Somewhere in the second act of Spider-Man: Brand New Day you stop watching a superhero film. Peter is standing in a city that knows Spider-Man and has no idea who Peter Parker is, and the two people who used to know both halves of him are walking past like he’s a stranger. And something in your chest goes very quiet. You know that feeling. You have lived inside it. Everyone knows the version of you that shows up, and almost nobody has met the person underneath.
Spider-Man is not written as autistic, and nobody at Marvel has ever said he is. What he is, in every version from the comics to Brand New Day, is a character built around masking, a fierce and inconvenient sense of justice, being misread by people who are looking straight at him, and love that shows up as doing rather than saying. Those are four of the most recognisable threads in the autistic adult experience. That is why so many of us walk out of a Spider-Man film feeling seen by a character who was never meant to be about us. The mask is a metaphor. For you it was never only a metaphor.
What the research shows
- In interviews with 92 autistic adults, camouflaging was driven by two motives, blending in to avoid harm and wanting to know and be known. Its consequences were exhaustion, a threatened sense of identity, and being seen through a stereotype. Hull et al. (2017)1
- Among 262 autistic adults, those who camouflaged consistently across every context reported significantly higher anxiety and stress than those who masked less, and many described switching the mask on and off depending on who they were with. Cage & Troxell-Whitman (2019)2
- Autistic adults passed information between each other as accurately as non-autistic adults did, and rated their rapport with each other higher. It was the mixed autistic and non-autistic groups where detail was lost and rapport dropped. Crompton et al. (2020)3
- When autistic adults talked about right and wrong, they leaned on care and fairness far more than loyalty, authority or purity, and described morality as a matter of consistent principle. Dempsey et al. (2020)4
A city that knows the mask and has forgotten the person
The premise of Brand New Day does something the earlier films only gestured at. At the end of No Way Home, Peter asked for the whole world to forget him, and it did. Four years later he is still out there every night. New York knows Spider-Man. It cheers for him, argues about him, has an app that tries to track him. MJ and Ned know Spider-Man too. They’ve met him, talked to him, been saved by him. They just have no idea he is Peter.
Sit with that for a second, because it is the cleanest picture of autistic masking a blockbuster has ever accidentally drawn.
You have a version of yourself that is well known. Colleagues know it, your family knows it, the group chat knows it. It is competent and agreeable and it laughs at roughly the right moments. People like it. Some people love it. And the version of you that stims in the car before going in, that has rehearsed the small talk, that goes home and lies on the floor in the dark for an hour, that person is unknown to almost all of them. Nobody chose that. Somewhere a long time ago you learned that the unmasked version got you hurt, and the masked one got you through, and you kept doing what got you through.
Hull and her colleagues heard this from nearly a hundred autistic adults, and the two reasons they gave for masking are the two reasons Peter wears the suit. To hide in plain sight, and to be known and connected anyway.1 Both at once. That contradiction is the whole engine of the character, and it is the whole engine of a masked life. You want to be safe and you want to be seen, and the mask only ever delivers the first one.
“My whole team would tell you they know me well. They know the guy who turns up. I’ve worked with some of them for six years and not one of them has met me.”
— Autistic adult, HeyASD community
What the film gets right, and what most people who write about masking get wrong, is that the mask works. Spider-Man is loved. The mask is doing its job, doing it beautifully, and that is the problem, because every cheer for Spider-Man lands on the mask and never reaches Peter. If you have ever been praised for something you did while masked and felt nothing, or felt worse, you already understand this scene better than the people who made it.
The one person you can take the mask off around
Here is the part of the film that hurts, and it is in the trailers so I can say it. MJ is at MIT. She is seeing someone. And Peter, the person who used to have one human being on earth who knew both halves of him, is watching her move on with a version of her life that has no room for him in it. She never rejected him. She can’t remember there was anything to reject.
If you are autistic, you probably know exactly what it is to have one person like that. The friend, the partner, the sibling, the one colleague, in whose company the mask just comes off, without ceremony, without you deciding. You say the odd thing and they don’t flinch. You go quiet and they let you. You info-dump and they ask a follow-up question. And you notice how much lighter you are, and you notice how rare it is, and the rarity does something to the attachment.
