Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg Ferrell) and Speaker 2 (Britton Payne)
Bonus Episode 106 R: Your New Favorite Authentically Autistic Characters in Kids’ Pop Culture
Meg:
Hey, it’s Meg with exciting news. Starting November 12th, we will have two additional podcast episodes each month for you. I’ve been sitting down and interviewing OTs, SLPs, and mental health providers about how exactly they do their work. In each interview, I’m learning about their personal stories, the values that guide their work, and what their work looks like in practice. Each interview includes a case study where the practitioner dives into the practical ways that they supported a client in a tricky situation. I’ve completed the first eight interviews, and topics include self-injurious behavior, PDA, suicidality, mental health, emotional regulation, and more.
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[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast, a place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell from learnplaythrive.com, broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.
Welcome to Episode 106 with Britton Payne. This isn’t one of our normal podcast release days, and it isn’t one of our typical topics, but this conversation is just too good not to share. So, here we are with a bonus episode that’s all about Autistic representation in media. We wanted to make sure to get this out to you before December 1st because some of you have always dreamed of becoming screenwriters, and there’s a competition I’ll tell you about that you don’t want to miss. But first I’ll tell you about Britton Payne. He’s really working on every possible level to increase the representation of authentically Autistic characters in media. Britton Payne is an entertainment attorney, recently of Warner Brothers Animation and Nickelodeon. But on the side, Britton regularly presents at ComicCon and elsewhere about autism and pop culture. This year, Britton started The Autism Scene, a non-profit advocating for the inclusion of explicitly Autistic characters in pop culture. This winter, The Autism Scene is running The AuSPEC AWARDS, which is a script competition requiring a series regularly meaningfully interacting with explicitly Autistic characters. Make sure you check it out at theautismscene.org because there’s a chance that you can submit a script. Britton and his wife, Alice, are active community members of the Frostig School in Pasadena, which is dedicated to helping children, teens, and young adults with learning differences live to their full potential. Here is this incredibly fun interview with Britton Payne.
Hi, Britton. Welcome to the podcast.
Britton:
Hello, Meg. It’s so nice to be talking with you.
Meg:
Oh, I’m excited to talk to you too. This is such a fun topic. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey and how you got here doing the work you’re doing?
Britton:
Yeah, I mean, it’s like a lot of things. It comes from a lot of different places. But I’m a lifelong comic books fan; comic book fan. I love entertainment. I’m an attorney. I started becoming an — I went to law school in my thirties, so it was a second career after being creative for a decade in New York City. And my son, who is now 11, was diagnosed as Autistic around 18 months, like, relatively early compared to other diagnoses that other kids have had. And eventually, through working in entertainment law, I figured a way to dovetail interests in my relative areas of expertise. So, what it has all boiled into for the last couple years, I’ve been speaking at Comic-Con. I’m a huge comic book fan and I’ve been speaking at Comic-Con about the intersection of autism and pop culture. Some of those panels have been autism and comic books where I go through talking about every Autistic character who has ever appeared in comic books, which is a big number for an hour-long presentation, but a relatively small number given the thousands and thousands of characters who have appeared in comic books.
And then, authentically creating Autistic characters where I pulled together a group of people who had been involved in writing or otherwise producing pop culture with Autistic characters and sort of what their headlines and interests are. And then, one that I did recently, my son really got into Spidey Super Stories comics, which were comics from the 1970s put out by The Electric Company, which was sort of a parallel show to Sesame Street. And so, people of a certain age would remember it and otherwise, I don’t know why you would, but it was after 50 years. Why do Spidey Super stories comics still matter to Autistic kids and everybody else? And so, in doing those things, I was also behind the scenes trying to figure out how to use my position as an insider in Hollywood — I was working at Nickelodeon, or Warner Brothers Animation at the time — and how to use my Rolodex to do some good and in what way can I do something where only I can do it? And the answer was by being an attorney. To an awful lot of people, people pick up the phone when the lawyer calls you. You might have had that experience, you know, when I say that I’m a lawyer, you’re like, uh oh. You sit up straight a little bit and you’re like, am I in trouble?
Meg:
Yeah. I had a moment of, like, did we do something wrong? And then, I was like, oh, no, this is really cool. Carry on.
