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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Why autistic characters on screen are pushed to look more autistic
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, a panellist explained the choice between canon and coded autistic characters, and argued that scarcity forces the few named ones into a textbook version.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Midway through the media panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, put a question to the panel about Heartbreak High. He had watched both seasons, and he said his autistic mind had picked up something in the second, an exaggeration of the autistic character’s traits that he put at 15 to 20 per cent. Wearing his media hat, he read it as a consequence of success. The show had found a bigger audience, and the characters had been crafted a little differently for it. He asked whether the panel had noticed the same.
A panellist said they had not watched season two, but that the pattern Gold described was one of the problems with how autism is portrayed. “we’re still very much at that point where people have to see autism lived large”, the panellist said, pointing back to an earlier comment that the meltdowns in The Good Doctor have to be huge. Audiences, the panellist said, want to see an autistic character who looks very autistic and looks like the autism they expect.
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Sources the story draws on
- Is the world ready for an Asperger's sitcom? (opens in a new tab), Slate (Paul Collins)
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Seeing Ourselves on-screen: Report reveals progress for diversity in Australian TV drama (opens in a new tab), Screen Australia
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