So my Fandom 2019 meme largely evolved into a post about autism on TV...

[cloudsinvenice]

Caveat: there is no way in hell I'm going to pick just one thing for most of these. You have been warned.

Also, I found myself writing a whole lot more about autism and disability representation re: Atypical and Special, and regarding upcoming TV, so if that interests you, see behind the middle cut...

1. Your main fandom of the year?

Unusually, I don't think I have had one that stood out, unless we count my obsession with Seeming. Otherwise, it's been all over the place:

- after the year started strongly in Vampire Chronicles fandom, I grew too overwhelmed to keep on top of vc_media's re-read of The Vampire Armand; with hindsight this is emblematic of the kind of year it's been
- I spent a lot of time repeatedly comfort-watching Hannibal season one with Will's "closer to Asperger's and autistics than to narcissists and sociopaths" line in mind, and I found some new-to-me fanfic authors I really like
- arcadiaego and I did more in-depth processing of Black Sails, which I want to return to soon
- ayebydan and I are working through the Harry Potter movies together, which is fantastic because I've spent very little time in that fandom for years and it's nice to examine the characters and world in depth
- I did not expect to get so much out of Good Omens - not so much the show itself as the fanfic and the sheer availability and ease of finding bits of art and meta all over the place just when I was incapable of keeping up with any fandom in an organised way

2. Your favorite film you watched this year?
On The Basis of Sex was great. So was Heavy Trip. Pond Life was superb. I liked Captain Marvel. Oh, and Spider-Man: Far From Home was extremely good. Who would've thought that yet another Spider-Man franchise would turn out to be one of the most watchable things in the MCU?

Speaking of which, I finally saw Black Panther and it was a lot of fun, and pleasingly self-contained. Yes, your man from the Cap movies, played by Watson/Bilbo/whatsisname turned up, but it was nice to see a late-MCU film that, on the whole, worked beyond the context of what had become a gigantic, sprawling space opera which necessarily became about wrangling lots of characters and chunks of plot.

Which is to say that Endgame, by contrast, is like the curate's egg: very good in parts. I'll definitely watch it again, but I think on balance the solo character movies in this franchise work best, and the things that ultimately tired me out in the comics (massive crossovers, miserable doomy scenarios where characters die, or become OOC for reasons external to the narrative, going to fricking space again) are also things I'm tiring of in the movies. Tying everything in that story arc together in Endgame was a massive achievement, but one I'm kind of glad is over for now? Maybe the ending of this cycle clears the slate for a while and some interesting, more character-driven things will happen in places like the Bucky/Falcon series, or the new solo character movies.

Finally saw The Shape of Water and it's everything everybody said it was. I particularly like how it shows minorities supporting each other: clearly the message is that none of us is getting anywhere fighting solely for ourselves. I also managed at long last to see Freak Show, which I really, really loved.

3. Your favorite book read this year?

It's been a really great year for comics anthologies and graphic novels on one hand (ten), and autism books (twenty-three) on the other. If I cheat a little (i.e. listing books which I mostly finished in 2019), I can say I've read 52 books this year, getting me back to a one-a-week average for I think the first time in years. I have a hard time picking a favourite out of all those (and as I've said elsewhere, I want to develop a recs/anti-recs list based on the autism ones, though I'm not sure if I'll do that here or in namespace), but I did finally read Dune for the first time and I want to read the rest of the series.

4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

Sol: A Self-Banishment Ritual by Seeming: I recommend it to fans of The Cure and Depeche Mode, but it's also just its own darkwave-funk-synth thing.

5. Your favorite TV show of the year?

Things I enjoyed and would recommend include:
- Trinkets (three high school girls pal up after meeting at a shoplifting support group)
- Fleabag (I assume it needs no introduction)
- The Terror (season one is about the real-life Arctic expedition of the ships Terror and Erebus; in the show it goes wrong in a way which I assume diverges from reality, BUT WHO KNOWS; if you liked Jared Harris in Chernobyl then I recommend also seeing him in this)
- Gentleman Jack (the new Anne Lister biographical drama; it's also been renewed for a second season!)
- Runaways (for my money this is actually a better teen superhero show than Titans, and I like Titans a lot)
- Sex Education (Gillian Anderson is fantastic in this)
- Batwoman (Gotham was also fun but outstayed its welcome, and Batwoman is in a different register which appeals to me a bit more)
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

And I enjoyed the final season of Game of Thrones a lot more than most people did. But the thing I really obsessed over and which will haunt me was The Americans. It's an unusually immersive show, with a sense of both the sweep and the minutiae of history, and a very intimate portrait of two characters who are doing what seems like the world's most difficult job as deep-cover Society spies in early-80s America.

