I read some of your fics but I can I have like a um i don't know how to make this
You have a headcanon that Bakugo has autism and ADHD? Can you like tell me about it? I wanna know how you characterize him if that's the right wording like how he was diagnosed and how he deals with now vs how he started when he first found out (I remember reading you saying he holds his leg to stop it from bouncing)
oh my god YES. Audhd Bakugou is my favorite thing to write about right now and I will absolutely tell you everything!!
Okay so the way I characterize him has a lot to do with how he grew up, especially in comparison to how I characterize the other kids I write as autistic. All my bnha fics so far have been for my series: triple A, which all takes place in the same slightly-alternate universe/timeline.
I headcanon characters as neurodivergent because I want to! It’s just fun and cathartic for me. With Bakugou, at surface level I started with his canon personality and mannerisms. He’s loud, maybe he likes being loud + maybe he genuinely struggles to regulate his volume (and his tone of voice). He’s shit at making social connections, which can be very nuanced and very autistic at the same time. He’s really into heroes and also has obviously put massive amounts of learning and practice into using his quirk, maybe that’s a special interest of his!
Then I put together my own mostly canon-compliant backstory for him, that tells the story of how he turned into this ragey, repressive, hyper-competitive, asshole 15 y/o. Bakugou was diagnosed with autism at age 2, which is how A Future Hero starts and as of Rumors ch10, it’s been heavily alluded to. It’s actually the youngest you can be reliably diagnosed. In AFH we see a little bit of early intervention therapy Bakugou got, but through the pov of a child. I’m still currently writing Rumors, but what is posted is enough to know that Bakugou also had a pretty severe speech delay which is what probably led to his autism diagnosis.
As for ADHD, he has not been diagnosed yet as of the current update of Rumors! (Ch10) But it happens sometime around end of 1st year/ start of 2nd year at UA. He hasn’t received any treatment for it yet either. I hc that he has impulsive/hyperactive type adhd which means symptoms like trouble being still, interrupting, acting (and speaking) without thinking, are a lot more pronounced for him. As a child these behaviors were basically just shoved under the carpet as ‘more autism’ and he’s used to repressing them the same way.
In Rumors, one of things Bakugou goes through is recontextualizing his childhood as he learns more and more from the people around him about being neurodivergent. And it explains some things that happened in AFH. Like the early intervention therapy he went through was ABA therapy. Which is a very highly debated topic in the autistic community and my opinion boils down to: I think some people have had some really good experiences with it, but a concerning amount of people have experienced actual trauma in the name of ABA and I’m not comfortable at ALL with how easily that can happen. I think reform is desperately needed (and to be fair, has been happening more recently)
Bakugou also received solely ABA as a child, which is not normal and I purposely wrote it that way. ABA can be sole treatment but it’s almost always in conjunction with others like occupational therapy and speech therapy. In upcoming Rumors chapters we are going to learn that Bakugou should have received additional support, especially with such a severe speech delay. And that his ABA experience was specifically very shitty and an outlier. A lot of who he is in the present and how I characterize him is because of how people consistently failed him when he needed help the most.
Some of the things he was taught at 2-5 years old was to completely repress stimming, force nt social behavior like eye contact and sitting still, and he was punished for having meltdowns. To make matter worse once his quirk came in he became what the people around him considered to be a very difficult, violent child. It became very important to other people for him to be compliant.
I don’t consider myself like, a bakugou apologist lmao, I try to make it clear that he actively chose to be a shitty asshole. In the backstory I made for him I also want it to be clear that his choices are heavily influenced by the fact that he was never healthily taught to regulate his emotions and was actively discouraged from learning. Because that makes more sense to me than “he was just praised too much as a kid.” instead his behavior really strikes me as someone who (on top of everything I talked about before) was conditionally praised.
He’s taught not to stim but was given no replacement coping methods to regulate himself: now you have a kid who feels everything very intensely because this is the only way he’s been allowed to feel
He’s taught that having meltdowns are not allowed and makes him a very bad kid: Now you have a kid with a short fuse, who gets burnt out too quickly, because he’s bottling everything up until he mentally cannot anymore. He still has meltdowns bc sometimes there nothing you can do about that! But it manifests as these intense fits of rage that we’re familiar with in canon. Because somehow in his fucked up world his anger was seen as power and at best ignored, at worst, praised.
So that’s where my Bakugou arc kind of starts! He doesn’t really “deal with it” yet in what I’ve posted, what he’s been doing his whole life is becoming more and more unhealthy for him as he matures (it’s very common for autistic adults, especially if they don’t know yet/haven’t been diagnosed, to experience this). He’s basically been brute forcing himself to appear neurotypical and none of his issues have been dealt with, just pushed off to the side. By the time he’s humoring the possibility of having adhd, it’s impossible for him to start unpacking anything with knocking over all these towers of repression he’s built up. But in his mind, that must be the only way forward towards his goal (being a better person, which has been canon since Bakugou’s Start Line). Basically instead of going to therapy Bakugou has chosen to punch the wasp nest that is his neurochemistry. His friends are still holding out on getting him in therapy though.
I don’t really have a solid idea of what exactly he’ll be like once he’s done some healing bc I haven’t gotten that far in the outlines of the fics I’m working on right now, but I want to follow how he’s grown in canon because I really like how his arc is going and well, that’s him!
