In my opinion, Will Graham, Holden Ford, and Gregory House are the best autistic characters I've seen. They're very smart, and while House is actually a genuis, the way his intelligence is approached compared to a characters like Spencer Reid or Sheldon Cooper is vastly different. They're extremely passionate and good at their jobs (which are arguably their special interests) but it just feels a lot less... gimmicky and like its not feeding so much into stereotypes. They stim and get overstimulated all the time. They have relationships, but they struggle with social interaction and society's expectations. They're rude quite a lot, not because they're inherently mean people, but because while they can recognize they're being rude, they either can't understand that the reasoning society has put in place for why their actions/words are rude or they don't even really notice because they can't naturally recognize the social cues going on around them (House specifically wants to be an asshole but I'm talking about how he acts unintentionally). They have one person they're really close with who understands them but otherwise tends to isolate themselves. They struggle to understand how they're feeling. They're different. They're weird, but not comically so. They feel like they were written as real people with real emotions and not as some extreme, unrealistically fake character.
Don't get me wrong, I love Spencer Reid as much as the next person, and autism is a spectrum, and I know there are autistic people who do relate to him and other autistic characters. I just feel like autistic characters are so often sensationalized, infantilizated, and written as almost comically unrealistic. And I'm not saying Will, Holden, or House aren't unrealistic because they are in a lot of ways, but they don't feel like a joke. The point is that we are all different, and it's nice to see characters break out of that mold that autistic representation has historically forced them into.
Again, autism is a spectrum, and I know there are people out there who relate a lot to Spencer or Sheldon or whoever, and that's completely fine. But I feel like we so rarely get to see autistic characters actually on a spectrum, instead of being shoved into one box.