Controversially, I ended up liking Atypical a lot, which made it very sad to discover recently that Michael Rappaport, who plays the dad, is an ableist Twitter bully. Leaving that aside, the conventional wisdom in the ASD community is that the show is trash, but I'm a bit less inclined to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Believe me, I understand the frustrations. I bounced off it myself the first time I tried to watch it. The mother of an autistic kid (I generally prefer to cite autistic people, and I don't agree with the whole piece, but DAMN did she phrase this perfectly and get across a lot of my own concerns), writing about the show for the Guardian, highlights that Sam is less a fully-realised character than "a human whiteboard illustrating the triad of impairments" (compare with how engaging and individual his sister Casey is), and that's a problem.

And yet, the show manages to put across a lot of ideas which are actually in sympathy with what the neurodiversity movement is trying to achieve. I think my favourite moment is when Sam, explaining elopement, says that everyone wants to run away sometimes, but only when you're autistic do people have a special word for it. It's so standard to pathologise our outward behaviours rather than examine their causes (research into elopement is a fairly recent phenomenon) that this will be a new idea for most viewers.

Then there's Paige's silent disco plan, which ends up happening despite pushback from the parents of neurotypical kids. I think it's very powerful to show that kind of inclusion. Yes, of course we should be living in a world where these are standard, not progressive ideas, but we're not; we live in a world where most Americans, and quite a few people from elsewhere, are getting all their facts about autism from Autism Speaks and other orgs which have limited or no input from autistic people.

The other thing that interests me about Atypical is that, to judge from season 3, they seem to be veering towards the idea that Sam's mother Elsa might be on the spectrum herself, but undiagnosed - particularly given the conversation she has on running into her estranged mother while shopping, about what kind of child Elsa was. There's a line that seems to have no purpose other than to indicate that Elsa was... atypical. It would be nice if a) they were going there at all, in light of how much discussion there is now of women, in particular, being diagnosed in middle age; and b) they actually have the chance to go there, given that this was season three and Netflix generally cancels all but its wildest successes after three seasons.

Anyway, I think the producers are showing signs of listening to the audience - after people criticised season one, they brought in autistic actors to play the members of Sam's support group. I'm in two minds about the idea that the show makes autism something to laugh at - I would definitely like to see those characters get more room to develop, so those scenes don't just become the ~light relief of autistic people being amusingly blunt and obsessive, and I think we could do with seeing Sam actually making close friendships with other autistic people, rather than just being among them because he's been told a support group would be a good idea.

For years, LGBTQIA people in fandom have highlighted how socially unrealistic it is for so many canons to have just a token gay character whose entire social network is straight, and this applies to other minorities too, because you find your people, often long before you have the language to express your identity. It's part bonding and part survival. For years before I realised the concept of ASD applied to me, my social network had a high proportion of people who either knew they were ND then, or have since come to suspect it/been diagnosed, so I think it's likely that Sam would naturally gravitate to other ND people at college.

I think Special, also on Netflix, is a really good example of how well fictional representation can work at its best: Ryan O'Connell is a gay creator with cerebral palsy who's telling a story from his own experience ("I don't want to shock or alarm you, but selling a show with a gay disabled lead is very hard!"), and that's a story that is essentially similar to that of Atypical: that of a young disabled guy who is starting to feel the limits of having his life run by his mother, and who wants to have sex and ultimately move out.

A car accident and a new job let Ryan pretend his limp is from the accident rather than due to congenital disability, which of course causes its own problems, and introduces the concept of internalised ableism to an audience for whom I think it will mostly be new. I saw facets of my experience in Special that I haven't really seen elsewhere on TV, and I think that's stuff you wouldn't really get without a disabled writer who has that lived experience of untangling their life from that of a very involved parent, and having to negotiate how that disability is perceived during a new start with a new peer group.

