RELATED TERMS: Anime and Manga:
Barry Watt, a psychotherapist working mainly with young homeless people, situates the popularity of the South Korean drama series Squid Game within a larger movement of young people towards Japanese and Korean anime and manga. They are looking, he conjectures, for a response to their experience that is not being met by western European media outputs The characters in anime and manga, by shifting back and forth between low affect and high violence, demonstrate a narrow emotional range. Watt suggests that this narrowness might appeal to the growing number of people who identify as neurodiverse, for whom old-school storytelling, with its complex plotting and layers of characterisation, is a perplexing phenomenon.
Neurodiversity is an umbrella term covering a number of neurodevelopmental conditions. These include ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia and Dysgraphia.
Literary Examples
In The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki establishes a complex neurodivergent subjectivity as she traces the character Benny Oh’s journey into schizoaffective disorder (Harrison, 2021).
References
Williams, Z (2012) Game, debt and catch: how Squid Game got its tentacles around us. The Guardian, 9 October 2021. [An online version of this text, which differs slightly from the print version, is available at https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/09/netflixs-squid-game-owes-its-popularity-to-anxieties-of-modern-life]
Harrison, M. J. (2021) Zen and the art of reality. The Guardian, 9 October 2021.
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