He DOES understand social cues tho. Is he straightforward? Yes. He's not the "odd" one out at all. He understands that the reason he was "different" was cuz of his mom and how she wanted him to act. He finds it a pain to go against it until puberty hits and is done with it. If that were the case, the other 2 following him are also socially inept more so than him. They also don't get along with others especially the girl but no one's jumping up and saying that's autism. As both a younger and older teen you can see he is fully capable of expressing his desires and feelings. He is also capable of not shoving his feelings onto others as seen by how he treats nari and is waiting for her. He interacts well with both adults and peers. And even in the family setting, he's only the odd one out for not going along with his mom's shenanigans
i’m not really talking about how he feels when i say he’s the “odd one out” but just that he genuinely behaves as such. everyone around him views him as slightly weird or kinda abnormal — which he has always been since he was young, so it doesn’t have much to do with his mother.
i also never said that the 2 others following him doesn’t harbour autistic traits? i think the girl also has some strong resemblance to autism. I also do not understand your point of him being able to express his desires and feelings? autistic people can very well do that from a very young age as well. i think the fact that he doesn’t express his feelings through facial expressions much is also an autistic trait/symptom despite him being very aware of his feelings.
in addition, you can still interact well with adults and peers as an autistic person. his (potential) autism doesn’t affect him too much socially, but rather his overall behaviour which then is a hit or miss in a social setting. what i previously meant by him not getting social cues was a scene i remember; which was him taking nari’s plushie without her permission just because it was next to him (their first interaction, i believe).
we also know that he had late development in talking, walking, etc. (or did he just not want to? i don’t rlly remember) but he was above average in intelligence. this is pretty common amongst autistic people, which is probably the main reason why people headcanon him as autistic based on the latest chapters.
again, i haven’t rlly read the past 100 ish chapters, so i’m sure there may be other factors that prove he is or isn’t autistic. however, we simply do not know if he is or isn’t since it hasn’t been clarified yet. therefore i do not think there’s anything wrong with people making theories/headcanons they believe to be true based on how they perceived the information we got.
Chanyang is definitely autistic