Britton:
[Laughs] Yeah. Well, a lot of people have that. And so, once they get over that initial fear, they’re like relieved. Oh, he’s only calling to ask a favor, or to ask my opinion, or to talk about autism in pop culture. And in doing so, I was trying to figure out, okay, well, what’s the — what do I think, given my position, I could be the most effective way that I could help people like my son? And the time he was, I guess, second grade and I started noticing that the way kids groupings were breaking off, the kids were starting to get their own special interests. So, everybody’s in the same pile, and TK in California was transitional kindergarten, and then kindergarten. And first and second grade-ish, I started noticing that he was getting fewer birthday party invitations and things like that. And some of that is that his behavior — he’s super sweet and kind and also a little bit perplexing — as kids are starting to find their social groupings.
And I was wondering where are those neurotypical kids getting their instruction, and their information, and their guidance about their Autistic peers? It’s a little bit hard if you are a parent and you do not have exposure to autism, to teach your neurotypical child how to interact with kids who are different from you. And certainly, in the public school system, every teacher is overburdened and it can be hard to focus on those kinds of things specifically for a bunch of reasons, including the kids’ privacy. But pop culture can model all kinds of things. And then, you look around at pop culture and you think, well, there’s not a whole lot of representation of autism in kids’ pop culture.
So, that’s the angle that I sort of took was like, okay, well maybe I can affect that. Maybe I can get more Autistic characters in kids’ pop culture. Let me start with the animation world. And I talked to a lot of executives and a lot of writers and showrunners and people who were involved in the animation world that I was close to, and realized that top-down, the only thing I could meaningfully do was tenderize executives to be able to say ‘Yes’ when something comes up from below. But then, a top-down order from executives doesn’t end up getting received very well by writers, ’cause they’re independent people and they don’t like being told what to do. So, then it was like, okay, well, I can talk to writers about autism pop culture and that bore some fruit. There’s a character who’s gonna be coming out in DC comics in the next year or so who will have a more robust — who was originally introduced as Autistic and will have a more robust autism representation because I’m friends with the writer. And that hasn’t happened yet, so I’m not gonna spill any tea about it. But people who know me and know him probably know exactly what I’m talking about.
But how do you incentivize writers to write more Autistic characters? And I came up with this idea of a competition, a spec script competition, which is one of the ways that people try to break into Hollywood is by writing a speculative script to try and get work. And the competition will reward people with meetings, with folks who hire on the current animated shows, which I happen to know those people and how to find them and how to have favor with them. And one of them, the grand prize winner is gonna get an amount of money. But ultimately, what the competition will do, it’s gonna — one of the rules of the competition is you have to have a serious regular from an existing cartoon show meaningfully interact with an explicitly Autistic character. And with that, I’m like, well, let’s see where it goes. And hopefully the idea is it’s gonna put into the minds of writers, this is something you could be considering. You could be considering writing an Autistic character. Your peers are going to be doing it. So, it’s not impossible. So, why don’t you also do it?
And then, theoretically, in Hollywood, now these scripts will be circulating around, even if you’ve never heard of this competition. And executives might say, “Oh, I’m reading a lot of scripts with Autistic characters. Maybe that’s in the air. Maybe it’s — maybe I should put it in.” There’s a saying out here, too, that’s there’s a rush to be first to be second. You don’t wanna be the first person to try something new, but you definitely wanna be the second one to try something new that works. And so, with all of that, I’m hoping to just do my little tiny part to help generate an environment where Autistic characters can appear in kids’ pop culture more than they currently do. I’m starting with animation, but it really should be everywhere. It should be in music, and video games, and anything that can model for kids how to interact with their Autistic people.
Meg:
Absolutely. It’s really fascinating to hear how these changes start to happen behind the scenes and the impact you can have high and low and in the middle there. And I very much agree with you that kids are learning how to take the perspective of people who think, act, and look different from them through, one, conversations with adults; and often, there aren’t adults who are able to provide that for them. TV shows, books, all of the media we consume in our lives, it’s really helping them bridge the double empathy problem, our difficulty imagining the perspective of someone with a different neurotype than us. Can you say a little bit more about why Autistic representation in pop culture is important?
