Anyone writing characters with diverse genders or preferences?

[The Dark One]

Often "intelligent" characters (and autistic characters with strong special interests so they get mistaken for being smarter), are written like robots and throwing around flowery vocabulary.
I can't really remember that female scientist in the Dan Brown books, but "she didn't say anything smart" is relative. From my experience with professors, other students and uhm myself, the test at uni gave me a score of 135, I can assure everyone I'm pretty dumb. Others are too. Just because you are good at these logical-mathematical tasks doesn't make you any less of an emotional human being or throwing around flowery vocabulary all the time, or making smart(er) decisions in life.
My professor said: Someone being intelligent doesn't make them any less stupid than everyone else.

So what was the point of Dan Brown presenting this woman as a genius with a 208 IQ in a novel.

Why say that at all (and keep saying it) when she does nothing on any level to warrant that?

It's a major failure of characterisation in my view and nothing to do with the realities of how intelligence is conceived or manifests.

 

[LittleOwlbear]

So what was the point of Dan Brown presenting this woman as a genius with a 208 IQ in a novel.

Why say that at all (and keep saying it) when she does nothing on any level to warrant that?

It's a major failure of characterisation in my view and nothing to do with the realities of how intelligence is conceived or manifests.

I dunno, characterizing someone's intelligence by their IQ result seems to be the real life equivalent for throwing a character's stats into the story. xD

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I dunno, characterizing someone's intelligence by their IQ result seems to be the real life equivalent for throwing a character's stats into the story. xD

That's pretty much exactly what that is, really. It's really lazy shorthand for Smart Chick = Hot. It's far from new, just finally getting a bit marginalized - in some necks of the wood, at least. There are authors who think this is how you character, though. Slap on some good stats, some body parts that defy gravity, and a pair of painted-on jeans and you get the Strong Female Character. She's always the one hot chick (or just one chick, babes come with ratings, you know) on a team of five, she's always a badass out of the box, but that's okay because our Hero is going to be getter than her once she takes him through the training montage. And, oh yeah, she's totally doing him.

But she's not going to be too into it, because she's still Smart Chick.

It's gotten better and easier, but as we can see we still need to talk a lot about it. Talk until we all forget why it was important in the first place. We'll get there.

 

[Finchbearer]

About IQ, that was and is a political instrument used by white power groups to show their "darwinist superiority" over black and arab countries which get average IQ in 60-80-range. Of course because IQ is often just a mirror of education, but you also could twist these results and say they are stupid because of biological factors.
Same goes for capitalists and classist people arguing why poor people of any color and gender often get lower IQ results.

I mean…I can believe it but this is not something I knew about. I thought it more a Victorian invention to make little worker bees make more money for the Empire. The education system hasn’t changed at all with maths and logical problem solving being the biggest marker for ‘intelligence’.

 

[Finchbearer]

Characters who are probably on the autistic spectrum who have a special area of intelligence are often the subject of savant-like wonder, as though they are a circus act or a curiosity.

I have a hyperlexic toddler - so likely he is autistic but not certain - and on reading a paper recently I found an American scientist whose paper read to me as super offensive, he always made references to autism as bad or negative and referred to hyperlexia as abnormal development, inferring that autistic people are not normal, he then bracketed ‘neurodivergant’ - why not just write that?? And guess what, he made his entire career off of finding savants. He’ll happily criticise autistic people but make his career out of them.

The same thing happens all the time in writing, be it fiction or screenwriting. The stereotypical autistic person, Big Bang Theory, Rainman etc. with no accountability for the fact that these people are clearly just neurodivergent. Big Bang Theory missed a trick where they could have used Sheldon’s (and Amy’s) characters to talk about autism, but they kept denying that Sheldon (or any of the other characters) were in fact somewhere along the autistic spectrum.

Intelligence gets wrongly portrayed all. the. time.

 

[Queshire]

As someone diagnosed with Autism since middle school I feel like I should say something here, but I'm not sure what.

 

[Finchbearer]

As someone diagnosed with Autism since muddle school I feel like I should say something here, but I'm not sure what.

Muggle school?

You don’t have to say anything?

Imo most of the time we are just totally average people with average intelligence, with the super-human ability to mask

 

[Queshire]

You saw nothing.

 

[The Dark One]

Intelligence gets wrongly portrayed all. the. time.

Another IQ movie that drove me mad was Good Will Hunting.

