They're just like me fr (autistic)

Something I've noticed when seeing fan communities of Serial Experiments Lain, whether it's a post from the lain subreddit getting recommended to me, some sort of fan website or forum, any piece of fanart or video or whatever. People really like the cyberpunk aesthetics of it. All the things with, what I guess you could call, retro-futurism of late 90’s internet, the whole thing of “everyone is connected”, “let’s all love lain”, the soft transhumanism, etc. To put it simply, all the “wired” parts of SEL. Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of these or liking them as much as I’ve seen some people do. I personally do like them a lot too, there’s a certain appeal to them. The general look that SEL has is something that really scratches a particular ich for me. That being said, all of these things are not the reason why I like SEL, the reason it's my favourite anime.

I have watched SEL all the way through two times. Of the thirteen episodes, there are a few that stand out to me, and that I've even gone and rewatched individually. Those are: episodes 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12 and 13. What ties all these together is that they, at least one portion of the episode, deal with Lain’s social life, her relationship with her friends. The reason why I remember these episodes, or I guess just their particular portions, is that Lain is autistic. I think that everyone that is either a: autistic themselfs or b: has a good understanding of how autism manifests and how autistic people are can easily identify this from the very first episode. Which is why, out of the ones that I listed earlier, episode one is the one I've rewatched the most. It does a very good job in showing Lain’s autism (and just generally speaking it’s a very good first episode). Something that the first episode shows really well is how although Lain’s friends are, well, her friends, there’s this weird distance between them. Lain just seems… out of it, the way she speaks in a very whispery voice, the weird brief pauses. She doesn’t really seem very aware of what’s around her. Which makes you question, how much do Lain's friends know each other? Or more specifically, how much does Lain know about her friends and how much do they know about her? Hell, how much- to put it in certain parlance- “allistic” friend stuff have they done? I think It's implied in episode 2 that the whole cyberia thing is the first time the four of them have ever hung out outside of school.

That isn’t to say that they aren’t really friends or that they don’t care for one another. Arisu very clearly loves and cares about Lain. And Lain certainly cares for them too. There’s a scene at the end of episode 8, a very haunting scene, I think one of my favourites of the whole show. Lain arrives at school, everythings normal. She sees her friends calling to her, and she’s like oh I want to go to them. But then, uh oh, some weird Lain clone comes out of her and she’s the one that goes to her friends and goes “omg haiii :D hai everyone! hey lets go hang out at cyberia after school!” They walk off and the og Lain is a bit dumbfounded and looks at them with a look of “wadda hell”. This scene, to me, represents something that I (and I'm sure that many other people with autism) have felt. You wished that you were the Lain clone, that you were more sociable with your friends, that you were a social butterfly. But you aren’t, you can only fantasize about it, and it hurts that you aren’t this version of yourself that’s more out there and open. Which is why I think I'm fascinated by this fictional 14 year-old’s autism. I (an autistic person) see an autistic character (Lain) doing things (autistically) and me being “wow, I also feel like that sometimes that’s crazy :O”. I think that Serial Experiments Lain is fundamentally about connections. Connections to your friends, your life, the internet, and even reality itself. The former two of these is something the ps1 game delves much deeper into. We get a view into Lain’s psyche, we see directly what she’s actually thinking about her friends and her life. And the whole thing about “the knights” or the weird conspiracy theory things the anime had is completely absent. Which, in what I know might be a bit controversial, makes me like the game more. At least in this particular aspect of it.

The reason why I've been thinking about this again lately, and why I even decided to write this in the first place, is because of a certain trailer for a movie that I watched, as well as the movie itself. It was “The Unbreakable boy”. From the trailer one can easily gather that it’s one of those slop “based on a true story” movies. My choice of watching the film (even though I knew it was going to be bad) wasn’t because I wanted to hate watch it. Not even because I thought it could be funny bad. I watched it to more closely analyze something that caught my attention on the trailer. The movie is about a 12 year-old boy with autism, he also has brittle bone disease but the trailer doesn’t tell you this. Initially it seems that the protagonist is the titular boy, going through life as an autistic kid. But this is a vile trick, as there's a moment when the mood gets a little sad and there’s some narration from the boy’s dad that goes “ohh, I feel like i fucked up and im a bad person :(“ and so on. Then a voice over from his mom “ah, it's not your mistakes that define you but how you heal” or some bullshit like that. Seeing this moment on the trailer made it very clear to me that the protag of the movie is not the unbreakable boy in question, it’s his dad.

