While mostly inaccurate and incredibly flawed, the autistic savant trend has recently given way to something potentially more damaging: autistic fetishization. This new trend essentially portrays autism as cool and desirable, a primer for superhuman abilities or even the next step in human evolution. That's not to say autism can't be cool or desirable, especially when defined that way by people who live with it daily, but a problem arises when the voices defining autism in pop culture don't have autism in the first place. The result is a series of Hollywood-generated "autistic archetypes" that never entirely ring true to the experiences of actual autistic people.
Read more about about autism stereotypes in popular media here.
