For me the first thing that comes to mind is Tales from Earthsea. I don’t think it’s excellent or anything and has plenty of problems but people act like it killed their dog. While it has its problems that have been covered extensively, I think it has a beautiful atmosphere and art.
IMO it would have been better received if it wasn’t advertised as an Earthsea adaptation and was just its own thing.
To be fair, sometimes we get lucky enough to get stuff made by Autistic artists for us Autistic people and it doesn’t do well in the general audience, but we absolutely love it. Our tastes in some things are just a little different. Absurdist comedy, or left-field mysteries… and the emotional writing or acting might feel completely off for normal people, but we won’t notice it. We like normal people stuff too, but I got a special place in my heart for stuff that was clearly made by another Autistic person.
I definitely struggle to enjoy a lot of mainstream movies / TV. Never really considered there’d be stuff made by autistic people, for autistic people, but it makes complete sense. Do you have any examples?
I don’t think anything officially calls itself as such. But all the zany parody comedies are good examples. Stuff like blazing saddles, hot shots, airplane… normal people like them ok, but they play especially well to us. Pretty much anything with leslie nielson as lead. Mr. Bean/rowan atkinson stuff tends to follow that same trend. Probably the most openly Autistic tv show would be rick and morty. Most people can’t get past how annoying the characters are, I didn’t even know they were annoying… lol.
Most older stuff like this came out before these people knew what Autism even was, or considered they might have/be it. But now it’s more likely to be an open secret, or occasionally even widely known in some cases. For music, saVant is an autistic artist that in my experience is not well liked by normal people, but is some of my favourite music.
As with most other stuff, personal taste is still more important than the line between Autistic/non-autistic, but there are strong correlations. Especially if the artist didn’t know they were Autistic. They might have inadvertantly done things in a way that feels more comfortable to us, and it didn’t bother their editor enough for them to recommend changing it. Or they may have been given more freedom and as a result just naturally gravitated towards stuff that is more important to us, and away from things that would be more important to a general audience.