Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Louie Duck (DuckTales)

*Louie-related spoilers.*

As I started to realize—first gradually, then with increasing speed—how easily so many DuckTales characters could be viewed through a neurodivergent lens, Louie was the main member of the Duck family that I couldn’t really see as anything but neurotypical. He doesn’t really infodump like Huey or vocally stim like Dewey, and he doesn’t have Webby’s penchant for obsessing over a new skill until she masters it. It took me the longest to figure him out, but once I did, it made a lot of sense.

One of Louie’s defining characteristics is that, like Scrooge, he’s obsessed with money, but unlike Scrooge, he has no desire to earn it through hard work. Whether that hard work is funneled into business or treasure-hunting, it all seems like too much effort for Louie. Instead, he turns his attention to get-rich-quick schemes, concocting numerous plans to strike it rich without having to put in the time.

Of course, in the service of avoiding hard work, he actually does work pretty hard. Scrooge is the first to notice that Louie can “see the angles,” recognize all the variables of a situation and put a creative plan into place, one that’s informed by what has and hasn’t worked in the past. Louie’s classic pose has him slumped on the couch drinking pop and watching TV, but he demonstrates that he’s more than willing to put in the necessary brainpower and legwork for a good scheme.

I didn’t peg this as an autistic trait until Della’s return in season 2. As Louie struggles to cope with his mom being home after ten years, trying to figure out how to process the enormity of what’s happened, he admits that, for him, seeing the angles is about preparing himself for every eventuality so nothing can catch him off guard or upset him. And that’s when I saw it—this is how Louie tries to create structure and systems in an unpredictable world. He manages the chaos by examining it until he understands familiar beats and probabilities.

At its heart, seeing the angles is pattern recognition. It’s hard for Louie to get excited about an adventure when he’s already seen how often a fun romp takes a death-defying turn before resolving into a payoff—and he figures there has to be an easier way to get the payoff while skipping the unpleasant parts. He’s not interested in exploring an ancient civilization because he keeps a running tally of how often one of them has nearly been sacrificed in a ritual. Della coming back throws him for a loop because he’s never had a mom before. He doesn’t know how to arrange this experience into something predictable.

This brought me around to an AuDHD headcanon for Louie. Whereas, with Webby and Della, autism and ADHD simultaneously leap out in both their characterizations, I’m going with the dual neurodivergence for Louie mainly because it would make sense that ADHD is masking a lot of his autistic traits and vice versa. He can largely fly under the radar in ways that the super-autistic Huey and super-ADHD Dewey can’t, appearing more neurotypical than his brothers until we see it come out in his attention to detail and pattern recognition.