Britton:
Yeah. One big reason is because even when there are no Autistic characters — explicitly Autistic characters — in a program or in a kid’s exposure to pop culture, there is still representation. It’s representation in the absence. It’s saying, “Oh, it is normal to not have Autistic people in your personal social sphere.” When you’re putting together your team of kids who are gonna go try and solve a mystery with your dog, and none of them is Autistic, then that’s saying, “Oh, we’re not obliged to include anybody else in our group.” There are also three different types of representation specifically. One is coded representation. So, that’s where characters are presented with common Autistic traits, but don’t explicitly identify the fact that they’re Autistic. So, that’s Wednesday Addams maybe, or Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory. And there are people who don’t feel that this is representation, but this coded representation, if you applied it to any other affinity group, you might say, is that really representation when somebody is behaving using characteristics that can be associated with this affinity group, but not actually identifying as part of the affinity group, or just taking them and dropping them when it’s convenient?
Another one, the second is representation without obstacle. So, that’s essentially where you say this character is Autistic and maybe they have a nominal representation that indicates that they are Autistic, but that otherwise there’s no obstacle that’s met. They’re the same as all the other characters. There’s a certain value in that, right? Anything you can do, I can do. And so that can be useful in a certain way. Alone, to me, it doesn’t feel like it’s enough and it’s not frankly what I’m looking for.
The third is representation with obstacle. It’s where you have explicitly, in this case, Autistic characters and that it includes the particular challenges faced by Autistic people as they move through the world. So, when you have that, when you have not only explicit Autistic representation, but you have representation with obstacle, then you can affirmatively model accommodation and empathy. If they are in fact having a problem, if you’re imagining somebody who is using a wheelchair and they get to a curb and there is no cut in the curb, then you can imagine, like, oh, well, then for our friend, we should cut this little ramp in the curb and make sure that they are accommodated. And then, you continue on your adventure. You are modeling empathy, you are modeling accommodation, which is really important.
So, with those three ways of when it comes to autism, we see a lot of coding. We see a little bit of representation without obstacle. And we see a little bit of representation with obstacle. But overall, I think it’s a volume game. People my age, their representation of autism was Rain Man, and that’s it. And when there’s only one example of an affinity group being represented in pop culture, there’s a lot of weight that goes on that one representation that certainly doesn’t capture the experiences of everybody in the world and can leave a lot of people feeling left out, can leave a lot of neurotypical people, in the case of autism, having an incomplete understanding. And then, the mistakes of that one representation are magnified.
If you can have a lot of representation — that’s why I’m focused on television rather than movies — you’ve got a lot of representation that gets people where they are. You don’t have to go to the specialty movie that’s about an Autistic character. It’s gonna appear in your show about unicorns, and your show about mystery solvers, and your show about space adventurers, the shows that the kids are watching anyway. Then you can have lots of different representations and the weight isn’t on any one representation to carry the load of the whole entire group.
Meg:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then, it makes a lot more space for representation of people with all of these different intersectional identities, including and especially multiply marginalized Autistic people. I was thinking, as you were talking about how naturally curious children are about people who are different from them, my eight-and-a-half year old would not go to bed last night because his music teacher had mentioned synesthesia to him; people who experience their senses as a different sense. And he had 600 questions for me about what that experience of being human might be like.
And I’ve just noticed this since they were old enough to communicate with me that they wanna know everything about how other people experience the world. And not in a sensationalizing way. They’re interested in robust AAC just like they’re interested in Spanish, right. It is another way of communicating in this world. So, this is such an easy win because humans are naturally curious about ways of being human on this planet. So, you talked a little bit about some of the different categories of how Autistic people are explicitly, or not explicitly, represented in pop culture. What values do you center in how we are representing Autistic people in media?
Britton:
That’s an interesting question for me to answer. I kind of separate myself a little bit from that question. I feel like the answer is authenticity. And the way of achieving authenticity is not by listening to me or somebody like me who’s not Autistic. The practice in Hollywood, to the extent that I can see it, is that when you have a script that involves somebody in an affinity group, no one from that affinity group is represented in the scriptwriting process or in the executive process; that you hire an expert, you hire a consultant to do an authenticity pass. The idea of that is to include someone who can make sure that this character in this affinity group makes sense, isn’t using language that a person from that group wouldn’t use or isn’t falling into a standard trope that everybody knows except — or standard tropes, I’m borderline okay with. Insulting tropes are the ones that are prompt — if you’re gonna be insulting, at least have somebody tell you, “Hey, this is insulting.” You can still use it. It’s your choice. You’re a creative person. You might choose to have this insulting representation so that you can address it with your story or because you’re not cool and you are going to experience the blowback from it.
