Discussion Main / DiagnosedByTheAudience

Is it okay to put The Angry Video Game Nerd on this page? Not only is the character the focus of a video example, but there's already an example or three of this trope listed on the show's YMMV page.

I removed the example for The Spoony Experiment because someone was using clever wording to try and sneak in a dig at the actual actor, Noah Antwiler's, diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I took it off of the YMMV page for that series as well, where the text was a lot blunter about it talking about Noah himself and not the character. The guy's been a target of years of harassment since his mental and physical health ended his Youtube career.

The people speculating about "Spoony's" mental health at the Turn of the Millennium were talking about behavior patterns exhibited by Noah in public and that the way he was writing his character and the way he behaved indicated, to them, that he had a mental disorder. That he was later public about a diagnosis doesn't really change that including the trope here is us trying to trope a real man's real life mental illness.

It was actually super creepy and still is, this should not be added back to the page.

Am I the only one who is starting to think that this trope is being overused on TV Tropes? By a lot? Seems to me that any socially awkward character gets tagged with this trope sooner or later. Being socially awkward, or shy, or quiet or whatever is not a disorder and it doesn't mean you have autism or aspergers or any other mental illness!

I think it does a disservice to people who really are struggling against some mental issues to dub everyone who's a bit socially inept as Ambiguous Disorder, just like calling being sad depressed does a disservice to people with real clinical depression.

I would like there to be a website about mental disorders in fictional characters. I suppose I can start a wiki on Fandom, but I would prefer if there are voting tools for users to vote on whether they think a character has a condition, similar to the genre voting system on RYM.

Can't we talk about the Real Life Goldwater Rule on the main page, because the stinger basically states it anyway & it could be of interest?

Would Floofty from Bugsnax be an example of this trope? I mean, they're arrogant and rude with bad social skills, would rather keep to themselves, is almost obsessive about the possibilities of what the bugsnax are capable of - to the point that it's beyond rational (i.e. they very nearly cut off their own head just to see if bugsnax would help it to regenerate) - and yet, they're incredibly intelligent - and are not afraid to let people know it.

All of this almost makes it sound like Floofty is on the spectrum somewhere.

I don't know. What do you guys think?

Removed:

• Monkey Island:
  • Guybrush Threepwood is shown as a Manchild whom nobody respects or believes when he says that he's a mighty pirate. Yet, he's very resourceful and is perfectly willing to do sociopathic things to achieve his ends. He has no problem talking to complete strangers, but is hopeless around Elaine, to the point where even after he marries her, he does whatever she says and she handles his business whilst he furthers his interests in being a pirate. Guybrush manages to alienate almost any friend he makes.
  • Otis, the prisoner, is just a little strange — he says that he was jailed for stealing a flower, fails to notice the fact that a cake is hiding a file despite it weighing more, and says that he would do anything for his freedom before proceeding to do absolutely nothing when Guybrush invites him onto his ship.
  • Stan is extremely self-serving — His response to his businesses getting a bad reputation is to simply change the nature of his business, and his attempts to be friends with Guybrush are always a flimsy excuse to sell something.
  • Wally is good at cartography and hopeless in every other situation. He's admittedly based on nerd stereotypes.
  • In The Curse of Monkey Island, the Shakespearean actor Slappy Cromwell seems to have no issue playing to an audience entirely of monkeys.

Monkey Island is a comedy series. Of course the characters will act in ways that would be odd in the real world—because it's funny. By the same token we could put half of all characters in all comedy stories on this page.

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Misused, started by FTD on Feb 17th 2018 at 2:14:37 PM

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by icewaterfire22 on Dec 1st 2018 at 8:39:42 PM

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Not Tropeworthy, started by icewaterfire22 on Jan 30th 2019 at 7:48:34 PM

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by ccorb on Sep 8th 2020 at 2:26:56 AM

Removed:

• Rome:
  • Octavian at first glance seems like The Sociopath: he often appears emotionless; he is skilled at manipulating and reading people; despite a self-professed aversion to violence he is undisturbed by cold-blooded murder or torture; he is deferential and polite to people who hold power over him or who he needs something from, but is notably rude and short with people when he has the upper hand, sometime even to the same person under different circumstances, i.e. Cicero or his mother. However, at the same time he shows hints of being disturbed by his actions, suggesting he is capable of shame and regret; he can form genuine personal friendships, albeit with only a small number of people; and, while he can speak with passion and conviction in front of crowds, he is noticeably blunt and awkward when dealing with individuals.
  • Mark Anthony is far more personally charismatic and socially adept than Octavian, but just as ruthless. He is easily distracted and bored; prone to sudden fits of violent, sometimes murderous rage and has limited impulse control with excessive alcohol consumption, drug use and hypersexuality even for his time. This might suggest some form of Borderline Personality Disorder; however, he also shows consistently high self-confidence until he suffers a major defeat, and he is also shown to possess quite a bit of cunning and forward planning abilities, in one scene verbally weighing his options and carefully thinking through the consequences of each.

