I was pretty small when my friend’s parents rented the VHS while we were on holiday. The main thing I remember was that Robin Williams asked a kid how many points they got for killing a person and the kid said, “A thousand,” and my friend reacted like that was a huge deal. I remember thinking that was weird because we didn’t know what the point scale was so it might not have been that big, but I knew how to mask my autism enough not to say that. I can also speak neurotypical enough to understand they were going for the emotional effect of a big-sounding number, so in that sense my friend had the right reaction.
As an adult I can look back and go “oooooohhh this is about the military industrial complex exploiting poor young people by dangling meagre benefits in front of them”, and I think that message did seep in to my young brain in some way.
I was pretty small when my friend’s parents rented the VHS while we were on holiday. The main thing I remember was that Robin Williams asked a kid how many points they got for killing a person and the kid said, “A thousand,” and my friend reacted like that was a huge deal. I remember thinking that was weird because we didn’t know what the point scale was so it might not have been that big, but I knew how to mask my autism enough not to say that. I can also speak neurotypical enough to understand they were going for the emotional effect of a big-sounding number, so in that sense my friend had the right reaction.
As an adult I can look back and go “oooooohhh this is about the military industrial complex exploiting poor young people by dangling meagre benefits in front of them”, and I think that message did seep in to my young brain in some way.