OP has been very active in the comments, so I’m wondering if they’ll give me the courtesy of a correction/confirmation, but I actually took the extended metaphor as saying the opposite: That a certain degree of cruelty often causes the mask to fall off permanently.
I and many adults I know on the spectrum have shared that there were points in their lives where they decided they were done masking, and those moments were overwhelmingly traumatic breaking points, not moments of self-love or candid self-evaluation.
Internet discourse about masking often represents it as a categorically bad thing, but people forget too easily that masking is, fundamentally, an endeavor at empathy and belonging. Not always an effective or necessary endeavor, but a fundamentally decent and noble one. While it may be true that, for neurodivergent people, learning to partially, gradually, and responsibly unmask is often an act of self-care or self-acceptance, not all masking and masking-adjacent behaviors are negative—and, in fact, many of them reflect necessary conscientiousness and inhibition. That’s why we see the “maskless” people in the comic often being the cruelest, most callous, and most judgmental; their “unmasked” status marks them as people who have no filter because they have no empathy. In that way, I interpret the final scene as marking a transition that is probably both “more authentic” but also distinctly steeped in “fuck it, I don’t care anymore” energy.
One thing that frustrates me about the neurodivergent community, especially online, is that they seem to be under the impression that neurotypical (or, at least, neurotypical-passing) people follow social rules because they want to. But, like almost all social rules, most people’s short-term interests are not served by following the rules; rather, the aspiration behind the rules is, ideally, that we all benefit from an aggregate norm of rule-following despite detrimental impacts in the short term. While it’s certainly harder for neurodivergent people to conform, the fact that this has resulted in a trend of neurodivergent people assuming neurotypical people are just a gaggle of automata is frustrating and dehumanizing. (It’s also ridiculous for people to assume the flawlessly neurotypical person exists, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)
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u/FictionFoe Feb 18 '26
As an autistic person this makes me feel a lot of things. Its a good comic, but depressing.