TPF wiki (still under construction but coming along): https://thepowerfantasy.miraheze.org/wiki/The_Power_Fantasy
The Power Cut Discord (a TPF fan community, originally founded as a zine workspace but now expanded to a general discussion server): https://discord.com/invite/YWWP2AQRhp
TPF tag on Archive of our Own: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/The%20Power%20Fantasy%20(Comics)/works
TPF TV Tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/ThePowerFantasy
TPF SpaceBattles forum thread (I haven't used this site but it appears to be a forum for creative work and media discussion): https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-power-fantasy.1197083/
TPF on League of Comic Geeks: https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comics/series/174522/the-power-fantasy
If anyone knows any other places where TPF fans gather, please let me know and I'll add them here! Also please let me know if any of these links are broken.
I'm looking forward to the eventual return of The Power Fantasy purely for the Consequences like.
Valentina loves music, and there's some bands and songs she particularly loves, and... there's no guarantee that she'll ever get to hear those bands, let alone those songs, again. She'll have taken over and have to spend decades living with the cost as all the things, all the music that she was excited to have enter her life again, just... won't be there.
Because music is a reflection of the times that they're living in, the experiences that people have had, and the hopes for the future, and... what will any of those factors that made Valentina's favorites even be, if they even exist anymore.
She won't know if she's managed to save the world, and will spend over three decades without the music of the future that she remembers and loved
For sure! And on the other hand, there’ll be new music, maybe whole new musical genres… I’m sure she’ll like some of the new stuff, but it’ll be bittersweet. After all, none of the cool new sounds would have come about without terrible human cost, right?
I think it’s partly that we see less of Jacky, and so have less time to see his personal breakdown moments. But I do think that admitting out loud that you’re an overwhelmed, terrified wreck of a person— as Jacky does— is a helpful way to be less of an overwhelmed, terrified wreck of a person. The other Superpowers could stand to learn this.
"Humanity has always longed for an all-loving god." Bullshit, Etienne.
Many societies are (or were) polytheistic- monotheism has been big for the most recent parts of human history, sure, but it's not the only game in town. Many societies have oriented themselves around a god or gods who love them but hate the people who are not like them. You could make an argument that he's lying for Valentina's sake- a literal angel, whatever that means. But I genuinely think Etienne's idea of "human nature" is much more limited in scope than he realizes.
Like, think about it. He formed his worldview in 1940s France, and was initially only able to see as far as Germany. The history books he would have been lifting from people's minds would have been a Western version of history, considering his location in Europe. In my opinion, Etienne's assuming cultural universals about "human nature" where they don't necessarily exist. Not just the desire for a singular, all-loving God- I think Etienne's whole worldview, even as his consciousness grew worldwide, was largely shaped by his origins in immediately post-WWII Europe.
(Also, while we're at it, he's probably lying here. The last of the camps were closed months before Etienne was born. Maybe the timeline is different in the TPF-verse, but...)
For bonus points, match Mane 6 to Superpowers and do both at once, as has been done here and here and especially here (they're all the same OP but separate reblogs.)
I never watched MLP but I'm going to go for it anyway, and say I'm the Queen, in an MLP AU where the pastel queen pony and the midnight queen pony are actually a Jekyll and Hyde situation.
Eliza Hellbound sells her soul to hell for three reasons, neither of which is "Someone has to kill the Queen." That's the excuse. Let's talk the three actual reasons, and then talk about the correspondences between her and myself.
(I'm tagging this so a bunch of different communities see it. If you're not in The Power Fantasy fandom, I promise I'm going to explain all the tags eventually, but I'm also going to spoil significant parts of TPF's plot. If you are in TPF fandom, and you're glancing at the tags and cringing in advance... please bear with me. Give me a chance to explain.)
First reason: Eliza has always felt strange inside, in certain very specific ways. She's always known that if the world knew her as she was, they'd tell her "that's not how people really are" and then ostracize her as completely as possible. She sold her soul knowing it would give her Superpowers, and the ritual she designed involved marking her skin with shapes and symbols.
