#sophea 1.0

[sopheadraws]

When it comes to Brittany S. Pierce, people’s interpretations are all over the place. It ranges anywhere from <3 innocent babie <3, to severely cognitively impaired, to manipulative liar who pretends to be stupid so others obey their will (which I’ll later accuse her mother of, but that’s neither here nor there). Anyways, I’m adding my opinion into the cacophony because, despite the indecisive fanbase, thorough Brittany meta is lacking in quantity. Also, I tend to think my opinion is best, as is human nature.

This analysis is rooted in autistic!Brittany, and while its unnecessary since I’ll go through many of her autistic characteristics, here’s a post detailing the headcanon and a medical article describing the diagnostic criteria in simple terms if you’re unfamiliar with the disorder. I understand that not everybody considers Britt neurodivergent, and that’s totally fine - I’m always up for a healthy conversation/debate! - but please give me a heads up if you plan to respond critically because a lot of this is based on my own experiences as an autistic teenage girl, so unmentioned critiques can feel personal fast. Now without further ado:

A Deep Dive Into Brittany S. Pierce <3

Auditory Processing Disorder “APD” is a subdivision of Sensory Processing Disorder “SPD” which is a quintessential element of an autism diagnosis. APD is pretty much exactly what it sounds (haha pun) like: despite somebody’s hearing abilities, the brain fails to process auditory input properly. The APD trait I hear discussed most in autism spaces is the inability to filter out background noises, but Britt seems to struggle most with interpreting meaning from words. Sometimes when people talk to me (“dolphins are just gay sharks”), even though they’re speaking clearly and I’m very literate in English, it sounds like jumbled nonsense (“dulfanz-our-goost-gae-shorcks”). This accounts for what I’m calling Brittany’s “so close you can taste it” lines. Think of her claim that Christopher Cross discovered America or that O is the capital of Ohio; a man named Christopher C. is indeed credited with discovering America and O is the only capital letter in Ohio. As a whole, they often misunderstand things told to them directly, and it seems a lot less foolish if she only understood half of what was being said via APD.

I’m calling the category of Brittany lines that can’t usually be rationalized as possible by anybody over seven (e.g. Rory the leprechaun, storks delivering babies, and anything with Lord Tubbington) the “stranger than fanfiction lines.” Now, I could take these at face value and say she’s tapping into a magical dimension, but I have my own set of autism driven realism issues, so, without a pre-existing fantasy world, I’m using my significant brainpower to twist Brittany into plausibility =D I ultimately think the best explanation for the stranger than fanfiction lines is echolalia. Echolalia is the repetition of words or phrases, and it’s usually associated with autism. Autistic people often reuse other people’s words, and since we usually think in pictures and have various social communication problems, it’s easier than formulating new sentences. Or we just like the tongue movements/sound a word makes. Personally, I quote songs a lot - if you say something loosely related to a Taylor Swift, musical, or Glee lyric, chances are I’ll sing it - and dipsomaniacal is a new fave to say randomly. There’s some evidence for Britt doing this in canon, unrelated to the stranger than fanfiction lines. While Brittany is known for calling him Blaine Warbler, it actually originated from Rachel and the infamous spin the bottle kiss. They also repeat ‘uber weird after Blaine in the That’s So Rachel reading, and the last line of that scene is them talking in time with Blaine, a behavior seen in S1 with Santana. However, it interests me most that she calls Artie a robot, as we see her dad call Stephen Hawkin, another wheelchair user, a robot in S6.

Basically, I blame the Pierces for how terribly adjusted their child is <3 (Mostly Whitney. Assuming Pierce actually has an IQ of 40, he’s disabled too and deserves some slack in terms of spreading misinformation.) In her admittedly limited screen time, Whitney manages to do two positive things: be an LGBTQ+ ally and let her younger daughter do soccer, I guess. Otherwise, she kept the truth about Stephen Hawking from Brittany for 20 years, cheated on her husband on their honeymoon for claiming infertility, crapped in random barns, insulted her husband’s intelligence, publicly insulted her husband’s appearance, and arguably restricted her daughter’s intellectual growth. To be honest, I realize Whitney isn’t that deep and I don’t actually hate her, but if people can hate Brittany for being a comedic character from the 2010s, I’ll do the same thing to their mother in defense of Brittany. Fight stop the violence with violence, baby! Anyways, I don’t think echolalia alone can explain the stranger than fanfiction lines. At least, not without a source. And that’s usually where upbringing comes in.