But hiring somebody who is an autism consultant on any project that has an Autistic character, I think, is how you get closer to authenticity, especially at the volume that I’m imagining that there should be so many more characters out there who are Autistic. And they’re not all gonna get it right. And that’s kind of okay. And it’s more okay if there are thousands of representations than if there are 30, like there are currently. So, I recognize that there are ways that people would and wouldn’t want to see Autistic characters represented in pop culture, but some of that is because they are responding to the representations that have gone before and the lack of the numbers of represented characters.
I don’t wanna see another movie where it’s a superpower, where autism is their superpower, right? I totally understand that. I think that’s a totally reasonable position to have. I also recognize that that is in part because it is fully overrepresented. The same thing with there are a lot of different ways that autism expresses itself. The Autistic characters coded and explicit in pop culture, the vast majority of them are going to be not people who are using AAC devices, not people who are non-speaking, and not people who have a higher degree of challenges and need a greater degree of support. They’re just, that’s — those are the fewer representations. And even especially among those where those characters are represented with their own voice, where they are centered and where it feels like you’re understanding their point of view and their perspective rather than how they impact somebody else around them.
So, but it’s not no one is better than the other, at least to my thinking. And I certainly opened the door for other people to say, like, “No, no, Britton, you’re wrong. These four representations are actually quite terrible.” Like, great. Have at it. But have at it from the point of view of an Autistic person who is a consultant on the project, or who is actually in the writer’s room, or who’s a central creator.
Meg:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I imagine this is standard practice when you’re representing other people’s identities and cultures in films. But often, representation for disabled groups and neurodivergent groups, it’s like we’re so far behind in culturally responsive practice because these groups haven’t been represented or believed to have their own culture that they can represent themselves. So, I think that’s the perfect answer. I mentioned to you before the meeting that I one time got an email from somebody from Netflix who was like, can you consult with us about how to make our platform more accessible to Autistic people? And I was like, yeah, I’ll consult with you. And I met with them just to say over and over again, “You should ask Autistic people, you should ask Autistic people. You should ask Autistic people.”
It was actually a really lovely meeting, but that is the answer. And I think some of our folks who are listening probably write children’s books especially — or even like little stories, different resources to help kids with perspective taking. And it’s a good reminder for us, too, that if we are trying to represent the perspective of an Autistic person, to make sure that we are having Autistic people review. And we do this with all of our courses. We have a panel of Autistic people who review everything we’re teaching because I am not an Autistic person teaching on neurodiversity and supporting Autistic kids. And it’s a really beautiful process, and I learn a lot, and I enjoy it every time. I wanna hear some examples. Can you share with us some Autistic characters in pop culture that you personally love?
Britton:
Yeah. There’s one that really just got me good when I first read it. So, I came up with the idea for doing autism and comics as a panel a couple years ago, and I knew of one or two characters. Black Manta was one of the — Black Manta and Aquaman, bad guy. And he, one time in a comic book that I happened to have read, had a really terrible representation of his autism, right. This is 20 years ago. But I like to take the position that, okay, that was bad and insulting and it was also 20 years ago. Instead of saying, “Oh, that was a bad representation of autism, let’s not make Black Manta Autistic,” let’s make him Autistic. Let’s keep him Autistic. Just have somebody who is going to represent his autism more authentically so that historically, when you’re talking about medium that’s been around for 80, 90 years and these characters that remain extraordinarily popular that sort of have fed the movies of the last 15 years, if just because an older representation of autism was not as thoughtful as we would want to have it today, doesn’t mean it should be thrown away. Let’s hold onto that character. Superman wears a red cape; Black Manta is Autistic. And work that into the newer representations of the character.
