love the idea of a character who seems like a twist villain but the twist is that they’re actually being genuine and the villain is some other guy. character who is just so fucking bad at communication that everyone thinks she’s hiding an evil plan but also nobody has told her yet so she thinks shes getting a good grade in friendship. this too is autism.
i once read a mystery novel where a character is basically the prime suspect in everyone’s eyes, partly because they just find him viscerally unlikable, and partly because he keeps saying things that are demonstrably untrue about what he saw
but at the end it becomes very clear that all the inaccurate statements he made about things he witnessed were 100% explainable by the fact that he was red-green colorblind. he was completely unconnected to the crime. Always felt kinda sorry for him
(he did not get a happy ending. he died, in a way that initially looked like someone killed him for reasons related to the crime, but turned out to also be explainable as an accident due to his colorblindness. unlucky bastard always in the wrong place, wrong time, possibly wrong novel. Relatable)
I remember that when this was revealed, to explain why the guy never mentioned his colorblindness, the detective says something about how red-green colorblindness tends to go along with a sort of pathological urge to hide the condition, as if it were a crime
And I remember thinking, yeah I bet that was the case, last century when that novel was written, and when all disabilities were super stigmatized and this particular one was barely even known. Yeah, of course if your most common experience with talking about colors was always being called an idiot or a liar for saying the wrong color name, yeah you’re gonna get in the habit of finding ways to avoid talking about it.
Just like how I got yelled at for failing to recognize names, faces and social norms, so many times in childhood, that I developed Light Yagami level strategies to sneak around having to know any of these things and still avoid looking too weird to the casual observer. But I do still get caught, sometimes. Impossible not to.
Yeah. This too is autism.