Iâve been seeing a lot of thoughts and hc of autistic wylan lately and you seem to also be a fan of the concept. May I ask why? Exactly? I could definitely kinda see it but wanna hear you thoughts youâre always so eloquent
Hey there anon! Sorry for the delayâIâm guessing you already found an answer to this elsewhere while I was off Tumblr for a bit, but just in case, here are my thoughts. This will be heavily personal, but⊠well, you canât very well ask an autistic person about autism and expect neutrality!
Autism is different for everyone and can be difficult to pin down, so while Wylan is arguably autistic, he misses several beats that for me would have made him definitively and undeniably autistic. For example, when the bells start to ring, triggering black protocolâI work in a place with a lot of bells and am frequently caught too close to one and normally press my hands over my ears until itâs over because that sound is like shrapnel raking across my insides. All of them. Not just the ear and brain parts. Wylan doesnât have that sort of visceral reaction, but that may just mean he doesnât have the same sensitivities that I do, or to the same level. He also never, that I recall, eats meatâas weird as that might sound, eating meat is incredibly complicated with heightened sensitivities to taste and texture. Iâm not sure how old I was when I realized it was strange to get up from the table to spit out my food because it viscerally repulsed me. So it might be that Wylan is autistic and has different experiences than I do. Those are things I would include in a story as major indicators of a character being autistic. This might also mean that his fatherâs way of raising him taught him to hide unusual reactions and stimming behaviors. Itâs not that much of a reach to assume a man who tried to abuse the dyslexia out of his son would take the same approach to autism. (More on autism and abuse later.)
So while Iâm going to lay out why I read Wylan as autistic, thatâs why I think itâs valid to read him as not being autistic as well. Both are valid.
A final caveat, I am well overdue for a reread of the books, so I likely left something out or could have found better examples. Take this as a few of my reasons for a personal headcanon. Anyone who feels differently, that's fine! We can each read things our own way :)
1 - Hyperfixation: The way Wylan loves music
Most of the Crowsâ backgrounds color how they see the world: Kazâs shrewdness, Matthiasâs tactical thinking and superstition, Inejâs faith and Suli wisdom, etc. Thatâs a sign of good character writing. But very little of Wylanâs upbringing seems to have influenced how he sees the world. It comes closest when he thinks about how his father would scorn his new friends, but we never see that scorn from Wylan.
The way a hyperfixation feels, itâs like youâve always lived in a close parallel world, never fully been a part of the other one where it seems like everyone else lives, but suddenly thereâs this bright shining piece of your soul laced through the other world. It lets you connect, it lets you exist in their realm, and you canât help but filter everything new through that lens because itâs the brightest, most wonderful thing. (I had been between hyperfixations for a while when I started a new job; six months into that work, I read Crooked Kingdom. One of my coworkers thought I had fallen in love, it was that marked a difference.)
So, combining these: Wylan never really acts like he was part of his fatherâs world, and indeed is in some ways separate from the other Crows, but he parses everything through music, his hyperfixation. He sets words to music to remember them, like he does with the contract. Even his own anxiety is made sense of through music, when in his first narrated chapter, he sets it to music: what am I doing here what am I doing hereâŠ. When heâs overwhelmed, his thoughts are âa jangle of misplayed chordsâ. The Crows have backgrounds that influence how they react to the world, but Wylanâs hyperfixation is his means of experiencing and understanding the world.
2 - Literal thinking: Wylan responds to exact words
In this post, I went into detail on the line where Wylan suggested waking up men to kill them. Wylan is generally unsupportive of killing peopleâOomen, Smeetâs clerk, his father⊠he advocates not-murder in each of these situations. Accepting his aversion to murder, his suggestion to wake men up and kill them seems like a genuine reaction to Jesper saying he doesnât want to kill unconscious men. Wylan takes things literally.