So, that’s the, like, a thesis that I have that just because it’s a bad representation doesn’t mean it should be thrown away. But the one that really got at me, it sort of expressed my experience as a parent of an Autistic kid, but in a different culture. And it’s called the — it’s a manga, which I don’t read a lot on manga, but it’s called ‘With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child’. And the character’s name is Hikaru Azuma. And it’s the story of this kid and getting his first diagnosis in Japan. The book is probably 15, 20 years old at this point, and a lot of it was about it’s a slice-of-life comic book, it ran for under 10 or 15 years, I think. So, it’s pretty dense and it takes him from birth to being a teenager. And each little episode, kinda like a soap opera, takes you through one of the obstacles that he faced or that his family faced in trying to get him services or the impact that it had on them in their community. And it didn’t directly parallel my experience because most of the time that I have been a parent with an Autistic kid with a diagnosis has been in California and not in Japan, but nonetheless, it was really beautifully written. It’s got a little bit of the melodrama that you’ll see in manga and it just pulled at my heartstrings. I just thought it was so wonderful.
An issue with that though is that it is written by a friend of a parent of an Autistic kid. So, it was great that that creator opened doors for a story that had not been told very much, but of course it was not an Autistic creator. If you want an Autistic creator, ‘Invisible Differences’ is a wonderful book, kind of book, also from 2016. It is the story of a young woman who is complicated, finds life complicated, and then stumbles on the idea of autism, gets an adult diagnosis, and changes her life, and becomes a lot happier. So, that’s roughly what the story is. I think that’s really good. There is an interesting — I, in my life at least, I’ve known a bunch of people who have gotten their autism diagnosis as adults and they often are young women. So, you know, there are a lot of reasons why that might happen.
One of my favorites though, is something that my daughter enjoys. It’s called ‘Speak Up!’ and it’s by Rebecca Burgess from 2020, there’s a sequel in the works. And it’s the story of a teenage girl in this kind of – it’s a little, it’s not YA, it’s a little younger than YA, but it’s a classic graphic novel story aimed at young girls, right? Aimed at 10-year-old — my daughter’s 10 and she read it when she was eight, and a new-girl-in-school type of story. So, in this particular case, this girl is Autistic and she is getting ostracized, and the nice kids don’t know how to interact with her, and the mean kids bully her. And she really feels terrible and she’s trying super hard to mask while she’s at school. And then, when she goes home, she and her buddy, who’s also ostracized from his school, they decide that they are going to — they make music, they’re a pop star on YouTube, and it gets incredibly popular among the very same kids at school who are picking on her. So, it’s sort of a Spider-Man/Peter Parker setup where Flash Thompson thinks Peter Parker deserves to be shoved around, but thinks Spider-Man is awesome, but it’s the same kind of thing. And then, the friend signs this girl, Mia, up for the talent show. So, now she has to decide, is she going to kind of out herself as being this secret pop star who wears, like, David Bowie makeup and stuff? And so, the author, Bex Burgess, is the writer and the illustrator and is also Autistic. So, it has a lead Autistic character. You get to see a lot of the thought bubbles and the kinds of things that make comic books a special medium where, especially when you’re representing an Autistic character, where a character, you can see that the thoughts and the sentences that are in the character’s head differ from what she’s able to say out loud because of the way her particular autism presents itself.
So, it’s a really lovely, fun, engaging, and very popular graphic novel for young kids that I now see at Scholastic book fairs and the kinds of places where popular books show up. I like it also when those shows just try. You know, there’s Bruno, is a character from ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ that has showed up. Twyla Boogeyman is a character in ‘Monster High’, Monster High cartoon, where they do a really good job of integrating her autism into her character. And then, the nature of her superpower in Monster High, where they’re all Frankensteins and werewolves and stuff like that, she’s a boogeyman, and her autism is folded into that. ‘Carl the Collector’ is a new kids’ cartoon that it’s the first kids’ show with a lead character who is Autistic. ‘As We See It’ as an adult-focused television show that features three Autistic young adults trying to make their way living in — a group home isn’t quite the right word. They’re just roommates and they have somebody come by and check in on them periodically. And that’s a really terrific, terrific one; really well acted. ‘Everything’s Gonna be Okay’ is wicked funny. It’s this Australian com basically about a super funny, quirky family, one of whom is played by Kayla Cromer, who’s an Autistic actor playing the part. She was on ‘Good Doctor’ as well, and Charlie, who I guess was the new Autistic intern under the main doctor who’s also Autistic in that show. ‘Atypical’ is such a beautiful show.
