Hi! I saw your autistic headcanon for Howl in the Diana Wynne Jones tag, and figured that if you don't already know about it, I should mention that Cat Chant from the Chrestomanci Chronicles has been confirmed autistic by DWJ herself. In case you want more autistic DWJ characters. (Not instead of Howl, but in addition to Howl.)
On the one hand I’m very happy to hear that (and I suppose that means I’m now legally required to give Charmed Life a second chance after dropping it the first time) and it’s very cool that she confirmed that, because Cat is a wonderful character and I really do love him!
I’ve read that you’ve said Cat Chant [a recurring central character in the Chrestomanci books] is slightly autistic. Can you talk a little about that?
Well, you know he has very great difficulty telling people things. It’s a mild form of autism. He’s not completely turned in on himself, but he is rather. This is how autism seems to be. I mean the worst cases. The child is almost unapproachable by other people. But in the case of Cat, he is [mildly autistic]. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so much under the thumb of his elder sister. I mean, it does make you victim material, very much, to be sort of semi-autistic. Always, when I’m thinking and writing about Cat, I know that he’s not going to tell people anything properly…. It’s a sort of social activity that’s beyond him. Such people can learn of course, and do. But when you’re a child it’s an extreme difficulty.
I suppose I’ve gotten spoiled by Anne Ursu’s The Real Boy and how wonderfully it handled autism and Word of God confirmation of an autistic character (aka the mc was always intended to be autistic and Ursu did her research and is generally really good and respectful about it, but due to the fantasy setting the word ‘autism’ isn’t used in the book), but it really is a bummer to see yet another author bumble their way through an autism confirmation with ableist language and ideas about what autism is. It could be worse, I definitely got some autism vibes from Cat, and it’s nice to have it confirmed even in a clumsy way, but still. The implication that the only reason Cat got manipulated by his sister was that he’s autistic, and in general the language of “semi-autistic” and the entire section describing the “worst cases” don’t make me very confident that Diana Wynne Jones actually knew anything about autism prior to writing Cat, or even after writing Cat, honestly.
But still, it’s always nice to have canon autistic characters, even if they’re handled in a clumsy way, so thank you for letting me know!
