Sia Music - Blog Posts
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Autistic characters should be played by autistic people!
I hope it is okay if I reblog to share my thoughts on this!!
As a neurodiverse person, I think it is incredibly important to have neurodiverse actors playing the neurodiverse characters!
I would absolutely love some genuine representation seen and seeing neurodiverse actors for younger neurodivergents who aspire to act or are big PJO fans to have people to look up to and see themselves in!!
Also not only do neurotypical actors playing neurodiverse characters tend to come off as over to the community as a mockery, but also neurodiverse actors are commonly overlooked and mistreated. From executives not making the set a safe place for them to work, to straight up bullying them and forcing them to suppress their neurological traits.
Not to mention that recently a big deal in the neurodiverse community(particularly for autistic folks) was Sia's movie "Music" where Sia not only hired an allistic actor to play a nonverbal autistic girl(who not only compared autistic people to inanimate objects, but also made a mockery of autistic body language and facial expressions throughout the whole movie), but Sia also claimed to have heavily researched autism and neurodiversity for three years before partnering with "Autisim Speaks" a well known autisim hate group. Sia ignored autistic and other neurodiverse voices, and straight up made a mockery of them for asking her to consider recasting and making accommodations to include autistic people. There was much more that went wrong with Sia. There are some things I fail to mention due to not wanting to go further and being physically and mentally exhausted just think about it, and some because it is genuinely triggering. While I know Rick wouldn't do that to us, Sia's movie had a rather large impact on the neurodiverse community and a lot of neurodiverse folks will be scared of this going in the same direction based on ot having the same issue that started the attention shift to Sia's movie and opened a lot more of the discussions on this topic of neurotypical playing neurodiverse folk.
Nonetheless all Sia wanted was to profit off an already struggling and stigmatized community like so many others have in the past, and frankly I am so tired of neurotypical people saying they care about the community just to show they are only here to feel good about themselves or for inspiration porn and profit.
There are many neurodiverse actors who would love to have the chance to have a job and take part in this movie. Not every character in PJO is neurodiverse(confirmed by frank zhang!), and so of course not every actor on the show has to be neurodiverse but those confirmed to be neurodiverse should be played by neurodiverse actors and those actors should be given a safe place to work and have their needs actually met.
I say, nothing about us without us.
do you think it’s important that the cast are neurodiverse/have adhd even if it means aging up the characters?
Thank you for this question. I will admit that I hadn’t thought about it before, and that’s a fault of my own. I am not part of the neurodiverse community and I don’t want to talk over those voices. Those members of the pjo fandom will have far more valuable insight and their thoughts and opinions should hold more weight on this topic than mine.
That being said, I think it is important as representation is always important. It would be something great if they could try for it. Whether it is necessary in the casting decisions, I don’t believe I have the right to determine.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think since I’m not behind any of the decisions. They will cast who they cast. As far as aging up, based on what they have said so far, I don’t believe they will consider that.
Whether or not they cast actors who are neurodiverse/have ADHD for the demigods, it is important that they do the necessary research. Since Rick is working on the show and his son has ADHD and dyslexia—the son for whom he originally wrote the series—I trust that the show will not have a negative portrayal of the neurodiverse community. Then again, I ask pjo fans who are part of the community for their thoughts on this.
There is an entire blog, @cripplecharacters, you can start with. Please, this is what we're here for. To make sure people don't write stuff like this.
We shouldn't be your only stop and as OP said, sensitivity readers are worth the investment, but we can help, too. Please utilize disabled sensitivity services. We're here because we want to help you represent your characters right.
ive been thinking a lot about the whole sia music think lately and ive said this before on my other blog but if youre allistic and working on a story involving autism/an autistic character please please get an autistic sensitivity reader (ideally more than one tbhhh) and, in addition, if you can please compensate them.
if you cant afford to compensate a sensitivity reader because the story youre working on isnt something you expect to be able to monetize like thats understandable especially right now. you should still seek people out. odds are you will find someone willing to give your work a once over and provide some thoughts, but like, if thats the case expect the kind of work you would naturally expect from a freeby. reading and giving feedback on another persons writing IS work and it honestly can be very draining work especially when it involves essentially asking a marginalized person to encounter and correct microaggressions they already are forced to deal with in life. that deserves the proper appreciation.
like if youre writing something about an autistic character and reach out to me ill definitely give it a look because this is something i care about a lot and i really want to see better depictions of neurodivergence in media, but if im doing this for freesies im going to be a lot less willing to get into circular arguments about what gets a pass and what doesnt or give you super detailed advice on how to fix a particular problem.
if im taking the time to review your potentially insensitive writing for nothing but my hope that itll do some good for the community, dont expect me to hold your hand. seek out sensitivity readers. pay your sensitivity readers.
That's right. It looks like the two adult characters did physically get on top of her, restrain her, and put weight on her. Of course there could have been some cinema magic in place to protect Maddie, who was a child, from being injured, but it looks a lot like they put at least half of their weight on the poor girl and even that could have seriously hurt her or started to suffocate her. Did she have a hand signal to tell the crew that something was wrong and she needed the scene to cut? Wait, her hands were restrained. How was she supposed to communicate that she genuinely needed help and wasn't just pretending to be panicked? Restraints like that could have made speech very difficult, maybe impossible. So yeah, Maddy very much could have been in actual danger.
Considering how little Sia seems to care about putting people in danger with what she's portraying, I wouldn't put it past her. Doing this safely would have required careful planning and a lot of effort she seemed at loathe to put in.
People are right to point out the use of dangerous restraint methods in Music in the context of its impact on the autistic community, but I'm also concerned about how they actually filmed it? Like maybe I'm missing something, idk a lot about filming movies and such, but if they actually did that restraint, doesn't that mean Maddy Ziegler was put in danger?
