oh my WORD yes. i only just finished reading the book the other day, and it's been nonstop xmas since then, so i haven't gotten into the fic. i'm looking forward to it.
oh my gosh those are adorable, what dollmaker did you use? is that murfey hanging out with erskin in the top pic? it is a bit hard to tell him from bel even in canon, but that cowboy hat is saying murfey to me. :D
*lols at galley's "NOTICE ME SEMPAI" shirt combined with his rather... punk/goth/dark (?!) aesthetic*
Its the anime couple maker on doll divine! There's a lot of customizabity, i really like it. And that is indeed murphy! I like him a lot and thinking about the differences between him and bel was a fun exercise. I was picturing jethro hella giving galley that shirt and laughing forever. The rest of it I figured probably was bel's stuff from his goth phase.
Question about bel and autism: Spoiler: Cut cause im pretty sure im being ignorant and offensive I cannot see how bel kadros is autistic. Like, obv at least humanstuck!bel is so probably troll bel is troll!autistic but just. Hes really good at social! He writes poetry! He's athletic and graceful and eloquent and just...bluh. Im phrasing this like "bel doesnt suck he can't be autistic" and thats not what i mean at all, but i don't know how to ask this question in a non-asshole way. Just like. How. And also what. Blargh, i cannot figure out what autism even is and thats frustrating.
i base bel's autism on my own, mostly. i write poetry, i'm pretty decent at social when it's in a context where i understand the rules, and i was quite athletic until i became physically disabled. bel has sensory processing issues much like mine; is senses are turned up to eleven, and he can't ignore anything. in verses where he's a combatant, he's leveraged that to his advantage; in the ordinary-joes humanstuck verse, he just has to exhaust himself with exercise and take mild sleeping pills to get enough rest. he's very attached to routine. he doesn't like to change his plans. you can see this sometimes in the way he digs in his heels when someone goes off script, or overthinks decisions that might lead to plan changes. he's more faceblind and expression-blind than i am in all but the ordinary-joes verse, and mostly deduces people's emotional states from words and context; in the ordinary-joes verse, he's an artist more than a writer, so he's studied facial expressions like i have, and is therefore about as good at reading people consciously as i am. but it doesn't happen instinctively in any verse, so he can still get caught out, and he's extremely easy to fool with a simple performance as long as there are no logic holes in it. one of the things that's probably throwing you off is that he doesn't stim. he trained himself out of it because he is a stuffy stickbutt who has to look dignified at all times. in the space navy au, the mild brain damage from the spore infection has slightly impaired his self-control, so we're going to see him starting to stim a bit more in that one. his shutdowns and meltdowns are disguised as sulks, self-pity tantrums, and gothic clifftop moping. he also retreats into reading a lot. you might notice that when he's been among people and noise for an extended period of time, he starts faltering, and eventually becomes a bit of a liability. autism isn't always obvious. i wasn't diagnosed until my mid-30's. it's easy to mistake for a collection of quirks and habits.
@Lissiel Er, now we have a Word of Jesse, but I wrote all these thoughts down, so I'll post them anyway. Spoiler: my one and a half cents on Bel's autism Bel is the type of person who sees something he's not good at, but should be and then throws himself at it with extreme vigour until he becomes good. Think of that time Jethro tried to teach him how to knit: Bel spent like three days with tutorials, produced a very fancy knitted object that made Jethro go "wtf dude" and then decided knitting wasn't really his thing. As a blueblood he has to socialize with other trolls, so he would logically go and teach himself how to socials. (Bel may remind me a bit of someone I know who scored a solid "suspected" on the RAADS-R scale and tends to logic their way through socials ("if this and this, then person feels that"). It passes as 'okay at socials', even with totally-neurotypicals, but isn't an innate grasp on them, and Bel's approach to learning socializing would be higher-octane than my acquaintance's.) His interest in books seems to be a special interest to me, but I'm not quite sure. Also, I think eloquence is actually associated with autism in some cases (hyperlexia? it may have been a different term). I am a "maybe" case (too mild to be officially tested, probably), and I tend to talk with long sentences and use more complicated words than anyone wanted to hear in a casual conversation if I don't restrain myself. Also, a significant part of the cast is also autistic (Galley, but I think also Jethro and Sigmah), so they and Bel would sort of communicate on the same wavelength.
Ok wow that is all super interesting info and im selfishly glad i asked. Because that is super cool, and man do i love bel as a character. So much. I do want to apologize again though if it was an asshole question. I've been chewing on it for a long time now but i still was really fretting about asking. Erm. Its kind of outside the purview of this thread, and please feel absolutely free to tell me to go to hell if you'd rather not, but can i ask you a question about getting diagnosed as an adult with less obvious autism like that?
it wasn't an asshole question! ignorant, but ignorance is curable and asking was the right call imo. and yeah, ask away.
yeah, he took Learning To Social very much as a skill-aquisition task, and hyperfocused on it. his core special interest is information; collecting it, analyzing it, using it. learning all the things. sigmah is also autistic, yeah, because he's based on seebs. jethro, even though he's based on me, isn't autistic; not sure why that seemed like the right call, it just fell out that way.
Oh. Hm. I am not sure why I thought Jethro was autistic, it may have actually been "if sounds like Jesse and feels like Jesse then surely". Thanks for correcting me.
Erm. I know that adults have a harder time getting diagnosed, and afab people if this was long enough ago for that to be relevant, and it seems like bel's symptoms are pretty easily missable, so um. Was it hard to get diagnosed? And like, what did that do for you? Because im 30 and girlshaped and im starting to think that man that sounds really familiar. But watching how much trouble it took for my nephew to get his diagnosis and considering i get by pretty ok I feel like it'd be too difficult for too little return to try and get diagnosed? But i feel like it would really explain a lot, even if its like bel and easy enough to write off as other stuff.
well, seebs got diagnosed, and at first we were like "well that explains a lot of our misunderstandings, obviously you're autistic and i'm not" -- but the more we talked about it the more we kept coming up with "but jesse does that too?" so it really came down to my being empathetic. and then we found out that autistics can sometimes be overempathetic instead of the reverse, and it kinda clicked. so i made an appointment with the autism society of minnesota. they sent me a long questionnaire to fill out, and then there was an interview, and it was all surprisingly mellow and reassuring. the counselor was like "yep, you are very definitely on the spectrum, here are some strong indicators and what they mean." stuff that had baffled me all my life, like my extremely uneven achievement curve -- off-the-charts good at some things, abysmally bad at others, even though to most people the skills are of equivalent difficulty -- was suddenly explained. it was pretty great. i assume your nephew is smol? children often have trouble getting diagnosed because at a young age it's hard to tell a lot of autism spectrum symptoms from other things like adhd, frontal lobe damage, or even partial deafness. in a way, seeking a diagnosis at 35 made it much easier, because i had the experience and self-awareness to distinguish between, for intance, "introverted" and "extroverted but faceblind".
Dog Park Interactions have made me SO HAPPY. My boy has been on the receiving end of horny jock dogs and gotten yelled at for disciplining them. Unfortunately he doesn't have human brains and he'll try to protect me when the owner comes to yell at me for letting my Big Vicious Brute "attack" their "sweet" "gentle" Fido who "just wants to play". I don't know what planet you're from, lady, but calmly sitting on some rude fucker's head does not count as "attacking" them.
