, at its simplest, is deciding what word comes next, over and over and over again. and so i write fic fast because my writing style is just my inner monologue, the characters are already established, and in terms of plot all i really have to do is figure out the happily ever after.

but it also took me 3 years to write my short story collection. i have novels i've been working on for 5 or 6 years now. i have hundreds of thousands of words of prose in various WIPs that will have to be completely rewritten because of how sloppy they are and how they don't get the work done i want them to be doing. so i definitely understand what it is to write slow, and how frustrating it can be when you're just eager to be finished.

i'm sorry your readers have abandoned your story and i'm sorry i don't have more practical advice for you. my only real advice is to relish in the process and enjoy any minute you spend crafting a sentence you can be proud of.

[johannestevans]

hhhh I'm just

i love izzy to death obviously but it's driving me a little mental about how people refuse to acknowledge his harms even when writing from Ed's pov and I'm just like. really

like thinking about mental illness and neurodivergence in the text and how to be izzy reads as very autistic + anxiety whereas ed comes off as very ADHD and BPD

and people are perfectly willing to accept that Ed has ADHD when it means that Ed is stupid or needs to be managed, and even besides the stigma against personality disorders in general, absolutely refuse to acknowledge that Ed's erratic moods, constant spirals between depressions and obsessions, violent lashing out, difficulty to commit or make decisions etc... might also be symptoms

and it's so blatantly fucking racist

like people do it already with white men's autism all the time, where it's like a get out of jail free card to be a rigid asshole, and the implication being that white autistic men are super duper special boys who just don't KNOW they're bigoted, or are incapable of learning not to be bigoted because they're frightened of change and difference

its the self-infantilisation argument that's inherent to a lot of white "ignorance" but it's turned up to 11, bonus points if the label used is "aspergers" to really hammer home the eugenics

meanwhile literally everything ed does is used as a cudgel against him? acting like Ed is manipulative BY being depressed or BY being suicidal, but also like

his up and down moods are not a nebulous "crazy" to blame and attack him for - he's a heavily traumatised, unbelievably lonely and isolated, indigenous man navigating an extremely racist world in a position of command constantly threatened by violence, esp of white imperialism, but specifically by individual white ppl holding up or echoing that power structure

like? are you really surprised he's erratic? are you really surprised he constantly mimics other people's personalities and gives them whatever they seem to want from him? are you surprised he does performance after performance and is very careful about showing his "real" self?

like i think about when lucius snaps at Ed and is like "most people aren't cool like you are" when like, Lucius has seen Ed be vulnerable several times, but also when Ed is doing that routine it's ultimately him worrying about his reputation which is. directly a worry about his own safety and survival

and when Lucius says that it's a mini revelation because like... oh, he doesn't HAVE to be cool here? he can relax? he can enjoy it?

(but also... can he really? who else is watching? where are the cracks in this fuckery? what's will happen to him if he lets his guard down too long?)

like I'm screaming bc ed constantly and continuously faces rejection, because he comes off as very ND, because people find him "intense" and "intimidating" and "hard to read" and "distant" and all of that is multiplied a thousand fold by the specific ways in which people racialise him, associating him with violence, lacking capacity for pain and especially emotional pain, and putting his "craziness" down as like, the uninhibited "savagery" in him or whatever

like, bro!

and especially to then paint all of that and the ways he holds his position as unthinkably abusive when izzy's abuse is JUST from a victim's POV, but also then specifically within their interactions to act like Ed is victimising Izzy and there's not, you know? some mutual mental illness things going on, sure, but also its a racially charged relationship between a brown man and his violently white lieutenant?

like. i just don't see how that can interest you when all of that is part of the POINT of the SHOW

[meanautisticenbian]

Fuck it, I'm gonna dissect all the bullshit in that one Lilith post bit by bit

TW// Lilith hate, victim blaming, abuse, cult mention, ableism towards Autistic people, sexualization of minors (briefly mentioned)

I'll be putting my text in bold just in case it's hard to distinguish between the pictures and my commentary

Here's the post I'm referring to in case you're curious

Moving on and starting with this bit

People pay attention to Eda all the damn time, she's literally one of the main characters. Funny how you only mention tik tok and nothing else. Is that the only other social media you have? Because fans on different social media platforms act much differently; on IG and Reddit stuff like the sexualization of minors and fucking ODALIA AND ALADOR STANS are normalized, where everywhere else it's pretty much universally agreed that that stuff is bad. I don't know a lot about what toh Tik Tok is like just because I don't usually go on tik tok, but even if it is like this, it's not the same for the rest of the fandom. A lot of the fandom still hates Lilith and blames her for her abuse and not being able to leave

You say that like she's a bad person, she's really not. The curse she placed on Eda wasn't intended to be permanent and probably wasn't even supposed to take the effects that it did. She was most likely scammed. I mean look at how she reacts when Eda transforms for the first time. She also feels guilty enough about it to throw herself into an abusive situation and spend almost her whole life trying to make up for it. Lastly, yes she hurt Luz, but let's not forget that Belos threatened her life upon Eda's capture and Lilith was running out of time and had no other option. Obviously what she did was wrong but she's not the real monster here.