It's particularly important that he's both gay and disabled, because there's always the problem that despite their considerable overlap, those communites can respectively have problems with ableism and with homophobia and transphobia. This throws up difficulties like lack of access to community, and medical gatekeeping: for example, see Ellen Murray's video/transcript "Wrong Decisons" on how being disabled can work against people (and particularly young people) who need to transition; Laura Kate Dale covers this and other problems in her book, too. So the more culturally visible intersectional experiences are, the better.

And of course there's the part where women, non-binary people and people of colour tend not to be depicted in autism stories in general. Think how many disability stories, in general, skew white-straight-cis-male; it's interesting that here, writer/producer Robia Rashid highlights that she, as a biracial woman, had to work harder to tell Sam's story, and I would've loved to see her get to create an autistic teen girl character from her own ethnic background, but I'm guessing that centreing the story on a white family with a teen boy was felt to be an easier sell. If anyone has links to other interviews where she gets into that further, I'd love to read.

So anyway, part of my reluctance to totally dismiss shows that handle autism imperfectly comes from the knowledge that we can't take representation for granted. It's also worth noting (as per this interview https://www.advocate.com/television/2018/9/09/why-atypical-part-queer-tv-revolution with Brigette Lundy-Paine, who plays Casey) that the show values various kinds of diversity both in front of and behind the camera, and developed its storyline about Casey's bisexuality in the season that's been released since then.

Yet I also don't want the takeaway here to be, "Autistic people (or anyone) should suck it up and consume canons they feel hurt by," because GOD, absolutely not. And yet I think there are useful things in imperfect writing; there are conversations started by shows about us which could be usefully continued by shows written BY us. Autism is having a "moment" in pop culture terms, but we need it to be a lasting thing, and I think ultimately that means more of us - all of us - behind the camera, because no single portrayal, however well written, can or should be expected to represent all of us.

I have seen a couple of things discussed online that I'm excited about. The new Pixar short, Loop, is about a non-verbal autistic girl, who for a change is NOT white, and the creators worked with consultants from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (i.e. the people you should be calling if your hand hovers over the phone number for Autism Speaks). They made the effort to cast a non-verbal woman, which expands industry expectations about what disabled actors can do.

And there's a new Josh Thomas show, Everything's Gonna Be Okay, which I am incredibly eager to see. I adored his series Please Like Me (on Amazon Prime in the UK/Hulu in the US), which centred on a group of friends going through everyday struggles in a way that felt more real than most sitcoms, in that characters are gay or have mental health issues and it permeates the entire show in a way that goes beyond a diversity tickbox; it's just their life, and above everything else, human beings are just random failboats who amuse themselves in weird ways. (Also notable: Hannah Gadsby is in it!) I think a lot of the shows we remember with the most love, from Broad City to Being Human, are the ones that make you feel like you're part of the characters' friendship group, and this is very much like that.

Also, about what I said about getting us involved on the creative side as well, I'm just going to go ahead and quote Thomas's Guardian interview which was conveniently published today:

“Having gone through the casting process of auditioning people who are neurotypical and people who have autism, there was only one choice,” Thomas says. “I went in thinking it was more ethical, and I came out of it thinking, ‘This is just better.’ Kayla gives the character so much more authenticity.
“There are heaps of girls with autism who are really great actors. I spoke to a mum who said, ‘My daughter’s really good at acting because she had to learn how to mimic to survive and to study human behaviour to understand how neurotypicals work.’ I found that really interesting.”
Thomas was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 28, and he thinks that has given him a small window into people who aren’t neurotypical. “I like people who are really direct and I like outsiders,” he says."

6. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

Good Omens. It's nice to have something that's easy to slip into fanworks for without needing three twenty-episode seasons' worth of continuity under your belt to know what's going on.

