šŖ±Wiggly Worm Wednesday!šŖ±
@soaringornithopter tagged me back in July for one of these and I finally had something I want to share. If people are interested I would happily talk more about the alt season one I've imagined for this autistic Steve - all from Barb's POV.
I usually don't headcanon Steve as autistic. I like that idea for many other Stranger Things characters, and I have written Robin as explicitly autistic in a few of my fics, but for Steve, if I'm gonna make him neurodivergent, I usually don't pick autism. That doesn't mean I haven't read a lot of good fics where he is autistic, and of course, that got stuck in my head. How could Steve be autistic and be close to the character we see on screen?
Key canon characteristics that I think Steve has to have and would have to be addressed somehow would be: his popularity, his reputation with the ladies, his reputation as an asshole/bully, his athleticism, and his friendships with Tommy and Carol.Ā
His popularity could be explained by absent parents, good looks, and a lot of money at his disposal. To give an autistic flare, he could be naĆÆve, a common trait. To the student body at large, that would make him either a lovable himbo or a usable idiot.
Steve was a weirdo in elementary school and probably a lot of middle school. My idea would be that he got hot early for a boy, so seventh or eighth grade. Carol probably realized he was impressionable and naĆÆve, and she could use him as leverage on her own climb of the social ladder. Steve is not an idiot; he realizes that Carol is helping him not be a weirdo anymore. It also might explain why he is dismissive of Jonathan in the first few episodes. He was that kind of person, and he did not want to go back to that by any means necessary.
That would also explain his reputation as an asshole or even a bully. Even if he doesn't explicitly bully, if he is autistic, there's a good chance he misses a lot of the social cues of more subtle bullying done around him because he's either spacing out (thanks to the overstimulating school environment) or he is straight up missing the cue. It would also explain why he doesn't stop Tommy most of the time, but when Nancy complains, he does stop Tommy. She's giving him a cue he can understand that Tommy is overstepping. I also think hanging around Tommy and Carol would skew the cues that Steve has learned. He is meaner than he would otherwise be because he learned by watching them.
If I had to choose between hyper or hypo-sensitive to most stimuli, I would make Steve hypo-sensitive and sensory-seeking. That would potentially explain part of his love of athleticism because he's getting a lot of proprioceptive feedback through roughhousing, training, and playing in games. It also might be why he seeks out sex as much as he does in canon. Especially if you add handsome, naĆÆve, and sensory seeking together, you get somebody who might seek out sex and get sex on the regular (caveat regular sex for a high schooler). I think someone who was hypersensitive to stimuli would not seek those experiences out as much.
Finally, I love making Steve's athleticism part of his special interests. I love that Steve was obsessed with baseball stats as a kid. That is almost cool and gets him a modicum of respect from his peers. He's not bad at sports in elementary school during PE, and maybe even talented at some things, but he doesn't have the attention span for it because he doesn't care about it at first. After he gets into the stats and they start playing baseball in PE, he discovers a love for the memorization and collection of statistics and the actual game itself. It also gets him a modicum of social approval, which he desperately desires. He got into more sports as time went on, and his special interest expanded because he learned that baseball was both fun to collect and fun to play. He expands his play as well. Because he is sensory-seeking, he also gets a lot of self-regulation from playing sports, and that helps reinforce his love for them.
In canon, he also has a reputation for being vain. I'd love to give him another special interest in his appearance. This is a guy who goes out of his way to buy fashion magazines when he goes to Chicago with his parents because that's the only place he can buy Vogue Men Italia.
I like the idea of those two special interests helping him pass.
Finally, I'd love to give him a big special interest that he keeps secret because he learned in elementary school that no one cared, and in fact, it made him weirder. Something benign but also that he could dive deep into. I kind of like astronomy, with a subsection of Greek mythology as a logical extension of learning astronomy when you are a child. He learned about the constellations and deep-dived into Greek mythology to learn what the constellations meant. But he doesn't even share this stuff with his parents because it's too weird.
Finally, it's very important to this version of Steve that he would not meet the criteria to be diagnosed as autistic in the late 60s and into the 70s. So he would have no idea why he was different, just that he was very different, and always had to keep it under wraps.
titsay
dailybridgerton
annaxmalina
yousharknotpass
izzy806
gummygunk
