helloo i am new to you but man have i missed hearing good firefly talk (i don't really have people besides my dad to discuss with and we can't get into every theme i'd like)
question! where do you stand on the autistic river front? i understand its a popular hc and it's not that i don't get it, but to me it feels a misrepresentation of brain trauma and ptsd, you know? i think it's honestly less interesting for the way she sits outside of society and is treated as "other" to stem from autism and not the trauma she incurred at the hands of the powers at large.
hello!! nice to (virtually) meet you and ty for the ask <333 seriously feel free to chat any time, i love talking about firefly and especially my beloved space siblings <333
yeah, i get what you mean. my feelings about that are complicated, because i do think river’s mental state is a complicated variety of factors and symptoms that does sometimes tend to get smushed down into one specific box by fandom. like you said, river has been through some severe trauma at a very young age, so i think it’s fair to say she’s suffering some form of ptsd, as well as having a traumatic brain injury re: the removal her amgydala.
so i agree that i don’t like / it feels a bit uncomfortable when people don’t acknowledge that part of her story. i don’t actually mind autistic river as a concept, though, and i don’t know that the Only reason people see that is because of her trauma symptoms. in the flashback we see of young river in safe, though we only see a little of her, it seems to suggest she, though quite playful, is very blunt and a little morbid for her age (“we’re going to have to resort to cannablism”). i think there is some supplementary material that suggests river had difficulty making friends and didn’t necessarily fit in on osiris, and more broadly, though there are lots of different ways being autistic can present, i can understand why river’s “academically-minded child prodigy w/difficulty making friends” is something a lot of autistic people can relate to. plus, the river tam sessions seem to imply she’s always been psychic/at least had the predisposition for it, and i think there’s an argument to be made about her abilities on that front being a parallel for certain autistic traits such as hyper-empathy, sensory overload, etc.
plus i tend to think a case could pretty easily made for autistic simon as well, seeing as i think he’s kinda the definition of low empathy but high compassion, and he, while not necessarily as prodigious as river, was also clearly quite academically adept or ‘gifted’ as he says in the pilot (a loaded term, but one often connected to neurodivergent youth), getting through his internship in 8 months etc. notably, i think simon was probably quite good at masking in osiris, because he spent a life time developing a sense of the social rules and rituals there, but he notably has a hard time on serenity because he Doesn’t always understand the rules of this new environment they’re in. he also, like river, can actually be a little (what some might deem inappropriately) blunt about morbid/difficult things, like starting to explain the clinical process of suffocation or “that’s assuming there’s a head” sjhshshs. and neurodivergency tends to run in families.
a bit off topic but, all this to say, i agree that there’s a lot More going on with river than being autistic, but i also understand why people read her that way and i tend to do so as well, especially given that the medical abuse she is put through at the academy i think is something a lot of autistic people can relate to, if not in the exact same way.