My god that was some self-indulgent rubbish about a badass character who was too-cool-for-school.

Of course he's from the working class and totally opposed to the academic elite and all their "prejudices" and of course he outshines them.

That's OK... I can believe that in mathematics an autodidact can come from nowhere and have incredible insights despite complete lack of exposure to advanced mathematical theories. That's well documented.

If they'd left it at that I would have probably been ok with the movie despite its confected sneer at academic elites catering to the non-elite ticket purchasers. But they didn't leave it there. They couldn't help themselves in one of the more "powerful" scenes where Matt Damon rips the crap out some College student who'd made a joke at his mate's expense. Damon does this by revealing that he has read far more on a very obscure subject than the undergrad thus humiliating him in front of a large crowd.

Sorry but this is bullshit. For MD to have that kind of hyper-detailed knowledge he would have done hundreds of hours of reading, in that niche field. The odds are astronomical that he could have done hundreds of hours of reading in just that field for the purposes of the scene, so the implication must be that he has far wider hyper-knowledge than that. That would involve billions of hours of reading - by a chap who spent little time at home and no time at all in libraries. When did he find the time to read all that stuff?

This is where the writers (Damon himself and Affleck?) got it very badly wrong. Mathematical insight and vast knowledge of literature are two very different forms of intelligence (indeed knowledge is not necessarily intelligence, even if processing it is). I hated that scene but what I hated even more was the cheap shot taken by the writers.

That said... I'm a small enough man myself when it comes to cheap shots IRL.

Years ago - I would have been maybe 22 - I was working in a bowling alley. On the day all the university offers came out, a young couple appeared at the counter wanting to have a bowl. I'm setting them up with shoes etc and overhearing their conversation I understood they were both delighted with the uni offers they'd received. Then the girl said: "What about the guy behind the counter? He must have had such a fine education to have that job."

Immediately I turned to them and said (words to the effect of): "Well yes... straight out of school I did an undergraduate course in ballistics and topographic geometry, majoring in pin theory. Then I did a masters in kinetic reduction of targets, and now I'm doing a PhD in marketing to explain all this to people with very low IQs... would you like to hear more?"

I continued to bore and humiliate them for another couple of minutes, and when they finally started bowling I made their game a misery by constantly pressing the reset button behind the desk that made the foul line alarm go off every time they got near it.

Happy days.

 

[Finchbearer]

I know it’s a well known film…but I’ve never watched it! But clearly there’s misrepresentation all over the place.

Alan Turing is a real life example who was portrayed recently in the film The Imitation Game, which did a fair representation of Turing, who was thought to have been autistic. Obviously his real life story is quite tragic, but he helped the war effort and was the father of modern computing, but died in obscurity.

I worked in a shop during my degree and I’m sure I received unwanted pity from various customers. Some of the most intelligent people I’ve met have worked in min wage jobs. I used to work with a woman who went to St Andrews and studied theoretical physics. Incredibly intelligent woman, but she only wanted an easy job where she could just go home and enjoy her free time. It’s not always what it seems from the outside.

 

[Queshire]

Muggle school?

You don’t have to say anything?

Imo most of the time we are just totally average people with average intelligence, with the super-human ability to mask

To actually say something though, I get where you're coming from, but I have to admit that I still have a soft spot for the Autistic coded mad scientist characters. Mad scientists are cool.

Currently my favorite Autistic coded mad scientist character has to be Ruan Mei from the game Honkai Star Rail.

There's not just the sense of wonder with the character, but also a sense of... loss? Questioning? That you don't see with a lot of mad scientist characters, but which resonates with me personally.

Alas, she does do some pretty horrible things in the game, but you take what you can get.

 

[Finchbearer]

I didn’t say there was anything ‘wrong’ with the savant trope (if you will) but these days it would be pretty blind to not acknowledge that many people who have those qualities have neurodivergence too, and may have difficulties or shortfalls in other areas. If anything, the creators can easily use this to resonate with the audience and connect with them, which in the case of your example, that is true.

 

[Finchbearer]

Side note: you mentioned an anime where they eat monsters? Like they cook them while they travel? I think I’ve just seen that on Netflix… is it called Delicious in Dungeon??

 

[Queshire]

Side note: you mentioned an anime where they eat monsters? Like they cook them while they travel? I think I’ve just seen that on Netflix… is it called Delicious in Dungeon??