And then there was the absolutely ridiculous good luck of coreopsismajor reccing Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach by Nnm. This was in November, right after I'd agreed, with reservations, to maybe write something (because I sure as hell wasn't going to TALK about it) about my teenage medical trauma for therapy. It was the best possible time to read a fic that introduced me to the concept of narrative therapy, which helped legitimise the whole exercise when I was spending a lot of time arguing with myself about the sheer length and frankness of the document. I think a lot of us find fandom therapeutic in one way or another, but I didn't expect a Good Omens fic to speak so directly to my circumstances or be so validating.

7. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

- The receding prospect of actually getting a Vampire Chronicles TV series. This is EXACTLY the right cultural moment for it to happen, with more diverse writing and casting practices growing, so much investment in long-form fantasy TV, and audiences realising that you can tell emotionally deep stories about imaginary creatures... but I really don't think it's going to.

Last week I looked up how long Bryan Fuller was involved with the show in 2018, and was shocked to find that it was actually only a month. It felt longer because his February departure that year was not actually publicised until May, and the Rices seem to have sat on the news until they could announce that Chris had finished writing the pilot episode. Recently, Hulu dropped the series. To the best of my knowledge, Dee Johnson is still attached as showrunner, but losing Hulu has to have been a blow to the show's prospects, and you've got to wonder (or not, as the case may be) what's going on behind the scenes.

- And then there's the receding prospect of actually getting Hannibal season 4 - though Bryan has stated that the issue of the rights to the character of Clarice Starling isn't the stumbling block...

8. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?

I think Michael Sheen's Twitter presence was a blessing unto us all this past year.

9. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?

Noelle Stevenson, for giving us She-Ra.

10. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

When I saw this Lego IDEAS project get made; surely the platonic ideal of Lego sets.

11. The most missed of your old fandoms?

I keep meaning to get back into X-Men comics but fucking Comixology broke in some way I can't even fathom, losing the comics I had purchased, so I still haven't read the new Generation X stuff. Suspect it had something to do with one account breaking and then me making another one, and somewhere in between Comixology had merged with Amazon and IDEK what happened. And their customer service is absolute shite and didn't even bother getting back to me.

12. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?

A lot of you seem really into Guardian so I'm considering giving that a go.

13. Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year?

Everything's Gonna Be Okay is the thing I'm most immediately excited about. Oh, and Cartoon Network just released a trailer for Thundercats Roar!, which seems to be taking the "we will mock the IP lovingly" approach, which I'm not against at all, particularly since they used the original show's musical cues.

Comments

[birke]

I enjoyed Atypical, but I definitely saw it as a story about a family with an autistic child, written for a neurotypical audience.

The season-3 development where they suggest the mom is autistic was really interesting, and I agree with you, I hope they develop that if they get another season. That was the one aspect of the story that personally resonated with me, actually; my own mom's more peculiar tendencies make a lot more sense if you think of her as being somewhere on the spectrum than if you think if her weirder qualities as personality quirks. I don't think it's pathologizing to say that. I hope it isn't. I just know that my dad gets frustrated with her for not making friends and never wanting people over to the house, and I understand that's hard for an extrovert like him, but if you think of her as someone who really needs a strict order and who finds other people disruptive to that order... it just makes sense.

[cloudsinvenice]

I don't think that's pathologising at all; I've had similar thoughts about my own parents (indeed, a common conversation in my online support group is, "I'm starting to wonder about my parents now I'm seeking diagnosis..."). It's like, you can see all these things as individual and unconnected, but if you hypothesise ASD as the underlying cause it makes a lot more sense.

[sabotabby]

There’s a new Josh Thomas show??? Please Like Me broke me.

[cloudsinvenice]

I KNOW OMG!!! I want to watch it all again now.

[ayebydan]

ayebydan and I are attempting to go through Harry Potter and Marvel but keep getting distracted by BULLSHIT.

There, fixed it for you :P

[cloudsinvenice]

Accurate. :D

[lunabee34]

This was really interesting food for thought; thanks for posting.

[cloudsinvenice]

You're welcome; it's been sitting in my drafts for ages and I thought I'd just push it out the door at last!

[illuminating_dragon]

Off topic, but thank you for the card. I picked up my mail on the way to the bus stop and read the story on the bus. The other passengers must have wondered why I was smiling. :)

[cloudsinvenice]

Delighted to hear it, and thank you for yours! :)