Why I believe the Top is on the autistic spectrum

[liabrown]

I wrote this piece during the early spring, before the release of the DSM-V. Since then there have been changes in the field of autism diagnoses: Asperger syndrome and autism have been folded into Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the criteria have been partially re-worded. However this change is somewhat controversial, and because the DSM-V is so new

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

I always thought your take on the Top was very interesting, and so is this meta on how autism might explain his personality.

[liabrown]

Thank you for reading, and I'm glad it makes sense -- hopefully the piece is convincing :) It didn't actually occur to me until I saw a fan bio of him which described him as "OCD", and I thought to myself "That isn't OCD, it's a perseveration!" [though I didn't use the term in the essay, 'perseveration' is the term for the obsessive interests AS people have] and it immediately clicked into place. But it's probably what subconsciously interested me about him in the first place.

[dewline]

As a working theory for this version of the character, it makes sense. And most of the writers - probably all, although a check of their pre-comics backgrounds could make a hash of that assumption on my part - likely didn't have the research re: such issues to make the needed connections.

[liabrown]

Thanks for reading! Yeah, I'm sure the writers didn't have deliberate intent to write an ASD character way back in the 1960s, but one wonders if he was patterned after an oddball somebody knew. People who are diagnosed as Aspie these days wouldn't have gotten such a diagnosis in the '60s (it didn't exist as such), but of course such people were still around. And many became engineers, which one could argue is basically what Silver/Bronze Age Roscoe was.

[dewline]

Or could've been, but for circumstance and choice in tandem.

One more example of the passage of time combined with editorial policy on characters' aging - the timeline compression aspect in particular - to create a problematic situation, perhaps?

As you say, the diagnosis would've been missed in the 1960's. With character aging rules as they've been kept - even before 2011 - the chance of missing the diagnosis becomes less and less, thereby making the likelihood of Roscoe falling into crime smaller (though not impossible) as well.

[liabrown]

He launched his very own satellite into space 15 years after Sputnik; most engineers could only dream of that :>

One problem that a lot of adult Aspies encounter is getting a diagnosis once past childhood. Knowledge of Asperger's really only began to circulate in the English-speaking world in the mid-90s, and anyone who'd already reached young adulthood (and beyond) has often faced difficulty getting diagnosed. So even a compressed timeline might still have resulted in circumstances staying the same. Of course, it's all moot now, and I knew that when I wrote this :\ But yeah, it's interesting to think about how his life might have changed if he'd gotten a diagnosis as a child (or even as a young adult).