Thread by @sanmeikitten

A post-mortem for chapter 14: Amity

In a lot of ways, I really hated this chapter. I've written plenty of angst in my time, but this was bleak. It frankly depicts a young woman being twisted and poisoned by a mother who would rather destroy her child than have her be different.

Unlike everything else I've written, there's no sign that things are going to get better yet. It begins badly, it ends badly, and it's almost uniformly bad throughout the middle. The hope spots are quickly quashed and the brief windows into a better possibility are pipe dreams.

Furthermore, I'm never entirely sure when I'm doing justice to the subject matter, but this especially feels so inadequate.

I'm autistic. I was socialized into not stimming in obvious ways, and I was taught to mask very well. I don't feel like this equipped me to write Amity.

Amity was abused, full stop. ABA is abuse, full stop. I dressed it up with magic, but I make no distinction where it comes to the impact it hard on her: she was abused into behaving neurotypically. This even apart for the bully she became is abuse.

An empathic response to this chapter is to feel sickened and heartbroken for her. The skills she was taught made her fit into society more easily, but her bullying behavior isn't the only cause for why she is lonely, emotionally dysfunctional, and filled with self-hate.

Is this part of the AU, or how I see Amity in the show? I guess the answer to this is "both, but also not really." Dana made it clear that the one constant of audience interaction with the series is that if you FEEL represented, then she feels that is authentic.

Is Amity meant to be read as an autistic teen in the show? I think probably not. Is it authentic if you feel represented by her as an autistic person? Absolutely. Same with Luz having ADHD or being trans masc. If you see yourself in these characters, that's valid.

In my summary of the fanfic, I wrote that I incorporated various headcanons, not all of which are mine. I don't personally read Luz as trans, but I wanted to write a trans Luz. I don't read Amity as necessarily autistic, but I know a bit about autism and can't rule it out at all.

One of the difficulties psychologists have had in diagnosing autism in women is that the models for autism were based on very young adult males, most of whom had severely stunted verbal development and engaged in self-harm. Young women tend to present differently.

There are any number of explanations for why this is, among which is simply that the diagnostic models were over-relied upon despite not representing the whole of autistic people. Furthermore, if you know an autistic person, you know one (1) autistic person, not autism.

This means psychology is still catching up to what autistic men look like, much less autistic women. Do some of the autistic women I know resemble Amity? Yes! Could the Amity of the show be autistic? I believe it's possible -- possibly even unintentionally.

A lot of writers include elements of themselves and the people they know in their work, and chances are that most of us know at least one person who is autistic, diagnosed or not. Sometimes we see that person in the mirror.

I am trans and autistic, if it wasn't clear from a grown-ass person being so into the Owl House that it pulled them out of retirement to write fanfiction for the first time since 2003. The story I wanted to write isn't about being trans or autistic -- not exclusively.

But I wanted to write a story about trauma and healing, and about how there's no magic fix for having a past that hurt us. How we can go the rest our lives continuing to feel the way we do. How it can continue to hurt for years and years afterward.

I have PTSD. I know this.

And I wanted the theme to say, again and again, that things can still get better. That people will put down ropes to help us out of the holes we find ourselves in. That we're still worthy of being loved, even while we're suffering.

Amity will get there too.

My hope is that we all will.

I see you. I love you. You're still worthy.

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