madimpossibledreamer

So this is important enough for its own separate post. I was going to just include it in author's notes for today's post but nah, it's getting its own. Also, the warning is for abuse specifically ableism.

I was rereading today's post to try to figure out warnings. There's all sorts of family abuse-related warnings going on. and neither Jotaro nor Joyce are perfect parents here, but I was trying to figure out why Buffy is responding to Jotaro much better now that he's here and not going to leave again, why Xander's sympathizing with Joyce's struggles as a parent but not Jotaro's, and then it hit me.

I'm definitely writing Jotaro as somewhat autistic in this fic. (Separately in the Eyes of Heaven fic Meet Awkward Jolyne thinks about how mental health support was kind of...unfortunate, when he was growing up.)

Buffy also made the point that they think alike. She finds it easier to read him now, but still has problems reading him and doesn't always find it easy to explain what she's thinking either. They have similar problem-solving approaches, and don't always have to talk because the next step seems obvious.

It reads like she inherited his neurodivergence, though probably to a lesser degree and she's far better at masking. (Before anyone comments that she doesn't seem neurodivergent...that happens. A lot. Like many things, symptoms are different for women and men. Women tend to be better at masking than men. i was reading that not all autistic people have tics, and/or sometimes they're not physical or verbal, i.e. sometimes it's listening to a song on repeat. Autism doesn't always involve social unawareness, either--some autistic people have extreme empathy where they feel sad when others are sad, etc, or have normal social understanding--their brains are just working differently to get to the same place. Also, some people have read Cordy as autistic, and given that Cordy is sometimes read as Buffy's Shadow...) He understands in a way Joyce can't because she's neurotypical. Jotaro understands because to him and Buffy certain choices are obvious in a way they aren't to others. Joyce never bothered having her kid tested and doesn't get how to help her kid because it's not intuitive to her. (Given how she dealt with the first claim of vampires, she probably wouldn't deal well with it even if she did know.)

Jotaro's not perfect but he is trying to be a good dad. Buffy's self-blame is a little, uh, indicative, too--people can mess up their kids unintentionally, too, and from what I'm getting in this one, just like Jojo's canon Jotaro's hard to read and constantly seems angry or at least forbidding, which can be easy for a kid to misread (made worse because Jotaro doesn't bother correcting said impressions because he doesn't realize he's giving off said impressions). Also just like canon he thought making himself scarce was protecting people until shown definitive proof it didn't, at which point he's panicking a little. Like, if they hated him, fine, as long as they're safe, but they're not safe and he hurt her and he definitely didn't mean to do that. Joyce is trying, but only, like, the stuff that she's read, the stuff that would work for neurotypical people, and she hasn't even bothered doing research because she wants a "normal" kid she can relate to and knows what to do with.