Let me tell you about a character “Char” (short for Character). She’s a teen, a bit chunky, a Goth, a lesbian, and hates the world.

She especially hates her mom. Mom is a single mother (Char doesn’t even know who her father was), and she’s very important. In fact, Mom is something of a celebrity. Char hates the fact that when people finds out Mom is her mother, they ply her with tons of questions about Mom, and ignore her. Mom is always away on business, but makes a point to come home if Char is having problems and does her best to help. Mom doesn’t even nag her about losing weight, but does make comments about healthier diets. And Char hates her mom.

Char has one good friend whose main qualification for being a good friend is that he also hates the world and agrees with everything she says.

Char is not teased in school for being fat, or being a goth or for any reason. There’s some minor wordplay once, but it’s dismissed immediately. The main reaction other students have to her is questions about her famous mother.

Char has a crush on a popular girl at school, who’s blonde and pretty. When a class assigns them as partners for a project, the girl is nothing but nice to her. There’s even hints that, maybe, she’s interested in Char too.

And Char still hates the world.

Now, theoretically, I can relate to these facts. I was a chunky girl in high school with very few friends. I wasn’t Goth (that didn’t exist when I was a teen) and I’m not a lesbian, but I was (and still am) autistic in a world where A) girls couldn’t be autistic and B) autistic couldn’t be functional in society. I hated my mom because she couldn’t understand where I was coming from. Honestly, I loved school but dislike/hated most of the people there. The one guy I crushed on never really noticed I existed, even though we shared classes all through high school and, yes, even worked on projects together.

But I don’t like Char. It’s not because she’s Goth or lesbian. It’s because she’s not a CHARACTER. She’s a cathartic substitute for the author. A wish fulfillment. An ultimate Mary Sue.

Readers don’t like characters for their flaws. Readers like characters for their strengths. Writers need characters to have flaws so there can be honest conflict to put in the story, but a character without positives turns readers off.

Let’s look at Char: She hates the world, but the world is pretty good to her. Mom’s super busy, but obviously loves her and makes time to try and do things for/with her. Unlike my mom, who decided I was fat because I took a size large (I was 5’8” and had a 29” waist), and constantly brought home clothes for me with LARGE flower patterns like all the fat ladies of that era wore. She was constantly monitoring my food intake, just as she did hers because she was on an eternal diet of some kind. But Char’s mom doesn’t do that. Char’s mom asks her to think about healthy alternatives and let’s it go when she refuses.

Now, when I say I hated my mom, I mean that I blamed her for everything wrong in my life. I couldn’t make friends. I wasn’t popular. I didn’t communicate with others well. I wasn’t interested in anything my peers enjoyed and, frankly, thought they were morons for liking it. It was all autistic, but no one knew that. Somehow, in my mind, it was Mom’s fault. (We’ve gotten over this long ago, by the way.) Yet, I knew that if I seriously needed something, Mom would die fighting for me.

And you get the feeling that Char’s mom would do the same for her without a second thought. (Actually, later in the story, Mom does get into a life-and-death battle to save Char, and comes close to losing.) While I understand the teen hatred of parent, I can’t sympathize with Char’s because even when I suffered from it, I knew I could count on my mom.

The writer of this story didn’t give that knowledge to Char, even though it’s apparent to this autistic reader. It would’ve been a simple thing to do to give Char something positive, but that didn’t happen.

So I don’t like her. The writer was lazy and relies on the reader to have positive reactions because of superficial resemblances to the character. But I’m willing to bet that there are more people out there like me that can’t or won’t do that. And if you’re creating Fiction for the mass market, the general audience, you have to do the work to make more than just your clique appreciate your work.

And this is the problem I’m having with a lot of “woke” fiction recently. There is a weird attitude that because a character is LGBTQ or Black/Afro-American or whatever minority, I’m supposed to give them a pass if they’re not a well-presented character. I’m supposed to forgive if there isn’t a real story, with no actual conflict (besides the character’s angst over being a minority) because of representation. I’m supposed to ignore the writer’s laziness in giving the audience a full experience because the lead character is a minority.