Cage and Troxell-Whitman found that a lot of us are switchers. We mask at work and with doctors and with acquaintances, and let it drop with friends and family, and the people who could switch it off somewhere carried less anxiety than the people who never could.2 So the safe person matters more than it looks from the outside. They are where your nervous system goes to rest.
Which is also why losing them, or fearing you will, can tip over into something bigger than affection. When one person holds the only door out of the mask, wanting to keep that door open can become limerence. Intrusive, consuming, a fixation that feels like love and is partly love and is partly terror of going back to being unknown. Peter is heartbroken over MJ, and underneath that he is grieving the only place he ever got to be Peter. You may have grieved a person that way and never had the words for why it went so deep.
If you have one person you can unmask around and a whole world you can’t, you already know the question that follows. What happens to the rest of you, and where does it get to live. The Unmasking Years is about the long work of letting the person under the mask exist in more than one room.
Doing the right thing and getting called a menace for it
There has never been a version of Spider-Man that the city fully trusts. He stops the robbery and the headline says he caused it. He saves the train and the police pull their guns. He does the right thing, at real cost, and is met with suspicion by the people he did it for. This has been true since the first comics, and it is the thing that keeps him going out anyway, because Peter was never in it for the thanks. He goes out because of the rule.
You know the rule. If you can help and you don’t, that’s on you. Uncle Ben said it in one sentence and Peter has been paying it off ever since. And if you are autistic, that sentence probably sounds less like a superhero’s creed and more like the way you have always thought. Unfairness lands in your body. Someone gets talked over in a meeting and you feel it in your jaw. A rule is applied to one person and not another and you cannot let it go, even when letting it go would be so much easier for everyone, including you.
Dempsey and colleagues sat with autistic adults and asked them how they thought about right and wrong. Care and fairness came up again and again, far ahead of loyalty or hierarchy or keeping the peace, and people described morality as something that should be consistent, the same rule for everyone, applied whether or not it was convenient.4 That is Peter Parker. It is also the thing that has got you called rigid, difficult, self-righteous, or a menace, depending on the room. We have written about justice sensitivity before, and about what refusing to lie costs you. Spider-Man is what both look like with a budget.
Brand New Day sharpens this with the Punisher. Frank Castle also cannot stand injustice. He also acts on it. The difference between them is a line Peter will not cross, and watching the two of them argue about where that line sits will feel very familiar if you have ever been told your principles are impressive and impractical in the same breath.
Being misread by people who are looking straight at you
Peter’s life is a long sequence of people misreading him. He is late because he was saving someone, and he is unreliable. He is quiet because he is exhausted, and he is aloof. He lies to protect the people he loves, and he is a liar. He carries something enormous and nobody can see it, so they grade him on the small things they can.
The double empathy problem names this. For a long time the story was that autistic people lack empathy, can’t read others, miss the cues. What the research keeps finding is that the misreading runs both ways. Crompton and colleagues had autistic adults pass a story down a chain and found they lost no more detail than non-autistic chains did, and rated the rapport between them higher. It was the mixed groups where information fell apart and rapport dropped.3 You can communicate. You have spent your whole life communicating across a gap, and been graded as though the gap was yours alone.
I learned this early, before I had a name for any of it. At school I went quiet for years, because every time I tried to explain what was going on inside me it came out wrong or landed wrong or got laughed at, and after enough of that you stop. Why bother, I’ll be misunderstood either way. I built a whole personality around being the one who didn’t need explaining. It took me until 38 to find out I had been calling a mask a personality, and by then it had grown into the skin.
So when Peter stands there with everything he has done invisible and everything he got wrong on the front page, you don’t need it explained. You have been the person in the room who did the most and was understood the least. To you that is a Tuesday.
“I was told I was cold for most of my twenties. I was carrying two people’s worth of worry about everyone I loved. It just didn’t show on my face.”
— Autistic adult, HeyASD community
Love that shows up as doing
Think about how Peter loves Aunt May. Across every version of the story, it is almost never a speech. It is rent money he can’t afford slipped under a stack of bills. It is showing up bruised and saying he fell off his bike so she won’t worry. It is patching the ceiling, fixing the sink, sitting with her when she is scared and having no idea what to say, so doing the dishes instead. And when he loses people, and Peter loses a lot of people, the grief is unspoken and total and it comes out as work. He goes back out. He does more.