Eliza's spent her life hiding from people's judgement, designing a persona that accomodates her needs and limitations while allowing her some amount of social acceptance, because she knows that to live as an outcast would be unbearable. The only way she can imagine showing the world her true differences is by making them physically undeniable, and by gaining so much power that she can show the world they need her more than she needs them.
Second reason: The specific way Eliza's always felt strange is that she has a deep, intense affinity for symbols and metaphors, and how they build off each other into works of rhetoric. It's beyond just enjoyment- for her, there's wonder and transcendence in the process of discovering how ideas fit together. She belongs at the center of a flowing network of ideas, more than she's ever belonged in a group of people. She's the work, and the work is her.
Eliza excels at magic because she's fascinated with the nuances and capabilities of the system Jacky designed, but she's frustrated with how he refuses her access to the deeper tools. Designing a spell he specifically tried to deny her access to, working from a single vague insight to a full-fledged ritual, is the most compelling challenge she's ever faced.
Third reason: Despite the two reasons above, Eliza held back for years- until right after her husband Dev was taken from her, to go die alongside Jacky, and many of Eliza's other housemates/coworkers, and potentially most or all of the Pyramid. Eliza waited until she had nobody left who loved her as the person she appeared to be. Only then she took the leap to sell her soul, and physically, concretely prove who she was- a metaphorician, not a person in any conventional sense- and prove that nobody could hurt her for being so.
---
I'm scared to post all this without explaining all the reasons I think these things. I'm worried people will disbelieve me, maybe even start excluding me. But I need to just get the words out, and hope some people will listen, and maybe start processing my observations of the comic itself later.
Because here's the thing. Eliza is alterhuman in a world where it's actually possible to choose physical nonhumanity- except nobody else ever has, because either they knew better or didn't know how. She's demonkin, but I'd argue that her soul-deep affinity for patterns makes her archetropal in a way I'm defining as "metaphorician". She's also xenogender, in the sense that she's never not a woman, but she feels wrong in her body until she can present as a nonhuman kind of woman.
You could argue that "alterhuman" and "xenogender" (or MOGAI more broadly) are invalid concepts to apply outside the specific internet communities those concepts grew out of. But I don't know of any better words for the shifting undefinable otherness that Eliza spends thirty years of her life biting down on, before it resolves into demonhood.
But I know how Eliza feels, because I am Eliza. In a strictly metaphorical sense, don't get me wrong- but I too am a metaphorician, and I take metaphors very seriously. Once two ideas truly attach they can never be separated back out. And only if you take that attachment seriously, and allow yourself to believe nonliteral truths, will the metaphor start becoming a useful tool for truth-seeking.
Eliza's mistake is that she's too afraid to admit to being different, unless she can undisputably prove those differences and turn them into strength rather than vulnerability. She'll use the powers of hell to make her body validate who she was all along, and rationalize away the consequences. She's got reason to fear the judgement of others... but ultimately, bargaining with hell did her worse.
My mistake is that I've been too afraid to admit to being different, because I didn't think I could undisputably prove it, and I felt like it'd be a vulnerability instead of a strength. Because after all, I'm Eliza and both of us are metaphoricians.
I always lurked around alterhuman and MOGAI communities, envying the people who'd found the other half of themself, even if mainstream society wouldn't understand. I always wanted mine, but nothing fit well enough to stick. I knew I wasn't the spiritual type of alterhuman, or the label-collecting type of MOGAI- I wanted a single metaphor to align myself with.
The problem is that I've always liked playing with symbols too much to ever take one seriously. Hand me an idea and I want to shake it, rotate it, take it to pieces and put it back together- but not accept it at face value. The closest I ever came was that I like sharpness metaphors for myself- sharp mind, acute senses, keen curiosity, piercing wit, incisive critique. But I never felt like that was an identity in and of itself.