I’m ruling out nature automatically because there aren’t chromosomes telling people to believe in unicorns. Well, some people - including autistic people (hehe see what I’m doing here?) - are more inclined to believe falsehoods, but falsehoods have to be fed by someone else. With autism, the reckless believing tendencies come from literal thinking in part. Also, since SPD makes processing the outside world difficult, we often can’t recognize “obvious” truths in the first place. My extended family hated watching movies with me because I used to ask questions every five seconds lol. Setting Pierce aside because he seems to follow Whitney blindly; Brittany’s unnamed sister, Sue, and Whitney are the remaining suspects.

I assume Brittany’s sister is significantly younger than Britt because she played soccer with a seven-year-old in S1 (technically she could’ve been the coach, but that throws off my theory that the Klaine/Brittana wedding was child free), and children aren’t clever or mean enough to throw off anybody’s world view so badly :) Sue does seem the obvious answer, but she didn’t meet Brittany until they started high school, and she’s consistently baffled by Britt’s behavior despite encouraging her own eccentricities in the other Cheerios. And that leaves Whitney as the perpetrator, blaming her Scientology and gambling addiction on a cat.

Finally, I do think there’s a few times when Brittany intended for her jokes to be jokes. I don’t think it happens as much as you might expect, but there’s a scene in S3 when JBI is interviewing Brittany about her class president candidacy, and she tells him she’s voting for Rick “The Stick” Nelson before turning to Santana and laughing that clued me in. I think the mentality behind these lines (the “pun intended” category) is best explained with an anecdote from my own childhood.

When I was little - maybe six or seven - I really wanted to be funny. Well, I wanted to be liked, and since I didn’t understand social cues, my solution was humor because I knew my dad told jokes which made me laugh, which made him likable! Unfortunately, as a literal thinking child, I had no idea how to do this, which meant I parroted the only joke I knew (“What time is it when an elephant sits on the table?” “Time to get a new table!”) in hopes of chuckles. This went about as badly as you would expect. After a while, my parents got rightfully fed up with this joke and got me a joke book. I had no sense which of these jokes were funny, which wasn’t helped by most of the book being about taxes, bad marriages, and other stuff aimed at adults.

It wasn’t until a routine walk to the convenient store that my comedy dreams were fulfilled. My dad, little sister, and I used to walk to the “snack store” to buy a drink each and share a candy bar. While we had some routine favorites, we also tried out new candies together. However, there were a few bars my dad refused to buy because he’d disliked them prior to our snack store outings. Most infamous of these forbidden fruits was the Zero Bar. We tended to reference the Zero Bar when picking our next treat, and on this fateful day I said, “It’s called the Zero Bar because zero people like it.”

And my dad laughed. He laughed because of something I’d said. I was elated!

The only catch up was I hadn’t actually intended it as a joke. After all my attempts to be funny, the only thing that apparently worked was speaking my mind. This singular incident didn’t rewire my understanding of humor - I attempted the parroting tactic with the Zero Bar joke after all - but it’s the most pivotal moment in my mind. To this day, I play up my neurodivergent thought process to make others laugh. I reference Glee at seemly unrelated times with mock enthusiasm to callback times I’ve mentioned Glee with real enthusiasm or talk about my other interests in forced monotones.

There isn’t any actual evidence that Brittany has the same weird complex about humor, but some of their interactions regarding stupidity parallel it. In general, when they’re away from Santana, Brittany appears fairly insecure about her neurodivergence. I might even go as far as to say that she doesn’t joke without Santana around. Now, I don’t think Britt knows what her atypicalities are until they’re presumably diagnosed at M.I.T., but every neurodivergent person I know knew something was wrong before being diagnosed. (I want to talk about how Blaine’s diagnosed autism is a foil for Brittany’s undiagnosed autism at some point, but you didn’t sign up for autistic!Blaine, so now isn’t the time.)

Anddd, that’d pretty much it for now :) I intend to write more in depth Brittany meta in the future, but this is a decent overview for the time being. I hope this made you think, and I’d love to hear your thoughts if it did!

[sopheadraws]

Nobody talks about how "female autism is a myth" is actually a true statement. I use autistic as an umbrella term, but I was actually diagnosed with GASD (Girl Autism Spectrum Disorder), which is exactly the same as Autism Spectrum Disorder, but it's only for the girlies.

[sopheadraws]

Babygirl, why is your actor so bad at their job?