As They Ever Were With Him - Tumblr Posts

For everyone who finds Oliver's behavior confusing or illogical or just plain weird in Saltburn: that's likely how Oliver felt all the time about most other people around him.

Being neurodivergent in a world that expects everyone to think and act and engage with others in the same way (but never quite spells out what that way *is*) doesn't just mean that you act in a way that other people find weird and confusing. It means that you often find the way other people act and interact with the world to be weird and confusing right back.

Unlike Michael Gavey, who decided everyone else's weird confusing behavior was a them problem that he didn't care to understand, Oliver wanted to understand his "normal" peers and fit in with them.

Unfortunately, Oliver fixated on a guy who was popular because of his money and good looks but was also so privileged that he only had incredibly warped and unhealthy relationships of his own with his peers, so Oliver's best attempts to learn how to fit in and get other people to like him by pleasing and emulating Felix wound up with him murdering his way into lonely castle ownership and a coke addiction, instead of making any actual friends.

Meanwhile, said rich guy and his family never "saw through" Oliver's actions, because Oliver had fed them a story where all his socially awkward traits could be explained by a background of external trauma sources rather than an inherently neurodivergent view of social interactions, so they expected him to be a neurotypical kid with Trauma and thus neatly explained away any unexpected behavior while still assuming that his behavior in general would be mostly normal by the standards they were used to.