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catharsis-in-a-bottle · 3 years

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A very long post about romantic attraction, social situations, sexual orientation, etc.

In short, a slightly organized brain dump involving some of my personal experiences and hopefully some takeaways.

There are many things I’ve learned, both in general and about myself, simply by investigating online resources about the acespec and arospec communities.

Some of these were things that I think I already knew internally, but that I had never voiced before because I didn’t have the words or the terms to describe them.

I’ve learned about different types of attraction, and I’ve realized that I can categorize them internally. For example, I’ve definitely mistaken platonic attraction with romantic attraction in the past. The term ‘squish’ - basically a sort of friend crush - can be applied to several of my experiences, and honestly, it really explains my conscious disconnect towards romance. I’ve realized that wanting to get to know someone better does not equate wanting to date them.

I’ve learned about other arospec identities, like greyromantic and demiromantic, and how they might apply to me. I’ve realized that my romantic attraction has essentially been limited to one person, and that otherwise my desires have been platonic - again, wanting to get to know someone better because I find them interesting, or else having a deep admiration/respect for them. None of these things are romantic attraction, and it’s been very relieving to discover this. It makes sense.

I think I’ve always had a weird feeling towards all the societal cues and expectations associated with romance. Why are certain things associated with wanting to form a romantic relationship? As a child, I thought I was a girl and I knew, just from the social code of school life, that becoming friends with boys would be seen as some romantic advance (despite the fact that we were all literally elementary schoolers.) In first grade, everyone thought I had a crush on this kid I was friends with, and I always laughed at them. I was just looking for friends. Friends isn’t a freaking gender-specific term. I think I’ve always kind of tried to “play it cool” with the boys, especially in middle school, simply because I didn’t really want anyone to think “haha, so-and-so is dating so-and-so” just because I had a conversation with another person. And what sucked is that when I thought I might be bi, I kind of consciously did the same thing around girls as well - I tried to be socially adept and “cool” and not too overly open, just because of all of these social codes that indicate romantic intent.

One of these strange codes that confused me was this: “if so-and-so has a crush on you, you should totally date them!” What if I didn’t like so-and-so back? Why the hell would I date them? But something that I witnessed happening quite often in middle school was kids finding out someone ‘liked’ them and then wanting to ‘like’ that person back, despite not having formed attraction in the first place. It felt like a puzzle. It was something that I observed and maybe sort of over-analyzed, because dissecting social situations and laying out pieces of the puzzles on the floor is something I just do. I reckon that kids were not only beginning to experience romantic/sexual attraction individually, but that they were also recognizing the social standards that were beginning to form. The first batch of kids wanted to form relationships (if not long-lasting ones), and so they did; other kids who were experiencing attraction subsequently felt a little bit of pressure to get with someone fast. The complaints of “I’m so sad I don’t have a boyfriend” and similar phrases rang free throughout the hallways. In short, allo- and heteronormativity seems to have influenced a lot of people. Which is fine for many, but also restricting for those in the lgbtq+ community (but of course, the jungle of school life does not intend to cater to the minorities) It was simply a thing that happened, and a thing I’m seeing a bit more clearly now.

[Also, the concept of using the word ‘like’ to describe adolescent romantic interest in another person always confused me. I never got why ‘like’ had romantic intent - I liked people that I’d formed friendships with. No one ever outright said “I have a crush on this person.” They just said like.]

There’s only one occasion on which I’ve known how to react emotionally to someone telling me that he had romantic interest in me, and that’s only because I personally ‘liked’ them back. I had already imagined that situation, and I welcomed it. [Amusingly enough, we both kind of ignored our confessions for a while, but eventually we formed an actual relationship. Ah, the joys of social situations.] But in terms of other people admitting their interest, which hasn’t happened all that much but has still happened, I’ve had very mixed reactions. One time a couple of years ago, it was my friend whom I cared very deeply about. I didn’t really know how she knew that I didn’t have interest in dating her, but somehow she did, and she told me so. This made my reaction less clouded and more simple, and it wasn’t really an uncomfortable situation; I confirmed easily enough that I didn’t have any interest in dating her and the situation resolved nicely. Basically, although it wasn’t an ideal occurrence, it didn’t affect our friendship in any way.

