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{{trope}}
[[File:rain_man_dirty_harry2.png|link=Xkcd (Webcomic)|right]]
 
The Rainman has a [[Disability Superpower]]. Karmic law dictates that every mental birth defect has a compensating benefit. Like [[Min-Maxing|taking flaws on an RPG character]], there is always an intelligence point payback, and usually a special skill, too. Some Rain Men are [[Loners Are Freaks|friendless creepy freaks]], others are [[Genius Ditz|lovable weirdos]]. Rain Men are ''always'' equipped with supernatural skills.
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See also [[Science-Related Memetic Disorder]], for a truly exaggerated take on the subject; [[Crazy Awesome]], for utter insanity as opposed to a simple mental disorder; [[Idiot Savant]] when the disability is just plain stupidity, and [[Neurodiversity Is Supernatural]] for if the character's "gift" is a superpower. Can overlap with [[Useful Notes/High Functioning Autism|High Functioning Autism]].
 
If you are looking for the film called ''Rain Man'', it is [[Rain Man (Film)|here]].
 
{{examples}}
 
== Literature ==
* [[Discworld (Literature)/Unseen Academicals|Mister Nutt]].
* We might as well nickname this trope "Stephen King's Magic People With Mental Conditions."
** [[The Stand|M.O.O.N., that spells]] "Magic People With Mental Conditions"... The sort that [[Evil Eye|ward off]] [[Big Bad|evil]] [[Cosmic Horror Story|interdimensional]] [[The Antichrist|apocalyptic]] [[Evil Overlord|overlords]]. They also tend to be [[Too Dumb to Fool|secretly wise]] characters who have [[Karmic Protection]] against the villain.
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* Pick a [[Dean Koontz]] novel, any Dean Koontz novel... nine times out of ten there will be a mentally handicapped character of some sort who has extraordinary gifts, up to and including psychic powers...
* ''A Wizard Alone'', the sixth book in the [[Young Wizards]] series, centered around an autistic character who was portrayed as locked up in his own head on account of being autistic (which is a very inaccurate portrayal of what it is like), but was taking advantage of this [[Did Not Do the Research|writers' error]] to lock up the [[Big Bad]] in there with him. A little off in that being autistic didn't seem to give him a lot, otherwise, and was basically treated as something awful that'd been sicced on him by the Forces of Entropy and a metaphor for people closing themselves off because of a trauma such as grief. {{spoiler|In the end he pushes it off on <s>Satan is everywhere</s> the Lone Power and becomes a normal wizard, apart from his special ability to be two places at once, which is caused by being a conduit for holy power. Which is unrelated to the autism, incidentally, or at least not ''said'' to be related.}} Something like that.
* [[The Millennium Trilogy|Lisbeth Salander]] is a combination of [[The Rainman]], [[Badass]] [[Dark Action Girl]], and a healthy serving of [[Broken Bird]]. She's incredibly withdrawn and doesn't get on well with others (to the point where she was legally declared mentally incompetent), but she has a [[Photographic Memory]] and extraordinary talents for hacking and working with machinery and can dig up practically ''any'' information about someone given enough time. In the books she is speculated as being an Asperger, but she doesn't really fit the definition given the calculated ruthlessness, flexible independence, and lack of anal-retentive compulsions. The author himself, in talks with his editor, stated that he saw her more as a borderline sociopath with incredibly bad upbringing circumstances, which would fit better, or how he envisioned that a modern-day [[Pippi Longstocking (Literature)|Pippi Longstocking]] [[Truth in Television|might turn out after growing up (as a mentally disabled orphan) in the Swedish bureaucratic system]].
* Friendly of ''Best Served Cold'' (followup novel to ''[[The First Law]]'') is a bit odd, taciturn, and, well, [[Ax Crazy]], but he's also ''excellent'' with numbers. He gets hung up on counting especially, such as the fact that there are eight letters in "counting," and that two times eight is sixteen which is the square root of two hundred fifty-six which...
* It's been speculated that Jeremy Clockson in ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Thief of Time|Thief of Time]]'' is autistic. He's also a brilliant clockmaker who instinctively knows what time it is. In fact, he knows it so deeply that he gets [[Berserk Button|really upset]] if he sees a clock that's wrong.
* In ''My Godawful Life'' by Michael Kelly, a parody of [[Misery Lit]], Euphemia has Asperger's ''and'' [[Tourettes Syndrome|Tourette's]] Syndromes {{spoiler|although it's also implied that she fakes them as an excuse for her lack of empathy}} but also serves as a walking dictionary, thesaurus, A to Z, clock, calendar, episode guide for ''[[Doctor Who]]'' and ''[[Star Trek]]'', and is a prodigy in a variety of disciplines including maths, physics and Latin.
* ''[[Mass Effect]]: [[Mass Effect (Franchise)/Ascension|Ascension]]'' has Gillian Grayson, a high-functioning autistic preteen with extremely high biotic potential (gravity manipulation/telekinesis). Early on while she's doing schoolwork she only occasionally types in an answer, but it's always the right one. However, she does seem to be somewhat realistically portrayed - physical contact is alternately not felt and painful, she doesn't understand other kids, she doesn't always respond to someone speaking. Kahlee Sanders, taking care of her, thinks that going off the Cerberus medication she was taking and being in an environment suit among suited-up quarians contribute significantly to her disability becoming somewhat less severe by the end of the book. She shows some emotion and more curiosity about things happening around her, and with the suit insulating her from the outside world, physical contact doesn't overload her senses.
* One of [[The BabysittersBaby Sitters Club]]'s clients was an Autistic girl who couldn't talk unless she was asked to name a date or if singing was part of the music she heard (she was a piano savant). At one point her sitter discovers that a neighborhood boy was charging other children to see the freaky savant girl.
* Little Pete from [[Gone]]. He is a five-year-old and severely autistic. In Diana's [[Random Power Ranking]] system, [[Muggles]] are 0, most mutants are 1-3, [[The Hero]] and the [[Big Bad]] are 4, and Little Pete is 10.
 
