#problemnytic rants

[problemnyatic]

dunmeshi post moment but it drives me up a goddamn WALL how people are so loud and upfront about their fav's flaws and shortcomings and how it makes them interesting, and then drop the notion like a stone the moment it comes to how others treat laios.

Like there's all this discussion about how the characters will respond in interesting ways to different situations because they're rich, multifaceted people with different strengths and flaws, but somehow everyone's behavior toward and in response to laios is just taken at face value as "probably reasonable."

No!!! No it fucking isn't!!! He isn't a "menace" and he isn't stupid and he isn't unreasonable, he's autistic, plaintext blatantly autistic and a solid half if not more of the situations he "blunders" into would have been resolved if not prevented if not nonexistent if the people around him had shown any respect for his intelligence and willingness to adapt to new information.

Everyone around him is constantly infantalizing him and acting like there's no reasoning with him, opting to straight up use force over just telling him what the expectations are in a situation he's liable to misnavigate, and it's unnecessary! Yeah he gets a little blinded by excitement about monsters, but it's more common for others to project their own discomfort onto him than for his interest to actually be leading somewhere genuinely bad, and when people actually take the time to explain to him that a situation needs more focus, he listens! Every time!

I'm not going to say he's done nothing wrong, he's as flawed as anyone else in the cast. But I routinely see folks mischaracterizing him as exactly the bumbling idiot the story is screaming that he isn't, and I can't help but see this thermonuclear media literacy moment as a massive fucking tell of folks' ableism.

So in case you needed it in plain english: Autistic men aren't inherently more dangerous or unreasonable than neurotypical folks. In fact, they're far more likely to be victims of violence. Y'all're just ableist as hell.

[problemnyatic]

Protip: If you wanna see something happen more, don't punish someone for doing it. This means teasing someone for moving out of their comfort zone for the first time in a while. This means being flippant towards someone when they genunely try to give a shit about you.

Just. Think about what you're actually doing when you say something to someone, what effect it might have on them, and if that's what you actually want to have happen. Ask yourself, "Does this just make sense because it's what I'd think? Am I considering this from their perspective?"

The first thing you should always do if you find yourself displeased with something is check to make sure you're not doing anything to contribute to it yourself, at least nothing that can reasonably be avoided. This is about personal interactions, not participating in funtamentally broken societal structures because they are what you live in.