I’m sorry, I can’t do it. Actually, sorry, not sorry. “Woke” or whatever, Fiction is still entertainment. The writers, the creators must do ALL the work that Fiction demands and give the readers/viewers that desired experience. If there’s representation, wonderful! All for it. But if you don’t give me actual characters in actual conflict in an actual story, I’m not spending my time and money on it. And it’s NOT because of “woke” representation.

I have many people in my life who are LGBTQ. I’ve always felt something of a connection because, being autistic, I was born different from the norm too. It’s something we are, something we learn to deal with, something that has just become acceptable to admit to in public in the last couple decades. It’s something that, in the past—and still today, some people think they can cure or otherwise program out of me. I get that otherness. I truly do.

I want good representation for all of us in fiction. However, this stream of stories I keep seeing with characters like Char (who is a summary of an actual published work, by the way), that is not good representation.

That’s actually shitty representation. It presents none of the positive traits that we, as individual people, have that counter-balances the hurt we’ve carried for our entire existence. Just presenting all that hurt in Fiction triggers bad reactions from what I’ve seen.

It can trigger guilt in the reader. I’m reading this pain, I think back over my own life and I recognize someone from my past that I could’ve helped, could’ve reached out to, but I didn’t for whatever reason. And now the author has made me feel bad about my inaction. Or maybe my active teen insecurities for acting against that person. I don’t like feeling guilty, so I’m going to be opposed to this work and, likely, less likely to explore more representative fiction going forward.

It can trigger anger and outrage. I’m experiencing this work because I want a good story, and all I’m getting is how the world I know and love is so evil and cruel and how DARE the author accuse me of that. Immediate shut down and could even go on a rampage against this work and anything else like it to protect my comfort zone.

It can trigger frustration. Damn it, I was really liking this story and then it got hijacked into this stupid character’s non-problems and it just went to pot. I can’t trust this author to tell a good story. What if all representation does this? I don’t think I’ll trust it anymore.

These kinds of fiction are NOT helping representation.

There will always be people who aren’t happy with representation. We can’t change that. However, what we can do is not give them fodder to bring other people to their viewpoint with lousy Fiction. I really think that if you care about representation in Fiction, in all its forms, start demanding quality fiction. We can’t continue to let representation make bad characters and bad stories sacrosanct. That’s just five steps back and no steps forward.

And “woke” is in apostrophes because that’s not my word of course; it’s the understood term. Please don’t get on me for the phrase.

I’ve realized I don’t talk much about being autistic. When I started the blog, I’d intended to, but I haven’t. When I thought about why not, I realized it’s because no one really knows what “autism” is. People who have it know what their experience is, but as far as I can tell, “autism” itself is the new umbrella diagnosis for any kind of social ineptitude that can’t be explained otherwise.

I think this is a thing psychology does. Anyone else remember back in the 70’s through 90’s (or so) when almost every boy had ADD or HDAD (and when they combined the two)? Any child, particularly boys, who had trouble paying attention in class seemed to get labeled as ADD. If they fidgeted, they were HDAD. As time went on, medical science (both mental and physical) seemed to out there was other explanations and now there’s not so many cases. Or, at least, that’s my experience of it.

It seems to me like that’s what happened to autism. Any social ineptitude that can’t be explained some other way becomes autism. It’s not that there’s a plague of autistic children, it’s that the definition seems to be catch-all.

So it’s no surprise that no one knows what autism is because it’s pretty much everything that’s not something else as far as I can tell.

The other thing is things like the terms “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” that gets attached to autism. Not only does those say so much nothing (functional or non-functional–is that so hard?), but it also gives people the total wrong impression about how it is to be autistic.

I can’t help but think that most people think of spectrum of autism is like this

Low-Functioning                                    AUTISTIC                                       High-Functioning

It’s not that simple. Nothing in life is really ever that simple.

It seems like it should be because most people don’t think about what it means to be successfully “social”. It’s so natural to people without a problem that it’s not thought through. Being social means being able to respond correctly to conversation; join in conversation easily; to comprehend what is being said as it is meant; to be able to start a conversation with family, friend, authority figure, or a stranger; to be place a phone call–every little action it takes to be part of human interaction is a different possibility for success, failure and anywhere in between.

