This is a trope that Hollywood loves- the genius who seems to be on the autism spectrum, or at least is extremely lacking in social and interpersonal communication skills such as reading non-verbal cues and understanding sarcasm or irony. To name a few examples— Rain Man, Sheldon from BBT, Monk the detective, and of course all the iterations and reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes.
In fact, the original Sherlock Holmes is the earliest example I can think of. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did a remarkable job creating a fictional character that seems to have been on the autism spectrum decades before autism was even recognized as a condition. Is there any earlier example than that? Doesn’t have to specifically be autism, just an example of a genius in many ways, but otherwise socially or emotionally handicapped in a significant way, to the degree it might be considered a disorder.
I don’t remember an earlier example, but Sherlock Holmes was also the first I thought of when reading the thread title.
ETA: oh, I totally forgot: Sherlock is definitely modeled after C. Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe’s character in three short stories. So maybe Dupin is the older example.
I’m not so sure about Holmes-- He actually had excellent interpersonal skills; he just didn’t like people. But he could seduce domestic servants, and disguise himself convincingly, and so on, very effectively.
Hmm…it’s been a long time since I read the actual stories. I devoured them as a kid and reread a few times over the years, but it’s been awhile. Your description makes him sound more sociopathic than autistic.
Maybe I’m thinking more of the reimaginings of Sherlock. It used to make me mad as a kid how they got Watson wrong too, like in the Basil Rathbone movies, depicting him as a dim-witted dullard. He was a doctor and the purported writer of Sherlock’s adventures, so he was no dummy. Just a normie.
The Thai martial arts, Chocolate, is about a young autistic girl who is a kickboxing savant, and uses her skills to fight the local crime gang to get money for her mother’s cancer treatments. In the films climax, she fights a boy who knows capoeira and also has Tourette’s.
Dr. Frankenstein, who is not a doctor but a freshman in college, is portrayed as having a very strange personality, but whether he counts as on the spectrum I’d have to go back and reread.
I also would have mentioned Dupin if EinsteinsHund didn’t. We think of Holmes as the first, but there were zillions of detectives, many of them deeply weird, before him.
I’ve got it rattling around in my head that there was someone from Greek mythology who would meet the description, but I can’t think of who it would be.
Hephaistos maybe? I don’t know if he was on the spectrum, but he always seemed to me like the nerd of the Olympus, an outsider without the glitter of the rest of the bunch.