Will Graham is autistic.
It’s the little details that make his character: his tendency to pick up speech cadences from whomever he’s around, his body language, his difficulty with understanding what he’s thinking or feeling, the fact that everyone around him infantilizes him, even his fashion sense being ‘this appears to be sort of generally clothes-shaped’. He’s one of the best-done autistic characters on television…
Except that Bryan Fuller’s opinion on Will Graham’s autism is “For Will Graham, there’s a line in the pilot about him being on the spectrum of autism or Asperger’s, and he’s neither of those things. He actually has an empathy disorder where he feels way too much and that’s relatable in some way. There’s something about people who connect more to animals than they do to other people because it’s too intense for whatever reason.”
(Yes, Bryan Fuller did give a description of some people’s experience of autism as a reason why Will Graham could not possibly be autistic.)
Most people would consider my thoughts on Will Graham’s autism to be a headcanon, in the same sense that thinking he’s LGBT or a person of color would be a headcanon. But I don’t think it’s irrelevant that if Will Graham walked into the office of any competent, non-cannibalistic psychiatrist in the country, he’d walk out with an autism diagnosis. That is far more grounded in the text than most headcanons. Indeed, it’s the clear and obvious interpretation.
The solution to the mystery, I think, is precisely that authors don’t know what autism is. 1 in 68 people are autistic; therefore, nearly all authors have met at least one autistic person, and most have met several. However, they’re not likely to know that the people are autistic. Many autistic people do not disclose their autism; some might not ever have been diagnosed. And because they don’t really know what autism is, they’re not going to recognize the signs.
Compare this to homosexuality. Many gay people are out in every part of their lives; the gay people that any author has met are very likely to identify themselves as gay. And homosexuality is legible in a way autism isn’t. Visibly autistic people are not usually read as autistic; they’re read as weird or nerdy or high or a vague undifferentiated “special needs”. On the other hand, a man who kisses another man is easily recognized as gay.
For this reason, authors have autistic traits as part of their general sense of what people do, without understanding that those traits are autistic. (I’m not saying that authors model their characters on any specific autistic person, although that’s some writers’ process– I’m saying that when an author’s subconscious mind thinks “hm, what would it be plausible for this person to do?”, autistic traits are included as part of the things it is plausible for people to do.) When they want to write a character who is weird or nerdy or vaguely special needs, they wind up writing a tremendously accurate autistic character– by accident.
Indeed, these characters are usually much better depictions of autism than the characters that are supposed to be autistic, because the latter are influenced by the author’s stereotypes and pathologizing depictions of autistic people, while the former are based on actual autistic people.
This doesn’t apply nearly as much to gay headcanons, because it is extremely rare for authors to know that typical gay behaviors exist without connecting them to the existence of gayness. (It is, interestingly, possible that an author knows of the traits of self-closeted trans people without knowing that those are self-closeted trans person traits– but I’m not sure if there are commonly unintentional self-closeted trans people in fiction outside of transformation fetish porn.)
In conclusion: there is a sense in which Will Graham is ‘canonically’ autistic which would not apply to more normal headcanons like him being gay or polyamorous or trans, and the same thing apples to a bunch of other neurodivergences.
Thing of Things 
Bryan Fuller didn’t create the character of Will Graham; Thomas Harris did. If you’ve read Red Dragon, did you get the sense that the original Will Graham is autistic? Interestingly, after reading the book and reading about Harris’s life, I got the sense that both Graham and Harris were dealing with some degree of attention deficit disorder. I may have been picking up on the same “vaguely special needs” traits that Fuller faithfully brought to the screen and fitting them to my own experiences with neurodivergence as you seem to have done to yours. A quick Google of Harris certainly gives the impression of some degree of neurodivergence if you’re looking for it.
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Haven’t read Red Dragon, am strictly talking about TV show Will Graham.
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I haven’t seen the show, so my book impression is at best orthogonal, but the impression I got from the book was some kind of PTSD plus what the actor says in the interview – the Graham’s unusually strong empathy resulted in him taking on characteristics of Lector as he understood him better, sort of like people who adopt the accents and cadences of people they’re talking to. (IIRC, Red Dragon led to a bunch of similar spinoffs about troubled profilers).
I wonder if the actor got some spectrum traits by adopting some of the Sherlock iconography? Certainly, if you try to create a monomaniacal genius crime analyst, that’s probably where you start in our current culture.
