Special interests

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I'm not sure that it's so much the special interest that is part of the pathology, as it is the tendency to hyperfocus on a narrow subject matter - especially when it's to the exclusion of other important subjects that need attention (e.g. maintaining relationships with the people we care about and developing various life skills).

21st century poetry, the color grey, The Magnetic Fields/Stephin Merritt, Low, electric guitars, card and chance games, synthesizers, the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Here are an example of the most common interests to show that both Neurotypicals and Autistic people have shared special interests but rather a different way of expression.

https://www.autismparentingmagazine.com/autism-children-special-interests/

Forensic Science, the entire Legend Of Zelda timeline + any games of it, Supergirl, and Sharks

The rulesets of role-playing games like BESM, Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, Paranoia, and Traveller.

The Legend of Zelda is my biggest and most longstanding special interest.

My "Special Interest(s)" are what I've named the "true depicting" of things! And that's a made up word that I only got in struggling thru/with WP-isms as a very green AS-perite.

One can show, describe, explain, etc., a thing in many ways: pictures, poetry, analogys, maths, allagoricals, etc. Depictions is my ad hoc covering term for all these. "True depictions" are all of these "taken together" of a thing concept, idea or whatever, but also of their being ranked in order from a greatest to a least of some "attribute." An abstraction.

What attribute? how? why not? etc., is the art of the depiction-ing. And "art" is what I claim it truly is!! It's an infinity of infinities (of attributes if nothing else.) Too much and too many to fit on a page, in a book or even in an encylopedia.

Difficult, hard and even impossible literally!?!? Maybe. But approximately it's art and an "art!"
And I'm compulsively driven to do it , & love it, forevermore! So it's a "Special Interest Best Compulsion" too.

Hey, me too! Not all of those systems specifically, but if you give me a TTRPG rule book I will likely know how to play it proficiently in an hour, and in a week I will probably know more about how to bend/break the rules than the average DM (specifically for purposes of knowing how to make the system more functional to that end).

I just was talking about this with my Mom. I honestly have a hard time seeing my special interests as "Special Interests" in relation to AS. Like...anyone who is artistic *should* have an interest in the development and history of their specific medium, as well as the technical mechanics of how to design a hand, a body, a face, or a scene in really specific ways. People in Cartooning should know why it is that Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear both wore ties, what rubber hose animation was for, and how parallaxing works.

Now, whether those people knew this stuff when they were like 8 or 9 is a different matter I guess. Nor do most artists have a really huge habit of wanting to talk for hours (bit of an exaggeration, but not by much) about why the average human figure is between 6-7 heads tall. But in general, my special interests happen (luckily I guess) to align with things that aren't seen as too esoteric or extreme. I come off as being eccentric in most cases. My special interests actually can be seen as pretty normal by most people, which is how I ended up getting to my age without being diagnosed.

Art, History, Geography, Video Games, and Music.

Been thinking about this a bit since coming across another thread talking about special interests. Never really stopped to tabulate them all before. I have a few long-term ones, and a bunch that come and go like styles...

Long-Term Special Interests:
--Science fiction & urban fantasy
--David Tennant's TV & film career
--Cats (turned this one into a job track for almost 3 years: cat caregiver in a shelter)

Shorter-Term:
--All things Elvenar
--Vanlife
--A series of TV shows over the years... Arrow, Dr Who, X-Files, Angel, etc
--Anime (this one comes and goes: long binges followed by long absence of interest)
--Memorizing the names, faces, and roles of as many 90s-era actors/actresses as possible

...And now, of course, my newest one: Autism. This one will probably continue until I get brave enough to get assessed and answer the question for good... Whether there's really something to my suspicions, or whether I'm just a weird, quirky, off-in-her-own-little-world NT. Only time will tell.

This is my current special interest, FILM MAKING

Magic and witches

Just music these days. Recording my singing and playing on a laptop and trying to get a great result without spending tons of money on fancy software and hardware. But it can barely be called eccentric, which I guess is rather diagnostic of an ASD special interest. There must be a lot of NT musicians who love recording and have their own studio gear. I used to do it in a very nerdy way, spending much more time on the technical side than the artistic, but I've been temporarily separated from a lot of my gear, which has put paid to most of the nerdy stuff, and ever since I first noticed how nerdy things had become I've tried to stay better in touch with the reason I record music, which is about emotions and artistic expression.

I do a few other things that I get very detailed and obsessional about, but I'm always wanting to surface from those and get on with my life. Sometimes I think enhancing my laptop's software and general configuration is a special interest, but I suspect I'm just being practical. It's a very powerful way of getting things done, so it's more a means to an end than an end in itself. For a long time it looked like the means had become the end, because I was spending ages working on enhancing it, but I seem to have got it pretty much how I want it now, so most of the time I just use it for social interaction, music, movies, reading the news and getting the weather forecast, etc. All very normal.

Ooh! Don't tempt me. I keep wanting to make some videos of myself performing my music, using only a single movie camera and free software, with me as the only person involved. But I'm such a perfectionist, and it would probably take me years to get results that compared with the best, if I could even achieve that at all. And if it wasn't on a par with the best, I'd be dissatisfied with my efforts.

Special interests? I have a few. They often centre around politics and history such as the Reagan era and the New Cold War, the Fifth Century Roman Empire, France during the Second Empire, Norman England, and early 19th Century Australia. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Doing things outdoors ("nature"). Which does overlap with several other things, but the core is just being outdoors.