Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Ben Wyatt (Parks and Recreation)

I already talked about my AuDHD Leslie headcanon, so it only makes sense to talk about Ben’s autistic coding too. He has a lot of similar traits to Leslie along with a number of different ones, and the way their brains work is part of what makes them such a great couple.

When Ben is introduced at the end of season 2, he’s the matter-of-fact “bad cop” to Chris’s relentlessly cheery energy, the one who’s deep in the weeds of Pawnee’s budget spreadsheets and is prepared to tell them what they can’t afford. He’s not a miserly hardass—it doesn’t bring him joy to slash budgets and tell people no. At the same time, he’s not all that sentimental about it and doesn’t try to sugarcoat things. Instead, he sees numbers as plain and truthful, and he’d much prefer to be honest about the reality that cities are facing with their budget woes. There’s something that feels really autistic about this to me, not just Ben’s approach to the whole thing but the way other people react to him. He’s assumed to be the penny-pinching villain from the state budget office, and people assign mean motives to his value-neutral statements, thinking he gets off on their budget crises when he’s just doing his job.

Ben’s attention to detail and love of numbers/spreadsheets is something that makes him very good at his job and also brings him a lot of personal satisfaction. It’s not boring or busy work to him, and he genuinely likes it. He’s into rules in general—he loved the regulations and protocol of Model UN in high school, and when he designs a board game, it’s so fastidiously complicated that it’s only really embraced by fellow accountants.

Ben’s initial job, traveling around Indiana to help different cities with their budget issues, might seem at odds with his autistic traits, but it’s actually a good fit for him. Even though he’s constantly going somewhere new and meeting new people, the transitory nature of his work means he never has to really get invested in those people; he’s just passing through, and each city has enough commonalities with the others that they all start to feel familiar with one another. Not to mention, with Chris as his partner, Ben is often left to deal with the numbers while Chris handles more of the interpersonal aspect. If anything, becoming a more permanent fixture in Pawnee is a little harder for him, actually becoming part of the fabric of the local city government and viewing the other characters as colleagues and friends. By that point, his affection for Leslie is obvious, so it’s worth the effort for him, but it takes time for him to find his footing within the group.

Just as I’m realizing that so many of the shows I really love have Big Neurodivergent Energy, I’m also figuring out that a lot of my favorite romantic pairings involve two neurodivergent-coded characters. Like I said at the start of the post, part of what makes Ben and Leslie work so well together, as coworkers and as a couple, is the similar way their brains work. They have plenty of dissimilarities, but they’re both obsessive about policy minutiae and get genuinely excited about working through the finer points of local ordinances. Both have certain struggles and insecurities, but rather than covering them up and putting their best neurotypical-passing foot forward, they’re open and honest about what’s hard for them, what scares them, and what they don’t understand. In Ben’s case, he’s great at his work but gets really nervous under public scrutiny and can flail—his first media appearance in Pawnee is impressively disastrous. They’re not really shy about how much they like each other, and when they have a problem, they talk it through. Even if interpersonal relationships can be difficult for autistic folks, they often have fewer barriers in communicating with other autistic people, and they’re less likely to succumb to the neurotypical pitfall of letting an issue fester because both parties are pretending everything is fine. Ben and Leslie’s mutual honesty and willingness to talk about things, even when it’s awkward, makes them pretty unstoppable when they get together.