For instance, because I can start a conversation with a stranger, go grocery shopping or hold down a job doesn’t mean that I don’t have problems being social. I am pretty much utterly literal. It’s literally taken me decades to learn to consider tone of voice as well as words being used. I have been known to argue dictionary definitions against colloquialisms I’ve never heard and aren’t apparent in usage. Most humor doesn’t register with me. When I think something is supposed to be funny, (even professional comedians) I look to whoever;s around to be certain. Please don’t waste your puns around me, I don’t get them. Even in writing. (Honestly, puns just register as ignorance at using the wrong word. Seriously.)
Have too many people in a conversation and I start to shut down. I can’t do large, loud parties anymore because that’s one of the few things that has caused a large emotional/mental melt-down. On top of all that, Tact and I have only been recently introduced, so I still struggle with not just blurting whatever I’m thinking, though I did learn to stay silent as a child most times.

I have a friend with an autistic son who is also considered high-functioning, however he has difficulty having a conversation with anyone he doesn’t already know. He has never held a job. Sometimes he has difficulties talking to his aide, though he’ll talk to his cats endlessly. Yet, we’re both on the same place on that scale, but we’re not in the same place in functionality.

Sometimes I think of autism as more of a graph, with an X and Y axis, but even that’s not quite right because I’m not sure there’s one universal set of X and Y’s.

Not a wonder no one knows what autism is when I think about it. I have it and, frankly, I’m not always sure what it is. I just know my brain is wired differently than pretty much everyone I know and I’m the one who’s always had to learn to cope. And I have. I’m functional in the world, to various levels of success.

There’s some of my thoughts about being an adult autistic. You can see why writing fiction can be a challenge sometimes. I have dreams of writing an autistic protagonist/narrator at some point, but I’m definitely not certain he will be sympathetic or even comprehensible to most readers. It certainly would be interesting to see if the experience is cathartic or panic-inducing. Won’t know until I try, I guess.

The How to Train Your Dragon movies and its TV series do what I’m talking about when I say “mugging myths”. In their case, the myth they mug are what we think we know about Vikings, as well as some historically accurate things about them.

The modern view of the Vikings are hairy barbarians wearing horned helmets plundering anything that’s not nailed down. Women wore metal breastplates and joined in the fun with the guys. I’m not sure where this view came from, but it’s been perpetuated a lot in Hollywood and the opera. It’s become a myth about the Vikings.

When creating, it helps to remember what the audience thinks it knows rather than what’s real. The creators of How to Train Your Dragon does this in spades, and uses some of it to hang the world on. After all, they’re not really doing history anyway since there’s dragons in this world. Why not have fun with it?

In the first movie, we’re introduced to Berk, a Viking settlement on a remote, rocky island. It seems to be off on its own, separated from any other Viking contact and dealing with the regular dragon attacks on its livestock and all-too-flammable wooden buildings. That it’s separated from a larger Viking community is odd, historically, but is nicely explained in the second movie when Stoick (Berk’s chief) reveals that there was an incident years ago where the chiefs had gathered to discuss the dragon problem, were attacked by dragons and he was the only survivor. This is a brilliant explanation that deepens the world.

Historically, the Vikings of Iceland would gather for a Thing, which was a gathering of the king, chieftains, warriors and priests to discuss disagreements, feuds, trade negotiations and whatever things (this meeting is where the word “thing” came from, FWIW), needed to be decided. It was traditionally held away on neutral ground, so no one held the home court advantage. So when Stoick talks about this meeting being attacked and everyone killed but himself, it rings true. For those clans who lost their chiefs to hear the story that dragons attacked, but only one man survived…well, that sounds really suspicious, doesn’t it? It’s not a surprise that Berk was ostracized from the rest of Viking society.

Now, it doesn’t matter if the viewer knows about the Thing. It’s tidbit of fact that wove into the fabric of their story, bringing an authority to it.

I think I just hit on something there: The real facts, the familiar woven into our fiction is what makes it real to the reader.

Perhaps the essence of mugging myths, or history, or…anything is to figure out the facts, the familiar things in it that ring true into your story and make certain you incorporate it.

I might have to think about this.