Neither character acts like they have a mental illness. Their personalities are just supposed to be foils of each other. Octavian is cerebral and socially awkward. Marc Antony is a passionate hotshot.

Why is there the same commented note repeated like ten times in a row?

Is it just me, or have there been a lot of male characters who are supposed to be attractive in anime in recent years who are like this? Most notably Haru in Free, but also Tsukito in Kamigami no Asobi, Arata in Tsukiuta, and... someone sees Jean Otus from ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. like this (I don't, but that's beside the point). Anyway, people aren't offended (like it's fetishized or anything), they seem to like seeing characters like this. I saw someone say they loved KamiAso because they've never identified with any character as much as they do with Tsukito... even though he's a little bit Played for Laughs (like, writing it down in his notes when someone tells him "you don't have to take notes"). But then again, he is based on an actual god that's still worshiped in the place the story is from, so he's obviously not being looked down on... edit: Someone sees Atom from Marginal #4 this way as well, and that interpretation actually works really well.

Could it be worth mentioning the Real Life "not otherwise specified" disorders, like PD-NOS, PDD-NOS, etc., in the introduction somewhere? That's pretty much this trope in the real world, and could easily be included in a way that doesn't run up against the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement.

Commented out:

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime. It's pure speculation that doesn't explain why the character has an ambiguous disorder. A reader of the book should rewrite it.

The Hunger Games, because it doesn't explain anything beyond "this character might have autism". Again, someone else should rewrite it.

The Giver. Again, "This character might have autism" with the added bonus of "and people thought autism was rarer when the book was written".

Criminal Minds. Some progress here because at least the mention of autism is justified by characters speculating in-universe. It still doesn't show how his personality could be considered weird.

Warhammer 40,000. Could anyone explain exactly how someone with the Pariah gene acts weird? Because the example is not doing it.

Deleted:

Hannibal. The protagonist admits he's an autist. If there's ambiguity then that's artistic license or poor research, but definitely not the trope.

A few mentions of "a popular fan theory is that X character has autism/Asperger's/any other issue" which are not part of the work and thus should go to maybe Fridge brilliance or WMG.

A pothole to Hollywood Autism in BioShock Infinite. In which part of the game does it say that the Lutece siblings are autistic? It must be a DLC because I've never heard that.

Adventure Time. The Ice King is odd, I will give you that, but saying it's all because of dementia and that is portrayed realistically is not the trope. The example should say something about his child-like behaviour, his obsession with kidnapping princesses, and the like.

Rewritten:

SpongeBob SquarePants: It doesn't matter what an actor or writer thinks of a character. We are here to talk about weird behaviour. SpongeBob is certainly weird but the example didn't explain how, just that he was apparently popular with autistic kids.

Dragon Age. Speculation about ADHD and autism.

Archer. Made things clearer and moved the quote to the Quotes subpage.

Is it intentional that most of these are described like Autism?

Okay, this title and thread are starting to bug me. Apparently "ambiguous disorder" means "we're not psychologists, so we don't know what it is". Many of these examples are easily explainable even just from reading a textbook. Diagnosis isn't the hard part of being a therapist- helping the patient work through it is.

Seems like this trope exists for the sake of people who have only a vague understanding of psychology. It used to be called "ambiguously autistic" and I get why that was changed, but the new thread title is far too broad. Pretty much any personality that someone finds strange or peculiar or God forbid, different, can get thrown in here.

Deleted the following Zero Context Examples. If anyone is familiar enough with them to add some description and return them to the page, please do so. :)

Literature

• Toto in the Gone series.

Video Games

• Both Bianca and N from Pokémon Black and White.

Western Animation

• It seems to be hinted that Ed from Ed, Edd n Eddy has some kind of a disability.

Moved the following from Literature to Description as per How To Write An Example - Keep It An Example:

A lot of mentally ill people in classical literature, especially from the 19th century and earlier, tends to be this; psychiatry was a very young field back then (and, until a certain point in history, didn't exist at all), and so there was no manual to turn to if you wanted to give your character odd quirks.

