Would it be that Christopher has a disorder that makes his thought pattern very different, but can nevertheless always tell what's happening in his mind, and is capable of expressing it clearly?
It's... I guess what was missing for me was the emotional component, certainly not outwardly expressed, but inwardly felt--and the fact that the autistic folks I've known really did have senses of humor and empathetic stuff going on. It feels kind of like it's the most "dehumanizing" portrayal possible, slathered in stereotypes and without anything... in there. His thought pattern isn't
really different. Even I display more lateral thinking than he does, and I am way, waaaaay lighter on most of the issues than that dude is. He gets overloaded, and there's none of the sheer horrifying panic there; he takes refuge in math and it's kind of like "well, okay, math."
And the thing is, I grew up with folks with quite severe autism, the sorts who did have meltdowns in public, and who will always be living on Disability for the rest of their lives--period, no question about it--and they still managed to seem more human, more feeling, more humorous, more intelligent, more caring.
I dunno. And there's none of the desperation to fit, either, which is what I think my ex-boyfriend's complaint was. He doesn't care at all. The dude's 15, and he hasn't gained the least element of caring. That's a shock. By that age, I know both of us had learned "fuck up, and you are going to be hurt." There was an obvious direct correlation. And he has none of that. For someone so self-aware, so clear in his thought, he seems like someone who has never been shouted at, punched, shaken, drowned, or anything. There's no anxiety, no tension, no true interpretation of anything at all. I would have liked to have seen him experience the gut-wrenching feeling of going along, doing okay, and then suddenly realizing that he doesn't know what to do next, worrying that if he doesn't figure it out in the next, oh, two seconds, he's going to be hurt. It's so embarrassing and so shaming, but ... no.
That, and when he has his meltdowns, all I get is the motions of something being wrong. He has no coping strategies. You don't really get to 15 without coping strategies, whether it's "get the fuck out of here" or "scratch your arm to make it better."
And for someone who is supposed to be as good at higher math as he is--i.e. not just throwing numbers at the parallel processing centers of his brain, but really doing the logic--he really isn't employing those thought processes.
*sigh*
It just feels wrong.