"I do like Lilith" this entire essay says otherwise.

Literally none of us ignore any of the bad shit she's done, stop lying about us.

Yes, Lilith did mock her for her curse, which was messed up, but we don't actually know for sure if the curse is basically canonically a disability in that world, so if that's the case then for now it's technically not ableism until we get confirmation otherwise.

"it was an accident and I forgive Lilith" no you fucking don't. First of all this entire essay is you talking about how evil you think she is and secondly, if it really was as bad as you view it, you wouldn't be that forgiving.

Ah yes the victim blaming, the one thing that almost everyone does to Lilith and barely anyone talks about.

There is literally not a single Lilith stan out there who blames Eda for getting cursed. You're just mad that your victim blaming towards Lilith got called out so you silence us by lying about how we do the same thing to Eda.

No one is making Eda out to be the villain either, the only example I can find of this is a few fanfics where she treats Lilith a lot more harshly than she should, and even then, scenes like that are written in a positive light as if you're supposed to be on Eda's side, so with that in mind, the writers of these fics are clearly not even Lilith stans. In terms of how actual stans treat Eda, the worst they do is make her slightly ignorant of Lilith's trauma, kinda like the fandom, minus the "slightly", until she grows as a character and learns to see the red flags. If that's the problem you're talking about, then breaking news: Eda's not perfect either. She has flaws too just like literally everyone else in the show and people are allowed to write about them

Tell me the truth: are people making playlists for Lilith that include a lot of sad and angry songs because she's not a happy person anyway so there wouldn't be a point in having any happy songs, or are they making "trauma" playlists? There's a difference

I'm sorry, are you trying to tell me that people recognizing Lilith's trauma is victim blaming Eda? That's not how it works sweetycakes

There is far more Eda angst out there than there is for Lilith, where are you finding so much Lilith angst? LILITH is the one who's traumas are being ignored while Eda's gets all the attention. You're acting like one of those white cis gays on twitter who see black people talking about the anti blackness they experience daily and accuse them of being homophobic because "there is so much homophobia in the world and they still manage to make it all about race".

No one is saying that Lilith has worse trauma, we're only saying that her's is also severe and that it definitely exists. Also funny how you're allowed to be mad at us for comparing Lilith and Eda's trauma (once again lying about us), then you go on to do the exact same thing and say that EDA'S trauma is worse. Even if, hypothetically speaking, Eda did have it worse, that doesn't mean Lilith doesn't have the right to be traumatized. Both of them have trauma, both should be recognized. Also, Lilith had far more going on in her life than just the guilt of her actions, she was was implied to have been psychologically and maybe physically abused, and was probably even tortured. Stop ignoring all the red flags and condemn the actual abuser (Belos) before you criticize anything the abused (Lilith) has done.

We're not making everything about Lilith, like shut up.

Please don't say that autistic people "have autism", it implies that it's something that can be removed from us. For example: you don't say "a person with blackness" when referring to black people or "a woman with homosexuality" when referring to Lesbians.

Oh yeah I'm also autistic so here are MY thoughts

Amity and Lilith are not antagonists anymore, hcing them as Autistic is not villainizing autism.

The autistic Lilith headcanon was made by autistic fans, allistics only latched onto it because they either wanted to be supportive or they saw that she actually had a lot of autistic traits

You're not the only autistic person alive, just because you're not like Lilith or Amity doesn't mean none of us are or they're not autistic. I mean, I know I am

You're not fun or funny

"not all Autistic people are like this" remember that line, dear readers

Actually, I prefer the autistic villain trope MUCH more than the grown ass autistic adult that acts like a five year old trope. At least we'd have less stereotypes associated with us.

Autism is not supposed to be portrayed in only fun and happy characters, that is literally the epitome of stereotyping and infantilizing. You literally just said that not all autistic people are the same, doesn't this count as being all the same? Does this mean I don't exist anymore? Am I just not autistic? Are you even aware that a flat affect or monotone voice is literally a very common autistic trait? You can't just say that we're stereotyping autistics and then just go on to stereotype us, like what the fuck are you even on? Is it only ok when you do it?

Amity is not edgy for fuck's sake

Literally no one is headcanoning Lilith or Amity as autistic because they're mean, we headcanon them as autistic because they actually show traits of it

Oh, our harmless headcanons are making you feel uncomfortable because they don't fit into the stereotypes you made up about us? Good to know our plan is working I guess

Last thing I wanna say regarding this post as a whole: why are you acting like liking Lilith and feeling sympathy for her is a bad thing? If you find this then don't say "I don't think that's a bad thing", answer HONESTLY

Well that's all I have for now, thank you for reading, I need to go to bed soon