Yes! There's actually a lot of pretty compelling research to support this.
Representation in fiction does genuinely help both those being represented to "see themselves" in scenarios or roles they don't see people like them in in their daily lives and may not have seen as "for them". And then it also makes readers who aren't like the character empathise with that group more and by showing their daily life makes it less alien to the audience, reducing fear and prejudice.
There's a need for both metaphor and direct representation in the world.
Metaphors can be great for that wide applicability, ability to still provide escapism or to allow folk to relate to something without alerting bigots by directly depicting it. They're valuable!
But there's also a need for direct representation based on lived experience and research in order to normalise things people might otherwise see as "alien" or "hard to relate to" or just never conceive as existing.
I didn't realise I was autistic til a couple of years ago, in my mid-thirties, because depictions of autism in media tend to show autistic people as: Always cis-het white men or boys who are really into maths and/or science and dress like an old professor or a small child, speak in a nasal monotone and are obsessed with sci-fi, and are completely unfeeling and unaware of other people's emotions." Oh, and they're never the empathetic protagonist, they're pretty much always the mysterious or frustrating person the protagonist has to deal with.
This is a problem because it both makes it impossible to see myself in those characters, but also as a way of familiarising NT people with autism makes them expect something so different from me and almost never pushes them to relate to an autistic person.
It's not perfect, but I've been loving Incredible Attorney Woo on Netflix because:
1. It's a courtroom drama with romance elements so all the neurotypical women at my job will happily watch a show about an autistic character suddenly because the genre and presentation are familiar to them.
2. It's about an autistic woman and explicitly uses that term. Her special interests are law and sea mammals and while she does wear baggy clothes, she's cute and fashionable, so she's not just all the usual stereotypes.
3. The autistic protagonist is sympathetic and even gets a romance subplot, opening up the idea that an autistic person can be a functional, relatable adult.
4. It depicts NT people working with an autistic person and dealing with problems that would realistically arise like "she has become overstimulated", "She's having a meltdown", "She interpreted your brief very differently from how you expected." (all problems that have actually occurred with me at work), but ultimately they manage to work together well and win cases, and she's a productive member of the team.
People watching Attorney Woo come out of it with a much better understanding of autism, and with that useful template of having seen examples of how an autistic person can work with others, perhaps in an office a lot like theirs and with people a lot like them, how to deal with problems, and how to relate to them than say, people who have watched Star Trek and been told, "You know, in some ways Mr. Data could represent autism."
