My Thoughts on Extraordinary Attorney Woo as a Fellow Asian Woman with ASD

As a young woman with Asperger’s Syndrome, I have been looking forward to seeing more ASD representation in movies and TV shows. The South Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo turned out to be the perfect show for me, which I started watching last summer. The titular Attorney Woo is named Woo Young-woo, a young South Korean attorney with high-functioning autism. Her interests are only limited to two things: the law and whales (to the extent where the mammal’s imagery is used to represent her “lightbulb moments”). She was raised by her single father, her mother abandoning her just after she was born. She has only one true friend outside of work, the wild and equally eccentric Dong Geu-ra-mi. Having graduated from law school but struggling to find employment because of her condition, she applies to be an attorney at the prestigious Hanbada law firm. She gets the job and while her co-workers initially find her odd, they gradually warm up to her with the exception of the jerkish Kwon Min-woo, who schemes to get her fired from Hanbada upon surreptitiously discovering that she got the job because of nepotism. Using her high intelligence and eye for detail, Young-woo manages to work her way through the cases she’s given, whether they are won or lost and not without judgment from the people around her.

While I do not work with the law, I still manage to find my situation to be similar enough to Young-woo’s. While I can still show interest in other things, I am more likely to be enthusiastic about two particular things as well: BTS and gender inequality, to the point where I may zone out when they are not relevant in a conversation. Because of this, I struggle to relate to other people and make friends. While I’m confident that my social skills are better now than they were when I was a teenager, it’s still a work in progress. I also feel that my overachieving, perfectionist tendencies alienate me from my neurotypical peers. I tend to use vocabulary and terms that not many people would understand. In fact, a scene of Young-woo as a child has her reciting definitions of assault verbatim that she read from a book in her father’s legal library. I also have panic attacks when I’m in a tense situation/have a sensory overload. I struggle with eye contact from time to time but I try to get better at maintaining it. I can be very blunt to the point where I may inadvertently offend someone. I also tend to talk in circles and not really get to the point. I can easily say that attention to detail is one of my best qualities. I live in fear of certain people judging my ability to do certain things simply because of my condition.

However, another thing that caught my attention was Young-woo’s love interest, co-worker Lee Jun-ho. He may look the part of your archetypal conventionally handsome male lead who can have any “perfect” girl he wants yet shows genuine interest in his autistic coworker who is fascinated with sea creatures from the day they meet, even at moments where everyone else would be annoyed with her antics. His first interaction with her has him patiently helping her with the revolving doors. His first instinct is to comfort her when she has panic attacks. He got into a brawl with a friend who expressed his disapproval of her. He still agrees to go whale-watching with her even if it’s not one of his favorite things in the world. When she decides to break things off with him following a painfully awkward meeting with his family out of fear she would be a burden to him (though she tells him this in an ambiguous manner), he is genuinely hurt. This is not to say that softer male leads are completely absent from Korean shows (especially if they’re aiming to cater to the straight female audience with a hunky leading man) but seeing one that falls for a woman with mental disabilities even if it means he will have to take care of her even more than he would a neurotypical woman is heartwarming to see and a nice departure from the mafia bad boys that have become a staple in South Korean entertainment.

I think that Park Eun-bin (Young-woo’s actress, who is neurotypical in real life) does a fantastic job in her portrayal of a young woman struggling to make her way in a world built for neurotypicals because of her disability. Despite being extremely intelligent, she also comes across as childlike due to her obvious quirks such as counting to three with her fingers before entering a room, her iconic “kayak, deed, rotator, racecar” introduction, her discomfort with being touched, repeating other people’s questions and as mentioned before, her fixation with whales. Yet she still shows unflinching determination to succeed in her cases and utilizes her strengths to do so, even if her team doesn’t stand a chance and despite people’s prejudices, not helped by her sometimes unintentionally offensive brutal honesty. Hopefully as diversity becomes more prevalent in modern media, we see more autistic representation not for the sake of political correctness but because it goes to show that all of us on the spectrum can do our job just as well as our neurotypical peers as long as we utilize our strengths and everyone around us can acknowledge them instead of focussing on our weaknesses.