[meta] » nothing good ever came out of "gross"

[rhodanum]

At first I wanted to write up a title referring to the meat of this post (ableism, the endless infantilization of neurodivergent women by individuals who view themselves as progressive), but I decided to be both sharper and more tongue-in-cheek about it. Because if there's a trend I've noticed in the last fifteen years or so, it's that the people most likely to do what I outlined above are the ones who also bandy about the word "gross" as if it's going out of style. There's a dark connection between ableism and responses rooted wholly in knee-jerk discomfort that never get questioned or challenged.

For the past few weeks I've been re-watching the Trigun anime (1998 version) and re-reading the selfsame manga. This was one of the cornerstone canons of my early adolescence and I still view it with deep affection and believe it's a worthwhile experience, even if several aspects of it haven't aged well at all (the minimization of female characters within the narrative and the association of explicit, on-page queerness exclusively with villainy). I'm well-aware of its shortcomings and, like many similarly flawed shounen or seinen canons, I deeply love transformative works that take the original and improve upon its issues.

I was searching for something in particular related to Trigun when I ran into this blog post. I know that it's thirteen years old, but the author's take on Milly Thompson struck a very unpleasant chord with me, because it is one I have seen again and again, in relation to similar characters... and one which has become more prevalent rather than less, in the last decade or so. I will quote the entire section, then break it apart piece by piece:

I take especial issue with the entire Milly and Wolfwood thing. I quite frankly find the idea that Milly does sleep with Wolfwood gross. Milly for the entirety of the show has been played as an innocent, as an overgrown child. She loves pudding and speaks and thinks in simplistic ways. She does not know her limits on alcohol. Meryl essentially plays the role of her mother, ensuring everything from making sure she wakes up on time to that she remembers to pack everything. Milly demonstrates little to no ability in caring for her own self.

Someone who is functionally a child should not be having sex with someone. And someone who is an adult should know better than to have sex with someone who is functionally a child.

Milly Thompson of Trigun, along with her friend and colleague, Meryl Stryfe, is one of two insurance agents given the unenviable task of tracking down, following and reining in the infamous Vash the Stampede, a man widely seen as a walking natural disaster, capable of leveling entire cities. Milly is also a female character written very clearly as neurodivergent, most likely autistic. She's never named as such within the canon itself, but she displays many traits that myself and other autistic AFAB people have seen in ourselves over the years:

• hyper-specific food choices that she hardly ever strays from
• deeply negative reactions when those food choices aren't respected
• taking sarcastic/ironic remarks at face-value
• direct and blunt (albeit also couched in her usual sweet-natured temper) way of expressing herself
• equally direct way of looking at the world
• a habit of intuitive leaps that leads her to conclusions which other characters reach through longer routes (or never reach at all)
• very strong affective empathy, that allows her to truly read a character (Vash) that many others cannot

Milly deeply loves and focuses on sweets and ice-cream... and so do many other adult autistic people. Milly can't hold her liquor... and so do many other adults, regardless if neurodivergent or neurotypical. Milly sees the world in "simplistic" ways... or, rather, she sees it in the same way that many ND people do, without the myriad filters of NT functioning bolted onto us. Even her habit of not waking up quickly enough or needing reminders to pack in time are matters that people with ADHD and/or on the autism spectrum have to struggle with for the duration of our lives. This doesn't make us any less worthy of the status of adults capable of consent. Meryl Stryfe isn't in the least Milly's mother -- she's her friend and neurotypical senior colleague, who helps and supports Milly, in the very same way Milly helps and supports her, when it comes to issues that Meryl isn't at all versed in.

Right at the start of the story (Trigun Vol. 1, chapter 4), Milly is the one who takes the initiative of placing a tracker in Vash's packed lunch, so the two insurance agents can easily follow him. It doesn't work due to Vash finding and getting rid of the tracker, but Milly proves that she's very competent, even with her "airhead" tendencies being mocked by her terrible boss. This is a young woman who later on proves that she can more than hold her own in both arguments and gunfights... and yet she's still somehow unable to consent to a sexual and romantic relationship?

There is something both darkly amusing and despair-inducing that someone can look on this character and conclude she is "functionally a child" based on her interests and her autistic traits. Yet this is part of a grim pattern that has repeatedly seen autistic women, both real and fictional (and those of us mistakenly perceived as women) as "children" who are unable of informed consent. I have repeatedly seen ND women with interests similar to Milly's (diets largely focused on sweet foods, rooms filled with plushies and other stuffed toys, hyperfixations that are derided as solely for children) elicit outrage when they also showed that they are adult individuals who can consent to intimate relationships. And the would-be saviors, more often than not, have been alleged progressives, who claim to be fighting for the rights of neurodivergent people... when all they are doing is being led around by their own unexamined personal discomfort turned activism, bloviating "this is gross!" all the way.

Comments

[delphi]

I'm not overly familiar with Trigun, but I hear you. To me, "gross" is the start of a thought, not the end of one that's worth sharing with other people. "Gross" means "This makes me uncomfortable" - and sometimes when we dissect what makes us uncomfortable, we find a better-defined reason for why something repels us, or challenges us, or frightens us. But often, if we can't immediately think of a word beyond "gross" on the first pass, it's because it's coming from a place of gut reaction bias.

[rhodanum]

Precisely this. The very frustrating thing for me is that 90% of the time there's no push whatsoever to sit down and dissect exactly what "gross" stands for in a given context and what could lurk behind the initial reaction. People just toss it out as if it's an argument that wholly stands on its own and nothing further need be said or examined (no wonder my first reaction is to ask them "are you still in primary school?")