"I take it your daughter is... special? What they call
autistic?"

Awright.  From what little I know of autism, Azusa doesn't quite fit
the profile.  Autism creates a lack of response to outside stimuli,
whereas she's very outgoing and responsive to what goes on around her.
The obsession with cute and the childlike behaviour _could_ be
indicative of some sort of developmental disability, but autism 
doesn't seem to fit as well as it might.  

Then again, I could be completely wrong.  It's been known to happen
before.  This is always the problem with trying to apply real-world
standards to a character played for laughs in the original material.

Autism is one of those funny conditions which can express itself in ways
very different from the textbook case.  There was an autistic girl in
several of my classes in high school; she was an idiot savant who loved the
sciences but couldn't handle english or social studies, and she was
frighteningly unpredictable and violent, several times physically attacking
me and others (with remarkable ferocity -- one student had a large hunk of
his ear bitten off.)  She would do this in the middle of conversations for
no apparent reason, which is hardly a lack of response to outside stimuli.
She was also very childlike, in some ways; she had several small animals
that she loved to tell everyone about (over and over again,) and she wore
the same simple t-shirt and sweatpants to class every day

I don't really understand the definition of autism, but I do know that the
condition covers a wide range of personality types and behavior.

Thomas Schmidt
Tmschm@mail.wm.edu
http://nabiki.newberry.edu/job/