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Do you like fiction?

As a teenager, I had a lot of ridiculous, strong opinions! Basically whatever I thought first became steadfast.

I'm guessing that's how these topics came to be.

As I was slowly proven wrong, one by one, every conclusion and every assumption shown to be false with experience, I lost that unwarranted, rash confidence and went in the opposite direction. I know nothing for sure!

Maybe next up is the middle ground?
 
I really like fiction movies but am not drawn at all to books that are fiction. With books, it's really hard for me to get attached to the characters, to understand their intentions and emotions (unless I can relate a lot with the main character or that the setting itself is of interest to me). I mostly read books to learn about things. I don't feel the same about movies though. On the contrary, I get super absorbed in movies and can feel a lot of emotions watching movies.
 
I like some genres of fiction, but not others. I like science fiction or fantasy or adventure - with plenty of action - or possibly comedy, but not drama, classic literature, poetry or romance - I find those boring. I also like non-fiction. I liked those as a child, because they were a way of relaxing and escaping, or a way of learning new and interesting things. I always liked novel ideas and facts, things that are different, strange or weird, a different way of looking at things or perspective on what would otherwise be mundane, and science fiction has plenty of those.

I've never been into TV or movies - I don't like the excessive hype and commercialisation associated with most mainstream Disney or Hollywood productions. Most of them are too cliched, and just boring - I want something different or unusual, not another boring romantic comedy. I don't like the way they need all these emotional feelgood tropes, life is not like that. My escapism involves entering a new reality where things are just different, I don't fantasise about having a stereotypically perfect life with a perfect husband, two kids, a car, salary, loads of friends, happy family and all this American dream-like stuff that according to Hollywood people should aspire to.

@SUM1 do you play video games? I kind of feel this way about video games - I don't consider them to be bad in any way, I just never got into them - I grew up in the 70s and 80s and my family weren't very well-off financially, so we never had a computer or video games. Only more affluent families could afford those. Then as an adult, I was never interested, and I didn't have kids either, so I never had exposure to them. Now, it seems like the world except for me plays video games, I'm definitely in a minority here.

I played PC games from age 4 until about age 13, but they were never anything like RPG or FPS games. A lot of them were physics games, or games that incorporated gravity and realistic physics. I consider myself to have played those as a mode of learning, learning physics and ballistics subconsciously. Things like Phun, Free Rider 2 and Tricky Truck. I very much liked sandbox games or games without goals, things that could just be considered toys. And they were the only ones to attract me – the other ones turned me off. It seemed I was only attracted to that which I felt I could apply in real life. I never found storyline games or roleplaying games interesting. I also never wanted a video games console – I found it pointless to buy a system purely dedicated to playing a limited selection of games. But I haven't played games for years and would consider it a waste of my time now. There are much richer ways to learn now, so that's what I dedicate my time to. Yes, I do feel sort of alone in seeing a lot of people around me continue to play games into adulthood, but nowhere near the level of alone I feel in other things like not liking fiction.
 
All through grade-school, I rejected almost all facts as irrelevant. Science, math, everything, I constantly failed everything, except English! I didn't think anything else applied to my life. And I was right! If you read my post on your other thread first it makes sense.

I should point out that, although I was almost the best in my school before age 11, I quite rapidly declined in performance up to age 18, almost entirely down to my severe bullying and becoming more and more disillusioned confused with the curricula and marking criteria. My rapid learning began when I left high school aged 15 (due to said bullying), at which point I learnt over 100 times more than I ever learnt in all my school years purely from Wikipedia, which has continued to this day. Starting with politics and going on to prehistory, anthropology, history, linguistics, taxonomy, biology, genetics, etc. I now see school as the most ineffective load of crap for teaching me personally (may I point that out)* – I was turned off of almost every subject I took in school. It made me absolutely hate some of them. But since I left, I now love them. So I now see the distinction between school subject and general topic bigger than ever. *Though I do believe there's an element of school that is inhibiting the learning and wellbeing of everyone that attends, and if not that then certainly people with autism and/or social anxiety like myself.

I would never use a person's school grades as a measure of their ability therefore, as it ignores all sorts of factors such as bullying, peer influence, all the stresses surrounding school and exams, the completely botch criteria which doesn't value knowledge but instead values following commands and answering in the specific way they want you to.

A side-note that just came to me that I feel is interesting: during times of abuse, especially in children, your mind protects you from what's happening by dissociating. Your consciousness takes a break from reality. It's not by choice, and it's essential. Escapement from reality is natural.