It's so obvious in retrospect. The only true metaphorical match for one metaphorician is another one. But you don't know how far any comparison can take you until you get going.
So like- Eliza's fictional. I'm real. I don't see us as literally the same person, even if I'm her in the ways that really matter. But, my reading of The Power Fantasy is absolutely that Eliza is burning in hell because she was scared to speak her truth unless she had an unbeatable get-out-of-mockery-and-exclusion-free card. I've been trying so hard to pull together my unrefutable explanation for why I think that and all it's doing is make me anxious, because I know these are the kinds of claims people will go at you for anyway.
So I'm going to tell the truth about both of us. Cringe at me if you like. It's better than biting down the thoughts until they boil over into something way more desperate.
For all that I see Lux as described as the "Hardline Utilitarian Baby", one thing I don't think I've seen pointed out regarding is that the doctor who was about to discard him as an infant for racist reasons was constructing a utilitarian argument for doing so before he was stopped, and had to be psychically diverted into embracing a "maximal professional ethical duty of care before giving up" framework. This of course gestures at one of the big historical failure states of utilitarianism, namely the ease with which its language was and is brought to bear in promotion of coercive eugenics- but then also, more broadly, the total inability to prevent human subjectivity from seeping into one's "objective" moral calculus. Which you think would give Lux a bit more pause before jumping into his big Utilitarian world domination plan- but then again, he does describe himself as "Ethical" a lot more often than he describes himself as "Utilitarian." That specificity might not be an accident.
Also, I want to note that doctor was trying to save Etienne's life just moments before pivoting and making an argument that he should die. Racism/ableism isn't the motive, utilitarianism isn't the motive either. What shifts that doctor from "save his life" to "throw it away" is the hurt feelings from one, failing to save the baby like he wanted, and two, the nurse (his less-trained assistant, and a woman) showing him up by observing that actually, the baby is alive.
Okay, I have all these things I want to write about the implications of Eliza being autistic and I keep not writing them because I keep tying myself in knots about whether, to say the interesting things I want to say, I have to do the more tedious work of convincing people that she's autistic based on the most outside-in, deficit-based understandings of autism.
So, even though the DSM-5 does kind of an awful job laying out a concept of "autism" that's useful for autistic people, let's go through the diagnostic criteria and demonstrate how- even though we only see the tiny slice of her life that's plot relevant- Eliza easily qualifies for a diagnosis by those standards. I'm doing it now, so I can just link this post later when I need to.
"What's wrong with the DSM-5's definiton of autism, and what would be better?" is a big question, and so rather than spend most of this post answering it, I'm going to ask you to either just trust me, or do some of your own homework. If you want places to start on that: Clarifying Autism in the DSM-5 describes the problems with the diagnostic criteria and improves on them a bit, What is Autism? offers a more useful way to define and think about autism, and The Joys and Shapes of Autistic Play is a great example of the kinds of insights you can reach once you step outside the idea that autism begins and ends with the way the DSM-5 describes it.
The one thing I'll name here, because it's important enough I want to make sure you read it, is that the DSM-5 labels autism as a disorder and describes it specifically in terms of the things neurotypicals usually don't like about us. In some ways, it sucks to take a careful look at a character I love specifically so I can name the ways she fails at being normal.
BUT, I recognize that lots of people still think of autism as a technical psychological term that professionals get to define and autistic people don't get to redefine. Even a lot of autistic people, ones who have fascinating things to say about autism, will insist that there is no such thing as autism that doesn't fit the DSM-5 criteria. So in the interest of writing interesting things without worrying about how many people will reject them outright if I don't do this...
Why Eliza Hellbound Would Have Qualified For A Professional Autism Diagnosis (if she hadn't been born a white girl circa 1960)
(note: italicized phrases are keywords you can Google if you want to know more. There really is an immense amount to say about autism that would be impractical to fit in this post. And a real-life professional diagnosis would have to be based on more examples than this, but in that case you're supposed to do a deep dive into someone's entire past and present life. I feel like Eliza's got enough of these, in the snapshots of her life we've seen, it should count.)
