This is primarily an autism focused question, although allistics please do chime in if you have something interesting to say!
I’m not referring to stuff like Therians or “not feeling human”, although those are deeply fascinating topics. No I’m strictly referring to finding the task of imagining the human form (in say “daydream stories”) to be unpleasant/uncomfortable.
When I was real young I was REALLY uncomfortable imagining the human form. No problems with animals and weird creatures thought up by toddler me, those didn’t make me uncomfortable!
I brought this up with my IRL friend who’s also autistic. He also experienced something similar!
Anyone else also do this? I kinda want to just… Talk about it. It’s interesting.
A friend of mine struggles with live action movies and tv shows because she finds looking at actors much harder than looking at animated characters. I think i at least used to have that for a while and with most autism related things, i find it impossible to tell how much of that does not apply to me anymore solely because of masking. I also used to find it much more comfortable to imagine drawn characters than photorealistic ones (although i can generally imagine most things besides rotational geometries and spatial stuff in a way that is at least close to photorealism - this is about what comes to mind organically, not about what i can viualize).
While I never had any problems looking at actors and faces and all that, I do kinda vibe with this.
I don’t give very much thought towards human body language (including human faces). Animals though? Give quite a lot of thought towards that! I can get fairly detailed with characters emoting. Deer mice getting pissed, snarling their incisors and having their fur puff up. My author self insert character (a white tabby cat) gesturing with his front paws, facial expressions, the ears rotating around.
Thank you ma’am! Your comment has given me more to think about!
Animals emoting is … something that comes up a lot among my friends. Especially the ears!
Oh yeah, the ears! The ears are a massive part of how animals emote!
Us primates are really weird for having largely static ears. Most mammals have a lot of tiny muscles attached to the ears for making fine adjustments. Their ears are also visually prominent on the face! They “ear-to-head ratio” is quite large, making for a large prominent feature on the head. Perfect for using the ears as “flags” to tell everyone else what you’re feeling!
My writing be like:
Humans: “Lola slammed the table from being pissed.”
Mice: “Paul, now very much intimidated, shrunk down, flattening himself against the ground, and kept his face pointed up at the pissed off butch lesbian that was bearing down on him.”