honestly so much of the way we conceptualize autistic special interests is predicated on there not being anyone who shares them with us? and like. have you met humans. have you talked to any autistics. because lots of them are pretty interesting actually! and autistic people are often pretty good at infecting you with their interests so that you share them too even if you're not as motivated to fixate happily on them for their own sakes!
huge whorls of autistic-generated human communities exist, and people who aren't used to autistic people never seem to realize that Yes Those Are Also Autistics, often because people are used to autistic special interests occupying some very limited contexts like Computers because Computers were a big new societal innovation and community spinning up right when people also started thinking about autism as a Distinction Among Humans. Also Pokemon. And the Internet. Nineties kids know what I mean, eh?
anyway here are some heavily autistic communities that allistic people never seem to realize tend to concentrate autistics and be driven by them:
every non-commercial domestic animal fancy ever, including dog, cat, pigeon, chicken, and horse people; also includes a fair chunk of the commercial kinds but there are slightly less of these
fandom of any kind (for some reason--it's misogyny--no one seems to realize that this also applies to female-slanted forms of fandom focused on storytelling and modification as well as male-slanted ones that involve information curation)
religion. especially any kind that involves any kind of organization--less the charismatic ones that involve manipulating other people, more the kind that draw people interested in the way that religion works. less/more is not all/none.
kink and sexuality generally and also gender. we think a lot. it's a problem. and we get snagged on stuff. plus sensory shit ties into everything. just saying. e v e r y t h i n g.
academia. look we get. we get interested in things. if you get interested enough in things people call you an expert and sometimes they give you money. money is nice. it lets you buy more objects of special interest.
acting. we wear masks all the fucking time and we get caught up in it. which makes you think about structure, eh?
building shit. admittedly the allistics have largely noticed that engineers concentrate us by now but it has taken a surprisingly long time to realize that this also applies to other, older crafts.
fibercrafts and textiles. what about "we like textures and also figuring out how things work" is a surprise to you. also math. again the answer to how the allistics keep failing to notice this one is "there's lots of ladies in there."
I bet I'm missing plenty that I'm just not thinking of but my god, man, look at how many of these things touch us! look at how they shape our understanding of one another and ourselves! how cool is that
