everything's computer, everybody transgender

He doesn't have close relationships with any of his employees; they are just employees, and by the end of Chapter 3, most of them have left. He calls Lanino and Elnina "old friends" when begging them not to leave, and considering their presence in his Castle Town room, there's probably some truth to them, as his second-in-command, being closer to him than his other employees are, but it's unclear whether they actually consider him a friend. I'm inclined to believe they don't view their relationship as closely as he does (assuming he isn't just calling them friends as a way to be overly affectionate in an attempt to appease them; something I'll talk about later). The impostor Mikes are a hollow replacement for his real friendship with Mike; he does seem to like (or at least prefer) Cat Mike/Pluey, but is upset to see Small Mike and demands Pluey instead; his feelings towards Cowboy Mike are unclear as of now.

The way the impostor Mikes, or at least Battat, treat him isn't great either. Battat consistently infantilizes Tenna (something that commonly happens to autistic people), such as tucking him into bed and singing him bedtime songs, and wondering if Mike is an "imaginary friend" (the kind of thing a small child generally has); Small Mike talks like some kind of overbearing nanny. The entire dynamic the trio has with Tenna is itself infantilizing, since they genuinely think he believes them to be the real Mike. It's akin to a guy dressing up as Santa to make little kids happy; what makes the kids happy is that they believe it's real. This infantilization is likely a big part of why Tenna prefers Pluey, who behaves like a cat, and because of this probably doesn't infantilize Tenna - not to his face, at least.

While Tenna's bad behavior towards his employees, yelling at them and being highly demanding, contributes to his lack of closeness with them, it doesn't fully explain it, and is also certainly exacerbated by his preexisting lack of closeness with any of them. He lacks any real emotional support, meaning he has to suffer through all his struggles alone, which results in his more toxic behaviors. Trauma in general can lead to difficulties with emotional regulation, and his specific trauma surrounding abandonment and the loss of loves ones, leads to him being more controlling - and even then, that control comes entirely through the contracts everyone signed willingly, and once they quit, he doesn't actually do anything to stop them; he just begs them to stay.

Worth noting that they leave individually or in small groups, rather than all uniting together to stand up to him, because they recognize that he's not actually a threat and it's not necessary. After they quit, they have fun sneaking around with the Fun Gang, dancing in the Cooking Show Room, the Pippinses literally steal from Tenna in front of his face, the Shadowguys are doing their own concert, etc. It's all very out in the open. If Spamton isn't present during the pipis cutscene, they will also show up to shame Tenna for his consumption of pipis. While he will try to defend himself, their opinion clearly affects him, and he leaves his own child behind and runs away, allowing her to be abandoned or destroyed.

They don't respect him at all, and likely never have, and this is an interesting contrast between him and the other two leaders, King and Queen, who are taken seriously and respected by their people, either through reverence or through fear. Tenna doesn't inspire the same feelings in those around him; he's openly insulted and shamed by his equals (like King) and even those who are lower than him in the Dark World hierarchy. He's at the top of his world, and yet still ostracized.

In the Chapter 5 cutscene, Tenna says that ever since Spamton left, everything feels like playing pretend. While he is, in part, referring to the literal game of pretend he has with the impostor Mikes, because the real Mike no longer talks to him, he also likely feels like he can't be truly authentic with anyone other than Spamton, the only person that ever understood him.

Features of autistic communication may include directness/bluntness, repetition, and being hyperverbal (in simpler words, talkative); there's also the earlier mentioned example of not sharing or communicating one's emotions/feelings, like not telling anyone if they're having a bad day.

Both Spamton and Tenna are very talkative, as are the objects they embody; both spam emails and TVs talk a lot. Repetition is also a trait present in both; the term "spam" itself describes unwanted repeated messages, and TVs may broadcast reruns of various shows.

In the Dark World, the trait of being talkative is particularly noticeable in Spamton, since we have other Addisons to compare him to and see that he talks far more than them; part of it is certainly due to being more narratively important, but that doesn't entirely account for the difference. It's also implied that the Addisons found him annoying, with them saying he would "shoot his mouth" about making it big one day; a negative framing. Them saying he was doing this "every night" also highlights repetition. He talked a lot about the same subject repeatedly.

