the idea of irving being autistic coded (or at least my conscious self projection of that) just gets more interesting to me as we get to know his outie bc he doesn’t appear to have any of the traits his innie does. it looks like his mask was severed from him— his innie is missing the context and experiences that he used to build his social skills, any conscious compensation for traits.
Like, the autistic coding is definitely unintentional. I think irving is the way he is to demonstrate the innies’ naivete, their helplessness, and the disparity between innie/outie — just as with helly — is de-essentializing. it’s ironic to apply a psychiatric lense, really he is emblematic of how meaningless that framework is on the scale of a person, even with a kernel of something very real. It illustrates how i conceptualize autism - a deeply unspecific word that contains, beyond the weight of it in terms of power structures, a complex and unknown set of neurological happenings with no determined or standardized effect, end result or meaning. But that clearly has a disparate effect and meaning to those the term is applied to, beyond what the word itself carries with it.