Character Study: Andreas

Andreas Seaver is the main protagonist and point-of-view character in All Ways. He is a 12-year-old non-speaking Autistic boy. But who is he? And why did I choose him to be the primary vector of my book?

The first thing you learn about Andreas — other than his vulnerability to sensory overloads — is that he is observant.

Andreas watches the brows furrow. He knows what mirrors are. But the person looking back at him isn’t him.

He watches his mother study his reflection and sees that the mirror is not a reflection of himself. This knowledge is a weight, but what does he do with it? He uses it as self-defense: to remind himself that he is not uncomprehending creature his mother casts him as.

On a writing level, this was the first character trait I chose for Andreas because I felt that, in order to tell the story I wanted to tell, I needed to have a point-of-view character that could intermix their own thoughts with commentary about the perspective of others. I also needed to have a point-of-view character that could speak on some authority about the deuprotagonist. In this case, that secondary protagonist is Andreas’s older brother, York. Andreas can talk about York too because not only is Andreas observant, he has also spent his whole life with York as his most meaningful social relationship.

I also felt that I needed my point-of-view character to have this characteristic to serve the message I want to convey with All Ways. I wanted to exhibit how, while many Autistic people struggle with social cues, that does not mean that they do not notice that they are making errors. Non-speaking Autistic people in particular are cast by many pieces of media as oblivious to the world around them. This is simply not the case. In fact, in my experience, people censor themselves the least around non-speaking people.

I remember once that my mom and I went to a McDonald’s with another mother and her non-speaking Autistic child. They used sign language to communicate. A group who sat at a nearby group saw this, assumed they were Deaf, and started loudly gossiping about them. Never mind the fact that they could hear (and these people were also clearly pointing and leering); they were not alone! I was mortified for them and started apologizing, but they said they were desensitized to such ridicule.

They know them well enough to decide that they don’t like them. Because they don’t know him at all, except as “can’t talk, can’t come, and can’t understand.”

I drew upon this experience to create another “pillar” of Andreas’ character: his caution. Because people have laid bare their naked jeering, disgust, pity around him, Andreas is wary of others. He knows that he is not the monster they themselves created, but it is exhausting to always have to be on the defensive, to need to “prove” himself human.

And, yet, Andreas is kind. He is constantly on alert for signs of discomfort from his brother, and when he finds a cat in danger, he does not hesitate for a moment to help, even if that means confronting an adult who is far bigger and stronger than he is.

“Hitting the cat is wrong,” Andreas informs him.

“I’d steer clear of telling me what to do until you can actually say it.” Between one second and the next, the tablet is snatched from Andreas’s hands. Andreas yelps.

The man at the gas station who kicked the cat also takes Andreas’s tablet from him, which is his only line of communication. Even so, he does not panic, identifying the theft as a form of trying to assert dominance over him in a way that requires minimal effort on the aggressor’s part.

Because herein lies the biggest myth I want to bust in All Ways: that Autistic people lack empathy. There is a gap between knowing something is wrong and knowing what to do about it. The issue, often times, is that Autistic people do not know how to take action about the emotions they feel and/or the things they sense in others. This inaction is wrongfully cast as apathy, but not knowing what to do — and the distress from that — is the opposite of apathy.

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