When she was placed into an orphanage, they immediately tranquilized and drugged her. She seemed fine when she was with her mother, until her death. But you can see the 'face' fall off when things start going wrong for her on the chessboard, the 'face' doesn't hide the panic/discomfort/anxiety of what she described as her 'world' going off what her plans were.īut, yeah, there's a lot of overlap of visible symptoms between the spheres of neurodivergence, and what I could be seeing as a kindred spirit as such could definitely be attributable to the damage caused by her trauma.

Or even with people in private, like the difference in her reaction when she had sex with the men in her life (after learning that sitting up and reading was not 'appropriate').

You could see her study the people around her all through her life much like she did the chess board, to figure out the 'appropriate' action to take, so that as an adult, she could wear the face in public. There's definitely a way to look at it to see it as autism, but I think it makes fairly clear that a lot of stuff she has going on is medical side effects and trauma.Īs an autistic woman (and former local chess whiz haha), she definitely felt coded somewhere on the spectrum, probably more neurotypical than myself, at least, and I empathised a lot with her. Not to mention they directly tie her ability to play chess at all to the pills. Which can have antisocial effects at either extreme. She also has withdrawal from, and mood stabilization from, pills. Is she autistic, or is she suffering from the effects of these other things? The trauma is clear PTSD, illustrated through flashbacks that impair her socialization at times. The thing that makes it hard to say simply say she's autistic is: clear trauma, clear addiction, and clear demonstration of ability to socialize. My assessment was that you could maybe call her lightly on the spectrum, but she's certainly not intensely autistic. Lots of young kids don't know how to have conversations about anything besides their interests, and Beth demonstrates that she has lots of normal relationships in the first couple episodes. I didn't find this to be the case in my viewing.

When did queen play at the spectrum