This happens the most with Jesper, probably because Jesper talks to Wylan the most. Nina and Matthias donât really register him past how he might be useful, Inej is usually quite direct, and Kaz is very deliberate when he speaks with Wylan. This really interests me because Kaz tends to vary his speech more than the others do, he adapts more to being around other people. He jokes a little with Jesper, spars with Nina, speaks more openly and more sharply with Inej, and heâs precise with Wylan. Kaz may not know what autism is, but he recognizes whatâs effective with Wylan.
Another example is when Wylan is sketching the Ice Court plans and Jesper says it looks like a cake. There are plenty of valid responses here: pointing out that concentric circles look like lots of things, that itâs just a sketch, telling Jesper to stop looking over his shoulder. Instead, Wylan says that the Ice Court is sort of like a cake. That⊠doesnât sound like something Wylan would normally say. Heâs not addressing the whole situation, heâs addressing the specific words Jesper said.
One of the most heartbreaking examples of this (to me, anyway) is with Marya. Wylan does the same thing with his mother, when she asks if heâs there for her money and says she hasnât got any, and his response is, âI donât either.â We understand as readers that what Marya is communicating here is that she is so accustomed to being utterly ignored unless she is being used, and if she told Wylan that no one visited but to take advantage and she assumed he was here for the same reason, he would say it wasnât the case. But he just responds to the immediate statement.
There are a lot of examples of this.
3 â 0% perception, 100% creativity
Wylan can identify things that donât make sense or that he doesnât understand, but at the beginning of the series he canât make leaps, only ask questions. On the Ferolind, he wonders about the source of water at the Ice Court; though Kaz doesnât say as much, he was clearly wondering, too, because he eventually figured out the underground river. Thereâs an interesting parallel here where, in the beginning of Crooked Kingdom, Wylan asks a question about how theyâll break into Smeetâs and Kaz tells him to use his eyes instead of running his mouthâat which point Wylan is able to figure it out. I donât think this is because he never tried before, though, but because no one ever bothered to teach him. Kaz can be harsh but he gives harsh corrections rather than harsh rejections and Wylan learns from him.
Itâs hard to understand the world for people with autism. The world is designed and run by and for people whose minds are fundamentally different from ours, whose thoughts and experiences are unlike ours. Imagine trying to learn English or Spanish or Mandarin or any other spoken language if your first language was olfactory. Thatâs sort of what itâs like for someone with autism to just get dropped into the world and expected to figure this out.
This can be attributed to Wylanâs upbringing, but I disagree with that because none of the others were brought up in the Barrel, either, and Wylan doesnât understand trade or politics with any special skill. Kaz wasnât born in the Barrel, but he managed to go from âstealing is wrongâ to âwrong isnât my concernâ real quick; Colm Fahey didnât raise his son on gambling and firefights; the Ghafas never expected their daughter to be away from the family. Only Nina has relevant trainingâand even thatâs precious little, she left school way too early. The others figured it out; Wylan needed a bit more help. He also seems surprised by the way his father conducts business. Wylan takes things on face valueâlike the time heâs surprised someone would do something, simply because itâs unlawful. This is something he expresses to a group of gangsters. Heâs never been taught the way of any world and these things are not intuitive to him.
But Wylan isnât stupid.
He doesnât know how to understand the world, but he does understand how things go together. Given a pointy diamond, a handle, and a screw, he cut through Grisha glass. He carries flashbangs and magic napalm, he recreates military hardwareâWylan understands how to make things interact for a specific result. But to me the most telling thing isnât just that he puts together chemical pieces, itâs that he figured out Jesper controlled bullets. He saw the pieces and put them together.
Wylan can understand when things donât make sense, but he canât make sense of themâyet when he understands things at their basic level, he understands them without preconception, for what they are. This is a very autistic way of thinking about things, it goes back to the literalism. He canât make the leaps of logic other people can, but he also doesnât make the assumptions they doââIâve never heard of a bullet Grisha, so thatâs not a thingâ vs âWell Jesperâs an almost impossibly good shot and he controls metal and bullets are metal, so why not?â
4 - Broken brain/body connection
Wylanâs great at chemistry and drawing and playing flute or pianoâbut heâs something of a disaster other times. This is in particular contrast to the other characters, all of whom are physically adept. Meanwhile itâs a challenge for Wylan to climb a rope ladder and he spends a full paragraph trying to figure out what to do with his hands. Itâs easy to say, well, heâs used to a sedentary lifestyle, but at this point heâs not. Heâs worked in the tannery for months. Heâs just physically awkward.