Autistic love looks like this so often that it has become a running joke in our own community. You remember the specific brand of tea. You research the illness for eleven hours. You fix the thing before they’ve noticed it’s wrong. You drive across the city with the charger they left behind. And you can do all of that and still be told you seem distant, because the love came out through your hands instead of your face, and the person receiving it was reading faces.
That is the same double empathy gap, pointed at love instead of information. The care was never missing. Hull’s participants named wanting to know and be known as one of the two great reasons they masked in the first place, which is to say connection was the point all along, and masking was one more attempt to get it across.1 We’ve written more about what autistic empathy actually looks like, and about why the old story about it was wrong. Peter with the ceiling patch is the short version. He would rather do it than say it. Saying it never came out right anyway.
Why he is so tired
Every Spider-Man story eventually gets to the exhaustion, and Brand New Day leans into it harder than any of them. Peter has no Avengers, no Stark tech, no team. He builds his own gear in a rented room, works out his own problems, and goes out every night, and the film is honest that this cannot last. He is running on the rule and not much else.
You may recognise the shape of it. Two full lives, and only one of them is visible. The masked one is the one that gets measured, so it gets your best hours, and the real one gets what’s left, and what’s left is usually the floor and the dark and the door closed. Cage and Troxell-Whitman’s high camouflagers, the people who never got to switch it off, were the ones carrying the most stress and anxiety.2 Peter without MJ is a high camouflager. There is no room left where he gets to be Peter.
This is the road to autistic burnout, and before burnout, the smaller collapses along the way, the nights where the noise and the light and the people all arrive at once and something in you shuts. If that has been happening more often, our guide to autistic overwhelm is where to start, because becoming a better Spider-Man won’t fix it. Peter needs somewhere to exist.
What to actually take from him
Not that you are secretly a superhero. That framing has been done to us to death, and it is a trap, because it turns the cost into a feature and asks you to be grateful for it. The mask has cost you far more than it ever gave you.
Take the quieter things. Take the fact that the version of you everyone praises was built for a reason, and the reason was survival, and there is no shame in that. Take the fact that your sense of what is fair is a spine, whatever anyone chose to call it. Take the fact that the people who called you cold were reading a face and missing a life. And take the one thing Peter never quite manages, which is to stop waiting for one person to remember who you are and start letting more than one person meet you.
If Spider-Man has been sitting at the back of your mind since you saw the film, and you weren’t sure why a comic book character got that far in, this is probably why. You saw someone doing exactly what you do, at exactly the cost you pay, and for once it was on a screen where everyone could see it. Our piece on autism and Game of Thrones explores the same thing from another direction, the way the characters we recognise ourselves in are so rarely the ones written to be recognisable.
Key points
- Spider-Man is not written as autistic, and he does not need to be for the recognition to be real. The mask, the one safe person, the fierce sense of fairness and the misread good intentions are lived autistic experiences, and they were all on screen.
- The premise of Brand New Day, a world that knows Spider-Man and has forgotten Peter, is the most accurate picture of masking a blockbuster has ever drawn. Everyone knows the version that shows up. Almost nobody has met the person.
- Masking works, and its success is the problem. Every bit of approval lands on the mask and never reaches you.
- Having one person you can unmask around is where your nervous system rests, which is why losing that person, or fearing you will, can feel far bigger than a normal heartbreak.
- Autistic morality leans hard on care and fairness and expects the same rule for everyone. That is Peter’s creed, and it is what gets you called rigid, difficult or a menace.
- Care that comes out through your hands rather than your face is still care. The person reading faces missed it. You did not fail to feel it.
- The exhaustion is real and it compounds. Masking better won’t fix it. The person under the mask needs more rooms to exist in.
Questions about Spider-Man and autism
Is Spider-Man autistic?
No, not in any official sense. Marvel has never written Peter Parker as autistic, and no film has said so. What he is, in every version of the story, is a character whose life is organised around the same things a lot of autistic adults organise theirs around. A public self that people know and a private self they don’t. A sense of fairness that will not bend for convenience. Being misread by people who are looking straight at him. Loving through action because words never quite come out right. You do not need a character to be labelled autistic to recognise yourself in him. Some of the most accurate portrayals of our experience were written by people who had no idea they were doing it.