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== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[St Elsewhere]]'': In the series finale, the entire series is revealed to be the figment of an autistic teenager's imagination; a tiny building set inside a snow globe served as the hospital where the main action was set.
* ''[[Parenthood (TV series)|Parenthood]]'': Max Braverman, the 8-year-old son of Adam and Kristina Braverman, has Asperger's. Several episodes have featured characters on the autism spectrum or issues related to the disorder.
* Game shows: Several game show-related talk boards have members who are on the autism spectrum, and affected to varying degrees.
** While not directly noted as such, a subject of the 1979 game show ''The Guiness Game'' (where contestants won cash prizes for correctly guessing whether a world's record would be broken) was a child who could instantly figure in his head a ridiculously complicated mathematical equation. (The kid came up with the incorrect answer.)
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* ''[[Monk]]''
** "It's a gift... and a curse."
* Detective Goren from ''[[Law and Order: Criminal Intent]]'' is awkward and stutters but has an exceptional attention to detail and problem solving skills.
** He also faced down against an Aspie who was able to arrange murders so that no one would ever notice a pattern. He was so good that Goren and Iames only caught him because someone else made a mistake.
** That, and he {{spoiler|would unconsciously arrange things in a certain pattern, including the "random" dump sites.}}
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Carter: "Whatever. Still gonna look it up." }}
** Which nobody ever did: November 3rd, 1957 was a Sunday. Says cal(1) on my Linux machine.
* Many [[Fanon|fans speculate]] that Chloe O'Brian in ''[[Twenty Four|24]]'' has Asperger's, though it's never been confirmed by TPTB.
* Spinelli on ''[[General Hospital]]'' is so good with computers that the [[The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything|Port Charles Mob]]...''convinces'' him to work for them. At one point, Matt Hunter wants to test him for autism, but he refuses, telling him [[Shaped Like Itself|he is Spinelli]], and no further explanation is needed.
* ''[[Airwolf]]'': A boy with Down Syndrome has the ability to accurately draw something for memory. His father, an aircraft designer, gets kidnapped by people who appear to be working for [[Red Scare|a certain non-democratic state]].. He is able to draw the outside of the house, thus allowing Airwolf's image recognition system to find it.
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* ''[[Fringe]]'' has an episode about a mentally challenged individual (forget if they mentioned the cause) who is given IQ steroids to the point of being able to predict outcomes and create Rube Goldberg deathtraps.
* An episode of ''[[In Plain Sight]]'' had a bookie's accountant who had Aspergers. She was the perfect witness because she couldn't lie, but she was the worst [[Witness Protection|protected witness]] because it was impossible for her maintain a new identity. On top of that she still believed her boss was her friend and tried to visit him ''during the trial'', which nearly got her killed.
* An episode of ''[[Without a Trace (TV)|Without a Trace]]'' had an autistic boy go missing. The parents were asked if he had any special abilities. They outright say [[Defied Trope|"You mean like Rainman? No!"]] Although, he does do some pretty detailed drawings and can recite all the eras of the geologic time scale.
* Abed from ''[[Community]]''. Lampshaded after Abed has managed to sit perfectly still for twenty-six hours waiting in a room simply because Annie asked him to:
{{quote| '''Professor Duncan''': It's ''you''! It's your fault!<br />
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== Videogames ==
* In ''[[Clive BarkersBarker's Jericho]]'', Cpl. Simone Cole has the ability to [[Rewriting Reality|hack into reality itself]] by the magic of autistic weirdness and high mathematics.
* ''Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura'' has the "Idiot Savant" background, which gives you a huge boost to intelligence and gambling, at the expense of social abilities. You also get the "stupid" dialogue, which doesn't make exact sense, but I guess writing up a complete set of extra dialogue would've been too much.
* Probably the titular Max from [[Sam and Max]] at least in the Third Season, The Devil's Playhouse: He has no long term memory, the attention span of a fly and no social skills, but he has latent psychic powers which are linked to Toys.
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== Webcomics ==
* ''[[Last ResortRes0rt]]'''s Daisy Archanis is an autistic [[Mad Scientist]]; while the only real 'power' she's demonstrated so far are some kickass deduction skills that helped her figure out {{spoiler|Jigsaw was a vampire before anyone else}} AND {{spoiler|discreetly inform Jigsaw of this by exploiting Jigsaw's new thought-reading skills in order to avoid breaking [[The Masquerade]]}}, bonus materials imply that her autistic facets are actually a ''symptom'' of being a [[Our Souls Are Different|Light Child]] and thus having the potential for supernatural powers (albeit lacking the training to use them).
* The recently reintroducted Noah in [[El Goonish Shive (Webcomic)|El Goonish Shive]] has an number of Aspergers-like traits, including having ''absolutely no idea'' how social conversations are supposed to work. Knowing the series, however, it's more likely he'll turn out to be an alien or other-worldly being who just doesn't get human culture.
* Jiro Sasaki from "[[RubysRuby's World]]". Somewhat subverted in that he was a literal example in his youth, but his autistic brain has been complemented by the [[Super Soldier]] process to which he was subjected. His body and brain are augmented by nanotech, so his talents can be applied to pretty much anything... except understanding other human beings.
 
 
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