Unnatural Children

[beccaelizabeth]

I just finished reading another book where there's a scary Unnatural Child.
The signs of Unnatural Child include staring, not making much face expression, not speaking much, being very literal, and not really understanding social behaviour.
I think it's kind of obvious why autistic spectrum me is not a fan of this particular character type.
And it is a type. Sometimes they happen in super intelligent savant varieties, sometimes they happen in packs, sometimes they just stand around being isolated signs of Wrong in the background, but for some reason my selection of reading/viewing material has lead to meeting a lot of these. Probably it's hanging out in the horror/dark fantasy end. It's never just a pregnancy story, it's a body horror probably parasites possibly cuckoos story.

The part I liked least in this book I just finished was that it was literally unnatural, magic made, and also since it didn't have a gender there's a lot of using 'it' to blur the person/thing line. And every time the parent noticed the staring, the blank face, the watching other children like they're the aliens, it is taken of evidence of Thingness, in opposition to personhood.

People are not things. People are never things. Even really weird people. Y'all know everyone is really weird people in the right/wrong place, right? I think do as you would be done to starts with: assume there's a person.

I think a lot of very bad things start with finding ways to reclassify as not-person.

Is why I can get very passionate about human rights for vampires. It's not about what they might be, it's about trying to be a good person ourselves.

So, anyway: if I thought this book agreed with those early parent point of view descriptions, if I thought the book was pointing and going Unnatural Thing, then I would name it and swear a lot and throw it across the room. But I don't think it quite did that, mostly. By the end of the book the child was all heroic and saving everyone, and frequently it was cute. I think the book decided the kid was a good kid. So I'm not especially annoyed at it. I just didn't like it.

One thing that occured to me as I was typing was the power of point of view in creating Person in text. The book hopped around the brains of... somewhere above half a dozen and below ten, I think? Some people it only stayed with for a couple of pages. But there was no room for someone to be a panto villain cause they got those couple of pages of thinking about their goals and why they cared about them, filling in detail from a their-brain point of view. So when there's a character that is around in the whole book but doesn't get a point of view page, or paragraph even, then it leaves an eerie impression of there being no their there.

... now I want to rewrite it from the kid's point of view. :eyeroll:

Comments

[kickair8p]

Have you seen the Creepy Child page at TVTropes? Agreeing with "People are not things...Even really weird people..." -- I'm also on the autism spectrum, and was a Creepy Child growing up (which was the excuse for a good deal of the abuse I endured).

These days some of my art is (in part) about owning that trope. The character type exists because people like that exist -- writing getting across that we're people too has got to be a good thing, depending on how well it does that.


" ... now I want to rewrite it from the kid's point of view. :eyeroll:"

Good idea! There've been a few profic attempts to write from the perspective of a character on the autism spectrum, but not (IIRC) written by anybody on the autism spectrum. I'd love to see your take.

~

[beccaelizabeth]

I went to the TV Tropes page. As is usual with TV Tropes I wandered around in there a long while and forgot why I started.

I actually don't believe that the character type exists to mirror real people. It's all about absence, about almost-but-not-quite. It starts with things neurotypicals value like emotional expression and social engagement and just erases them. It's on the same continuum as zombies, empty people. I think it would be a shock to many writers that there are real people who very greatly resemble their creations, only are not in fact monsters.

I haven't set out to write a character on the autistic spectrum; it feels a bit like attempting a self portrait without a mirror. I don't know what I look like from the outside, I just be me. But also I figure if I write characters who seem like perfectly reasonable people to me they'll probably be quite a lot like me, so I can get on with writing about ghosts and spaceships and just incidentally people that probably aren't neurotypical.

[teland]

You know, this is something I never really considered, but I clearly should have. Thank you for this! Do you have any lists of books which get the autistic spectrum thing right? Have you ever read This Alien Shore? (I *think* it's by C.S. Friedman.)

Now I need to chat up my beloved Aspie Jack about this. Thank you again!

[beccaelizabeth]

I was trying to think of any at all books that have autistic people in them. I know there's some I got rid of and don't bother remembering. There's also one of the Diane Duane Young Wizards books, but she had the most peculiar definition of autism in there, seemed to think it involved not understanding there's more than one person in the world, which I can't see at all. On the plus side he was a good guy, so *shrugs*
Elizabeth Moon wrote Speed of Dark, which was about an autistic adult. I remember I liked it. But then it ends up with a 'cure'. I think that's okay though because it doesn't decide the 'cure' is a good thing, it just follows through on the idea of a 'cure' being possible.
I can't think of many at all.

I have not read This Alien Shore.

[teland]

Thanks for the recs! This Alien Shore is... hmm... relatively soft sci-fi about humanity -- and its descendants -- coming together again after an interplanetary diaspora. One of the planets is populated by people with various psychological disorders/'disorders' -- I forget why this happened -- and the society they build is absolutely fascinating, as it's designed by and for people who just don't think the way "normal" people do. Friedman doesn't come right out and *say* that X character is autistic and Y character is schizophrenic (and so on), but it's reasonably clear -- and the characters are allowed to be heroic and interesting. *And* they get POV time. It's not the best book in the world, but I loved the hell out of it. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it sometime.