A: Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts
(the DSM-5 demands you have all three of these to qualify as autistic)
A1: Social-emotional reciprocity
Frequently interrupting Dev, pre-SSoL (differences in turn-taking)
Infodumping at Valentina throughout issue 8
A2: Nonverbal communication
Intense stare eye contact
Flat affect with most people
Doing raptor arms or pressure stims rather than gesturing to accompany her speech
A3: Developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships (this is a very vague statement, and not all relationship struggles are characteristically autistic, so these are two of the three examples the DSM-5 specifically gives)
difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts: refusal to compromise what she wants for the sake of getting along with other people. Sometimes this looks like talking back to an authority figure in a context where that's socially inappropriate; sometimes it's forcing your husband to give you the secrets you wanted if he wants to save your marriage.
absence of interest in peers: she's been a Superpower for a decade and hasn't been engaging with the others, even to the tense politically-loaded extent they engage with each other.
B: Restricted or Repetitive Patterns of Behaviour, Interests, or Sensory Experience
(the DSM-5 demands you have at least two out of these four to qualify as autistic)
B1: Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (stimming)
Eliza doesn't do much of this one (my inference being that she works very hard on not doing this) but there's a couple small examples.
Picking at her fingernails (in the high school scene, and when she's waiting anxiously to see if Jacky promotes her)
Moving around constantly in especially tense conversations (with Valentina about Dev, with Dev about how God has stopped talking to her)
B2: Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior
She's spent ten years staying home and praying every day
Valentina mentions (complains, really) that they keep having the same conversation
B3: Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (special interests)
Her room is full of magical diagrams and books- it's not given much narrative focus, but it's something she's passionate about.
She cares deeply about Christian text, in a very characteristically autistic way. I know it's not rare to be devoutly Christian, but Eliza connects theological ideas and references Bible proverbs in a way that is very similar to how autistics might love deeply analyzing a story they love, and repeating quotes from it throughout their everyday lives.
Hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment (sensory sensitivities, as if things are more intense/unignorable than most people would feel. But also sometimes noticing certain sensory experiences less.)
This one is interesting, because yeah, we've never heard Eliza openly comment on her sensory experience- because that's not something she has cause to mention. But there's recognizable patterns in the things people do to deal with sensory experiences most people don't share:
She prays in the dark because she's sensitive to light, and does so naked because she's sensitive to clothing textures.
The raptor arms and pressure stims I mentioned earlier? Those are actions useful for coping with the physical discomforts that can be caused by a sensory environment, strong, emotions, or both. They're not as easily-recognizable as stims as the unusual repetitive movements mentioned eariler in the criteria, but they serve the same kinds of purposes.
Those are all the behaviors the DSM-5 is looking for. There's three other criteria, which are harder to confirm/disconfirm with the amount we know about Eliza, but I do want to address one more thing: I'm pretty sure some people are thinking "But there's other reasons she does all that..." and the main one is "...because she's Catholic."
And like... this is already too long a post. But, just because Eliza's managed to align all her visible autistic traits with a different core part of her identity, that doesn't mean her Catholic faith is the whole story on why she lives the exact way she does. More on that later, maybe. Hopefully a lot more about Eliza's autism in general, because now that I've spent all morning showing my work, I can take the deficit-based training wheels off and start to play.
Foreword: I'm both autistic and ADHD. I also have a Master in Clinical Psychology, specializing in ADHD and autism.
Before we get into this, I want to thank you for writing this up in the first place. I love talking about neurodivergency but I'm also too lazy to write up the basics myself, haha.
In my field, I'm more or less just explaining the "basics" over and over either way. The problem here arises because of the multiple different definitions of autism and ADHD between text books, doctors, popculture and self-educated autistic people across time and culture.
It's a looot less work to simply learn the "correct" definition of autism (which is what most medical professionals do) but that's how you end up not being able to recognize a) what knowledge set the other person has and b) how you can bridge that knowledge gap in a meaningful way.
