Bit of a disadvantage since I haven't actually read the book and don't really know exactly how she was written, but the the impression I've gotten is that the author basically shrugs the whole thing off as if it was "just a phase" rather than a lifelong emotional condition and is now completely "normal."
Shrugging it off would require
some sort of reference, and I didn't see any.
^Worse than I thought then.
That plus the impression I had was that Cerberus's medication had compounded an already existing condition, not created it. Even if it had, autism is a neural development disorder that has a very real physical effect on the way a person's neurons connect. Their brains are literally wired differently. While it's true that there are varying degrees of autism and some are functional enough that they can take care of themselves and pass for "normal" (for lack of a better term), whichever way you slice it, Gillian's condition was pretty damn severe--at times bordering on catatonic--for almost the entirety of her childhood. Drug induced or not that MUST have a noticeable impact.
In the real world, I'd agree. On the other hand, she'd opened up noticeably even by the end of
Ascension (or whichever book it was), after spending time without the drugs. So it wouldn't exactly be unprecedented.
I'm willing to suspend disbelief *to a point* for the sake of drama and buy into her condition improving in the relatively small timespan that Ascension encompassed (a few weeks/months?) However, no amount of 1-on-1 care and hanging out with quarians is going to erase that entierly. It's quite literally part of who she is and always will be, right down the the neural pathways.
Think Dustin Hoffman in 'Rainman' or Summer Glau in 'Firefly' & 'Serenity' for good fictional comparisons. Both characters improved greatly over the course of their respective stories, but they were still who they were. If someone were to write a story featuring River (who BTW, I realise wasn't autistic) set some years after 'Serenity' and wrote her dialogue as if she was a perfectly "normal" young woman with no trace of her idiosyncrasies, it wouldn't be River and nobody familiar with the character would--or should--buy into it. The way she perceives the world around her never changes, only her ability to process and articulate changes.
One of the main things that bugged me about Dragon Age II is how it basically brushed off your DA:O character with some offhand remark about how The Warden had mysteriously disappeared. My warden didn't (nor could she) go through the mirror at the end of Witch Hunt and as far as I was concerned she'd retired back to Highever with Leliana. I imagine it was even more irksome for players that actually killed Leliana!
I didn't necessarily mind the comments about the Warden disappearing. Characters coming back from the dead, though... that's a problem.
My concern with bringing our saves further forward again - I know that ME1 and DA:O both have a lot of save flag bugs that result in imports not getting all the right data. I don't exactly have confidence in ME2/ME3 not suffering the same fate.
While I do recall some issues, I don't think any of them where particularly serious. In fact the only ones in ME2 I can recall have something to do with a news report regarding Sirta Foundation and whether you intimidated or charmed Conrad Verner. Admittedly the latter was a little annoying, but the difference was minimal with no impact on actual gameplay the latter was utterly harmless and I doubt most would even notice. As far as I'm aware all the major flags worked fine, as did most of the minor ones.
Dragon Age was a different situation since the development team (who I should point out are a separate team to the ME devs) made a conscious choice to run roughshod over several possible endgame permutations. Maybe because they didn't originally intend for any of the DA:O characters to figure much into any of the following games and so painted themselves into a corner in DA2 when they found they wanted to use some characters who were killable in the first game.
In the case of Mass Effect 4, moving things on eliminates any such conflict as just about everyone (who isn't an Asari or a Krogan) would be long dead. I'd be happy if the only carry over from my ME3 save is a statue of my Shepard on the Citadel, rendered with my custom appearance.
