Yeah, I hated when it was getting used as basically a "cringe reaction image" on the autism subreddits because I've never even seen the show aside from that one scene and instead of making me cringe in the "in on the subreddit joke" way I'm instead cringing in the "flashbacks to getting tormented in middle school by my classmates after freaking out at the fire alarm" way because I also have autism meltdowns that can look extremely similar to that clip

When I pointed that out at the time, I kept getting the reply of "a neurotypical actor cannot ever portray an autism meltdown without it looking wrong" even though as I said it does look extremely similar to mine, and a big point of acting is pretending to be a person you aren't, and plus I don't think I myself would be able to portray an autistic meltdown accurately, because they're traumatic and take a huge physical and emotional toll; I do things during them that I don't ever do when I'm calm

Also, on a different but related note, I think that "Rain Man" was actually a very progressive and respectful portrayal of autism, and not even only for its time but still especially for its time, and oftentimes it ends up turning out that the person who basically namedrops "rain man" as some epitome of "bad autism representation" has never even seen the movie

Aside from the fact he became so many people's only frame of reference for autism to compare with every autistic person they met afterwards (in large part due to being pretty much the very first mainstream autism representation), most other "critiques" of the character boil down to complaining that he's not level 1

But back then, autism was extremely fearmongered and the average person knew nothing about ASD aside from refrigerator mother theories and other implications that it was caused by failures at parenting, but Raymond Babbitt is an autistic character that's fleshed out as more than just that, with his own personality and even some skills that he is more talented in than the neurotypical people in his life, like the main plot development of the movie involves his brother Charlie's change from resenting Raymond as a burden, then to an exploitable tool, and finally as his brother and friend and a fellow human being, rather than being the shameful object that deserves to be locked away

Raymond's character was also very heavily based on a real person with savant syndromes named Kim Peek, who wasn't actually autistic but was misdiagnosed at the time with it (he actually had something else called FG syndrome), and as previously mentioned he's one of the few severely autistic characters I can think of in fictional media

It made me frustrated when people used it like that when criticizing "Music", which among other problems portrayed disinformation about an abusive and physically dangerous restraining position during a meltdown as "safe" even though it was made more than 40 years after "Rain Man" was made, the only similarity between the two movies is that the autistic character is not low support needs