With Tenna, there's an interesting bit of dialogue that happens before his final battle:

When searching for what he might've done to upset the party, his immediate assumption is that he was talking too much. This likely didn't come out of nowhere; he was probably judged by others for his talkative nature in the past.

Throughout the gaming section, while the party is playing The Legend of Tenna, he keeps saying stuff, even when it's not necessary to explain what the party is supposed to be doing, and when none of them were trying to talk to him; he also gets ignored by them a number of those times, such as when he directly asks if anyone else thought the Tropic of Love was cool, and none of them respond. There's also him asking the party to say "I love TV" 99 times, and then doing it himself once the time was up; so he at least likes repetition.

Now, directness/bluntness. Spamton is generally pretty honest and direct. In his introductory monologue, he infodumps about his past, and he expresses a desire to see Kris's SOUL, immediately revealing what he wants; he explicitly states it again after becoming NEO. If defeated by fighting in his miniboss battle, he will explicitly admit that he's trying to rip people off. He mentions being physically in pain several times without being asked, and he complains a lot about how other Darkners have abandoned him; he's fairly open about his feelings.

Tenna doesn't communicate how he feels as openly as Spamton does; along with his final monologue in Chapter 3, the other major instance of him communicating deeper emotions and thoughts is in the Chapter 5 cutscene. He especially doesn't communicate to Lightners about his relationships with other Darkners; he largely avoids the subject when aware that they can hear him and only talks about his purpose as a TV, expressing only a desire to be watched (to survive by being useful), but making no mention of how lonely he is in the Dark World and how much he misses the one person he deeply connected with. In the rare times he acknowledges his desires beyond his purpose, like a wish to travel, he hides it behind comedy so that Lightners don't take it too seriously. Most of the time, he doesn't tell anyone how he's feeling, in part likely because he doesn't expect any support with his struggles, but it may also have always been an autistic trait of his. In the rare times he does communicate, he is fairly direct.

An example of both Spamton and Tenna being blunt is seen whenever they want to insult someone; there is no subtlety, they will explicitly call people mean names. Examples include Spamton calling the Addisons "sloppy sams" and calling Tenna a "criminal" and a "Boob tube" (idiot box), Tenna calling Spamton a "little freak", and this interesting contrast between Tenna and Queen:

Both of them are calling Rouxls stupid, but Queen does it in a more subtle way (enough that I, as someone who is probably autistic, didn't immediately pick up on it). "Bright" can be a synonym for "smart", so she's calling Rouxls stupid by saying that his brightness level seems low. Tenna, on the other hand, just bluntly calls the lamp "stupid", and also phrases it awkwardly. Their insults towards Rouxls are a very useful comparison between them, since both of them are upper class (and specifically rulers of their respective Dark Worlds) and are insulting the same person, meaning the difference can't be attributed to the relative social status of the characters. Tenna just communicates very directly; perhaps it doesn't even occur to him to be more subtle.

Queen will either lie to be nice (as she did with Berdly, calling him "smart" despite not believing that) or will be mean to people in more subtle ways, as she does here with Rouxls, or how she was basically ragebaiting King in their Chapter 2 cutscene; she never name-called. [EDIT: Also, it's worth noting that she knows King well, and they clearly indicate some level of mutual affection, so she's being playfully mean in that scene]. Meanwhile, when Tenna doesn't like someone, he will express that bluntly, even when they can hear him or he's speaking to them directly. Even his insult towards the Spamcannon's shortened nose is very direct, he just calls it "small and disgusting" rather than making some sort of more subtle joke.

Some examples of Tenna perhaps not being very good at reading the room include: his first appearance in Chapter 3, interrupting an emotional moment between Susie and Ralsei and turning it into a part of the show; him interjecting when the Weather Duo is arguing, and them being clearly annoyed and telling him to shut up (which he does); and him using diminutive nicknames on people he doesn't know very well. Importantly, he was not trying to antagonize the other characters in any of these situations.

We have examples of the diminutive nicknames with Toriel and King, which is notable, since Toriel is a Lightner (someone inherently above any Darkner in the hierarchy) and King is Tenna's equal as the ruler of another Dark World.

Although Tenna is the embodiment of the Dreemurrs' TV, having been with them for many years and knowing a lot about them, his attachment to them is one-sided and, from Toriel's perspective, he would be a stranger; he also definitely wants her to like him so that she doesn't throw out the TV. But it doesn't seem to occur to him that maybe he shouldn't be calling her "Tori", at least not yet, and stick to the more formal/neutral "Toriel".

