hello I am autistic and I am bored so therefore I will be analysing the autistic traits of hit gachiakuta protagonist rudo surebrec aka my son
I think his communication style is the most glaringly obvious trait he has. He is blunt and straight forward to a fault. He says what he means and he means what he says, and he doesn’t understand and often misses the smaller details and hidden implications in other peoples words. It’s why he struggles so much talking to Zodyl in the trash beast arc.The pragmatics of social interaction are constantly tripping him up, like in his first interactions with Zanka, and that whole mess with Follo. Not that either of those were even Rudo’s fault besides him being quick to anger in response but whatever.
I think another autistic trait of Rudo’s is his struggle to smile, many autistic people struggle with forming and understanding facial expressions correctly, and I myself couldn’t smile properly until pretty late in childhood. Rudo practicing his smile and not knowing why he can’t seem to form it right is very reminiscent of an autistic experience to me. As is being seen as strange and off-putting or downright scary for not being able to form facial expressions correctly.
His obsession with trash reads as two separate autistic traits to me, special interest and hyper-empathy. It’s obviously his special interest from the perspective that it’s one of the few things that brings him joy and is important to him, and that he spends most of his time engaging with. I mean, the boy officially becomes a cleaner and then immediately fills his room sky high with trash. It’s so important to him that it shapes his entire power.
Hyper-empathy is a little less well known as autistic traits go, since lots of us including myself are hypo-empathetic, but there are definitely many autistic people out there who experience empathy to such an extreme degree like Rudo does, with it extending to inanimate objects. In my opinion he has an easier time being empathetic towards objects than towards the people he encounters, which again is a pretty common autistic experience. I actually think when considering a distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy Rudo aligns even more with a typical autistic presentation, since his internal monologue shows how he has to consciously engage and change his thinking to generate empathy for other people (cognitive!), whereas his empathy towards objects seems instinctual and unconscious (emotional!).
Rudo pretty clearly has issues with emotional regulation. His extreme anger and the emptiness he can’t quite describe succinctly reflect both his inability to regulate and his inability to understand why he feels the way he does a lot of the time. The vast majority (~80%) of autistic people experience alexithymia, basically the inability to pinpoint and interpret emotions in a typical way. I think a lot of Rudo’s frustration comes from a lack of understanding, internal and external. All that anger and nowhere to put it, not really. Maybe I’m projecting my own relentless anger issues onto him, but he clearly cannot regulate his feelings well on his own, including (especially) his anger - and autistic people report this again and again. He seems to bundle up all his more distinct and complicated emotions into the tangle of his rage and leave it at that, not being able to deal with them any further - which again feels very alexithymic to me.
TLDR I will headcanon Rudo Surebrec as autistic until the day I die! To be clear, (while it’d be nice) I don’t think he was written with the intention of being an autistic character, but that doesn’t mean shit to me tbf, fiction is up for interpretation and this is how I’m interpreting him :)
(plus he’s my biological son so obviously I passed it down to him)
janainaart
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
jbbartram-illu