I don't know if I can even relate to that :/ . I do escape, I have always escaped and distracted from bad times, but it's never been to fiction. It's been to things like music, learning, sharing laughs with my one friend. It's also not that I don't have an imagination. I can imagine many things. I imagine my ideal world all the time, and music and pictures can help elicit that. I think there is something about my mind that hates being forced to rules and plans it can't understand. I think it explains part of why I failed at high school curricula and why I've never been attracted to fiction, where the story is all laid out in full for you. It would also explain why I liked computers and sandbox games without a goal, because the possibilities were endless and were there for me to find. That also ties in with the that whenever I've been put in front of a digital device with some kind of lockdown, I've exploited it. When I was 9 or 10, I found a way using command prompt to send popup messages to every computer in the room in school, which the teachers called "hacking" and gave me my only detention for. I also found files I shouldn't have in my high school computer. Anyway, this must explain some of my aversion to fiction.
 
Yes, I read a lot and watch a lot of TV series. I like movies too, but I don't watch them as often.

What I like about it:
- There has been some evidence that watching TV series makes you feel less alone and ticks the social box without being social. As pathetic as it sounds, it certainly does this for me.
- It helps me understand emotions in others (and myself) as the context is very clearly spelled out. I am usually pretty good at figuring out 'who did it' or what direction a movie is going to go in.
- It's a welcome distraction from my head.
- I can be really impressed that humans made up something this good and realistic.

However I know quite a lot of people who don't read and/or watch TV series / movies. Most of them are NT, but I can't imagine you are alone in that.
 
I've loved fiction ever since I was able to read and would spend almost all my free time as a child reading and re-reading books because they stimulated my imagination and were often more interesting than the real world. These days I also regularly write fiction as a hobby and that's added to the enjoyment, studying the technical side of constructing a story.

I found any consumption of fiction as a waste of time, because it would be a lot of investment into something I couldn't apply in my life or help me understand the world around me.
Reading fiction has been shown to improve brain connectivity and mental health, not to mention providing a place for people to explore worlds very unlike our own and improving visualisation. But my stance is that, as long as you enjoy fiction, that's all the justification it needs.

What is annoying though is that when I see how so many autists do like fiction intensely, and that even though I am diagnosed with Asperger's, I see the meaning and value of the autism diagnosis go down and down every time I see how fundamentally different I am to other autists. Even when fundamental things like the liking of non-fiction and the inability to feel empathy are in all the literature around Asperger's, so many autists, both self-professed and diagnosed, are so intensely opposite to those things. Yes, I get it that autism is diverse, but that's not the point. The point is it makes me wonder who on earth I can relate to and where I fall into.
There are loads of people who don't read fiction or watch many films - my uncle is one off the top of my head, but I'm sure you could find many by searching online. Liking or not liking fiction isn't really related autism, as far as I know, other than people possibly struggling with figurative language used (but that can appear in non-fiction as well).
 
I should point out that, although I was almost the best in my school before age 11, I quite rapidly declined in performance up to age 18, almost entirely down to my severe bullying and becoming more and more disillusioned confused with the curricula and marking criteria. My rapid learning began when I left high school aged 15 (due to said bullying), at which point I learnt over 100 times more than I ever learnt in all my school years purely from Wikipedia, which has continued to this day. Starting with politics and going on to prehistory, anthropology, history, linguistics, taxonomy, biology, genetics, etc. I now see school as the most ineffective load of crap for teaching me personally (may I point that out)* – I was turned off of almost every subject I took in school. It made me absolutely hate some of them. But since I left, I now love them. So I now see the distinction between school subject and general topic bigger than ever. *Though I do believe there's an element of school that is inhibiting the learning and wellbeing of everyone that attends, and if not that then certainly people with autism and/or social anxiety like myself.

I would never use a person's school grades as a measure of their ability therefore, as it ignores all sorts of factors such as bullying, peer influence, all the stresses surrounding school and exams, the completely botch criteria which doesn't value knowledge but instead values following commands and answering in the specific way they want you to.

I'm pretty sure that's the consensus about schools. I don't think many would argue that school offers the best, most efficient way to learn. Their goal is to educated as many people as possible, and when your goal relates to quantity then quality has to suffer. Learning in-depth in any subject isn't expected in school and learning on your own would have to happen, as I'm sure pretty much everyone here as figured out.
 
I wasn't saying it's a waste of time for other people. I said I found it to be a waste of time, myself. That was just my own experience speaking.

I can relate to what you felt. I 'almost' never read fiction books from the time I became an adult until about four or five years ago. I was really stuck on non-fcition - following my interests, of course - and I did feel like I was wasting my time if I read something that wasn't real. Like you, I wasn't thinking fiction was bad, because I actually loved movies (guess that's how I got in my narratives), just that I wasn't interested and couldn't bring myself to spend time on a novel.

But then nearly half a decade ago I suddenly got interested in novels and started reading more widely. Who can say why... It was like a switch. I still watch tv and movies, too. I now find myself reading novels that have some connection to my special interests...i.e. the same thing I always did with non-fiction :p
 

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