Hmmm.... I can't remember, but it sounds like something that I would mention.

Delicious in Dungeon is a wonderful series and I have high hopes for the animated version.

 

[Prince of Spires]

As someone who studied physics, and has a lot of friends who either did so as well or still work in physics, I think the Big Bang Theory did actually give a decent representation of physicists. Yes, they made the characters slightly more stereotipical. But plenty of the conversations and jokes and experiences were very recognizable.

As for intelligence, the most common problem in writing is that people confuse knowing a lot of stuff with intelligence. Being intelligent doesn't mean that you know everything. It means that you can very quickly recall stuff, you can see connections between items quickly, and you're very fast in learning new knowledge. That, and you have a very high level of abstract thinking.

This does filter down into language use, though again usually not in the way writers do it. It's not about using fancy words or throwing around knowledge. It's about skipping steps in your explanation, jokes being about the connections, etc. It's why highly intelligent people are often misunderstood.

 

[BrittleBones]

There's not just the sense of wonder with the character, but also a sense of... loss? Questioning? That you don't see with a lot of mad scientist characters, but which resonates with me personally.

As for intelligence, the most common problem in writing is that people confuse knowing a lot of stuff with intelligence. Being intelligent doesn't mean that you know everything. It means that you can very quickly recall stuff, you can see connections between items quickly, and you're very fast in learning new knowledge. That, and you have a very high level of abstract thinking.

This does filter down into language use, though again usually not in the way writers do it. It's not about using fancy words or throwing around knowledge. It's about skipping steps in your explanation, jokes being about the connections, etc. It's why highly intelligent people are often misunderstood.

I'm reminded of Okabe from Steins;Gate.

 

[LittleOwlbear]

Characters who are probably on the autistic spectrum who have a special area of intelligence are often the subject of savant-like wonder, as though they are a circus act or a curiosity.

I have a hyperlexic toddler - so likely he is autistic but not certain - and on reading a paper recently I found an American scientist whose paper read to me as super offensive, he always made references to autism as bad or negative and referred to hyperlexia as abnormal development, inferring that autistic people are not normal, he then bracketed ‘neurodivergant’ - why not just write that?? And guess what, he made his entire career off of finding savants. He’ll happily criticise autistic people but make his career out of them.

The same thing happens all the time in writing, be it fiction or screenwriting. The stereotypical autistic person, Big Bang Theory, Rainman etc. with no accountability for the fact that these people are clearly just neurodivergent. Big Bang Theory missed a trick where they could have used Sheldon’s (and Amy’s) characters to talk about autism, but they kept denying that Sheldon (or any of the other characters) were in fact somewhere along the autistic spectrum.

Intelligence gets wrongly portrayed all. the. time.

It's not only that. I'm more than happy about characters that are just "coded", because ... have you seen the Good Doctor? It's fucking awful, if they go the full route of "our main character is actually autistic".

What gets me the most in fiction and in real, that's why I'm not telling anyone aside from my close friend circle and partner, is the pathologizing and infantilizing.

Sheldon rarely gets shit for the things he does, like any other adult person would and there is sadly some kind of reality behind it. I have seen some autistic people, especially men, playing dumb when they overstepped people's boundaries massively.
I talked to a guy and he whined to me: "I didn't know this woman thought I stalked her, I was meaning well with her *describes everything that makes it stalking and shows me private messages how often she told him clearly no and leave her alone regularly* Why does everyone treat me like that, I'm autistic!!" Like he wouldn't have heard in his 28 years on earth about what makes stalking, stalking and doesn't know a "no". He just thought that woman must give in to him if "he didn't understand his actions and didn't mean harm" etc.

These characters might have fancy jobs in these series too, but they still are not treated like adults like everyone around them.

To actually say something though, I get where you're coming from, but I have to admit that I still have a soft spot for the Autistic coded mad scientist characters. Mad scientists are cool.

Currently my favorite Autistic coded mad scientist character has to be Ruan Mei from the game Honkai Star Rail.

There's not just the sense of wonder with the character, but also a sense of... loss? Questioning? That you don't see with a lot of mad scientist characters, but which resonates with me personally.

Alas, she does do some pretty horrible things in the game, but you take what you can get.

