On Shatterstar and Autism, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 90s
I’ve always been a weird kid. It was never easy for me to connect with my peers and I didn’t fully grasp why I felt like so much of an outsider. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I was diagnosed with autism, but that really doesn’t do more than put a name to your experiences.
It did, however, help me realize that a big chunk of things that are just innate to a majority of people were never actually programmed into me. It’s hard at times, feeling like everyone around you is in on a joke you don’t understand. I can blend in, I can pretend, but only because I’ve practiced.
Most people don’t notice that I’m autistic. It’s a mix of two things. One, people are much more willing to write someone off as a shy, awkward, nerdy type of person than an autistic person. Two, in order to fit in, to make friends, to not be ostracized, I had to learn how to copy.
I am not perfect at copying, but no one is because there isn’t one “right” way to be a person.
I can’t parse sarcasm. I’m terrible at maintaining an organic conversation. I need a script to keep up the right intonation and inflection or else I will slip into a monotone.
Because this isn’t innate for me, I’m juggling many things at once and I have to prioritize.
It’s hard to
- Keep up with a conversation that’s happening rapidly
- Consistently come up with organic words as opposed to something you’ve memorized
- Try to read the person I’m talking to,
- Try to parse any meaning outside of the literal meaning of what they’re saying
AND try to keep my inflection sounding “natural”.
People find it kind of off-putting when I can’t maintain all of these things which are so easy for a good majority of people. I’ve lost track of how many times people have made jokes about me being an alien or an android. This is, in part, perpetuated by the fact that so many non-human characters are coded as autistic, whether it’s intentional or not.
But what does this have to do with the 90s? Or Shatterstar?
Well, it’s unfair that we are so often forced to find solace in the non-human, to find familiarity in the shape of changelings or Vulcans or even genetically engineered gladiators from an MTV Hell Dimension.
Despite the fact that we either have non-human characters or quirky brainiacs a la Spencer Reid or House or a blend of both, sometimes it’s nice to have a character to look at and say ‘they’re like me’.
Which is where we come to Shatterstar.
The way I interact with pop culture and media is inexorably linked to the fact that I’m autistic. I struggle to have casual interests, I go through cycles of repetitive fixation, I use the things I love to help contextualize the world around me. All of those things are reasons why I love Shatterstar.
In the original incarnation of the character, he was written as someone unable to feel. However, I found that assertion to be directly countered by his actions; he was excitable and petty and occasionally angry and hurt. He just didn’t externalize those feelings in a way most people would recognize.
He is an outsider who doesn’t actually have the innate social skills of Earth. Granted, that’s because he didn’t actually grow up on Earth, but he’s still a few steps behind everyone else when it comes to getting people.
He doesn’t get jokes or idioms or sarcasm. He talks very formally and stilted, even after a lot of time on earth, and it can easily be read as a flat affect/monotone. He is blunt to the point of rudeness, but doesn’t always mean it maliciously.
He doesn’t understand the people around him, or how to read their emotions. Likewise, he doesn’t know how to read and process his own emotions. There is a link between poor emotional regulation and autism, which can affect both externalizing and understanding your own emotions. It can also make it hard for you to understand what other people are feeling and why. He is overwhelmed and confused by what he’s feeling and what the people around him are feeling.
The most notable thing about how he externalizes his emotions is his physicality. He moves around a lot, when he’s excited or anxious. He often seems restrained or flat unless he’s experiencing strong emotions. He needs stimulation in the form of movement or media; during X-Force, he trains near constantly, only relaxing by rapidly cycling through television channels.
He uses media as a way to contextualize the world around him. He copies what he sees, even to the point of outright quoting things from the things he’s watched. This type of quoting is functionally a form of echolalia. Specifically interactive echolalia, in which it acts as communication even if the context it’s being used in seems unrelated.
So much of pop culture is built on the ability to recognize and use quotes from something in a different yet fitting context which is just a socially acceptable form of echolalia.
The way he interacts with media is also relatable, he’s canonically watched the movie ‘Unforgiven’ nine times. Repetitive fixation on specific iterations of media is exactly the reason why I’ve read the entirety of X-Force and X-Factor three times.
Even though the metaphor of autistic people as someone from another planet is overdone and oversimplified, it’s nice to see a character I can see myself in being loved without having to change himself to seem more normal or more socially apt.
| Via: carrionkid |
