I fucking love vigilante as autistic representation
I've been watching peacemaker lately and just finished season 2 and I can not express enough how much I love the way Vig's character is handled here. He's not just unusually complex and nuanced for a character of his archetype, but he genuinely feels like some of the most empowered and positive autistic/spectrum representation in media I've seen in a while, maybe second only to Asakusa Midori in Eizouken.
I think the thing about James Gunn is that he understands that people are deeply complex and strange creatures with idiosyncratic ideals and principles. He knows how to heighten that oddity, and juxtapose it with a setting that has very real moral dynamics. Then he roots that oddity in deeply human qualities of the character possessing it, so that the things that make them weird are actually very human and believable, and as a result their oddity feels highly realistic.
On first blush, Vigilante seems like a wanton murderous psycho archetype with a goofy demeanor, but when you break him down, you realize this guy isn't like, eagerly killing for sport? Like, he enjoys killing to the extent that he's pursuing his moral goals, his extreme morals does see him dehumanizing his targets, but it's not necessarily the killing that motivates him at all, or even the point. He just fucking hates bad guys so intensely, in a very ill-informed way on what makes someone "bad" or on what punishment fits the crime.
Beyond that, it's implicit that he grew up in a very permissive home environment where his parents didn't challenge him and thus he never had friction growing up that led him to learn important life lessons about ethics.
We see that with how little his mother pushes against his berating of her, and we hear about how his father abandoned the family. We also hear about how his brother was hard on him and how he's just looking for an older brother figure to believe in. I think it's fair to assume he's had no real role models to teach him a more nuanced right-from-wrong, and as a result his development was stunted in his adolescent youth.
I also don't think he's a sociopath or a psychopath as defined, because his behavior is not anti-social at all. In fact, it more closely resembles the autism spectrum, particularly in his difficulty reading social cues, rote memorization of how to handle certain social interactions, and his fixation on specific key interests.
Unlike a sociopath or psychopath he's actually deeply social, even overbearingly so, and constantly seeks involvement with and validation from peacemaker and his friends. He wants to share his interests with others and constantly shoehorns himself into conversations to share those interests. He's a very poor conversationalist in the way a young teenager or older child might be, but he expresses a very sincere desire to be involved and to belong with a group, which is a quality you don't typically expect from sociopaths who tend to use socializing as a means to their own ends. Adrian wants friends.
As a result of all these factors, Adrian is living the life of a 13 year old's power fantasy with all the moral nuance of a 13 year old who REALLY likes like, deadpool comics. But it isn't just like, a weird sociopathic guy who acts like a more childish deadpool, it's a guy who you can believe was led to become this way. You can understand where he's coming from.
the more strange part of his character is how fucking effective he is as a combatant, and there's a lot of comedy in not showing how the hell he trained to be arguably a better killing machine than bloodsport or peacemaker. The fact that THAT is the part of his character that's outrageous (in this universe) has an element of comedy.
Coupled with the signs of autism spectrum disorder and how he's explicitly shown to be a gamer in season 2, it's not farfetched to imagine that he learned a lot of his skewed morals from video games. There's a genuine chance that his motivation for becoming vigilante was like, playing Assassin's Creed and thinking Ezio was so cool he HAD to be like him. I think that's maybe the funniest thing ever, and I'm really glad Gunn left this part of his background open-ended.
Vigilante is straight up such an incredible character study, I can't believe how much I fucking love Gunn's Vigilante
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