There are a lot. But the thing is, if I spoke for another five minutes, I would exhaust them all. And then, there are so many other shows and places where explicitly as its characters can be — there’s one really prickly one that I think is worth knowing about if you’ve got a young adult who — it’s a manga and it’s called ‘That’s My Atypical Girlfriend’. And it’s the story of kind of a shut-in manga artist who puts his work out digitally and has three followers. So, he’s not very popular. And then, one of them shows up at his doorstep and she is Autistic and also has other comorbidities and has been, is clearly traumatized, so she’s dealing with PTSD. And it is about their very difficult relationship with each other as young adults. So, this is a comic book, but it’s not for kids. It’s definitely for young adults. And even before recommending it to any young adult, I would recommend you read it because it — but it deals with sex, and abuse, and to find your way in the world that are probably pretty specific to young people in their twenties that felt really enlightening and kind of brave in going places that were very mature for a young adult, very mature.
So, I could feel myself hesitating as I speak, but it is something, you know, those are, those people are in the world too, who are young adults trying to figure out sex, and sexuality, and how to deal with their past traumas, and their parents are getting too old to take care of them, and how am I gonna make it in the world? And how am I gonna find my people? And is it okay to just find one person? And is it okay if we’re both flawed, but we’ve got each other? It’s a really beautiful book, but it’s also not for everybody.
Meg:
Yeah, I appreciate that. I think there are a number of providers who listen who are supporting young adults, and seeing your messy, complicated experiences represented in media is really validating. So, I love to know that exists and to encourage people to explore all of that. That was a lot of really interesting sounding recommendations. A lot of them I hadn’t heard of. We’ll make sure to list them out in the show notes for easy reference for people. The thing that came to mind for me, I remember when my now 8-year-old was little reading ‘Ada Twist, Scientist’, and I still remember it opens: “Ada Marie, Ada Marie, said not a word, till the day she turned three.” And then, when she starts talking, it’s just this intense curiosity about how everything works, which was actually nice representation for my neurodivergent kid who’s Autistic, but, you know, would take apart everything in the house to see how it works. And I don’t think, correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think she was ever explicitly identified as Autistic, but on the TV show she had a non-speaking AAC-using Autistic friend. Is that right?
Britton:
Yeah, it’s her cousin. Nassan is the character’s name. I’ve been on a panel with the creator of that character, Niya Wright is her name. She’s wonderful. She’s just such a terrific person to talk to. Her mom runs Nassan’s Place, I think, in Newark, which is an autism support non-profit. I don’t know too much about that, but she has talked about it some — and her story is really interesting too, Niya’s story. She was in the room when they were making that show. It’s part of — it was Netflix and Carrie Grant was the showrunner, and it was under the Obama’s production entity. So, they were, you know, those are, like, obviously people who care about the world and they are not just trying to make a show that they can get on the air and if it gets laughs, or if it does its job, that’s fine. They actually want to do good things in the world or things that they see as being good, the causes that they believe in. And so, that was a fertile ground for proposing an Autistic character. But she’s the one who did it, Niya was, and she based it on her cousin, and they did a lot of research. And even though the character was not speaking, they got a non-speaking actor who apparently was hard to track down, hard to find, but they found them to play the part. And they ran the gauntlet of having experts and they worked hard to put it all together. And they put together a really cute, fun show that does exactly the kind of thing that I hope the AuSPEC AWARDS, the competition that The Autism Scene is running, that I hope it finds people like that to who are in writers rooms and who, because of this idea getting just put in their head, maybe they propose it and maybe they have no connection to autism. You know, if you try to, if you try to solve this or address this issue only with people who are Autistic or who have a connection to autism, you don’t have the numbers to get the job done.
So, I’m aiming to try and get people who don’t care about autism to find a reason to get interested in it. If they’re interested because they wanna get the money, if they’re interested because they wanna get the exposure, if they’re interested because they hear about a cop who has to, in a pulpy novel, who has to — who’s the only witness to the crime where the wife turned up dead, and the husband’s the number one suspect, of course, and the only person who knows the truth is a non-speaking Autistic character. And the hard-scrabble cop comes in and he tries to talk all tough and it doesn’t work. And now this hard-scrabble cop who really cares more about solving crimes than anything else suddenly has to figure out how to have empathy for and connect with somebody who’s very different than the people that they’re used to dealing with.
