3:16pm July 3, 2014

I don’t always go in for autistic headcanons but.

In the Young Wizards universe, I know we already have an autistic character, who… as written initially, has nothing to do with autism at all (other than what people were writing fictional autistic characters like back in the eighties and nineties), but later picks up actual autistic traits and calls himself autistic.

But what about Dairine being on the spectrum? Could anyone else picture that? It’s the love with which she crafts allll those little robots, and sees them as people, and…. I just love it, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over to think of autistic!Dairine and her fleet of little robot computer things and her ability to communicate with computers as if they were alive.

Of course the YW-universe tendency for literally everything to be alive on some level is one reason I love it so much. That’s how I see the literal, everyday universe we live in. And I see it that way because I’m autistic, because I’m a specific type of autistic person who tends naturally towards what some people call animism but I’m very hesitant to give a label to, especially given the ways “animism” has been used in the past.

Basically, whenever I have learned about “animism”, it’s been in the context of “this is what primitive religions do before they learn to be more advanced” and it makes me very angry. Also I’ve never seen “animism” used in a way that really gave meaning to the way a culture saw the world around them, and I’ve seen it used to obscure meaning. Which is why I don’t call myself an animist, even though in English it’s the closest word to some aspects of how I see the world.

Also people who tell me that thinking everything is alive is anthropomorphism, can shove their anthropomorphism up their collective asses. Everything is alive in its own unique way that has nothing to do with human thoughts and feelings, and everything to do with each thing having its own unique way of being in the world, totally independent of humans. This goes both for traditionally animate and traditionally inanimate things. My recognizing the aliveness of things does not mean I think they’re similar to me. In fact, to recognize that things are alive, you have to be able to step out of the way and stop using yourself as a mirror to measure the rest of the world by.

Yes I’m still pissed at a blogger I otherwise liked, who when I posted a post about how I saw things as alive, posted a long condescending discussion of anthropomorphism and animism and how both are primitive and childlike at best, and how that’s all I was doing, nothing special, nothing meaningful, nothing unique, nothing important. Just things that we can pin down with tidy words and tuck them away into boxes and forget about them because we already know our viewpoint is the superior one.

I’m not still pissed in an ongoing way, mind you. I just get pissed off when I think about that post. About all the work I put into learning to communicate about things being alive, all the information I gathered about other autistic people’s experiences. And then the next day, to find a blog post from someone on the same blog ring, basically saying “Pssssh, heard of this before, nothing to see here, nothing interesting, it’s just a trick your mind plays on you and children and primitives get taken in.” So I tend to see most common views of animism as racist (is there a specific word for racism thrown at cultures seen as “primitive”?) at best and often additionally ableist…

…but what do I know? I talk to my surroundings and I sew meaning into the things I crochet and my social world is bigger than the world of humans or even humans + animals. I’m just too stupid to know better.

Anyway, back on track…autistic!Dairine, any takers?

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