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Off topic: In Will Graham’s case bisexuality isn’t completely implausible, or at least some degree of homosexual attraction, and it’s better supported in the text than most LGBT head canons. Starting mid-season 2 I billed the show to prospective watchers as “the best worst love story on television.” A pair of friends recently got into it because of the eroticism between the two leads.
On topic: This is an interesting observation that might be explained by convergent evolution. I think where you and Bryan Fuller are disagreeing is the source of Will’s behavior, because you’re both right that his behavior could be explained by your sources of inspiration. I think you’re also almost certainly right that Fuller observed autistic individuals and decided those behaviors would be a good match for Will’s personality.
“Will Graham was probably inspired by people with autism” is a statement you could make with reasonable certainty; “Will Graham is autistic” is not, since there’s an equally probable explanation given in canon that all the characters and even the creator accept.
The question of probable explanations is an interesting one to me because I’m currently playing a character based off – of all things – Will Graham. Many of his behaviors are similar, but they have nothing to do with the character having autism: Some were consciously developed as a means of visibly lowering his social standing, and others were the result of an extreme experience of isolation later in life that hamstrung his ability to express emotions. Refusing to make eye contact and showing nervousness by fidgeting were deliberate, and the somewhat flattened emotional comminication was involuntary (the character also has difficulty speaking English because of the same isolation, which makes stating his feelings even harder).
Other characters have read him as either autistic or sociopathic depending on how hard he was working to display emotion, but he’s neither. I have an equally plausible explanation for a set of behaviors adapted in part from an adaptation of people with autism, but the character’s canon backstory explicitly excludes autism as a cause. Under those circumstances I would find it annoying if someone argued with me that the character was really autistic.
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Will seems autistic to me in Season 1, but less so in 2 and 3, where he throws down some remarkable social manipulation, which, as somebody who’s been on the autism spectrum (I’m one of the 7% or so who lost the diagnostic criteria as I grew up, although my mind might still have some deep-structure divergences), I know is difficult or impossible even for autistic people who aren’t severely impaired.
I actually think that he’s more canonically bisexual. If a man and a woman had the sort of relationship that Hannibal and Will did, we would call it a clear case of “Will They or Won’t They?”
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From a Watsonian perspective, he’s straight; from a Doylist perspective, it’s an intensely homoerotic relationship which is deliberately written as such, but the fact that the answer to “Will They or Won’t They?” is obviously “They Won’t” changes the viewer’s experience.
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It is, interestingly, possible that an author knows of the traits of self-closeted trans people without knowing that those are self-closeted trans person traits– but I’m not sure if there are commonly unintentional self-closeted trans people in fiction outside of transformation fetish porn.
The webcomic El Goonish Shive contains a character who turns out to be an unintentional self-closeted trans person (if I understand that phrase correctly) due to their feelings about gender being based off the author’s, who themselves didn’t realize they were trans until they learned the word ‘genderqueer’ and then suddenly everything made sense. I find this very interesting.
On the other hand EGS is arguably pretty much what you would get if you took the ‘porn’ out of ‘transformation fetish porn’ so maybe that’s a bad example.
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Ah! I was reading the El Goonish Shive archive and I just got to that bit and it makes a lot of sense.
Do you know if the author is out about it? I don’t want to repeat that by accident if not.
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Yeah, I have seen him talk about it on Tumblr when people send an ask. (Also that he uses he/him pronouns.) It also might be in a commentary somewhere.
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Tumblr posts for reference.
A comic that touches on the matter.
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An interesting case is the character of Lalli Hotakainen in the webcomic Stand Still, Stay Silent. He is clearly written with unusual patterns of behaviour that are reminiscent of some form of autism, but the author has said that she doesn’t want to assign a priori any canonical diagnostic to him — that is, she deliberatedly and explicitely lets the readers come up with their own interpretation/explanation of this characher.
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Don’t forget he also hates eye contact! (Citation: S1E1 “Apéritif”.)
I think it’s especially important to argue for Will Graham’s autism because of the (unintentional) subversion of autistic tropes in “Hannibal.”
A lot of autistic or ASD-coded fictional characters are Pure Cinnamon Rolls. Their cognitive differences confer naivety, and naivety engenders intense, earnest moralism. (Ironically, Hugh Dancy played such an angelic Aspergian character in the 2009 romcom “Adam.”) Will Graham at first appears righteous and uncomplicated, but under Hannibal’s influence, reveals he can revel in great violence. His colleagues stop treating him like delicate china, and come to fear him. (As someone on the spectrum, I find it weirdly empowering when ASD characters are powerful, respected, and feared. That’s one of the reasons I love Peter Watts’ novel “Blindsight,” wherein all the main characters have some form of weaponized neurodivergence.)
