Thursday, February 6, 2014

Don't Shunt Disability Onto the Catalyst Character, Or: Please Don't Kill the Autie.

~ Written a few days ago and posted elsewhere. ~

No, really, I don't think you understand. 

If you write a character who shares major characteristics with certain of your friends? 
And SEVERAL major characteristics with a certain friend? 

Especially if said friend is perhaps already on the outskirts of every group they are a part of simply by nature of one of these characteristics, with only the one character displaying these traits? 

You've made a character that your friend will inevitably and immediately identify with. 
What does it say to that friend that you have assigned these traits to the character slated to die at his own hand? 

Straight up? If you write a depressed autistic comic artist, your depressed autistic comic artist friend will immediately and inextricably see himself in the character. So will pretty much any other depressed autie who sees your work, because for a few scenes there is someone like us...

I would like more value than my death, please. Stop telling me that if I were to attempt suicide it would prove valuable to you. If I am here for your emotional growth, it should be through my life, not my pointless death. 

Tell us our lives are valuable to you by saving our lives. Stop the goddamned suicide. Stop a world that honestly thinks it's alright to excuse and pity the people who murder their autistic children (One of the THREE autistic men MURDERED by PARENTS OR CAREGIVERS this year was in his FIFTIES when his FATHER decided he was too much of a burden) and drive them to suicide, because surely it must be better to be dead than disabled. Make the people who take the lives of the vulnerable, through actions or words, accountable for the lives lost. 

Don't mourn our deaths, save our lives. 

Wake the fuck up. 

We are being murdered by your words. 

PS: You want to see an occasionally nonverbal suicidally depressed autistic comic artist attempting to hold in a raging meltdown over what feels like betrayal of friendship and violent thoughtlessness? Come over tonight and tell me how I should have told you things. I'll throw the table around a little and display my autistic brute violence. 

PPS: I promise I'm not currently suicidal. Just pissed.