I also understand, why you have such trouble researching anything. It's honestly impossible for laymen to immediately find any accessible information on autism or ADHD and I don't even mean you specifically here. I've talked to so many people, who are so clueless about anything autism-related and they don't even know, how to google it. (Another reason why I really dislike when people tell somebody to "just google it": Autism Speaks is one of the first results when you google "autism" and it's a hate group.)
There's also so many sub-topics to the field and the field is shockingly young in the field of science and incredibly underfunded. Society is more preoccupied with finding an "autism gene" and "curing" us, than accomodating us or seeing the benefits of neurodivergency.
I also think official diagnosises(TM) are overrated. Most psychologists will just do the same multiple choice test with you that you can google yourself on the internet. The AQ50 (Autism Questionnaire with 50 questions) is already a pretty flawed way to diagnose someone, but somehow psychologists in the UK still use the even less accurate AQ10 with 10 questions. Most psychologists are bad at their job but still their word is treated like gospel. (Of course, extrapolating why you crossed a and not b, c or d requires professional advice.)
An official diagnosis can also do you more harm than good and I want to make this very, very clear here that I support self-diagnosis.
Incomplete list of reasons against getting a diagnosis:
You can be banned from emigrating to several countries if you or your dependant have an autism or high needs diagnosis. The criteria vary and it is honestly easier to simply look up the individual country's laws first because they also keep changing constantly.
In case of triage, like covid peak times, autistic people were not considered for resuscitation.
A diagnosis can be used in a divorce case to take away guardianship of your children and it can also be used to prevent you from adopting.
Your employer can fire you for an unrelated reason if they hear of your autism diagnosis because you asked for accomodation. It's illegal but very hard to prove in court.
Fascist parties are now also very interested in building data bases of trans individuals and disabled people, like in the US and Germany. You can guess where that leads.
The benefits of a diagnosis for autism are potential accomodations in your workplace and being able to tell your ableist family members that you are now diagnosed because they believe a doctor more than you. With an ADHD diagnosis you can at least get medication but there is no such reason for autism. Consider for yourself if a diagnosis is worth it.
With that being said, regarding neurodivergency in The Power Fantasy:
I think Eliza is obviously autistic. I do take issue with your defining criterias because the DCM is shit and horrendously outdated by like 10 years at any point in time. (But even then you still have some fossils slinging out Asperger diagnosises today, when it was collapsed into Autism ages ago. Sigh. Doctors don't read, it's true.)
I also think that you are overpathologizing a lot of her behaviour a lot. But what is autism?
[Description in alt-text.]
This is one of the more accurate and accessible definitions of autism. Personally I have a bit more of a radical definition, which I will elaborate on later. Let's go over the criteria you have for Eliza:
Stimming:
Moving around a lot or finger picking in a stress situation is not unique to autists or ADHDers. NTs also engage in stimming, especially if they feel heightened emotions, like stress or arousal (Masturbation is also a form of stimming, which can become a problem when autistic children shove their hands down their pants in public.)
What distinguishes it from autistic stimming then? Considering we're all humans, we are all very similar in the end. The difference lies in hyper- and hyposensitivity of the senses and whatever is deemed a normative response to a sensory input.
Autists are simply either the first or the last to react to a stimulus, but if you vary the intensity of a stimulus, eventually all humans in the room will have had the same reaction to it.
Example: A bad smell. An autistic person may notice it first. Then the neurotypical people in the room. Then the less sensitive autistic people will notice it, when the smell becomes overwhelming. The same person can also be hyper- and hyposensitive to different smells, for example perfume or body odor.
Routines:
Neurotypicals also engage in routines!!!!!! They are simply not pathologized as such. If anything, autists tend to be more flexible, because they constantly have their routines ripped away from them and learn to cope without them to some degree. Routines are an expression of autonomy and security, both of which are routinously denied to autists.
