So in a game called Fire Emblem: Awakening, there is a girl named Cynthia who has symptoms similar to what I see as an underrepresented form of ASD. There is another character in the game, an archetypical "professor" character named Muriel who is speculated to have Asperger's, but no one seems to think about Cynthia, who is social, upbeat, and expressive.
So I thought about how Cynthia might have ASD for a few reasons. Specifically, in the Asperger's diagnostic criteria:
(A) marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction: Cynthia's supports, (pieces of dialogue between two characters), have her seriously not picking up on a lot of nonverbal cues, especially with her father. There can be several fathers to her, but the one I had also used intonation to communicate his confusion at her strange behavior, which she seemed to not pick up on. Maybe she was just being obsessive over dashing entrances, though. Is this still standard behavior calling for a diagnosis, though? She also tends to shout a lot, which isn't exactly verbal and very annoying to others.
(B) failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level: Cynthia is a confusing presence to others, they finding her annoying or pitying her. One girl in particular really picks on her, and I've read the others also "talk down" to her.
(A) encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus: This one, really. Since her mother died, Cynthia has developed a huge preoccupation with heroes and heroic deeds. Past normal grieving personality changes, it dominates her whole life. Others, again, find it very odd.
She also can't seem to recognize her own father's face in one situation, though she might have been young when he died, (although she remembered his nickname for her, and does not appear to be much younger than a sister who learned swordfighting from him, and was not mentioned to have been any circumstances in which she would have caught up to her aging.) She has difficulty understanding how her enemies' minds work, expecting them to wait until she finishes her theatrics, and likewise has a very black-and-white view of good and evil and how everything must fit into a heroic tale, how "justice will always prevail" intended by the writer to be a sign if her ditziness.
She also speaks with six/seven-year old mannerisms despite most likely being a teenager able to fall in love bad get married.
Edit: She's also very clumsy.
Last edited by CryingTears15 on 19 Nov 2014, 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
19 Nov 2014, 4:16 pm