This highlights a problem with autistic representation in media, or really a problem with media that is “about” a person with autism. It’s not really about them, it’s about the people around them, how they have to deal with their autism. How it’s a source of conflict all shown in this “look at how much they have to deal with. Oh his autistic chud son leaves the church bathroom while being half naked. Or look at the dad trying to get his son to get ready for school but he’s so distracted organizing his toy planes or whatever. And look how great they are at overcoming it and accepting it”. It’s about how the boy's autism affects his father. The movie also does something that I think many would agree is a bit disgusting. It draws a parallel between the boy's autism and his brittle bone disease. There’s this one scene, where it’s first discovered that the boy has BBD. The parents are talking to a doctor, the doctor informs them that their child has Osteogenesis Imperfecta (That’s the medical name for brittle bone disease), how he broke his ribs when he was being birthed and that's why he cried a lot, very sad and so on. Later on, they discovered that their son has autism, they’re talking to a doctor, he’s telling them how this boy has autism. It’s framed very similarly to that previous scene, as a sad thing that's being discovered about the boy. Of course, treating autism like a disease and must be cured and treated is an absolutely abhorrent thing. Now I will give this movie some credit that it doesn’t go all the way with this. There’s one point where the school recommends the boy be sent to a special needs class and later on he is sent to a mental hospital because of an episode he had. Both of these are framed as bad things that shouldn't have happened. More importantly, his autism is further compared to his OI as that it’s something that he simply has and can’t be cured. Which is certainly better than other more eugenics coded ways of treating autism. That being said, the attitude of this film towards autism is rooted in something that is really harmful to the way we treat autistic people.

I want to move away from the topic of how society at large treats autistic people to focus on something that perhaps is even more important. It has come clear to me, through various interactions with people and personal reflections on how I view certain things, that a lot of people’s only conception of autism (and many other things as well) is only its most exaggerated form. Austin (that's the boy that can’t be broken) is autistic, his autism is a very loud and sometimes overbearing form of autism. Which really comes off as a bit of a stereotype, and that’s partially because whoever made this movie thinks this is what autism is. In the scene I mentioned earlier when they discover Austin has autism, the doctor does say “autism shows itself in many different ways” but he only mentions that in some it's more loud and in others more quietly. Which to me reads as “there’s two kinds of autism, one which is very shouty and another that is very silent”. What these views of autism really do is, in terms of representation, come off as a minstrel show about autistic peomple. That, oh they’re so loud and weird and yap a lot.

I remember seeing something on twitter once, it was in reference to The Good Doctor (which is another example of a very exaggerated and pretty stereotypical representation of autism) and it was that: when allistic people intentionally try to write an autistic character it's a walking stereotype. But when they unintentionally write an autistic character, it’s the most accurate shit ever. This is a result of what I mentioned earlier, that their conception of autism is just a very exaggerated form. And anything that’s different is just some other bullshit. These writers were most likely thinking of making someone that’s just a bit socially awkward in some ways, which just turned out to be an accurate representation of autism. Bringing this back to Lain, did Konaka intend to make an autistic character? Or did he intend to make a character that’s just generally disconnected from reality and social life? It’s hard to say, and I'm not an oracle that can look into Konaka’s mind when he was making the character of Lain. I feel like the unintentional creation of characters that accurately show autism is because, in contrast with what a lot of people think autism manifests. Most of the time it shows itself in more subtle ways. Not necessarily things that aren’t obvious, but more things that don’t scream at you. That people will recognize that there’s something up with you, but generally speaking you're fine.

A good example of this is Laios from Dungeon Meshi, and it's a character that I’m somewhat confident was an intentionally made autistic character that is not really offencive. Which is because of how his autism is portrayed compared to Lain and Austin. The most obvious factor of his autism is his obsession with cooking monsters. And even when it’s played for comedic effect, the joke is on characters like Marcille who don’t like monster food but slowly start to accept it. Which fits Dungeon Meshi’s theme of learning to take risks and try new things or whatever. It also helps that there’s another character, Senshi (who is not autistic), that also has a thing for cooking monsters. But aside from that, what makes Laios’ autistic representation so tasteful is how his autism is actually about him. He IS the protagonist of Dungeon Meshi, it’s about him! (And the other main characters of course). There’s one scene in episode 17 where Laios and Shuro are talking and are getting into a bit of a fight. Shuro says “I always hated your guts, you're dense, and I tried to hint that I felt that way” and Laios responds “then why didn’t you just tell me you cunt?”. This shows the very particular trait of autism of not getting social cues. Not the social cues of not going around half naked and such, but the more subtle cues that people drop. And again, it’s about him. We are learning this information at the same time as Laios, and we see how it makes him, reasonably, angry and upset. Even though his autism does affect other characters, it shows how, in turn, that affects him.

What a lot of people don’t seem to get is that autism can be very subtle, in ways that even the autistic person themselves won’t notice. Now, traditionally I would end this with a call to stop the horrible representation of autistic characters. But, and I know this will sound very cynical, one of the things about art (or just being able to create anything in general) is that there are people, and there will continue to be people, that have this very warped view of autism. And will make things like The Unbreakable boy, and it will be very awful. But for this same reason there will also be people who do actually know what autism is and make something that doesn’t make autistic people want to tear their eyes out. Or even better, autistic people making things about their experiences with autism. With the internet and computers it’s easier to make art and publish it somewhere for people to see than ever. Hell I might also make a comic about my experiences with autism and put it on mspfa.com or some shit. But you’ll have to wait and see for that.