Okay, as a mod of cripplecharacters, I'm about to go off from several different angles. And these aren't even all of my thoughts. I have more. (TW for ableism, mention of prone restraints, caricature characters, and really, really poor writing of disabled characters.)
If she didn't get her information through a collaboration with Autism Speaks then where'd she get it? She claims she did three years of research. Did none of that research include basic stuff about writing disabled characters in general? Also, it takes five seconds to find out that there's an issue with Autism Speaks. It's in the little Wikipedia blurb. She didn't even skim Wikipedia in three years?
Not even come slightly close to the topic of prone restraints (which have a death count,) and definitely not portray is as a good thing twice
Gotten rid of that detail of Music having an accident during Kazoo's relapse. Yeah, that can happen sometimes with some autistics in real life, but the fact that it was portrayed the way it was and by an actress who wasn't autistic-
Similarly, the angry "Brush you hair" scene was... where to even start? No, not by an actress who isn't, at the very least, MSN or semispeaking (or even nonspeaking)
Gotten rid of that inspiration porn Music singing scene at the end.
Significantly rewritten the guy who is... I think he's Zu's love interest?
Actually done something with the kid who seemed to care so deeply for Music.
Explained how said kid managed to acquire twenty thousand dollars to buy Music a service dog over the internet just like that???
Remove Music not doing anything about finding her grandmother dead on the floor??? Or at least acknowledge that the poor girl was probably traumatized from the experience and had no idea what to do or how to help? It's shot almost like she's being selfish and choosing not to help rather than being disabled, terrified, and unable to help.
Not forced Maddie into this movie using their massive power imbalance. Definitely should never have forced a young teenaged girl into a position so bad that she literally broke down sobbing because she didn't want to come across as a caricature, at which point Sia lied to her. Look, Maddie was what, fourteen? And Sia was basically a mother figure and the one responsible for Maddie's success.
Not called stimming tics. Tics come from a very different group of disorders, involuntary stimming behaviours are a completely different thing with different reasons and mechanisms. If she wanted to write Music having tics, she should have given her a tic disorder. Actually, wait, scratch that. She screwed up badly enough with a singularly-disabled character. I don't want to know how much lower she could go by trying to portray a multiple-disabled character.
Not lied about trying to get a nonspeaking actress (because she was quoted long before that as saying she would only make the movie if Maddie was the main role. She wasn't going to try with an autistic actress.) Not acted like firing the fictional autistic actress was a mercy rather than putting some work in and making the set accessible for her.
Like, sure, maybe a hypothetical nonspeaking actress couldn't have been able to handle the dancing. You know what the solution to that is? Either adapt the dancing or get her an autistic stunt double who can do the dancing
Not have Music be significantly less autistic in her head? The stimming and movement abnormalities fade, if not vanish entirely, during the dream sequences. As though the version of Music in her head is less autistic than Music in her body, maybe even not autistic at all. Which is an idea that has blood on its hands
Not tried to portray all of autism rather than just Music, a character who happens to be autistic. What Sia was doing was trying to portray autism as a whole, or maybe even turn the entire idea of autism into a character rather than create a person with autism. Compare this to a (slightly) better example, Wendy from Please Stand By. Dakota Fanning wasn't trying to portray all of autism and her character wasn't written to portray autism as a whole, she was playing Wendy, one particular autistic woman, rather than a caricature.
Given Music literally anything. Why doesn't she have hobbies? Where's her personality? I know nothing about Music as a person and that's because she wasn't written to be a person.
The dead disabled brother plot was unnecessary. As was the HIV plot.
"She can hear two rooms away" she's autistic, not Superman.
The grandmother left absolutely no plan to help Zu care for her H-MSN sister, not even a note in her will like "The neighbour is close with her, he can help." I know she died suddenly but c'mon, she has a grandchild who will need care for the rest of her life, she should have been more cautious as an elderly woman. Her carelessness was setting Zu up for failure and Music up for an even worse time of this massive change in her life.
So yeah, it would make sense that there's some growing pains, Zu has no idea how to interact with her sister and her sister is probably distressed, confused, grieving, and frustrated because her entire world is changing. But rather than treating this as a "Yeah, this would have gone better with a bit of planning and we're both struggling because we're going into this blind," it's portrayed as "Music is the source of all of my problems, she's the worst, she's unreasonable, she's the worst thing that's ever happened to me and I hate her." Why is Music being portrayed as a burden rather than the burden being how ill-prepared the grandmother left all involved parties for this eventuality.
Wasn't Music meant to be HSN? Like, level three autism? Spoken like someone who's never interacted with someone who's HSN before.
Zu is high-key resentful towards Music as though any of this is her fault and she seems so desperately dedicated to either ignoring or despising her sister and the way it's portrayed makes it feel like the audience is supposed to agree with Zu?
Wow, I went off. To keep this from being nine hundred miles longer, she should have just not done that. If she had submitted this plot to cripplecharacters, literally any of us, autistic or not, could have told her not to do this. Did she even talk to someone from the disabled community? You don't even need to be autistic, just disabled, to know that pretty much all of this was a horrific idea.
What SIA Should’ve Done Making Her Movie ‘Music’
Cast an autistic actor for the main character
Consulted with actual autistic people instead of f$&@ing Auti$m $peaks
Did PROPER research
Made the movie accessible to watch - got rid of the whole flashing light thing that could trigger seizures
Used an actual mixed actor instead of doing literal blackface
Started being open to criticism instead of having a flip out at people for calling her out
Not agreed with an interviewer comparing non-verbal people to an actual inanimate object wtf