One of the difficulties with the portrayal of autistic individuals in media is they can often be portrayed as savant. In this blog, I’m going to break down what that means and how we can portray autistic individuals with a bit more care in our stories.
What Does “Savant” mean?
If I said, Raymond in Rain Man, no doubt you’d understand what I mean by “savant”. It’s a term to describe individuals that are portrayed as being deeply interested in a subject or have a skill of some kind. Topics could be anything from the overly used maths, trains or STEM subjects. It might even be the slightly less talked about interest in things like celebrities, politics or a specific sports team. Savant individuals might even have a special skill that helps them or the story they’re in. It could be they’ve memorised a certain list or set of people’s faces.
I’m not saying don’t use this in creating your autistic characters. It does represent some of the autistic community whose brains do work like that. What I’m saying is that not everyone does. So, what can we do about changing the stereotype?
1. Doesn’t Apply To Everyone
Shockingly, not everyone is aware the “savant” isn’t applied to every autistic person. Not everyone has that skill or mass storage of a subject. It just doesn’t work that way. We’re part of a diverse community, so it’s got to be diverse, right? Not everyone has photographic memory. We don’t all have a memory like a computer.
Having autistic characters that aren’t that way inclined helps us to portray a bigger part of the autistic community. When you create your autistic characters, try and include them in different ways. There are many skills autistic people have that aren’t based on memory or fascinations with topics.
2. Doesn’t Always Work
We are all flawed individuals, right? It’s a kind of given with the amount of mistakes everyone makes. When it comes to autistic people, we’re not too different. If you’re expecting an autistic character to have a certain skill or subject stored away, don’t make them always accurate. Having a slip up now and again? It happens to everyone, so why not your autistic characters?
If there’s a piece of information you need to come out through your autistic character, try and use a different way of revealing it. There are a lot of us who are very good at spotting patterns. Why not allow your autistic character to keep spotting that pattern? If you don’t know what I mean, try watching a TV show that leads to a big showdown in the finale. I immediately think of Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston and that first series with the words “Bad Wolf” following everywhere. Not quite the pattern you were thinking of, is it?
3. Doesn’t Mean We’re Useless
Instead of us being seen as useful for a skill, what if it was another aspect of our autism that attracted people to us? It’s probably not something often thought about, but what about our humanity? Surprisingly enough, we have quite a lot of empathy that could be steered in that direction. Instead of being unempathetic, we’re actually more likely to not know what or how to process all the empathy we do have until it’s clarified for us.
Our humanity or something along those lines could actually give your autistic characters a new twist not seen before. It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Finding an aspect not thought about as much is a great way to make your writing stand out. You’ll not only portray a better representation of autistic people, you’ll more likely find a better twist or addition to your story.
Thinking again about what the “savant” stereotype of autistic characters can allow you to go deeper into those you’re writing about. How could you twist that perceived skill all autistic people seem to have? We’re a diverse community, so showing that on screen and in novels isn’t a bad thing, is it?
Happy writing!