X Just X examples that have been moved from main page, and are awaiting expansion.

• Gin Ichimaru from Bleach.
• Professor Cuthbert Calculus from Tintin, particularly in the Moon landing story.
• Flint Lockwood, if the film's Wild Mass Guessing page is anything to come by.
• Rose's brother Joseph in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
• The main character Charlie, from The Perks Of Being A Wallflower.
• Crake from Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
• Bones: Both Brennan and Zach Addy boast Word of God diagnoses not stated in the story.
• Dollhouse: Topher is a minor example, but Bennett is textbook.
• The Middle: Brick.
• Several examples from the various incarnations of Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers SPD: Bridge.
  • Power Rangers Mystic Force: Chip.
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: Dax.
  • Power Rangers Dino Thunder: Anton Mercer and his Superpowered Evil Side Mesogog.
• "Arnie", Arnold's "weird cousin" in Hey Arnold!
• The Simpsons: The Ditz, a very unusual and quite extreme case.

Is it just me, or are around 8 out of 10 Ambiguous Disorders aspergers?

Regarding L (and any other character) from Death Note:

NONE of them have ambiguous disorders- the author did a lot of research and each character is a textbook example of a real one. Check out the DSM and the works of Iris Gordon (specifically her lecture "Death Note - The Psychology of Solipsism") for details.

In short:

• L is autistic (heavily)
• Light is a psychopath ("cluster B specific charismatic" type)
• Near is schizoid (complete with finger puppets)
• Mello has Antisocial personality disorder (not to be confused with "Anti-social" personality disorder)

Anyway, the entry on L should be removed from this page, since all of his problems are classic autism. I can try and break out each one of his quirks and explain them if people want.

Edward from Cowboy Bebop has a disorder? The things listed as examples (skipping and improvised songs) are mostly things that I myself do and come across as more or less as eccentricity. Either it is so ambiguous it is hard to tell or I have a disorder.

So when exactly was this "wank" that led to the page getting renamed and now used as a dumping ground for anyone bizarre? "Ambigiously Autistic" was far more specific and would permit branching, and the only wank I saw wasn't from people tryhing to insist that their favorite characters were "spechul", but rather from people who were adamant that real autistic people can't lie and can't ever be deceitful, which is not only inaccurate but downright offensive (heck, I got told by someone that I MUST be a misdiagnosed sociopath because I have no trouble lying).

incidentally, would this make a good page quote?

"Although symptoms vary from person to person, my little 'mood swings', as you might term them, aren't actually manic episodes as pertains to bipolar disorder. Trust me; I've gotten the professional opinion of some of Japan's best psychiatrists."

"…then…what the heck is it?"

"They classified me…" The doctor suddenly pumped her fist. "AS UNCLASSIFIABLE! HOHOHAAAHAHAHAHAAAA!"

from Mobile Fighter Evangelion

I think a lot of these are interesting, but one WTF? really caught my attention: Re-l Meyer from "Ergo Proxy"? Seriously? Let's look at her "symptoms" as listed here: 1) very introverted

By what measure is "very"? You can argue she doesn't have many friends beyond her Autoreiv, but neither do any of the other characters, really. It seems to be a reality of life in Romdeau. Nor is "introverted" itself necessarily a symptom of anything. Jung must be rolling in his grave right now...

2) blunt and chafes at the extreme social order at Romdeau

Aaaaand why is that a symptom of anything? Romdeau is a dystopia; she's the granddaughter of its leader, and is sick of being patronized and bossed around by people she doesn't respect in a shallow, consumerist society. Setting aside that Romdeau is bad, this is still relatively normal behavior when you recall she's only 19. Rebelling against authority is acting her age.

3) keeps an extremely detailed journal of Vincent/Ergo Proxy's doings.

She's a member of the security forces of Romdeau. From the moment of the first episode, she is investigating Vincent Law because of his involvement with an infected Autoreiv. Why shouldn't she have a detailed record of him? He's a suspect!

And as for her reaction to Ergo Proxy, let's see, a woman essentially assaulted by a giant monster she's never seen before, which everyone around her then tries to deny exists, claiming she's crazy? Yeah, that'll leave you traumatized, paranoid, and maybe obsessed with proving you were right and figuring out what happened.