NTs engage in routines constantly. They eat 3 meals a day, go to work 9 to 5 and sleep during the night. If you wake up an NT in the middle of the night, they will be startled. NTs also do not like working nightshifts.
Now imagine you are in an emergency situation, like a fire or a flood. People will panic because their routines have been disrupted. NTs are strictly speaking more prone to panicking because they do not engage in scripting. Autists (generally) will robotically go through emergency plans without panicking because their status quo mental state is already a constant emergency situation. This is of course a huge generalization but so is the statement that only autistists engage in routines and react negatively when removed from them.
Praying and religious rituals are both routines and stimming. These and meditation can be considered a mental calming or concentration exercise. What came first? An autistic human? Or religion? I think religion was moreso born from human desire and that included autistic desire. Hence why a lot of autistic people may find themselves drawn to religious service because they've helped shape it across the ages.
Example: Athletes like basketball players go through ritualistic/ stimming motions before doing a free throw, because it puts them into a focused state of mind.
Eliza engages in praying for hours daily which counts as stimming. It may also be a trauma response but more on that later.
I think Eliza having a special interest in religion, ethics, philosophy and magic is spot-on. Many researchers have been clergy members across the ages.
absence of interest in peers: I think this is moreso trauma related because she does show immediate interest in Dev once he reveals his identity. She did have few peers (that we know of) before becoming a super power. Neurodivergent people tend to make friends with other ND people because allistic (non-autistic/ADHD) people have a different style of communication that essentially works as a language barrier.
difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts: Allistic people are notably more prone to care for and are manipulated by status above all else. Autistic and ADHD people are more practical and will point out flaws in reasoning, irrelevant of the person's status.
Example: I started this post writing down my qualifications, which more often than not convinces an allistic person to respect my opinion. An autistic people will wait and see and focus on the content of my words first, generally.
So is Eliza autistic or just traumatized? I think this is the real question to ask here.
The modern diagnosis for ADHD among other things is being criticized for only applying to a certain subset of ADHD people. This famously used to be only white male children, with women, people of colour and adults excluded. But it goes further than that:
The modern diagnosis essentially describes an ADHD person with ADHD-related trauma. Example: You are an ADHD kid who might struggle in school. You could easily get accomodations suited for ADHD kids to help you - but you cannot because you are not diagnosed.
You FIRST need to fail your classes, show obvious difficulties progressing alongside your peers, experience mental anguish, humiliation and trauma and THEN you can ask for help. The child first needs to fall into the well and then we can help it out. We can't just put a well over the lid, so nobody falls in in the first place.
The ADHD diagnosis describing a traumatized individual is also why so many people may make it all the way to university and THEN start failing their classes for some dubious, unknown reason. Their teachers and parents may have just been doing a decent job accomodating them until that point or they put in a lot more effort than their peers. This is where the burnout hits.
Essentially: The ADHD diagnosis is like Darwin going into the jungle and seeing a three-legged giraffe. He has never seen a giraffe before, so he writes down: "All giraffes have three legs." The giraffe had its leg bitten off by a lion.
What neurotype is Eliza?
So we have 4 types Eliza could be: NT with/out trauma, ND with/out trauma. She obviously has trauma, so the only thing debateable is her neurostatus. Regarding that I will now give an unbeatable argument that adresses the radical definition I said I would mention later in this epic-sized post:
Even modern, progressive definitions, like the chart linked above, define autism as a bunch of things. I personally think autism is one single thing only: sensory issues. Everything else that correlates with autism is nurture, not nature.
Emotional disregulation comes from autistic people being forced to mask and being told that their responses to stimuli are unnatural or overreacting. Autistic people then develop a heavily dissociated relationship to their own senses, which leads to meltdowns and mental instability down the road.
Social differences align because you are different. Humans will discriminate based on anything. As much as people will rag on you for self-diagnosing, NT kids are pretty good at spotting autistic children by default and will exclude or bully them accordingly.
