The 11th Doctor and Autistic traits of fictional characters

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I cannot believe how many people here cannot wait to plaster a famous person either real of fictional with an autistic sticker, Unless they come out say they are on the spectrum I just have to assume they are just a little flaky like most of hollywood.

When he said he needs to pretend to me a normal human, I thought "just like me everyday"

I also liked when Craig said "Has anyone ever told you that you're weird?" and The Doctor replied "They never really stop!"

I totally get that. Please reread what I said carefully.

Hey that just shows we've just become cool!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sillytilly92/5990388576/

I have this figure btw

[Moved from Autism Politics, Activism, and Media Representation to Television, Film, and Video]

Hmm, while I totally agree with the whole "The Doctor is an alien, so we can't assign him Human traits" thing when it comes to AS...here's an interesting thing about the Doctor.

By his own species' definition, he was not NT.

I wouldn't call him AS, because he's not human. But he was something like the Gallifreyan version of it. I believe they used the word 'rogue'. Anyone who didn't fit in with normal society was put in this category. Which puts him in the same category as the Master to them.

'Renegade' rather than 'rogue'.

I don't think any of us are really arguing fictional characters - alien or not - have AS, only that we recognise particular traits that we share or 'identify' with. We see a character struggling to make sense of situation most people take for granted and we think 'yeah, I've been there.' Doesn't matter if the character has two hearts and a respiratory bypass system.

And in many ways the looser identification is more useful: if we had a human character explicitly labelled AS he or she would only represent a very small sample of us. We're on a spectrum - there would be more of us saying 'that's not my experience' than people saying 'yes, that's me - nail on the head!'

On a related note I don't think there are many authentic NT characters on TV either: they're largely based on folk psychology and are more predictable and consistent than real NT's. They don't complain about it because its how they like to see themselves.

I think there's a case for Amy Pond having AS traits. She had an isolated childhood, she made a pass at the Doctor having entirely misread his intentions, she wasn't aware of her own body's emotional responses in Vincent and the Doctor (alexythemia?) and even Rory wasn't really sure she loved him as much as he loved her.

And the hostility of some sections of Outpost Gallifrey towards her - that she was a 'cold b***h', 'vain', 'self-centered', etc. are typical NT responses to people on the spectrum.

Well the writer, producer of Doctor Who, Steven Moffet, is also the producer, writer for the BBC Sherlock show. On that show, they pretty much said Sherlock has AS. So it would not surpise me if the new doctors have AS traits.

In Triumph of a TIme Lord, Matt Hills quotes Steven Moffat:

"I'm going to be honest and fans may hate me for it but they have to remember that I am a fan myself. A proper list-making-borderline-autistic fan...."

If he's going to use "autistic" as a self-descriptor, don't you find it at least a little bit likely he's going to use autistic-like traits in some of his characters?