And they do it, and then they go to Step C of the A-Z of crime solving, and you’re not really thinking about it, but you just got to see your buddy being empathetic and accommodating to a person who ordinarily would be excluded from the genre altogether. And that you’re a writer and you hear that story, you’re like, “Yeah, that would be tough if you were a detective and now you had to figure out how to unlock this puzzle. I love puzzles. The whole reason I’m into writing this kind of fiction is ’cause I like puzzles. Why don’t I see if there’s — why don’t I learn a little bit more about autism? Maybe there’s a different way of incorporating Autistic characters into my otherwise pulpy drama, or my silly comedy, or my space adventure,” or whatever it is, or my romance. There’s a wonderful romance story that I talk about in the Archie universe. You know, Archie and Betty and Veronica?
Meg:
Yes.
Britton:
So, there’s lots of other stuff like that, but they have a web comic and it’s called, it’s based on this character, Big Ethel, who was kind of a jokey character in the fifties, and they have revised it to be more body positive. And there’s a character — and so, Veronica is like the Paris Hilton of this world. It’s sort of set with the Archie crew and they’re in the early twenties and they’re trying to find their way in the world and find romance and whatnot. So, Veronica, who’s like a Paris Hilton type, is used to dating rich race-car drivers and rock stars and whatnot, and she keeps getting her heart broken. And she is, you know, cloying and name-droppy and stuff like that. And so, she decides that she’s gonna change things up. She’s gonna get a real job. So, she becomes a — and that’s gonna be, and no more dating fancy famous guys.
So, she gets a job as a party planner and she needs to hire the environmental consultant. And the environmental consultant comes in and it turns out he’s Autistic. And so, he is unaffected by her affectations. So, she flips her hair and gives social cues that she thinks he’s hot, ’cause he is, ’cause it’s an Archie comic and everybody’s hot in it. And he is unaffected by that. And yet, he still likes her, which she finds completely perplexing. How can this guy like me, but he doesn’t care about all the things that every other guy has ever liked me for? What’s going on? So, she’s perplexed by this guy and she thinks he’s hot and she wants to see what’s going on there, but she can’t figure it out. Meanwhile, he can’t figure it out either. He likes her, but he doesn’t know how to behave with her, but he doesn’t wanna blow it, so he asks his friend to help him out. So, now you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a situation where he’s getting his — a sort of situation, he’s getting his advice from his buddy of what to say to Veronica, and then Veronica finds out.
So, she’s mad that, like, well, if you really liked me, you’d know what to say. And he goes, “Fine, I’m Autistic and I have a hard time knowing what other people want to — what other people are thinking. But now that you know, you don’t have to bother me anymore.” And she says, “Hey, if you don’t always know what other people are thinking, how do you know I don’t like you?” And that’s the beginning of their relationship. And so, it’s written by an Autistic writer, Keryl Brown Ahmed, and it is super cute and it shows just how you can fold people into all of your kinds of, any kind of story that you’re telling, be authentic to their autism and still tell a compelling story that’s fun that people can be interested in, “Oh, this isn’t the same as every other stupid romance I’ve ever seen. It’s got this interesting twist but still hits all the beats that make me comfortable.” And I just feel like that’s a door waiting to be opened.
Meg:
Absolutely. Your love of stories is so much fun. I feel like I could listen to you recount all of these different stories you’ve heard for over the next hour, but I do wanna ask you to talk a little bit more about the AuSPEC AWARDS. What is it and how can people get involved?
Britton:
Yeah, so the AuSPEC AWARDS is a kids animated series, spec script competition. A spec script, I can’t remember if I already said this, but it’s a speculative script. The idea is that if you’re an animation writer and you are looking to up your game, or if you’re looking to find a way into showbiz — there aren’t a whole lot of doors, and at the same time, there are a million doors because everybody had their own weird way of getting into showbiz, and this is another one. So, we’re holding the first annual AuSPEC AWARDS, A-U-S-P-E-C, trying to sort of fold autism and speculative And it’s a competition, so we want as many writers as we can get involved because we don’t know what’s gonna be the next good thing, and we don’t know who’s gonna have the right formula for folding an Autistic character into this genre or that genre. This is specifically about kids’ animated series. It’s gonna open on December 1st for submissions and it’s gonna run through the end of January.
