All the Kids in the Anime Club

Simone Collins made an offhand remark, intended to be humorous, in her mention of dating and autism, something like "all the kids in the Anime Club" have dated each other by the end of the year.  I think she implied "but not necessarily successfully." I had not heard of an Anime-fan/Aspie* connection, but immediately saw how it could be so. I thought of a charming, eccentric girl from church immediately, now a senior in highschool. She draws her own anime and has a stable of her own charcters. And something on the spectrum fits for her. Plus, in Goffstown the anime club meets at the library. Plus, they are a little different from generic comics kids. Plus, I have younger sources (actually**, just Bethany) who believes she has seen this and it seems likely.  How much more proof do you need?  

This put me in mind of Ron Suskind's NY Time article from a decade ago "Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney," in which he describes using Disney movies, especially animations, to teach his son how to interpret social situations. 

Next, I thought of Korora's explanation over a year ago that the bronies, the adult fans of "My Little Pony," were often somewhat autistic and used the interactions among the ponies as personal instruction in how to navigate human socialising.  He even gave a good example of it in the comments just a few weeks ago. BTW, whether this autism/social teaching aspect is open conversation among bronies or whispered among the few who observe what is going on I don't know, so you might want to be careful how you use and present that information.

Are we seeing a pattern here?  Highly stylised characters being used not only for adventure and entertainment, but sought for their social teaching aspects. For people who sometimes take human interactions too literally, it's a godsend. Sometimes social, intellectual, and moral questions of complexity are addressed. Almost twenty years ago Cohen's autism research center developed a test studying how autists perceive and notice faux pas in described situations.

As we draw this circle just a little wider, we start seeing large additions to the human population: Star Trek, definitely aspie. Star Wars, less so but still yes. Fantasy literature, only sometimes aspie, but Tolkien and Lewis both wrote about the power of myth in literature to teach virtue as well as inspire. We used to take our two oldest sons to Renn Faires - in cosume, and the older one now takes his daughters to Comic-cons - in costume.  And he is the least aspie of the four of us. The literary genre of best fable...is that the older version of how to teach everyone, including aspies of previous centuries, how to act in the world?

Isn't all literature, drama, comedy, TV and movies, and art just less-stylised versions of the same thing?  This is how wise people/decent people/heroic people are supposed to act. Jesus taught in parables. God gave all of Genesis and parts of the rest of Jewish history to tell stories about who we are supposed to be.  The things we see as more for aspies is just a more-stylised version of Beowulf, or Aesop, or The Wind In The Willows, or even Exodus. When literature beyond stroytelling and decoration was less available to humans - that is, any time in the last 10,000 years - humans mostly learned about human interaction though contact with other actual humans. But there were still those stories...and ceremonies involving dressing up with wolves skulls...

*I still use the term "Aspie," short for Asperger's Syndrome, even though it has been discarded formally.  It very quickly became a garbage and catch-all category and became so imprecise as to be useless.  (As if Id, Ego, and Superego are models of precision? Borderline? Trauma? Oh well.  Separate battle.) But even though I agree it should no longer be used in a clinical discussion and would be more precise when talking about an actual patient under consideration, I think aspie is still a useful term. If autism is a spectrum, and I am convinced that it is, even with its variants mucking up the understanding, then there will be mild and partial cases, perhaps even more in danger of being confused with anxiety or OCD or sensory disorders, yes, but still there as a general concept that can be used by intelligent people in everyday conversation. As for autism variants, are we moving to a model of Autism Spectra Disorder, a way-station on the way to breaking it into ever-more useful pieces?

**"Actually" is a very autism spectrum term, and I notice I use it a lot.  A psychiatrist friend told me that when she writes her popular book for parents about dealing with an autistic child, she is going to name it Actually... If you notice that this is also identified as a mansplaining term, that will not seem so strange if you tie it to Simon Baron Cohen's theories of autism as the hypermale brain.