But there have been other times where it’s been extremely uncomfortable. Once, I joined an after-school club in which I barely knew anyone. During one of our meetings, we took a walk to a local coffee shop to just sort of hang out. And this girl - I’ll call her ‘C’ for online purposes - sat down and started talking to me. This was fine - why not have a bit of conversation? She talked about K-pop a lot (which eventually got very annoying lol) and just seemed like she wanted to be my friend, and internally I told myself well, I don’t really know her and she doesn’t seem like the kind of person I want to hang out with but we’re at a coffee shop and I’m bored. At the end of our coffee shop trip, C asked for my phone number. I didn’t take this to mean anything beyond the fact that she wanted to talk to me more, and though I felt inclined to decline her offer, I really didn’t want to hurt her feelings (again, the joys of social situations.) So now she had my phone number. Here’s where things got weird. For one thing, she sent me a bunch of random pictures of K-pop singers, saying things such as “omg he’s so hot” which was already uncomfortable in itself. Me, being a bit of an idiot, didn’t stand up for myself, or even block her number. Then, she came out to me as pansexual and told me she had a crush on me. When she told me this, she did not imply in any way that she didn’t have an intent of dating me or something, so I was very, very uncomfortable for several reasons. Firstly, I didn’t know her that well - I didn’t really even consider her a friend. Secondly, I definitely did not want to date her because I didn’t really know her. And thirdly, I didn’t know how to react. I think I said something along the lines of “Oh, well, um, okay, I don’t have a crush on you” and left it at that. For the final puncher, she started finding me in the hallways after school as she left for the bus and giving me hugs. I am typically not a physically affectionate person, so this was just weird as hell for me. Again, like an idiot, I didn’t stand up for myself, and so I just kind of stood there... all of this took place right before my school shut down because of the pandemic, so I was literally saved by everyone getting kicked out of school. Thankfully, I did not see her anymore, and finally I blocked her number as I should have done much, much earlier. [I didn’t intend to make that story so long, but there it is anyway.]

The point is, I found it extremely strange that someone I barely knew had a crush on me. This feeling was amplified when, a couple months ago, something else happened: someone on Instagram, who I didn’t know at all, expressed interest in dating me. I was extremely confused. Apparently they sort of knew me because we were in the same school system, but I’d still never met them.

I simply mean to say that romantic attraction drives people to lengths that I personally find strange and inconceivable. Looking into the aromantic community has taught me that essentially all of what we deem ‘romance’ is socially constructed. The rules, the implications, the things you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to flirt with the person you ‘like’. You’re supposed to get all nervous around them. You’re supposed to only form a relationship with one person or else you’re considered weird and even perverted. Flirting seems like a ritual, nervousness seems like a prison - why can we not do away with the expectations and simply do what feels comfortable to us individually? I have learned about the term relationship anarchy, which means doing away with and rebelling against all of these expectations. The expectation of monogamy, of ritualistic performances, of a certain type of romance, of what actions are deemed romantic or sexual, of having to have a romantic and/or sexual relationship, etc. I find that relationship anarchy is a very appealing concept. People should have whatever relationships or lack thereof that they wish. Queerplatonic relationships should be normalized. Loveless aromanticism should be understood and not demonized. Polyamorous people should not be alienated. In short, these societal expectations that we’ve established have no purpose beyond defining what a “real relationship” is, and by ensuring that romantically loving one other person is what “makes us human” and deems us “normal” in society. Platonic and familial love should not be put below romantic love, yet we’ve created a hierarchy. Me platonically loving my true friends should not be “less than” me romantically loving my boyfriend. And people who just don’t want any sort of relationships or attachments to other people should be respected, because they are not negatively affecting anyone in any way. Except by hurting the feelings of bigots, and I’d pay anyone to do that any day if I had the money.

Though I love my friends and my boyfriend in different ways, I realize that I have extremely similar criteria for a friend versus a partner. Beyond my general confusion regarding romance as a concept, this is another thing that has led me to believe I am arospec. It’s always been very difficult for me to imagine romantically loving someone who I couldn’t consider a friend - how, then, would my relationship even work? One thing about society’s ideas of romance that I do resonate with is the fact that your partner should be your best friend. [For me personally. I’m not just making a general claim.] It’s hard to see myself dating someone who I hadn’t known before, who I hadn’t befriended, who I hadn’t considered a best friend because we knew each other and had come to form an actual bond. I would be happy spending my life with someone who I considered both a best friend and a romantic partner. I don’t think this is something that is of absolute necessity to me - I could see myself without a romantic partner, which is another major reason I’m beginning to consider myself arospec [maybe greyromantic or demiromantic.] And of course, I have conflated romantic and platonic attraction in the past; upon reflection, I think I’ve only experienced genuine romantic attraction once, which of course also prompts me towards arospec.