Why do so many autistic people relate to Spider-Man?
Because the mask is the point of the character, and the mask is the point of a lot of autistic lives. Peter has a version of himself that the whole city knows and a version almost nobody has met, and the gap between them is where all the pain in the story lives. Add a rigid sense of justice, a habit of doing the right thing and being blamed for it, and love that shows up as fixing the sink rather than saying anything, and you have four of the most common threads in late-diagnosed autistic adulthood. Batman is rich and Superman is invulnerable. Peter is tired, misread and still going out. That is us.
What does Brand New Day have to do with autistic masking?
The film picks up four years after the world was made to forget Peter Parker. New York knows Spider-Man. His closest friends know Spider-Man. Nobody knows Peter. That is masking in its purest form, a public self that is known and even loved while the private self is invisible, and the film is honest that the mask working is what makes it unbearable. If you have ever been praised for something you did while masked and felt nothing, that premise will land harder than anything else in the film. Everything in this article is drawn from the setup shown in the trailers, so you can read it before you see it.
Is it common for autistic adults to only unmask around one person?
Very. Research with 262 autistic adults found that many of us are switchers, masking with colleagues, doctors and acquaintances and letting it drop with a partner, a sibling or one close friend. The people who could switch it off somewhere carried less anxiety than those who never could. Having a single safe person is common, and it is also fragile, because it makes that one relationship carry the whole weight of your unmasked self. That is why losing them, or watching them drift, can feel like losing the only place you got to exist rather than a normal end to a friendship or relationship.
Why does unfairness affect autistic people so strongly?
When autistic adults describe how they think about right and wrong, care and fairness dominate, far ahead of loyalty, hierarchy or keeping the peace, and the expectation is that a rule should apply the same way to everyone. That is a consistent, principled way of seeing the world, and it means unfairness lands physically rather than intellectually. Someone gets talked over and you feel it in your body. A rule bends for one person and not another and you cannot let it go. It is often labelled rigidity by people who find it inconvenient. Peter Parker has the same trait and the story treats it as heroism. The trait did not change, only the framing.
Do autistic people lack empathy like people say?
No. The old story was that autistic people miss cues and lack empathy. What the research keeps finding is that misunderstanding runs in both directions, and that autistic people communicate with each other about as well as non-autistic people do with each other. The breakdown happens across the gap between the two, and for a long time only one side was blamed for it. Autistic empathy also tends to come out through action rather than expression. You research the illness, remember the tea, fix the thing before it is noticed. If the person receiving that is reading faces, they miss it, and you get called distant while carrying more than they know.
Why does masking make you so tired?
Because you are living two lives and only one of them is visible, so the visible one gets your best energy and the real one gets what is left. Interviews with autistic adults describe masking as mentally, physically and emotionally draining, requiring recovery time alone afterwards, and threatening your sense of who you actually are. The people who mask consistently across every setting report the most stress and anxiety. Over time this is the road to autistic burnout. Spider-Man without anyone who knows Peter is a picture of what that road looks like, going out every night with nowhere to go home to.
Are there other fictional characters autistic adults recognise themselves in?
Many, and most of them were never written as autistic. The pattern is fairly consistent. We tend to recognise ourselves in characters who are misread, who hold to a principle at cost, who are competent and quiet and misjudged for both, and who love in ways that don’t look like love from the outside. We have written about this in Game of Thrones, where characters like Stannis, Brienne and Bran carried that recognition for a lot of readers. Spider-Man belongs on the same list, with the added weight that the mask is literal, and the film industry keeps building whole stories around the cost of wearing it.
Is it wrong to see autism in a character who isn’t written that way?
Not if you are honest about what you are doing. Reading autism into Spider-Man is recognition. Nobody is diagnosing anyone, and recognition is a legitimate thing to want when you have spent a lifetime seeing yourself described from the outside and almost never from within. The line to watch is the one where recognition becomes a claim about the character or the creators. Peter Parker is not autistic. Peter Parker is written in a way that a lot of autistic adults find true. Both of those can hold at once, and the second one is worth talking about, because it tells you something about what our lives actually look like when they are shown without a label attached.
If you’ve lived this.
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