I have less to say on this point only because itâs about something I donât fully understand myself. I donât really understand what it would be like to have a body that just⊠does things? Like normal stuff? Without tics and stims. No idea. Only that Wylanâs discomfort in and seeming lack of mastery of his own body feels very relatable to me.
5 - Abuse
One of the most familiar things about Wylan is how he has been so thoroughly abused and broken down that heâs afraid to do or say much of anything. Again, this is a place his background can be an obscuring factor. Of course Wylan didnât think to blow up the walls when the first met the parem-juiced jurda and got trapped, heâs a spoiled rich kid! Except, he also startled when Jesper said his name later. Wylan didnât hesitate because he was spoiled, he hesitated because he had no confidence.
He also thinks Kaz would laugh at him for playing music at his motherâs grave. Now, personally, I canât see Kaz laughing at Wylanâbeing indifferent, thinking itâs pointless sentimentality, shaking his head, maybe commenting sharply that they need to go if they donât have the time. But not laughing. Kaz is a snarky, sharp-edged jerk sometimes, but he doesnât go out of his way to criticize, he just lets people know when they inconvenience him.
Wylan has been trained to identify attention as negative by an overbearing abusive father who literally saw him as less favorable than a demon. Now, that may have been hyperbole, but Jan criticized everything he could about Wylanâart, music, emotionâand made clear that he was worthless and competent to nothing. (Jan Van Eck can suck a rotten donkey dick but thatâs neither here nor there.)
A lot of people with autism experience levels of bullying that have similar impacts. Or as the kids these days are calling it: we go to school. We go to school where we are weird. Where we look weird and move weird and talk about weird things and thereâs a whole little bevy of asswipes to makes sure we know it. I got teased more for playing Pokemon and sitting alone reading than the kid who pissed himself onstage at assembly. (This was before Pokemon was cool. Iâm old.) And that is not unusual for autistic kids. Itâs also not unusual for this to be compounded by relatives or even parents who may be trying to help but donât understand and can make things even harder.
So we canât read social cues and weâre taught at a vicious age that everything that comes naturally to us is wrong. Imagine trying to interact in society with that background. There is no guide and most advice from neurotypical people isnât actually what they mean. It breaks you down.
Wylanâs anxiety isnât definitive of autism, but isnât something that was incredibly familiar as someone whose neurodivergent experiences created a strong level of anxiety.
6 â High Compassion, Low Social Competence
Wylan isnât very good at making friends. In fact, none of the Crows likes him much in the beginning, and only some of them soften toward him by the end. (Matthias and Nina come to respect his skills as a chemist but neither seems to particularly like him.) But you can see throughout the books that Wylan wants to connect with them and be one of them, he just⊠isnât. Heâs off-beat. Heâs weird. He asks questions and mimics behaviors (trying to be cool and tough like Jesper, saying âmissionâ like Matthias does, imitating Kazâs scheming face) but he doesnât quite get how to adapt.
But he still cares about people. Not just them. Everyone. He cares about the people they leave in the ditch outside the prison wagon, he cares about Hanna Smeet, he cares about Alys. He cares about the people whoâll take a hit from Kazâs sugar caper.
Wylanâs awkward social skills have undeniable big autism energy. I posit his compassion does as well. This is simply who Wylan is, and that means being someone who cares about everyone. I have nothing to back up that this is related to autism. I can say that itâs like me. (Not to brag.) I canât turn off the part of my brain that says everyone matters. Individuals can opt out of that compassion, but they have it by default. Thereâs a certain agony in feeling a pull toward and love for just about everyone and yet an inability to develop meaningful connections with them, and that keen loneliness⊠it just burns.
