[content warnings: unpopular opinions, stockholm-syndrome-like affection for a terrible work of literature, abandon all hope ye who enter here]
I still really love Dagny Taggart. As a character, and as a… symbol, I guess.
Like… in my head, she fits the same niche as Matilda. She’s very clearly autistic- even if her author didn’t intend to write her that way, I mean for fuck’s sake she goes on long rants at the drop of a hat, doesn’t understand how social skills or the inside of other people’s heads work, stims on-camera at least a couple times (the very first scene she appears she’s stimming to music, if I’m remembering right), and she’s obsessed with trains.
There are a lot of bits where Dagny talks about how the world is wrong and the people around her don’t get it and it’s in a way that’s very autistic. It’s like “I don’t understand your social games!!! Why aren’t we fixing the problem, why are you doing politics and talking around yourselves!!!” And about how she did well at school but had no friends, about how she cut her life into a clean blueprint of ‘work/school/romance’ with nothing extraneous and was completely happy, even though the people around her didn’t understand why a young woman wouldn’t want to go to parties…
And, like… I needed that. As a kid. I needed to see an adult autistic woman who was a hypercompetent badass. There were precious few characters in the media I had access to who were autistic adults- period. There were a handful of kid characters, Sherlock Holmes, and the detectives from Death Note. That was it, and they were all male characters. As a tiny AFAB child, that was… discouraging.
Dagny Taggart, for a little while, was almost a Mary Sue Power Fantasy for my tiny autistic butt, just because she was a grown autistic woman who got to do cool things, like build Overdramatic Trains and have Grand Sweeping Poorly-Written Romances. I read Atlas Shrugged all the way through like, 5 times (though I’ll gladly admit to skipping most of John Galt’s MASSIVE DOOMSPEECH after time 1, because… I mean…………… come on), just because Dagny was That important to me. And I was always, even as a sheltered Mormon teenage, really mad at the third-act-John-Galt-Gary-Stu-BDSM-’romance’ bullshit, because no, that’s not who Dagny is, don’t take this away from me.
…the point of this rant is, Dagny is Important dammit, and deserves a story without Bad Ideology, Worse Speechifying, and Even Worse Long Clunky “Romance”/Cheating Subplots That Go On Forever, Repeat Endlessly, And Wreck Any Sense Of Pacing There Might Have Been.
someday I’m going to write a book that’s got a blatantly autistic female protagonist who stims to music and is obsessed with trains and is in a polycule, and she’s going to be, more or less, Dagny Taggart. only without all the ayn rand nonsense.