Special interests align from being more sensitive. You have better hearing or sight and will notice a bird before your peers when you are young. They compliment you, you connect a positive memory with birds. You start being interested more in birds. You become an ornithologist.
(I'm unsure why executive dysfunction is on here, since it's more ADHD related but autism and ADHD tend to overlap strongly.)
Repetitions and stimming are sensory regulation methods.
The argument:
Eliza is very much not a normative human, with her being able to directly experience hell. Her brain and body configuration is entirely different. This difference makes her by default neurodivergent and, to be honest, would require a whole new entry in the DCM for hell-exposed humans.
Now here is another problem with our sample size being 1 (one): We don't know if Eliza's behaviour is average or not. She could be Spider's George for all we know. Would a neurotypical person react differently to being doomed to hell? I think the question is an oxymoron, because a hell-touched human has already transcended current clininal definitions of humanity.
In the context of the other superpowers:
Etienne is a literally brain in a jar. His mental condition is completely outside what modern science can define. Beyond Autism.
Valentina is an alien. What counts as normative for angels anyway?
Heavy is beyond human as well, his cells being able to rebuild his body despite being shot in half and not being in contact with each other. Where does his power "sit", so to speak? His brain? He must have an absurdly high spatial sense, being able to use his powers globally and making Tonya gently float towards Heaven without injuring her or making her puke. Super Autism.
Masumi: ???? I'm still trying to figure out if she is the one holding back the Kaiju (the door) or is the Kaiju itself to some degree (the thing behind the door). I think the only thing we know about Masumi is that we know nothing. ????.
Jacky, Dev and Tonya seem the most neurotypical (as in their powers not making them fall outside predictive normative human behaviour). They are literally just tool users. Magic is a tool and the way it is portrayed in the story, it is also very tech-like. Tonya more or less has glowing claws. We don't quite know how Jacky's power works to know things intrinsically about the universe but for now I think he still falls in this category. Both Autism and Neurotypical.
Human brains are distinct from other animals in that they are incredibly plastic and adept at tool using. When we pick up a hammer, our brain starts seeing it as part of our arm and starts dodging and moving with enough force accordingly. We are so tool-brained that it sometimes mildly backfires:
Digital artists will do a pencil drawing and find themselves hitting the CTRL+Z keyboard shortcut in the air to erase something automatically. When you do a video game marathon, you may start applying video game logic to real life for a split second. You go to the bathroom after playing Minecraft and randomly think "I can't go down the dark hallway, there are monsters there." Or after Tetris, you start seeing colourful blocks falling everywhere and find your brain trying to sort things efficiently. This is called the Tetris Effect.
Considering this (by animal standards) absurd plasticity, I think that tool-users fall very much into the normative human area.
In summarium: Eliza was likely autistic before she sold her soul but now that she is a being connected to hell, we need to rewrite the DCM entirely.
Thank you for the deep and thoughtful response! It's so great to post things and get back stuff like this. In particular, thank you for walking the line of being willing to disagree with me, and also doing it clearly and considerately. A difficult thing to find in internet interactions!
I'm going to address your two big points about autism in general: the problems with referring back to the DSM, and the actual definition of autism. I do want to wrap back around to how this all applies to Eliza, but I think I'll save that for next time.
I 100% agree with all your reasons why I shouldn't have gone with the DSM-5 as the way to talk about autism. A lot of them were running through my head the entire time I was writing that post, and to be honest, it was mostly fear of being disbelieved that motivated me to go through the criteria as a checklist. As you also mention, a lot of people don't know much about autism or ADHD and often have misconceptions, and so I felt obligated to start from the most mainstream conception of autism. But you're right that the DSM-5, and the psychological establishment that uses it, harms and overpathologizes autism in many ways. I know better than to just go along with mainstream beliefs, and I'd like to do better than that, in line with what I know.
