Mind you her interest with dissection doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a psychopath. It’s common for autistic people to have morbid special interests. Like true crime, poisonous plants and animals. It helps us cope with the darkness in the world if we can understand it.

She doesn’t even react violently initially and doesn’t until her grandma gets in the way of her and her special interest. At first she’s confused and hurt and tells her “It hurts, you hurt me.”

She even says let me go, you’re hurting me. When her grandma holds her wrists when she was having a violent meltdown as a kid. That was after she was tricked to think she was allowed to engage in her special interest (dissecting frogs at the time) and being cut deep on her hand for it.

At another, her grandmother grabbed her wrists not tightly because she was having a more aggressive meltdown common with younger autistic children that haven’t learned to control themselves or were not taught and she gets even more aggressive bc the touch hurts her.

Like seriously, at one point her grandma is trying to talk to her and she’s slightly rocking on the couch and listening to the wristwatch ticking and counting seconds.

Like come on! Am I supposed to believe that she’s a psychopath and not just a misdiagnosed autistic person?!! Psychopaths know when ppl are joking, they’re still allistic and know social cues. Agh! I’m so sick of the demonization of autistic traits!

It’s not that she doesn’t have empathy or feels emotions, when her mask slips we can see that she does care about people and she does feel emotion despite how she’s portrayed. She couldn’t even tell someone was joking with her in the market and pretended to be joking too.

As an autistic and adhd c type person with complex ptsd from repeated trauma and being forced to mask and being written off as having “anger issues” when I was having autistic meltdowns, I see a lot of myself in this character.

Granted there are some similarities between autism and psychopathy but it’s likely partially due to high masking, low to mid support needs autistic people often being misdiagnosed as psychopaths for not behaving of have traits that are expressed in a very specific way.

Her friend and her grandmother teach her social skills even as an older adult (college). She doesn’t know how to fake smile. Mimics facial expressions. Uses anger and threats as a defense mechanism to scare people away. Her tone is often flat or monotone.

She is high masking. Was tortured technically by her grandmother who had her dissect a frog but when she made the first incision the grandma took it and cut her hand with the knife to teach her that she shouldn’t kill or hurt people which is lowkey bs and traumatic.

She listens to a watch ticking to regulate her emotions, a socially acceptable stim. She mimics people’s behaviors, words and vocal inflections randomly and in public, this is passed off as making fun of them but it’s not coming across that way at all.

I mean her mom abandons her with her auntie because she’s an inconvenience. She has meltdowns when she overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to regulate. She had a special interest of dissecting frogs as a child (not killing, dissecting and doing it perfectly) but the show portrayed it as killing.

In Moldovan/Romanian one of the words for kiss is pup and yes it sounds just like poop. So to say I kiss you in Romanian would be te pup. Basically I find that type of misunderstanding funny & I enjoy learning more ways that people from different languages might misunderstand, Tower of Babel style.