I’m very eager to see what Fuller does with high-systematizing-low-empathy Vulcans on his “Star Trek” show.
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Violence is an underappreciated stim.
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For a historical counterpart, there are a number of explanations for what disease Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol might have had: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22393183 (Of course, you can go the other way too–lots of people dying of broken hearts in novels of a certain era, because authors thought that was a thing.)
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Perhaps the dispute here is more about group membership as lived experience.
You saw several of Will’s behaviors as indicative of things like divergent communication or sensory defensiveness. All these behaviors happened in the canon. You arrived to the conclusion that Will Graham is autistic. It’s like counting the number of steps he took in a scene and saying “Will canonically stepped ten times”. This was the pursuit of a platonic truth.
Quite frankly, the problem is ascribing that much competence to the average doctor. By some standards, neurodivergence is a state of engagement with the (non-cannibalistic) mental health system. The autistic people are the ones that had to play with logical toys separately from the other children and get school counselors telling their parents, making their doctors switch to chewable tablets, and by high school their families have written a form telling supervisors to let them use their tablets for typing in the middle of class. In this view, “autism” is actually the condition of being sorted this way in the system, which clearly doesn’t apply to Will Graham.
That’s a pretty inane heuristic, of course. Is the gene for autism in a box with a decaying radioactive isotope, and only a doctor can open the box to verify activation?
(Disclaimer: I have not watched any substantial amount of any media featuring Will Graham.)
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You seem to be saying that autism is caused by autism diagnoses, but that doesn’t sound right. To the best of my knowledge, autistic characteristics are correlated with each other and probably share common causes. So autism would still be a thing even if we didn’t have a word for it or know how to identify it.
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To be clear, I do personally believe that autism dies exist independent of diagnosis as a platonic truth possible to derive from criteria. Like literally I trust that Ozy is right and Will being autistic is canon.
However, there is a separate experience of “having an autism diagnosis” that Will lacks. Some people describe that experience as autism.
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What’s a good written account of what autism feels like from the ‘inside’?
Or are there any accounts of head injuries or disease causing a transition from ‘normal’ to autistic or autistic to ‘normal’?
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It’s just occurred to me; is Amelie Poulain autistic?
She’s shy –she likes people but doesn’t like chatter or noise, she has fixations and likes people with fixations, and she does stimmy things like putting her hands in dry beans and skipping stones.
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I know this post is from 2016 but I still think about it every few months.
“It is, interestingly, possible that an author knows of the traits of self-closeted trans people without knowing that those are self-closeted trans person traits– but I’m not sure if there are commonly unintentional self-closeted trans people in fiction outside of transformation fetish porn.”
So! Fun fact. I think it is at least arguable that Data, from Star Trek TNG, counts as a self-closeted trans woman according to this framework, or at least, could. There are also several examples of Data being sort of allegorically/subtextually trans, as it were – being possessed by female consciousnesses, being put in a dress for a gag, etc. – but I’m going to stick to the strict “self-closeted trans person” stuff that would basically follow the framework of being canon-ish. Now, all of this stuff has to do with Data being an android – none of it would work with a human character – but Star Trek is not (generally) transformation fetish porn, so I think it still counts as a counterexample.
(I am going to use he/him pronouns for Data in this comment because that’s what he uses in the show; I dithered for a while about this but in the end I figured it’s probably better to use the pronouns he canonically uses).
Season one episode “Angel One” – when the women of Angel One try to bar Data from I forget what on the basis of him being male, he objects to being classified as such, saying something like “although I appear male, I am an android” (not an exact quote). In the context of the episode, this seems strictly utilitarian but is more interesting in the context of later things in the broader series.
Season three episode “The Offspring” – Data constructs a child for himself, based on his own programming. He explicitly says that he wishes he had been allowed to choose his own gender when he was built, and because of this, he allows his child to choose their own gender. She chooses to be a girl. Her programming is based on his, suggesting that he would have made the same choice had it been offered.
Season seven (or six? I forget) episode “Inheritance” – Data meets his “mother,” who he has never known, for the first time. She tells him, among other things, that he was originally planned out as a girl, but when they were making his body, his “father” changed him to a boy at the last moment, suggesting that he may literally have been programmed as a girl. I know the “born in the wrong body” narrative isn’t a great one but in Data’s case it’s implied to be literally true.
This stuff, taken together, seems to suggest that Data is maybe a self-closeted trans woman (or transfeminine nb person) in the same way that Will Graham is autistic.
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