When I saw the announcement for this show, you best believe I was very excited to see it! Autistic characters being played by actual people on the spectrum? We love to see it. I thought it was very heartfelt, the storylines were really good, and just overall….we love to see it!
In the following pack, you can find 309gifs of Chris Pang asVanin the show As We See It (2022). All of these gifs were capped and coloured by yours truly. Chris is ChineseandTaiwanese,please be mindful of that when using him as a faceclaim.
PleaseREBLOGthis pack, and use it for your needs. Please be mindful of my rules, and don’t edit or crop these gifs into icons without my permission. And I forgot to add it to my last pack post: #FREE PALESTINE. Also,#STAND WITH UKRAINE
I just binge-watched the whole series (8 episodes) in a day, and I wanna say I really got into it. I’m not going to say it’s my favorite show (Barry from HBO still has that spot), but it was really a good watch.
Spoiler free short review: I loved that every autistic character is played by an autistic actor, and there are even a few neurotypical characters played by autistic actors, according to an interview I’ve read from the cast.
Some of the situations depicted in this show won’t speak to everyone, but I was myself deeply touched, cried a few times and recognized myself quite a lot in this show.
I’m really hoping for a second season to help some characters to be a bit more nuanced and maybe to help me like some of them (because, without going into detail, there are definitely a few characters I hated, but the narrative didn’t necessarily treated me as being in the wrong for that).
More than anything else, I loved the little details that helped to make the show highly relatable. For example, you’re gonna see that one of the characters is sleeping with a weighted blanket, and their stimming is also quite noticeable and feels natural.
It’s definitely a show I would recommend for autistic representation, if just for the fact that the main cast is autistic and visibly gave their input about a lot of things. I feel like it could have used some LGBT representation as well, but who knows, maybe in season 2?
Now, onto the spoilers:
Throughout the show, I was terrified that they would have Violet leaving to the treatment care center. I recognized myself quite a bit in this character (except in the sexual side of her, because I’m ace myself), and one of my biggest fears has always been to lose the independence I spent so long fighting for.
Violet has been infantilized by her brother most of her life, and it shows. I really hated the brother sometimes, and I wanted to knock some sense into him, because he really didn’t allow Violet to shine on and find her place in the world by treating her like a child all the time (taking her phone away, preventing her from meeting guys etc.).
Worse, it definitely let her know that she shouldn’t trust him with her secrets, keeping things from him until it was too late and he was warned by someone else.
So, I was incredibly relieved when he finally realized that he needed to let Violet figure her things out, and decided not to send her to the center. Violet was visibly distraught over it, and she wouldn’t have been happy if she had been forced to be there.
I loved following everyone’s stories and finding myself in quite a few scenes, stims, ways of communicating. It’s so rare to find shows where I can actually fully relate to something and understand it, and it was the case here.
Like I get why Harrison got overly attached to Mandy, why Rick tried to have everything under control when he learned his dad got cancer, and why Violet was so upset that her brother didn’t trust her on her own. It’s familiar. It’s relatable.
Among the neurotypical characters, Nicole, Harrison’s sister, is definitely the MVP. From the get-go, she wants to treat her brother like the adult that he is, is mad that her parents aren’t honest with him, and she’s delighted to have him at her graduation party.
They could have portrayed her as a teenager/young adult being ashamed to have her autistic brother around, but no, she was always great, and I hope we’ll see more of her in a future season.
I don’t quite know what to think about Mandy. On one hand, she was definitely caring, and I loved her moments with Violet, but I wasn’t too interested in her romantic side stories and I feel that she’s a bit too condescending sometimes with the main trio?
Like in that cheerful way that people working in the autism field tend to be around autistic people? I don’t know, I’ll have to see more of her in the next season to really form an opinion about her.
Same about Douglas, Violet’s love interest. Like, sometimes, he’s really sweet, but he also seems too insisting and even creepy at times (the way he just sighed when Violet held him against her during the trust exercice, not liking it), and I don’t know. The way they got together at the end seemed too fast, not natural enough. I’ll have to see more of them in the next season to judge that.
All in all, it was a really nice show. I would love to watch more shows featuring autistic characters in a story that doesn’t necessarily focus mostly on autism (like an adventure or fantasy show or whatnot), but I still think it’s important to showcase this kind of represensation, given how far behind we are towards autism acceptance, even to this day.
One downside I would mention is how insistent they are with using first-person language, but I managed to overlook it after a little while.
I would love to see a nonverbal character in the next season in the main cast, played by a nonverbal autistic actor. To show how different we can be, and how communication doesn’t have to be verbal to be listened to and valued.
