don’t know if this is formal enough to be called a meta but i’m rewatching hunteri heroci and, while not my favorite episode in terms of cas writing, the amount of it that can be read as autistic coding for him is . It’s A Lot. and a lot that resonates with my personal experiences. as a preface obviously all autistic people are very different in how we experience autism but this is just from what i know of my own.
so, let’s dissect a scene real quick
- one of the very first scenes of the episode is tfw investigating the first corpse of the case. cas can get a complete read on the guy physically within seconds, everything from his state of arterial health to the lack of drugs in his system. he assumes that this- the logical, physical portion- is all there is to it. he doesn’t stop to consider the social/mental portion, which is the fact that the man was likely having an affair. it doesn’t factor in at all to his immediate reading of the situation.
- it also doesn’t really occur to him that smelling the corpse might be a generally offputting action, because as he immediately explains, its objectively helpful to them.
- being eager to prove his capabilities to his peers- to prove that he’s useful- while not specifically an autistic trait is one i can Deeply relate to as an autistic person
- the whole bit immediately after this where sam and dean seem to be able to quickly put together what happened (and cas even gets a quip in the direction of his unhelpfulness) is something that is Incredibly familiar to me. it happens to cas more than once over the course of the show. the hunting skillset is something it takes him a long while to figure out, and it frustrates him that it isn’t something he can just understand, as everyone around him- dean and sam here, and then again with mary in season 12- seems to know it so flawlessly. i’m not saying it’s a metaphor for understanding social language but i am reading it as such. no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you try to impress or even just understand your peers, everyone around you knows something you don’t. speaks a language you don’t quite understand. it’s frustrating, and takes work to learn.
i don’t have the coherency to dissect the whole episode myself, but it’s definitely one that focuses a lot on the fact that cas processes the world differently, sometimes shown literally given the spotlight shone on his inhuman abilities and unique perspective. his observant and direct nature ends up being essential to solving the case (ex: when he pins down who the thief is). it highlights the fact that he is “other” in more ways than one. was it intentional? dunno. was it handled totally gracefully? ehhhh. but it’s still something that means a lot to me.