Many resources - tumblr accounts dedicated to aspec experiences and questions, online stories, even just bare definitions of terms I didn’t know - have been extremely helpful in not only my understanding of myself, but also of the variety of experiences that lie with others. There is a beautiful array of diversity out there in the ways people think and feel, and it feels as if I have discovered a gold mine. [Hehe - do we place value on gold in the same way we place value on romance?] Simply learning about the multitudes of people out there with so many different experiences has been wonderful.

Upon reflection, I’ve also begun to wonder if I am acespec. Society is at it again - placing inherent value in certain concepts, associating expectations between categories. Specifically, the categories of romance and sexual attraction. In most movies with romantic subplots - which is a shit ton - sex seems to always be attached to the development of a romantic relationship. Here’s the thing - most people don’t think about the Split Attraction Model (SAM), which separates romantic and sexual attraction. It’s either you’re attracted to someone, or you aren’t. But for those who do use the SAM for whatever reason, romantic and sexual attraction are separate terms [though they can of course be intertwined.] I find it strange that romance sort of necessarily leads to sex - why? You don’t need sex to have a healthy relationship - but of course, many people want it and so it happens. And because sexual attraction is often tied to peoples’ romantic partners, sex is just associated with romance. [And also apparently sexual attraction can happen towards random people, which I didn’t know lmao.] The SAM is useful for many [not necessarily all] aspecs, as it creates this differentiation between wanting to date someone and wanting to, well, do the do with them. Through investigating common terms used by aspec people, I also find the terms aesthetic and sensual attraction useful, because I believe I have conflated aesthetic and sensual attraction with sexual attraction. [Also, in the past, for some reason I didn’t really know that sexual orientation referred to people that you literally wanted to have sex with. I thought it was just the people that you ‘liked’.] These specific terms have been quite useful to me personally, as I’ve realized that I really can tell the difference between the types of attraction that I experience. The issue is, I’m just not sure about my sexual attraction - have I actually experienced it, and if so, in what ways? It does get frustrating to question so much, but it’s an interesting exploration all the same.

Am I actually acespec? Maybe not. But even if I’m not, I’ve still learned a lot about acespec people, and again it’s wonderful to read about how many different experiences exist in this world. Looking back on my past has been interesting. Thinking about my present and my future is intriguing. Wondering what I am and where I’ll go is a mixed bag of emotions, but it’s here and I’m stuck with it. I think I’m probably arospec, and that discovery is honestly relieving. It feels like a weight lifted. It clicks into place. I’m just going to keep living and figuring out what the hell my sexual orientation is, and I’ll vibe with it, I guess. The general, whole, main point is: learning about these communities is an enlightening experience, and it has perhaps reshaped part of my view of society. And also, I write too much.

If you read this whole thing, I commend you for making it through my massive overshare. I hope you gained something from it, whether that be entertainment or knowledge or simple resonance with an idea.

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simana-x · 3 years

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Oh yeah, and this is the information page for the BTHB if you’re interested in taking part!

BTHB About Page

Guidelines + Rules

(home ask)

What is this? — Getting Started — How It Works — The Rules — FAQ —

What is this?

This is your motivation to write that fic. Always fun to take prompts when they’re in the form of games you remember from elementary school birthday parties.

You may have seen some bingo cards floating around in the fanfic community. People make a card featuring 24 prompts, and other people will submit a request for one of these prompts to be filled, as well as choosing which character(s) will prominently feature, and occasionally other details as well, depending on the cardholder’s preference. The cardholder then writes the fic and marks it off on the card.

Sounds fun, right? Right.

We all know that some of us are here to get DARK. So, why not make a bingo game focusing on Bad Things?

At this page you will find a list of tropes and scenarios. Currently, there are over four hundred listed. Most are whump-focused, some are more angst, and a few are centered around the ‘comfort’ part of hurt/comfort. Some are fairly general, some are very specific. Some are fairly lighthearted, and some take you right into the heart of Sadism Land.

These are the fics we’ll be writing.

Getting Started

Once you’ve finished reading the rules and FAQ, click on the ‘request a card’ link on the home page or here. This will take you to an application. Let us know the tumblr url you want us to send the card to, and if you want, what fandoms you intend to write for.

Next, you pick your tropes. We’ve got a lot of them, and of course, not everyone would be interested in writing for all of them. Some tropes may not work in the setting you want to write for, some may be difficult to get inspiration for, some may be too dark for you or not dark enough. Go ahead and check off the box next to every trope that you ARE okay with having on your card. You must choose at least 25, so every space on the card has a prompt. (There is no free space; freedom is an illusion.)