One of the main themes of the series is of choosing your own destiny rather than conforming to the one that was created for you. Everyone in Romdeau is manufactured (literally) for a role. Re-l's was, we eventually learn, to partly be a lure for Ergo Proxy; she's constructed using some of the DNA from Monad. It's hard to analyze anyone in this series because of that. You might argue that they are artificially generating mental disorders to control people, but it's a stretch.

Why aren't references to autism allowed on this trope page? Quite a few characters mentioned could reasonably be described as "Ambiguously Autistic," so why can't that be mentioned?

The next step will have to be checking the Wicks for Ambiguous Disorder to ensure there is no cheeky shoehorning of autism into them and are actually real examples of the trope. I've already spotted one, which was one of the ones I deleted in the Ambiguously Autistic clear up and has been shoehorned back in.

Also the moving them off YMMV since this is no longer a YMMV trope.

It struck me (as somebody who has this diagnosis) that a lot of these characters have a cryptic Asperger's Syndrome Diagnosis. I mean, with the significant increase in the actual diagnosis, I think we'll see quite a few of these sorts of characters popping up, with and without the formal diagnosis.

It might be useful to split the categories again, since Autistic characters will abound in one form or another, and since other sorts of characters might cryptically display evidence of other kinds of disorders.

Someone re-added Twilight Sparkle, with the following justification:

As noted on the Alternate Character Interpretation page, Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic may have an in-all-but-name case of Asperger's or similar; Celestia's instruction to stay in Ponyville and study "the magic of friendship" was a clever way of convincing her little shut-in to learn to deal with people, and the "Mork calling Orson" friendship reports at the end of every episode may be a device to help her understand and internalize the lesson of the day, more for Twilight's benefit than anyone else's.

The "study the magic of friendship" thing explicitly is meant to teach Twilight about friendship, but being a loner with no friends does not in itself mean you're autistic — especially not when it's more easily explained by the fact that you're a workaholic nerd who doesn't get much practice socializing. More to the point, even if you think she is autistic it still isn't an example of this trope. The trope is for characters who act so completely bizarre they absolutely cannot be considered psychologically normal, not for characters whose behavior is just not totally inconsistent with some recognized disorder. Twilight acts like plenty of neurotypical, introverted nerds. I've deleted the example; respond here if you want to argue it.

[edited to add: Ironically, I realized as I was writing this up that while Twilight clearly isn't, Pinkie Pie is actually a perfect example of the new trope, so that's something.]

What should be the page picture? Should it be Will Wheaton asking Stuart what's wrong with him from the third season of BBT? alongside the famous quote "What's wrong with him?" "Everybody has their own theory"?

also why was the Hank Hill example deleted? I believe it holds up better than the Dale example because, if you look over the show, there is something developmentally different about him (the wmg page of King of the Hill will have some reasons for it)

We've got a lot of examples here where the character's weird behavior is completely explained by their backstory. River Tam: acts crazy because the government did surgery on her brain. Lymle from Star Ocean: traumatized by having accidentally opened a portal to Hell. N from Pokemon: Raised by Wolves. Twilight Sparkle: loves reading, kind of a workaholic, occasionally mildly socially awkward because she doesn't have a lot of experience with socializing.

Do any of these count? Should we explicitly rule out some or all cases where the character's strange behavior is fully explained in-story?

Okay, is the new page title just politically correct or something? Can't we just say "Person acts like they have autism" and call it a day?

Removed this.

• Sherlock of Sherlock fame. There are a lot of fanwars over how to diagnose Sherlock Holmes (or whether to diagnose him at all), but Benedict Cumberbatch has explicitly stated he played Sherlock as an autistic.

Whatever is Holmes' deal in other incarnations, in this it is explicitly stated&confirmed on-screen in ep1 (A Study In Pink) that this version of Holmes is a "High Functioning Sociopath" (direct quote), nothing ambiguous about it.

removed this from main page: "* Neon Genesis Evangelion: Both Emotionless Girl Rei Ayanami and The Chessmaster Gendo Ikari show traits of Asperger Syndrome. "

Neither of these fit. Rei's behaviour is the result of being grown in a giant test-tube, being part a non-human clone, and also being specifically controlled to be a living WMD. Gendo is a man who is so focused on being with his dead wife he is throwing the world under a bus to get there. His behaviours are all carefully calculated to achieve that end. Neither of them fit.

Also, why was the example jammed in the middle of section instead of added to the end of it? New examples go at the end of each section.

Can anyone with a greater familiarity with the series expand on the Kenichi example in anime and manga please? Also need someone who knows the series to tackle the Mobile Suit Gundam Wall of Text please?