Mine is and probably will be for very, very long Hange from AOT.
One reason is because they are not described as antisocial, uncaring or reclusive like lot of neurodivergent people are portrayed and lot about them is such so much more human and relatable. They are, and some others are, actually intelligent without pulling many dumb cliches too, and not treated differently than everyone else. Erwin is like: yeah of course they are my next in line, who else would it be.
And they are my fav non-binary character to get back to topic haha

 

[Finchbearer]

It’s all about balance LittleOwlbear I think, because there is going overboard with the stereotypical autistic traits, and there’s also going ‘under board’ as in dismissing autism altogether.

There’s also context. Context is everything. You have a character who doesn’t know they are autistic and that’s why they’ve always felt different and can’t fathom why things always seem to go wrong, or you have someone who has always known they are autism and have been overly coddled by their parents and everyone around them to the point that it gives them a reason to do things they know are wrong with perceived impunity.

You have the choice of how to represent it as the writer and it can be as true to your own knowledge or personal experiences as you like.

The man you mentioned has clearly been far too coddled in his childhood probably to the point that everything can be blamed on his autism. Those early years influence the rest of our lives and give us that in-built narrative after all.

 

[pmmg]

About IQ, that was and is a political instrument used by white power groups to show their "darwinist superiority" over black and arab countries which get average IQ in 60-80-range. Of course because IQ is often just a mirror of education, but you also could twist these results and say they are stupid because of biological factors.

Like any tool, some use it for ways that we might approve and some don't. IQ tests were not created for this purpose, and have function and use beyond this. Its initial purpose was to assist in placing people in education programs best suited to them. But like everything else, there is good and bad in all of it. I would not worry about it though. Another type of IQ test is being able to sus out when something has relevance and when it doesn't. An individual who points to a test that has so many well known detractions of its ability to measure what it purports, and calls it proof of something, is probably one who would not do well on it anyway. But, it is still true, that after many permutations, and many samples, there is useful data that can be gained by having a measure of this information.


It does seem like it would be a challenge to write a character with a greater intelligence than ones own.

A high IQ though, as I am sure many are aware, is not simply one just knows a lot of facts, or has popped out a lot of new theories. It would likely show itself in other ways, like the ability to learn new things more quickly, the ability to problem solve. Perhaps a greater or more organized way to remember things, and even perhaps a greater perception than most at reading people and situations. Such a person might be able to predict more accurately likely outcomes for certain behaviors and actions.

Those can be shown in a story, and not have the author spelling out astrophysics equations to convince the reader about the intelligence of the character.


I could not answer why Dan Brown used that example, a 201 IQ, but I would assume he wanted it to be known she was in the upper echelon of smart people. I am not sure if it showed in his book or not, and I don't intend to read it to get an opinion. For some people though, letting their IQ be known has been more of a help than a hindrance to them. Mrs. Vos Savant, pretty much made a career on that reputation. If I was to guess, Mr. Brown is telling a story about faith, and the belief in Jesus, and his artifacts. More directly, that the Holy Grail was actually his offspring, and his decedents still live among us. He probably found it useful to have someone really smart in the story to lend credibility to the subject matter.

My suspicion is, that a woman who can score a 201 in her 20's probably could not repeat the same feat in her 40's. I would expect IQ would fluctuate quite a bit between stages of life, and life circumstances.

 

[The Dark One]

I could not answer why Dan Brown used that example, a 201 IQ, but I would assume he wanted it to be known she was in the upper echelon of smart people. I am not sure if it showed in his book or not, and I don't intend to read it to get an opinion. For some people though, letting their IQ be known has been more of a help than a hindrance to them. Mrs. Vos Savant, pretty much made a career on that reputation. If I was to guess, Mr. Brown is telling a story about faith, and the belief in Jesus, and his artifacts. More directly, that the Holy Grail was actually his offspring, and his decedents still live among us. He probably found it useful to have someone really smart in the story to lend credibility to the subject matter.

My suspicion is, that a woman who can score a 201 in her 20's probably could not repeat the same feat in her 40's. I would expect IQ would fluctuate quite a bit between stages of life, and life circumstances.

208 isn't just the upper echelon.

130+ is the upper echelon and it gets exponential after that. 150+ is super-high.

208 is totally off the charts. If you encountered a person with that level IQ they would not seem in anyway normal. They would blaze with intelligence. They'd be more like the interdimensional beings at the end of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull than like a normal human.

Siena Brooks was a very ordinary person who said nothing interesting and did nothing clever.

Hannibal Lecter is a good example of a character with very high intelligence. He was also totally normal.