The Good Doctor, and why many canon representations suck

The “I am a surgeon” meme got trending on many places of the internet, this reopened discussions around autism representation.

I’m not a big fan of the show, I’ve only seen episodes my mother also watched on the TV, and instead of breaking down the show, I decided to find the root cause of the issue: it’s made for a society, which is deeply prejudiced against autistic individuals, but also would like to be seen like they’re compassionate towards them. Not for autistic individuals. A lot of work suffer from this exact problem, and it’s not exclusive to autism representation.

Writers and execs often like to treat even adults like they treated the US kids watching Pokémon. I’m from Hungary, and I wasn’t shocked the many times I saw hamburgers or even rice balls on the screen instead of túrós csusza or other Hungarian foods. They fear that if the autistic individuals being depicted in these works as real human beings instead of whatever stereotypes people think of us, it will shatter their suspense of disbelief. Since business is already full of superstition (especially the myth of infinite growth), it doesn’t need any proof for the media executives.

Pity porn

Many members of the majority society like to believe the greatest compassion towards many minority groups is pity. It’s compatible with many things, mainly the medical model of disability, and certain forms of Christianity or other religions.

I decided to call such media depictions catering to this as pity porn.

This depicts the individuals in pitiable situations, often within the genre of drama, by depicting their life as something miserable and bad for the most part. Sometimes even the “joy despite of it” is forbidden, and is mostly relegated for the more inspirational genres, which is its own can of worms.

Most people are being taught the medical model of disability, which states disability as an illness to be cured. I don’t deny that not all disability is the same, there are many that are actively threaten the life of the individual and/or come with debilitating pain; and people sometimes become disabled who want to regain their old lives. On the other hand, there’s the lesser known social model of disability, which states the individual is disabled by their environment instead. As an autistic person myself, I feel more home with the social model, especially once I started to accept myself. I have a lot of “weird” quirks, which I thought were pretty normal for a very long time, but once I was let to socialize more, I was constantly let down, especially when I was officially diagnosed with it instead of “cured for something else I might have instead, that just happened to look like autism”. Nowadays I often see my autism as a positive trait rather than a negative. Granted I’m very self-reliant, and this is not true to everyone within my kind.

What we often call “disability” might not always be something debilitating, sorrowful. Some, at least a lot of people within the autistic community and some within the deaf community, often prefer this state of being. There’s also the curious case of people with body integrity dysphoria (which is it’s own can of worms), who deliberately wish to become disabled.

People talk little to none about how religion, especially Christianity, tries to exploit the disabled for new recruits. The “Christian” solution for disability, as of now, is conversion, then living a sinless and painful life, so God can fix them in the afterlife, or no longer be bound by the limitations of the physical body. This doesn’t always just come with some spiritual support or even help: It sometimes comes with bigotry mandated by the church, and often the help is either negligible, or used as a leverage to keep them in the hands of the church.

When the canon doesn’t bind

Within the more progressive circles of fandoms, people are usually familiar with headcanons and coding. The former is just a fan jargon of “personal interpretation”. The latter on the other hand means either giving a character (or even a whole fantasy species) certain cultural signifiers and/or traits associated with a real life group. The most well known examples are queer related, but others also do exist, and autism-coding is well known enough that it has its own related tropes.

While queer coding is often so abstract that one must be taught of, autism coding is way easier to spot. It’s pretty much just giving characters autistic traits, but not stating that they’re autistic.

One quite well known trope is within the anime fandom is called the kuudere, which is a character that has troubles with expressing their emotions, thus appearing “cool” (“kuu”) on the outside, while being more caring on the inside (“dere”). (Note: The western fandom often likes to put certain kuudere characters under the “dandere” label, which to my knowledge does not exist within Japanese shores, but from the west, and likely from “anime personality tests”, used as padding.) The trope likely originated from shoujo manga and first depicted guys of that kind, but hit mainstream popularity with Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Rei was intended as a deconstruction of the ideal Japanese wife, only for the otaku to find her to be charming instead. She also helped to popularize the light hair and reddish eyes within future characters. I even remember reading some Japanese feminist’s blog on how she noticed it herself too, but don’t remember the URL nor the name.

One descendant of Rei Ayanami even turned the autism coding up to such degree that it’s quite surprising that the character never got called as such. Mashiro Shiina from Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo (The Pet Girl of Sakurasou) not only has the usual mannerisms of kuudere characters, but also a lot of other autistic traits. Among many others, she’s shown to be sensitive to noises, is literal minded, her movements in the anime are very reminiscent of how autistic people move in real life, shows signs of echolalia, is literal minded, and has troubles taking care of herself in the beginning. While nowhere near from perfect (has the usual anime-shenanigans, Mashiro is depicted as a savant, etc.), it has most of the elements what I would consider are part of good representation: Mashiro is allowed to be happy, many of the conflict isn’t around her state of being, her character isn’t just there to teach “valuable life lessons” to the non-autistic (?) protagonist by being a deadweight on him, there’s even more autism-coded characters (Misaki, another girl from the more active and “bubbly” type, Ryunnosuke, a supporting guy who appears midway the anime, and very arguably the protagonist Sorata), even dares to make some respectful jokes with Mashiro’s shenanigans.

Why did I tell you all of this? Partly because I really liked that trope. But mainly because I now want to introduce you to something way worse: Asper Kanojo (That’s My Atypical Girl). The name isn’t enough of a red flag? Here’s another one: this manga’s genre is drama. It’s like if you wished for someone to make one of those kuudere girls canonically autistic, but the writer is The Monkey’s Paw. The art is quite competent, maybe has a few good jokes, but since it’s a drama, everything else suffers from it, especially its heroine, Megumi Saitou. Besides that, it’s filled with the kind of tropes that were very popular with many early “Asperger’s syndrome” characters to “make them 3 dimensional” (namely, Megumi is often shown hurting animals and people because she’s “sad”), plus whatever mental health related stereotype the writer read that day.

Media that has its bounds set by audience expectations will have its representation also tampered by it in turn. Be it an American prime time television series, or a Japanese comic likely made for drama lovers.

Some tips for young authors

• If you’re not autistic yourself, do your research. If you work as a team (e.g. developing a game), then get someone knowledgeable in the subject, and by that I mean hire some autistic people (so called “autism consultants” often are not by themselves autistic).
• Even if you’re autistic yourself, I highly recommend to do further research, both to avoid your own internal biases and to have a better view on autism. We all can have biases, even towards our own kind.
• For artists: Autistic people often have unique way of movement and body language.
• For voice actors: Even if you’re autistic yourself, you might not possess the monotone voice some autistic people do. Failing to do it well will make you sound like the lead actor of The Good Doctor, or even worse, if you’re mocking autistic people, like in the Hungarian dub of The Good Doctor.
• Don’t fear the autism coding! It can be a better workaround of the issue of some executives fearing that you might break the suspension of disbelief of people than making everything drama, and might be a pretty good solution for fantasy, stories set in times before the concept of autism diagnosis, etc. Just make sure it’s more that a word of god thing (cough… cough… JK Rowling). Be wild!
• Sometimes certain tropes can get overdone and thus awkwardly tiring. Remember that many kinds of autistic people exist, we’re not all asexual, not all like trains, not all kuuderes, not all bubbly and hyperactive, etc.