I was watching a French series the other night called 'The Forest'. It was 'okay' so I was going to watch it to the end because at the time I didn't have any other better show to watch.
Then suddenly there was an autistic character in it. But the autistic was a hermit, a murderer AND the writers implied that he was like that because of trauma in his childhood.
Is it more common in France to think that autism is from trauma as a child? Or was this just some one off, or coincidence?
Anyway, I just switched off the show after that. Like I said it was only so-so to begin with. I've kept pondering the above part, though.
Well considering a lot of us have a hard time in life thanks to a combination of how we are and other people's reactions to it - not to mention how we end up choosing to react to it, I could see someone who is Autistic going "off the rails" and taking it out on a world that has treated them like crap. Plus, when your (insert group here) is represented on screen, you have to accept that sometimes people from your group are going to be represented negatively - we're all human at the end of the day and as humans, we can be good or bad depending on our circumstances and/or our choices.
It's probably not just France either - wasn't part of
Joker's plot about how his mental instability was caused by his mother abusing him as a child?
As for representation in general, I've personally gotten to the point where I don't really care anymore. Most stuff I see featuring a character who is supposed to be somewhere on the Autistic spectrum either has them been quirky/awkward to the point where you're cringing/getting annoyed with them, having Autistic traits that fade in or out depending on whether the plot needs it/the writers remember it or being so low functioning that they need people to look after them, often coupled with the characters having meltdowns at the drop of a hat and some/all of those meltdowns been stopped in ways that wouldn't work.
What's more, these characters more often than not are saddled with a 'savant' trait - despite the fact very few Autistic people have them - to make them seem more useful or serve as a plot device, like Simon in
Mercury Rising been able to decipher the $2 million security code instantly or the kid in
The Predator been able to understand and read the Predator's language.
On top of that, I think you're never going to get an Autistic character that everyone in the community can agree on as 'definitive' because as the saying goes "if you've met one Autistic person, you've met
one Autistic person". As such, you're going to get some Autistic characters that some in the community like and others hate.
That's my two cents on it all.
