i'm rereading bold and forth on (amazing btw, just as good if not better a second time) and i was wondering if you Intentionally coded tom as autistic? i'm autistic myself and i really relate to the way you describe the way he thinks about social structure and social interaction lol. what made me send this ask in particular is the reveal that he had a post-it note flow chart for talking to shiv when he lived in the hong kong flat bc that is completely something i would do. anyway thank you for you amazing writing and i can't wait to read some of your other work!
ahhh thank you! Yes, I did.
As horrible as it is to admit relating to Tom, I really do--and so while writing bold and forth on I ended up put a lot of myself into him (there's one moment where I have a kid version of him feel sorry for all the other toys in the store: that was a direct pull from my own life). I am also autistic, and I think it's not even too much of a reach to read or portray Tom as the same given how much, canonically, he obsesses over the 'right' thing to do--and how often he's perceived to fail despite that level of effort.
I remember as a kid I was constantly sure that there was some cheat code or manual I was missing that would just make life work the way it was supposed to. Tom has pretty clearly, imo, spent a long time searching for the same. It's partly why I wrote the initial Tomshiv romance as being partly about her showing him 'how to be rich', the same way he later offers to do for Greg. There's something about that which, as gently mocking as Shiv is, or can be, feels to Tom like being held--because he hasn't had clear guidance like that before. With the rules laid out like that, maybe this feels to him like a game he and Shiv can win.
Tom talks about the nudie turtles and the hardening you have to submit yourself to in order to make it in the corporate city, but he chose to move into that world. I think he thought somewhere that was transparent about its cruelty would at least be easier to handle than a world where everyone was (or seemed) cruel in a more coded, hidden way. At the very least it might elevate him above people he felt rejected by or angry about or whatever. I think that impulse is clear in the fact he tries to use Greg as a punchbag and keeps failing to be adequately mean enough. He thinks it will make him feel better to be an asshole to someone because everyone shits on him, and then he's not even any good at that! He keeps sliding into empathy!
I'm really drawn to the side characters in Succession because they're not born into it. They ran away to the cruelest circus on earth and signed up to ride a little unicycle and get eggs thrown at them because they thought the rewards--status and power and cash--were worth it. What makes someone run toward that? Yes, he genuinely fell in love with Shiv, but he also fell in love with what she represented--a fucking meal ticket, and an escape (and she knew it, too! He ended up being coded about the true nature of their romance in order to try to preserve it, and it bit them both).
