stardustmacaronOkay, let’s talk about Hikari Yagami being autistic, because I’ve wanted to for a while. This is going to be a bit all over the place, but-
Let’s talk about this kid who apparently barely spoke except through a whistle when she was younger, unless it was to an animal.
Let’s talk about how she’s shown to be “popular” with her peers, yet seems to have no actual friendships outside of those shared with her brother.
(In contrast to the other kids, Mimi is shown to have friends outside the chosen children group, Yamato has his band, Taichi and Sora have each other and their sports teams, Jyou and Koushiro are shown to be not very social either, and Takeru is always presented as an outsider when he arrives anyway, so his social groups are difficult to determine. Hikari, despite being shown to be well-liked, is only shown having friends outside the chosen children exactly once, in Our War Game... Where she spends the whole party seeming more concerned with playing social skills correctly than the world ending lol.)
“The Call of Dagomon” feels like an extended metaphor for Hikari’s emotional fragility, her self-destructive empathy, her difficulty connecting with others, and her over-dependence on her brother to make up for what she lacks.
But one thing that really sticks out to me is her character in Tri. Hikari always came across as oddly mature for her age, too patient and too understanding for an eight-year-old. And Tri cemented that, because she’s largely not changed at all. She didn’t need to. She was already prone to acting much older than she was, in between bouts of more normal behaviour for a child, so as an adolescent, she just comes across as... Still mature beyond her years, in the exact same way she did at eight.
Her maturity levels are interesting. She’s definitely a happy kid a lot of the time, she’s playful, she can be snarky (the English dub might have turned this up a bit too much, but her teasing nature was there in the original too), she likes joking with the other kids and playing with Tailmon. And then at other times, she feels like a tired adult trying to counsel someone much younger than her. She feels like a character who is both too old for her body and too young for her mind.
And anyone who is familiar with autism can probably tell you that incongruous maturity levels like that are pretty standard, and Hikari fits that to a T.
Of course, a part of this can be argued that it’s likely a result of Yggsadril and Hikari’s crest nature. But crests are born from the children’s underlying traits to begin with, and Yggsadril likely chose Hikari because Hikari has such a deeply empathetic nature that she could hear and see what others couldn’t.
In addition, there’s dialogue in the PSP game (highly recommended for insight into character dynamics the anime didn’t go into) that shows she related to Koushiro’s attachment to his laptop through her own attachment to her whistle. It’s a comfort item for her, and is later replaced by her wearing a camera around her neck instead. (I don’t need to make a case for Koushiro being autistic, do I?)
In general, I like to think of Hikari as autistic, almost as a compliment to Koushiro being autistic. Koushiro is prone to insensitivity due to his difficulty in reading others and his tunnel vision for his interests, Hikari runs on the opposite end of that spectrum, she’s so overly conscious of others that she harms herself to keep them happy, and has difficulty settling on a concrete concept of her identity beyond her brother. Both of these extremes are common in folks with autism!
Addendum: my parent (also autistic) has pointed out that while Koushiro exhibits stereotypical signs of low masking autism, Hikari exhibits stereotypical signs of high masking autism, the kind that girls often exhibit that leads to late diagnosis. … Make of that what you will.
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