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RichardJ
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27 Oct 2013, 5:06 am

Do you think the character of Radar on M*A*S*H* had asperger's/autism?



Last edited by RichardJ on 27 Oct 2013, 8:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Fnord
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27 Oct 2013, 7:50 am

No. He was just a fictional character, played for comic relief.



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27 Oct 2013, 10:22 am

Often played very seriously and sympathetically, when you look at how Hawkeye often ends up bailing him out of his cultural blunders.
Never been a more spot on aspie character. He has a heightened sensitivity to what he is focussed on, the serious business of hearing the helicopters coming long before anyone else. But while they depend on his serious skills he is outside all the laddishness and when he fancies a girl he is the last bloke there who she could imagine going out with. It's the dilemma of every serious reliable character always.



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27 Oct 2013, 10:47 am

The character was a naive country farm-boy. These aspects were played up and exaggerated.

Farmers are more "in tune" with natural events, so Walter's ability to perceive the arrival of helicopters (a disturbance in the environment) was an extension of this.

The stereotype of the "country bumpkin" is not without merit. I've had to bail a few countrified cousins out of social blunders they've committed while in downtown Los Angeles.

Another aspect of Walter as the country bumpkin is his lack of previous experience with the ladies. Imagine yourself as a person whose only extensive female contact has been with your mother, your female cousins, and the occasional female classmate who turned her nose up at your farmboy ways. Now imagine yourself suddenly plopped down in the middle of a foreign country, surrounded by attractive, aggressive, and available women of nearly every ethnicity you can imagine, and men who were only too willing to brag about their experiences with them.

No wonder he was so timid.



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27 Oct 2013, 11:12 am

You could see aspieness in any episode you watched that he was in much. You were not told his economic background in every episode.
If you watched an episode without knowing his economic background, you saw aspieness. if you watched knowing his economic background but not assuming any economic background necessarily results in being like an aspie, you saw aspieness. If you watch overwhelmingly conscious of his economic background and holding that belief about it, you see it protrayed through portraying aspieness.