people going like "I hate that autistic people get represented as robots and aliens"
meanwhile here I am, seeing and better identifying with said robot aliens because "regular" autistic representation is fucking shitty
there is more empathy in those lmaooo
so yeah
Full thoughts are more complicated, but it's a vibe I share with many peers. One of my fellow furfriends recently decided to do a fun 'autism brainworm' alien fursona (deffo inspired by other stuff I do), and that feeling of being foreign or mechanical is really shared by a lot of ASD folks in fandom. My childhood best friend is self-reportedly a trans lesbian robot (she prefers robotics because of DID, her alters are 'parallel processes'), another friend from college prefers synthetics and is basically an airplane, one of my former roommates is a cute lizard robot (we just had to part paths QQ).
While my husband is so-so on synthetics, they appreciate certain aesthetics and REP's synthetic nature doesn't bother them (since they floofy afterall). I find that the more Queer and Neurodivergent among us tend to deviate from baseline human for self identification and we tend to gravitate to fiction. Transformers, Digimon, Pokemon, Halo, etc; it's pretty remarkable how titanic media giants can set up people for long-term identifiers. I should probably write more about self-dehumanization in a proper academic sense, it's a worthy topic I don't think psychology literature is prepared to incorporate into our understanding because of its inherent queerness.
