EMO❌HERMIT

Green has social anxiety.

This mostly stems from his overindulgence in performance, his overconfidence, and his tendency to one-up his friends, prove intelligence, and get distraught at losses or accidents (E35). While the Influencer Arc was a slippery slope from the beginning, Green felt particularly sensitive to the amount of praise, and I imagine that it is from an already-fragile self opinion. His confidence is mostly façade, with the idea that any failure, mistake, or otherwise "poor" action ends with others hating him. He attaches hard to kindness and praise as a result of this, causing his spiral in the Influencer Arc. The more attention he received, the more he felt a 'lack' of it meant hatred, and so on, so forth.

Red has mentioned ADHD. Who's the autism?

My favourite thing about AVM or AVA in general is the usage of body language to depict thoughts, emotions, or dialogue. It's with this body language that I identified Yellow as having particularly odd body language.

This started on my second watch of E30 when I noticed that everyone runs pretty similarly except Yellow. The others have their heads down, body leaning forward and arms thrashing harshly, similar to running in anime and other cartoon media. Yellow is an outlier in that he runs with his back completely straight, arms moving with an abnormally stable force. He takes running very literally.

Alongside this, Yellow is the most emotionally dysfunctional of the CG (Colour Gang). This starts all the way back in S1 with the 'death' of Green, and how Yellow is the one who seems to be struggling to process it. He tries to comfort the others, to no avail. In the start of E23, Blue laments about the separated group, and Yellow continues to appear as if he has not processed the panic yet, or that he believes that panic is unnecessary. He seems to process grief or loss differently to the others, in that he processes it either extremely slowly or not at all. He is logical and literal to a fault.

This, among a few smaller details, gave me the idea that - if anyone in the CG is autistic - it is Yellow. From this headcanon sprung other autistic traits: mostly his special interest in Minecraft logic and mechanics. Yellow is the second in the CG (with the first being TSC, hilariously) to use the computer world to his advantage (AVA8), and is the best with the Minecraft code (the staffs past AVMS3, redstone work, coding). He gets incredibly attached to new technical things, such as the staffs, command blocks and lucky blocks, and has a tendency to lose his common sense when indulging in these items (E19). His ability to take in the information quickly (AVE), alongside forming an obsessive fixation on code and mechanics and logic, gave me the idea of this being his core hyperfixation.

Red is ADHD, Yellow is ASD, Purple... is both.

One thing I noticed regarding body language is that, of the main six in the CG; Red, Yellow, and Purple are the most prone to performing repetitive movements, flapping their arms together and doing other odd wiggles.

Purple, like Red, shares an inconsistent drive - going from impatient and controlling (E9/E10) to hyperactive and overexcited (E21/E22) quickly. He is also very attached to particular objects, such as his elytra.

Purple, like Yellow, shares an inconsistent maturity - being a mix of both emotionally mature and immature. When surrounded by older figures such as King, he attaches quickly and hard, allowing himself to regress mentally (E22) and appear more childlike. This is to say that Purple contains both the ADHD traits in Red and the ASD traits in Yellow, suggesting that he may have both conditions, and have struggles regulating them.

Orange/The Second Coming has PTSD.

While this is a common HC from an angst perspective, I'm coming at this from an analytic point of view. TSC's core points of trauma that continue to affect him are the first half of AVA4, the entirety of AVA S2, and many events from AVM S1 - and these all share a common theme in death. TSC, at several points, has seen his friends almost and actually die - from AVA8, to AVM E8, when he's seen visibly dissociating after the accidental 'death' of Green.

This started with me simply identifying that TSC reacts badly to a lot of stressful situations. He is easily the most paranoid of the CG, being the one that directly rejects returning to the nether (E20), and also being prone to catastrophizing (E11). This paranoia also makes him prone to controlling the actions of others (E11, E20, E24) and getting angry when things don't go his way.

Speaking of anger, TSC has very poor anger management, but this mixes with his fear. The fight sequence in E24 has two main sections, separated by when TSC is holding back against Red, and when his anger takes over. Both at the start and end of the fight, TSC struggles to fight Red, mostly due to his own fear that he can go/has gone too far (AVAS2). When he does lose control, this is even proven as he tries to truly harm Red, and ends up frightening him (Red goes from instigating the fight to running away).

This is all to say that I feel TSC still struggles with the concept of death in the form of post-traumatic stress. Among all this, he also struggles with sleep (I identified him having hypersomniac traits rather than insomniac traits (AVM S2)), has issues trusting others (E20), and is incredibly attached to the people he has almost lost (namely Green but also the rest of the CG). These all come under both common and uncommon traits of childhood PTSD responses.

That was a lot.

The topic of my various analyses started in the Alan Becker server as I stuck my foot in there, but I also wanted to pass this onto Tumblr and Twitter. What do you think? I'd love to spark conversations with people, and also talk about more literal headcanons (I want to make a separate tumblr thread for that).

Either way, I hope this no-image, entirely-text post gave you some ideas or at least a look at how I feel about the CG and their responses to various situations. It's all part of how I write them and I would love to do more with these headcanons - but, for now, I merely talk.