ever since you said ‘autistic Byakuya’ I’ve been thinking about it nonstop so now I have to ask, do you think he used to have like. rocking/stimming-type stuff that he learned to suppress? because I’m getting legit emotional thinking about babykuya painstakingly training himself into Correct Noble Deportment. he can’t be expected to make facial expressions! it’s already taking all his energy to prevent himself from doing that weird thing with his hands!
Arright, I guess it's time to talk about my autistic Byakuya headcanon. First off, I want to clarify, it's not that I sat down and said, "I think my man Byakuya has the autism." I had reached a point in my fanfiction where I needed to write about Byakuya's transition from rigid, unfeeling antagonist in the Soul Society Arc to the stilted, but caring Nii-sama and Taichou we see in the later acts, and for some reason, I feel like writing Byakuya perspective sections was the way to do that.
One thing I did not want to do, which I see in fanfiction a lot is to dilute his character. Byakuya being Byakuya--posing, making insane claims about his own greatness, lecturing people on their own arrogance is one of my favorite thing in the world, I just wanted to create an internal narration that would sort of... justify this behavior and evoke some (but not too much) sympathy for the guy.
The first character trait that I hit on was the idea that B absolutely does not understand other people's motivations, but he makes wild guesses based on his own (extremely non-universal) experience, which often leads to him saying things that seem extremely rude or callous, but it's because you can't see all the internal convolutions that led to such a conclusion.
Around this time, I happened to learn that “cognitive rigidity” is a thing, whereby a person is caused great distress by the idea of acting outside of what their brain tells them is the correct way to do a thing. This might be a fourth grader who cannot bring himself to put a spelling word in a sentence if the sentence isn’t true, or it might be a man who cannot choose between a promise he made to his dead parents and a promise he made to his dead wife, even though one of them involves a person being unjustly executed. Again, from the outside, these problems may look trivial and easy to resolve, but they are very, very real and feel insurmountable to the person experiencing them.
Oh, and then a friend of mine was talking about “masking” which is very common among autistic adults (especially women) who were not diagnosed as children. Basically, one puts on a fake persona to face the world because you’ve spent your childhood learning that all your thoughts and feelings are bad and wrong and weird. Oddly enough, it turns out this is really bad for you, and will mess you up really bad in the long term??
Anyway, at this point, I had a big, personal oh moment, but I also had a big oh moment about Byakuya, which is, what if you take a kid who doesn’t intuit social interactions naturally at all, and who thrives on a clear-cut set of rules, and lay out a system of expectations and etiquette, with himself at the top? You get Byakuya, basically.
On one hand, he has never grappled with the common autistic anxieties of “why do people have these weird social rules I don’t know about?” or “what’s wrong with me?” He does know the social rules and he’s 💯 at them. He is a perfect Kuchiki. Of course, he doesn’t really connect with people, he’s the Kuchiki Heir (and later) Clan Head. He’s on a different level from other people, where he is more powerful and more important, but also has certain duties and obligations. This is how he is able to say things like “the difference between us is class” to Renji and mean every word of it. All of this fits perfectly within his worldview.
Sensory sensitivity is another thing that I think he experiences, except that when you’re the Head Kuchiki you can just demand silence during your poetry writing time and you can insist on only wearing a certain kind of silk and be very picky about the odors that are present in your home and that’s just normal. Furthermore, it perfectly fits in with my conception of Byakuya that he experiences sensory euphoria, where he’ll hear a piece of music played perfectly, or bite into a delicious piece of fruit, or feel the cool air on his face as he walks though his garden in the middle of the night and just quietly lose his mind over it.
You asked about stimming, and here is a big downside of Noble Neurodiversity. I do not think Byakuya was a major stimmer, but he definitely got harshly reprimanded for “unseemly behavior” and “fidgeting too much” as a young boy. I imagine that Ginrei had very little patience for this and was concerned that “there was something wrong with the boy,” which I am sure Byakuya picked up on, and did his best to stay still so that Grandfather would know he was a good grandson. As he got older, the ideals of sitting still and being in control of one’s body at all times and closing one’s heart (yikes) were drilled into him. It was not easy for him and I bet he got his knuckles slapped a lot, and also it has not been good for his relationship with his own body or his mental health. I read a fairly comprehensively researched headcanon once that Byakuya was originally left handed and had it trained out of him, and it’s not necessarily something that I’ve adopted, but I certainly can see it.
Conversely! I headcanon our boy Renji as being mildly ADHD, which he deals with very effectively by taking his Soul Ritalin and breaking up his paperwork sessions with trips to the gym and tapping on things constantly. Byakuya tries to make him stop and Renji is like, “Actually sir, you can’t, I got an Accommodation from Squad 4, you gotta let me tap” and Byakuya is like “I have to w h a t” and Renji is like “yeah I got an interest-based nervous system and small repetitive movements and white noise actually help me focus” and Byakuya is like “that is nonsense Lieutenant but I am afraid of Captain Unohana so I will let you have your Accommodation” and then after Renji goes home, he tries tapping a spare brush on his cup while he works and Damn that man!!
Here’s some other autistic habits I think Byakuya has:
When he makes friends he goes deep. I mentioned earlier that he’s a solitary guy, and he thinks that’s his natural state. He is the 28th Head of the Kuchiki Clan. There is no one else like him. That is just a fact. He *is* lonely, but he doesn't identify as lonely. There have been brief periods of time where he bonded strongly with another person and delighted in sharing his life and interests with them (his grandmother, his dad to some degree, Hisana). The reason he is so cold and distant at the beginning of Bleach is because he has intentionally cut himself off from forming relationships with others because he feels such deep pain when he loses them. Fortunately, he does go on to form close relationships with Rukia, Hitsugaya, and Renji-but-he-doesn't-like-to-admit-it (and probably also Ichika).
He hyperfixates, but on, like distinguished things, so no one calls it hyperfixating. Like, I don’t think you can be into chess without being at least a little neurodiverse, but that’s not commonly recognized because “chess is a smart people activity”, unlike, say, knowing far to much about a grim reaper manga for teen boys. In any case, Byakuya is a huge nerd about the history of Soul Society, but I think he’s also really into kidou esoterica and swordfighting theory and all stuff that’s really integrated into his life, so it’s useful, but just because an Interest is useful does not mean it is not also Special. Also, he has an OC.
He has an incredible sense of humor, but all his jokes are extremely niche and require enormous amounts of context. Like, if you accidentally said "grink" instead of "grinch" he would change the group chat name to "was the grink there?" but he would wait 75 years to do so, when all the people who were there originally have moved to Discord. He does not care. His jokes are for him. Rukia thinks he is hilarious. Is this a neurodiverse tendency? I don’t know. I do know that autistic people are some of the funniest people alive (or... not alive. as the case may be)
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