Now, with King, Tenna is genuinely trying to entertain him. And this is how he introduces himself:

Aside from his awkwardness, he also uses a diminutive nickname, "Kingy-doodle". It doesn't seem to occur to him that this might annoy King and undermine his own chance of success at entertaining him. King gets annoyed with him and yells at him to leave, and as Tenna does so, he trips and falls, which King and Lancer laugh at. He's initially (rightfully) upset about this, until King says "I like this one". After a lifetime of being ostracized and judged, Tenna doesn't have enough confidence or dignity to stand up for himself, and he clings to any crumb of positive attention (even if it comes at his expense), so he accepts this as a positive.

Tenna actually seems to believe that being overly affectionate will appease others; at least, that's what he naturally jumps to whenever he's in a difficult social situation, like when Susie overheard him scheming and he tried to deflect from it (as I mentioned earlier, I also wonder if him calling the Weather Duo "old friends" is an example of that as well, rather than indicating an actual friendship). He also generally becomes awkward in unexpected social interactions, like Kris coming to talk to him between the Rounds, the aforementioned case of Susie catching him scheming, or when everything goes wrong during Round 3 and he starts saying things like "that was so normal!". He's a good performer only if he has a script. Without one, especially in a stressful situation, he quickly falls apart, and his difficulties with socialization become more apparent.

Another trait of autism is the desire for routine and predictability, and becoming distressed when a plan or routine was disrupted by outside factors. Such a desire for adherence to routine, and for things to be done the "right" way, can make an autistic person seem controlling, even though their intention isn't controlling the lives of others, but rather their own.

I'd argue this is part of why Tenna behaves the way he does as a boss; he gets annoyed even at minor deviations from his plans, such as the Pippinses doing something they weren't "supposed" to do in The Legend of Tenna, even though it didn't have a significant impact on the game. Ramb's criticism of how Tenna modified the game is interesting as well, with him saying Tenna "made the whole adventure some big ol' blasted line from A to B" and that this is boring; Tenna not only took out a lot of the violence, but he added more structure to the game, more predictability. I think the desire for routine/sameness and difficulty handling changes, especially big ones, is also part of why Tenna has such difficulty accepting that the Dreemurr family fell apart; even if they had continued to watch TV and he wasn't at risk of being thrown away, he had a pretty fixed idea of how the family is "supposed" to be and he was used to it, so it was difficult for him to accept that it has changed.

We have examples of Spamton liking predictability as well, or at least disliking risk and uncertainty. His changing room is the Z-Rank, something one can only get by performing poorly on purpose. He'd rather have the certainty of his performance being the worst than the uncertainty of whether he would achieve his desired result if he tried to aim higher, or the risk of being made fun of for an earnest attempt to perform well; performing poorly on purpose guarantees that he has control of the situation. He likes to plan things out, and when it doesn't go the way he expected, he struggles to handle it and stay composed, such as him getting upset if Kris's inventory is full after the SNEO battle and he's unable to immediately add himself to it; this shows both his strong attachments to people (and sensitivity to rejection) and his dislike for his plans getting disrupted by unforeseen outside factors.

An example of both Spamton and Tenna desiring predictability is what they envisioned as their ideal future: a stable home, a stable job, and a conventional family setup, with them in a lifelong partnership having and raising a child together. When granted autonomy, they pursue stability and commitment; this is their idea of happiness. They can travel when they want to, as both of them express an appreciation for driving around and feeling the breeze, and Tenna expresses a desire to go on a tropical vacation, but they want to do that on their own terms, rather than being forcefully moved around by outside forces, the way Darkners generally are as objects.

Because of Deltarune's visual style, with the characters getting a limited amount of sprites, certain other features of autism, such as eye contact or lack thereof, or smaller motor movements that may be examples of stimming, won't be visible to us unless they or another character points it out. I think Tenna's standing and dancing sprite, used in places like his Castle Town room, could be interpreted as a stim. I'll also mention the theory/headcanon that the reason his tie is not tucked into his suit is so that he can stim with it. [EDIT: Adding that Spamton is quite physically expressive as well and does a lot of little movements.]

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