Then, in April 2026 on World Autism Awareness Day, we’re gonna have the big ceremony where we have everybody get together in a theater in Burbank, and have cocktails and stuff, and then rub elbows with all the people who are gonna be judges, and prizes. And if you’re one of the category winners, like ‘Best Sci-Fi’, or ‘Best Comedy’, or ‘Best Little Kids’, or ‘Best Non-Speaking Character’, then you get invited to the ceremony, you get to rub elbows with the peoples who were the judges, and win the prizes. And everybody who’s one of those category winners gets a meeting with somebody who is a current showrunner or executive or manager who is placing people in kids’ animated series television.
Right now, there’s — it’s in a little bit of a retraction, so it’s a good time to try and find your way in because not a lot of jobs are being just handed out the way they used to. This can put something on your resume as a writer that can show that you are a step up from the next person who’s writing, who’s submitting a script based only on the fact that they wrote a play in college or something like that; which is lovely, but this can help you push things forward. So, the idea is that the writers are gonna pick an existing animated kids show, write a spec episode that runs 11 minutes. And this is the catch — it’s gotta include theories regularly meaningfully interacting with an explicitly Autistic character. You submit it through theautismscene.org, there’s gonna be a page there for those submissions.
And then, hopefully, you’ll also, as the writer, want to continue to use that script to try and get work so that even if you don’t win in the competition, or even if the person you’re submitting to has never heard of the competition, they’re gonna read your script which you believe in and it feels great, happens to have an Autistic character, and then suddenly, hopefully, around Hollywood, people will start to say, “Oh, Autistic characters can be like this. They can be in romances, they can be in sci-fi, they can be in little kids shows.” And it doesn’t necessarily have to feel like a very special episode of The Unicorn Show or whatever, it can just feel like a normal episode because Autistic people are everywhere in our world and they deserve to be everywhere in our pop culture.
Meg:
Very cool. I’m rolling over what you said. There’s no doors in, and yet there’s a million doors in. And I see that with what you’re doing. You’re like, I want to see authentic Autistic representation everywhere in media. There’s no doors in, and you’ve sort of created all of these different doors on all of these levels. And I think what you said is really true. So, for people who are excited about this, maybe this is your door. That’s really cool. Where can we find the AuSPEC AWARDS, you, and the rest of your work online?
Britton:
The best bet is go to theautismscene.org, and it’s mostly just a collection of all the different projects and the information about the nexus of autism and pop culture. I’m putting as much effort as we can into this award specifically focusing on kids animated series with the hope that if it goes well, maybe we can do, you know, next year we can expand it to live action or to features or to video games, which is, I think, a place where I would love to see more representation of Autistic characters. And I also would hope that the award ceremony, if it goes well this year and we can continue, will be the animation prom so that folks who are not necessarily at the top of, you know, they’re not the ones getting paid millions of dollars to write the next Spider-Man movie or animated series, but the ones who are cranking out the content that our kids are watching on a day-to-day basis and falling in love with and remembering for 30 years, that those people will be excited to go to this event.
And then, again, like, even if they don’t care about autism, they’ll wanna go to that party. And if that’s a motivator, I’ll take that too. Whatever it takes, you know. Not everybody has to be a do-gooder. People have to try and follow their own dreams, and have to follow — have to put food on their table and have to try and do what they can to advance their career. So, if we can find a way, like a barnacle on them, to include Autistic characters in kids’ pop culture for a thing that I think will have a beneficial effect for all kids, then let’s do it. Let me do my little tiny part to activate my Rolodex and my ability to organize things, to do something that’s fun and that is the — that’s sneaking the aspirin in the applesauce.
Meg:
Very cool. Yeah. I’ve been to your website, theautismscene.org, and it is really interesting and definitely worth a visit. And we’ll follow along with your journey and see who wins. Thank you so much.
Britton:
That’s great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
[Ending note]
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