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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.