hello I am here to hear some of your amazing autistic!Doctor headcanons!
ahhhh!! i intend to start a post for this actually, so people can add to it and reblog it and chat to each other about it (because there’s no way near enough autistic!doctor things)
but here’s a couple, off the top of my head
- one brushes his thumbs against his lapels a lot when he’s stressed, and i’m totally counting it as a stim
- have you heard them talk? that’s practically textbook infodumping. ten does it a lot, as does eleven, twelve does too “can i talk about the planets now?” when he doesn’t get a chance to infodump, he gets stressy. it’s also why he talks to himself a lot - he often has a need to constantly babble information about things he finds interesting
- that one part in ‘the fires of pompeii’ where donna’s like ‘don’t tell me the tardis has gone’ and he’s like ‘ok’ and she’s like ‘so where is it?’ and he’s like ‘you.. told me not to tell you??!’ that wasn’t a joke, he genuinely thought she was being serious
- his autism presents differently throughout different regenerations. for example, ten was extremely fond of hugging people and holding people’s hands, and twelve is the opposite “i will hold clara’s hand, and that’s it”. either way, it’s autistic behaviour.
- one practically never looks anyone in the eye and that’s because eye contact makes them really uncomfortable
- since he’s gallifreyan and not human, of course the symptoms aren’t exactly the same (and it’s not exactly autism as such, but it’s the closest word we have for it and it’s very similar). but he’s certainly autistic from human viewpoint, and at least neurodivergent (incredibly so) from a gallifreyan viewpoint. for instance, gallifreyans tend to be pretty obsessive from what i’ve seen and heard, so while the doctor’s special interest being earth isn’t exactly unheard of, it’s still a bit (a LOT) weird to actually want to mingle with the primitives.
- they have problems with executive functioning, which is certainly not common among gallifreyans, since they’re all “perfect” and whatever, and would have been frowned upon. one has problems with speech processing - his brain works too quickly for his mouth to keep up and doesn’t process his thoughts properly, that’s why he jumbles up his words. eleven is a clutz because what are motor skills?
- he’s a total extrovert in many of his regenerations. a lot of the time he absolutely loves crowds, loves noise, loves loads of sensory input. however sometimes it can get a bit much. donna once bought him noise-cancelling headphones. he didn’t use them too often, but when he needed them, he was really grateful for them. twelve uses them a lot, being a little less sensory seeking than the others
- i also headcanon them as having synesthesia (which is quite common among autistics), and again, while this may not be unheard of amongst time lords, it’s certainly not normal for all of your senses to be so jumbled up. he sees sound as colour and strawberry ice cream tastes how a summer morning feels and the year 2365 looks like a painting by gustav klimt
there are so many wow. this is not a couple like i had originally planned.
however yes i will be starting a post soon! (i’m also making somewhat of a list of all the time’s they’re autistic, asexual, adhd and nonbinary in DW :D i’ll probably end up missing out a ton but hey ho)
