How a Steven Universe Character Has Been Teaching Me about Autistic Empathy

Better read from ℳontegasppα And Giulia C.’S Thoughts.

I’ve been watching Steven Universe: The Movie over and over again (my son is autistic and likes repetition), and there’s something in that movie that caught my attention.

It’s Spinel’s arc. It touches me deeply, and I can’t help but cry thinking about it.

Talking with neurotypical people about it, they often find it silly and childish, unable to understand the suffering behind it.

After a lotta thinking about it, I finally came to an understanding:

The character is an alien, out of the ordinary box, so her motivations and feelings aren’t compatible with “normality.”

They say:

— Why didn’t she just go away sooner? Why would anyone wait for ages?

Okay, “normal” people would get it and go on, but that thought disregards the character’s personality.

Put yourself in an atypical place of mind: she was built to play, knowing nothing else, and she trusted Pink Diamond with no shade of doubt on her mind. She spent her entire nearly-2,000-year life mostly in the same place, the Garden, with the same person, not knowing anything else.

When the love of her life asked her to “stand very still” in order to “play a game,” she wasn’t able to question, trust was in her very inner nature.

If you can take her place, feel it, you’ll see that it’s the cruellest harm anyone could’ve done to another. It was a betrayal of trust.

Now take it for three times her lifetime in the Garden — or more… Happily listen, happy to stay, happily watching her drift away.

It’s easier for us autistics to get it than for neurotypical people. Why?

That’s the gotcha:

Neurotypical people live in a world made for their own, where feelings and rules match their expectations. Anything outside the box is “alien,” odd. So, for a typical person, it’s too hard to take a different point of view.

But autistic people already live in a strange and confusing world, we gotta figure out how other people feel all the time. So, for us, putting on someone else’s sandals is an everyday task.

In other words, for us, autistics, an alien point of view isn’t that alien, or at least, it’s not so much weirder than the neurotypical.

I replaced “allist” with “neurotypical” ’cause, on reflection, it seems not fair to other neurodiverse people. I’m talking about a neurotypical disorder.