THE PLACE IS MY SKULL TO TREPANATE!

As An Autistic I am a little hesitant to slap concretely autistic headcanons onto all of my faves — both because it tends to feel overly self-indulgent past a certain point and because I feel like in a lot of cases it’s just unsatisfying to boil all the neuroses and quirks that give a character their intrigue down into a single concrete Diagnosis™ (consider, too, that this pattern of reductionism doesn’t stop at fan culture and is very much also felt by real life autistic people).

However. I will say. It was extremely funny of Game Freak to retroactively introduce the idea that this character, whose specific issues I seem to really relate to for some reason, is also really, really into Japanese myths and will talk about them at exhaustive length to a random French orphan he literally just met (to the point he still remembers the basics of his infodump about 10+ years later!). I can 100% imagine him coming to Kalos knowing the language perfectly well, but to very utilitarian ends — he can talk shop and threaten people, and that’s fine, that’s all he needs. And if you’re Kalos PD, of course, he only speaks Japanese.

But then this fucking kid, who he’s only feeding and housing for a few nights primarily because he feels sorry for him (and because his spirit and temper reminds him of his boy, safe at home a continent away), starts asking him the sorts of questions that only a child would ever really ask a man like him — about where he’s from and the cool things he’s seen and his favorite stories, and all of a sudden he’s pulling out a Kalosian dictionary trying desperately to find the words to describe the concept of Rayquaza to an eight year old who can’t point out Hoenn on a map.

And, again, he does such a bang-up job at this that the kid apparently still remembers it as a fully grown loan shark. So like…you’d forgive me just this once, right?

Ultimately, do I think Giovanni is autistic? I don’t know, I’ve entertained it before but it’s not something I’m as set upon as many of my other headcanons about him. The assertion that I’m actually going to make here, and the one that I think ultimately does more compelling work for his character than deliberating on if he is or isn’t — is the proposal that, if he is on the spectrum, he would almost certainly never figure that out for himself.

I do pretty squarely headcanon him as being some kind of mentally ill, but it’s that nebulous sort of Male Mental Illness, the untreated depression and brain fog that middle-aged men are want to power through because they believe that this is just what adulthood is Supposed to be like and that something is wrong with them if they can’t just power through it and be the pillar they’re expected to be. (I also very much believe this rubbed off on Silver, judging by the…everything about him.)

And…yeah, I could very much see this as being a believable part of that. Him growing up seeing himself as a cut above the rest in terms of intelligence and cunning, but also as deeply fundamentally flawed and ‘other’ in a way that those around him can’t (or won’t) name or point out to him directly, but ultimately also understand. And him, again, internalizing the idea that whatever is wrong with him is a Him Problem, and something that can and should be rectified through his own reductive view of success, of power and influence and capital — and then realizing on some level, once he finally has all of those things, that they were never what he needed or wanted and will never be enough.

if you're a rabbit, the boss rabbit is the one who gets groomed by its subordinate rabbits.

but if you're a cat... the boss cat is the one that grooms the other cats.