Ingo and Emmet Are Both Autistic and I Will Die On This Hill, Thank You Very Much

Hey, remember over a year ago when I wrote that post screaming into the void about how Emmet is autistic? Consider this an updated version of that post, because I really should have talked about how they both are.

Disclaimer: I am an autistic adult who went undiagnosed until age 20 despite a blatant love of steam locomotives so I don’t know how I was missed considering I had the single most stereotypical interest on the planet. (I’ll touch on that later.)

Anyhow, I’ll try to keep this brief (and will likely fail), but let’s get into how both Ingo and Emmet are autistic, actually.

Emmet’s the more obvious one, which is why I wrote the initial post linked above. He clearly scripts, has trouble containing his sheer excitement about things (read: Doubles) to the point of bothering other people, has no filter, will happily infodump about strategy or the MTA rules if asked, and in the manga has an arm-swinging walk that’s visibly a stim if you know it. 

The scripting is evident when you fight him by himself, as his dialogue often feels stiff (in Japanese it’s more informal to contrast with his hyper-formal brother), but the line that always seals the deal for me is actually this, when Ingo asks him to put in a few words before a Multi Battle:

“Hi, this is a script and I have no idea what to actually say to strangers so I’m just going to infodump the MTA rules at you now.”

But under that script, he’s bouncing off the walls with excitement - if you beat him, he’ll drop the script a bit, his “verrrry” verbal tic comes out, and he’ll ask you to come back. You can see a bit more of his genuine excitement in Masters, when he tells the player how happy he is that he gets to try a ton of new strategy because on Pasio battles are 3 vs. 3 (i.e. Multi combined with Triples).

One of my favorite screenshots from Masters is from this little moment in their event, in which they’ve just realized Roark and Steven Stone are there:

Look at Emmet’s hands. He’s practically vibrating. He wants to fight Steven so badly.

As for his lack of filter…well, that we’ve covered, but it’s especially evident in the manga:

He just…says things without really thinking about it. And it’s great.

No, he’s not neurotypical, I’m sorry. He infodumps too much to be.

Those dramatic speeches he does before battling? Those are indicative of scripting, too. He’s also using a lot of big words and weirdly formal language, something a lot of us have noted down when we’re diagnosed - we talk weirdly formally.

And oh, God, does this one infodump like a pro. When I first got his dialogue in Masters in which he infodumps about high-speed rail, I felt so goddamned seen.

(The real-life equivalents of what he’s talking about, the MagLev and TGV, are legitimately incredible, so I can’t blame him for this one bit because I am also excited about those things.)

Ingo also notably has ABSOLUTELY NO volume control, which is absolutely something a lot of autistic people (myself included) struggle with. I don’t realize how loud I am most of the time unless someone points it out to me. This is not always great, because I work in a library.

There’s also the “not smiling” thing, which Masters reveals he’s genuinely concerned about - a lot of autistic people don’t always display facial expressions equivalent to how we feel. Ingo tries to mask this by being over-expressive verbally, but people certainly do notice that he doesn’t smile much. (In Legends: Arceus, he’s finally allowed to smile for the first time in a game, and it’s actually really nice to see him get to do it.) A lot of the time, we’ll have to force the facial expressions people want to see from us, and it looks rather unnatural, so it’s nice to see a fictional character have the same problem for once.

Now, like I said I’d mention at the beginning of this post…

There’s no one definitive reason why so many of us do the train stuff, but we do. A lot of people think it’s the visual stimuli, or that trains run on a set schedule, giving us the routine we seek. Still others have proposed that it’s because trains are easily sorted into categories. Whatever it is - and it might be different for each of us - it’s there.

For me personally, I’m a history person (I literally have a history degree), and trains are actually a hobby I share with my dad, particularly steam locomotives. But I absolutely feel the draw that other autistic railfans feel to trains in general, and I don’t really know if I can put the feeling into words - I just really like seeing these well-engineered machines, knowing historical ones are being preserved, and longing for the day someone will allow me on the footplate so I can drive. I can’t fully explain the pull, but I feel the pull intensely.

Anyway, I have once again failed at keeping this short, because I can’t help but infodump about things, either. Whoops. So there you go, they’re both autistic, fight me.

the two types of autism