That said, I have a slightly different take on what autism actually is. You described it as a combination of hyper- and hyposensitivity to sensation- the idea that autistics perceive things either more intensely than allistics, or less. I know that's a widespread perspective, both with autistic people and with parents trying not to pathologize their kids. I do see sensory differences as a much bigger factor in autistic traits than many people realize, but there's also important traits that don't make sense to me solely based on different sensory intensities plus the strategies you develop to cope. I'd go more with the definition of autism as a difference in processing information- which many people in autism communities mention, but not always with a clear explanation of why, or their explanation does circle back to "it's more and/or less intense."
The explanation I'd give is based more on my own understanding of my subjective experience than anything else, so take this with a grain of salt, but- I think autism is best defined as a deep, innate desire to have everything you're experiencing internally and externally feel coherent with each other. And if there's a contradiction between an external perception and your internal thoughts and feelings, it affects how you think and feel. I think of this sometimes as the world always being close enough to push and pull on you, and sometimes as a desire to see ideas link together nicely, so I summarize it as "entanglement" like you're tied up in strings connecting you to the world. And I know that's a vague abstract thing, so I'll try and give some examples.
Entanglement explains hypersensitivity because things you perceive pull harder on your feelings and attention span- lights feel brighter because they affect my mood and eat at my attention more, where neurotypicals seem more able to perceive things incidentally. It also explains intense perceptions that aren't just straightforwardly "too bright/loud/flavorful"- eye contact feels more intense because my emotions are so affected by other people's perceptions of me, where neurotypicals are apparently able to receive social signals and not be hurt by everyday minute reactions of confusion or judgement. It also explains hyposensitivity, because if everything affects you more by default, there's the tendency to dissociate from your senses, but then you miss things.
It explains distress stims and happy stims the same way- it feels wrong for my body to be full of strong emotional energy, and yet physically be at rest, so I move my body to raise its energy to match. And it also explains bored/understimulated stims, by working the opposite direction- raising the energy in my physical body can also kind of reactivate my mind. When my physical and emotional experiences are entangled, they can kind of affect each other in either direction.
And then there's special interests. You explained it as being extra observant, and then getting social validation for noticing interesting things, but that doesn't square with how many autistic people are shamed for caring "too much" and talking "too much" about their interests, and keep them anyway. There's a reputation for autistic special interests to involve a lot of categorizing and reasoning through things- the practice of aligning ideas, making chaos into order because you like things to line up neatly. Many of mine are like that- you may have noticed me on here drawing conclusions about The Power Fantasy haha!
Many of my closest autistic friends have cultural special interests that are less about systems, and are pretty clearly metaphors for their sense of self. Entanglement between what they're dealing with and what they love, in a way other people might not get but that they instinctively sense. (Media about autistic people often tries to do this, but too often does it in an overly simplistic way.) The friend who likes Andy Warhol and old monster movies because they're insecure about their strangeness and are trying to reframe it as strength and power. The friend who likes My Chemical Romance and Batman: The Killing Joke because they refuse to let trauma break their spirit. The friend who likes surrealist movies and queer TTRPGs because they want to punch holes in the oppressive ideas of "normal".
And these tend to be people who've reached a point of self-awareness about these connections, but who have in the past alienated people by talking "too much" about something nobody had ever validated them for, and spent a long time frustrated that they couldn't make people care, because they didn't know why they cared. And I don't think it's just a matter of "you like something first, and you reframe it to fit your identity after." I hit the ground running with my The Power Fantasy special interest and was trying to explain it to people for days, and feeling so frustrated that I couldn't express what I knew was inside me and kept getting these looks of polite bemusement. I had to go text an autistic friend, someone who understood the need to just talk and talk sometimes, and spend ages texting excitedly about seemingly-random things until I finally understood why they excited me.
...the point of all that being that, in my opinion, a lot of autistics get caught up in very specific niche things because they've emotionally entangled themselves with something that feels just like them, without even knowing why.
Anyway. I don't know if I'm explaining this well enough to show how I think these things are all connected, but I tried. I can also give other examples if you're curious, but hopefully this makes sense.