Again, itâs not definitive of autism, but itâs very similar to an autistic experience.
I said in the beginning that I didnât think Wylan certainly had autism and I stand by that, but he is a powerfully honest reflection of many people who do. So he can be understood to have autism, and thatâs part of the reason some people have that headcanon.
i think that the reason L death note resonates with neurodivergent fans is because heâs a rare example of an obviously neurodivergent character who is respected by both the narrative and other characters and whose neurodivergent traits are not the butt of the joke or comic relief.
Just to really bring the point home for those who have not read the Six of Crows duology and think that Inej deserves to âhave some fun before she finds her way back to her true loveâ, or who perhaps think that a love triangle/jealousy drama would somehow spur Kaz into action (do you even know Kaz Brekker?):
For someone connected to the production to caption a photo of the actors with the (crack) ship name of their characters (âTonejâ) and talk about âskin on skinâ might seem innocent (âitâs just an Insta postâ), but letâs look at the context for those who are upset by this â some of whom have suffered similar traumas and find comfort/inspiration in Inejâs character.
Here is a sample of Inejâs previous experience of skin on skin:
There were young men, old men, handsome men, ugly men. There was the man who cried and struck her when he could not perform. The man who wanted her to pretend it was their wedding night and tell him that she loved him. The man with sharp teeth like a kitten who had bitten at her breasts until sheâd bled. Crooked Kingdom p. 274 Kindle version
And these are the men she remembers; mostly she forced herself to go numb, while making all the right noises and moves so Tante Heleen would not abuse her further.
Because she loves Kaz, she tells him she is willing to work on that trauma IF HE WORKS ON HIS. This does not mean that she is itching for skin on skin action there and then, it means she wants to be ready for it if they are to have a future together.Â
What if he had come to her, laid his gloves aside, drawn her to him, kissed her mouth? Would she have pulled him closer? Kissed him back? Could she have been herself in such a moment or would she have broken apart and vanished, a doll in his arms, a girl who could never quite be whole? Crooked Kingdom, p. 275 Kindle version
This is her mindset as she boards that ship in S2E8. She does not need a man who is basically a stranger to be her ticket out of trauma â not even a lovely one like Tolya (who in turn does not need or want romance in his life to be fulfilled). She needs healing, a purpose and â as a character â not to be reduced to half a ship in a fling which would be nothing but a waste of precious screentime.Â
EDIT: Inserting screenshot of the caption/tagging of the photo depicting Amita Suman and Lewis Tan, just to highlight the clear reference to the characters and not the actors, whatever was claimed afterwards.
I don't mind the various fandom Zuko ships in fanon (I like all the fan art) - but it always irks me a bit when the shippers try to insist they have a canon basis. For me, this goes equally for Zuko/Katara, Zuko/Aang, Zuko/Sokka, and probably more ships as well.
One reason is it doesn't fit narratively with Zuko's character arc. I'm not saying you can't write a romance where redemption is part of it, but it didn't fit with this specific character.
It's written so that Zuko doesn't gain romance from choosing redemption, but instead gives it up. That's why his canon love interest is Mai, a Fire Nation girl. That's why him taking the lightning for Katara is decidedly not romantic.
Zuko is fighting against the Fire Nation and risking his life, not for personal reasons or to achieve something, but for the selflessness he would now give freely (in opposition to the very selfish actions he took previously), out of loyalty to his new companions and his redemption of the Fire Nation. Those are his motivations - romance doesn't "oppose" it, but it muddles it.
Narratively, Zuko taking the lightning for Katara symbolizes his final act of making up for his mistakes in Ba Sing Se and the damage it led to. It shows his full dedication to his path. It's very touching, but a romantic reading diminishes the intent, in my opinion.
