Why I Believe Toya Aoyagi is Implied to be Autistic (an obnoxiously long post)
I’m gonna start with the more obvious ones because I’ll admit some of them might be a bit of a stretch towards the end.
Toya has a lot of difficulty with outwardly expressing himself. He tends to speak in a monotone voice and wears a blank facial expression most of the time. As the story progresses, this gets a little better, but he’s still not great at expressing emotion. At the start of the game, this made him quite unapproachable, as people thought he was too difficult to read.
Toya also has a habit of staring at people. Most often Akito since he spends more time with him, but he’s also been known to stare at others on multiple occasions. He most likely doesn’t realise why staring at someone would make them uncomfortable and does it out of habit without noticing.
Toya struggles to identify his own emotions, with An even pointing out that it sometimes sounds like he's from another planet. He often finds it difficult to understand how he himself is feeling, to the point where others will have to tell him how they think he feels (they’re normally right, but Toya doesn’t realise this himself until they mention it).
He also takes things very literally and doesn’t pick up on sarcasm. Autistic people not only tend to have trouble expressing tone, but they also may struggle to interpret other people’s tone and often don’t recognise when someone is joking or being sarcastic.
Despite being very smart, Toya doesn’t show much understanding of social norms. He turned up to class holding a giant plushie that he’d won from the arcade, and Akito was immediately concerned with how much it must have made him stand out on the way there, something that Toya didn’t consider since he was more concerned about how the plush had been crammed into a small locker (the fact that he personifies the bear is a whole other thing).
He also idolises Tsukasa a lot despite other characters finding him obnoxious and embarrassing to be around. It’s possible that he doesn’t understand the social norms that make Tsukasa “weird”.
Toya has a tendency to get overly-fixated on the things he’s interested in, to the point where he’s had to put off consuming media in the past out of concern that he’d become obsessed with it and struggle to concentrate on music practice. Despite normally being very calm and taciturn, he also gets very excited whenever one of his interests is mentioned, as seen in the close game/OFFLINE event when Puyo Puyo Tetris is in the arcade tournament. This is very similar to how hyper-fixations and special interests present in neurodivergent people.
He exhibits quite detail-oriented thinking with an intense focus on specifics. This has hindered his singing and songwriting ability in the past.
A few rapid-fire ones I'm too lazy to go into a lot of detail about:
Nitpicky about food texture (likes octopus but dislikes squid despite them being very similar)
Hyper-empathetic to the point where he often mirrors the emotions of other people without realising it
Seems to enjoy physical contact/affection but is never the one to initiate it (although I'm fully willing to blame this on Harumichi's authoritarian parenting)