Long-term, I don't like the implication of Fire Lord Zuko being paired with a water-tribe person, especially Sokka or Katara. Their cultures were severely colonized by the Fire Nation, and they shouldn't be doing the job of redeeming it. I'm not shaming the shippers about the colonized/colonized aspect - this is mostly about the narrative meaning. I don't like those characters as Zuko's Fire Lady (or co-Fire Lord?). I think Zuko, again, is best paired with a Fire Nation person, as his co-ruler. Another aspect is Zuko needs to follow his own moral path, to an extent, and shouldn't have a "war victim" steering his moral path for him, so to speak.
Zuko redeeming the Fire Nation is what Zuko's entire story has been leading up to. His Fire Lady (or side-Lord) would support him, not lead him. That's why Mai - who has a dedication to support Zuko, who has a moral compass and no real affinity for the colonist Fire Nation, but hasn't out-done Zuko's redemption, is a great choice as his Fire Lady.
Zuko/Aang also couldn't work in canon. Their respective duties would make such a personal relationship impossible. I'm not saying there couldn't ever be an Avatar/Person of great world leadership-relationship. However, in the context of the war, it doesn't seem appropriate (narratively). Roku/Sozin is often used as a basis to argue for Zuko/Aang, but I think it actually works the opposite way - because Aang and Zuko are meant to be foils to that legacy.
Letting personal feelings get in the way of responsibility is what led to the war. Zuko/Aang in a romantic relationship would narratively be a terrible follow-up to the backstory they told. It's why Zuko/Aang will always have a close relationship - based on their intertwined destinies, but underneath there will also be a complicated tension of opposing responsibilities, their legacy from the past.
When I knew Will was gay in 2016, during the first party scene, it wasn't because of some stereotype. It wasn't anything he said or the way he looked or his mannerisms or whatever.
There are just certain behaviors that a queer person can recognise for what it is. That simple act of telling Mike it was a seven behind the party's back told me all I needed to know.
Because as a queer person, I've done that.
I've looked for that extra attention, that special connection, that idea of 'us two against everything else', even our other friends. Especially at that age, when you didn't even know yet what it meant.
And sure, it could be nothing, there could technically be another explanation. But ultimately it's a clear as day sign of young love as Lucas and Dustin stalking Max. Specifically, young queer love, which looks slightly different from heterosexual crushes.
So yeah, when straight people are able to 'tell' whether a person is queer it's usually based on stereotypes, because they could never get it, but that doesn't mean it's the same for queer people. That's ultimately what 'gaydar' has always been - recognising behaviors that make you go "oh they're like me" not the typical "oh they're wearing this" or "floppy hands" or whatever. Not "oh they cuff their jeans!" or "finger guns!".
That's why 'Byler is the gay ship for gay people' - queer people recognise their behavior for what it is. That's why the GA can't connect with Mike.
They can't fathom the fact that Mike wouldn't call Will at all if he had a crush on him. But as a queer person, you recognize how figuring out your feelings often means distancing yourself from them. Both because you're fighting your queerness and because it just hurts to be around them, even - especially - if they are your best friend.
Ok so the renewal announcement didnât come in September like we thought, sadly. So back to fighting troops! Dm me if you want to join me in harassing Netflix to renew. I know we are all sad the announcement didnât come. It feels depressing and crushing and saddening. I feel it too. However, there is nothing wrong or sad or bad about continuing this fight and we will try our best to continue with it. However, side note, I will say that there were 10 different articles talking about renewal of Anne. Even now when you look up âAnne with an Eâ and go to news there are at least two-three articles that pop up on the very first page talking about renewal. Letâs just say itâsâŠâŠ.suspicious, because why would these announcement or rumors come out all of sudden? Two years after cancellation??? It canât be just due to social media buzz, because we only started buzzing AFTER the potential renewal announcement that started coming in DROVES. AnywayâŠletâs just say itâs suspicious đ€ Until then, have a great day and keep fighting Anne nation! We got this!
SCROLL TO MY THREE POSTS UNDERNEATH THIS!!!! EVERYTHING IN THE PARAGRAPH ABOVE IS CONFIRMED BY THE ARTICLES WE HAVE BEEN GATHERING FOR THE PAST FEW MONTHS!!!! GUYS !!!!!!