There will be a couple of additional questions at the end of the application, then, just submit! Make sure you have your submission box open on your tumblr, with the option to submit a photo, so that we can send you your bingo card. If your submission box is not open, you will not receive a card.

How It Works

When you receive your bingo card, you can start writing! You can write at your own pace and in your own time frame. Go ahead and post your bingo card if you’re making the fics available to your followers, and don’t forget to keep track of which spaces you’ve completed! Doesn’t have to be anything fancy; you can use anything from Photoshop to MS Paint to a text post with strikethroughs to track your progress.

For fic bingos, many people like to take prompts from their followers. Someone will send an ask requesting one of the tropes from your card and a character(s) for the fic to focus on. If you’d like, you can also let your followers prompt other details such as which character you want to have hurt and which one should be the comforter, whether it should be romantic or platonic, an AU to set it in, anything at all. Sky’s the limit. However, prompts are not required; you can select which combinations of tropes and characters you want to write and in what order you want to write them on your own.

Once you’ve written a fic, post it! If in your application you gave us permission to reblog your work, we’ll put it right here on this blog to share with other players and readers. Be sure to tag it with #badthingshappenbingo, or @ us in the post, to ensure we see it. Additionally, please tag the trope featured in the fic, and the fandom you wrote it for.

If you cross-post the fic on AO3, we have a badthingshappenbingo collection, which you can find here! Feel free to add your fic to the collection!

Once you’ve completed five squares in a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, you will be added to the Hall of Fame! But don’t feel like you have to stop once you’ve gotten a Bingo; the Hall of Fame will also give special prominence to those of you who get a Blackout - that is, completing every space on your card!

Rules

~ You must have your submissions open in order to receive a card.

~ Although you may request a new Bingo card, you can only have one card in play at a time. We urge you to try to complete your current card before getting a new one if you can.

~ Fics can be NSFW, but they MUST be tagged as such, and all NSFW content MUST be placed under a Read More.

~ There is no word minimum. There is no word maximum.

~ You are allowed to cross-post works you wrote for this event on other platforms, such as AO3, FFN, etc., but we’d like you to also either post the fic on tumblr, or post a link to it, so we can find it.

~ Your entry must be completed before you can mark off its space on your bingo card. The exception is if you are writing a multi-chapter fic, but the chapter featuring the prompt must still be completed.

~ Your entry must be newly written for the bingo, not retroactively tagged or added on to a pre-existing fic.

~ Please indicate somewhere on the post or in the tags which fandom your fic was written for.

~ Feel free to message the blog if we missed reblogging a post you created for this event.

~ Only one prompt per post counts. You can include multiple tropes in a story/chapter, but you can only officially tag/mark off the square for one of them.

~ We love drama in our fics, not on our dash. If a fic is written for a work or a ship that you don’t like, don’t read it. That’s all there is to it. ~ RPF (Real Person Fic) content is not allowed.

~ Although the official Bingo game is a writing-only challenge, you can also participate in this event as an artist. Find the details in this post here!

FAQ

Q: How long does this event last?

A: Forever and ever, I guess. There is no time limit for completing your fics.

Q: How long does it take to receive a card after applying for one?

A: Anywhere from several hours to one week. It depends entirely on how busy the mods are, how frequently applications are coming in, and how long the waiting list is. All of these factors fluctuate wildly from day to day.

Q: Which fandoms can we write for?

A: You can write for any fandom you’d like. This even includes original work, which we like to view as one-person fandoms. The only exception is that we do not allow RPF (real person fic) content. Let’s stick to hurting FICTIONAL people.

Q: I sent in an application, but did not receive a card. Why is that?

A: Most likely, it’s because your submissions were closed. If, however, your submissions are open and you still did not receive a card, it’s probably because either the Google Docs form did not go through, or tumblr ate the submission. Message us off of anon and we’ll get it sorted out.

Q: Can we submit completed fics for this bingo that are also written for other bingos or writing events?

A: As long as the other event also allows it, yes, that’s perfectly fine.

Q: Can we collaborate on fics?

A: When you apply for a card, the username or usernames on the application should always be the author of all prompt fills. If you apply for a card for yourself and another user to share, all works for the card must be a collaboration between the two of you. If you apply for a card for a single user, all works for the card should be written by that single user.

Q: I posted a filled prompt and you didn’t reblog it. Why is that?

A: We aim to reblog all filled prompts. However, due to tumblr being tumblr, occasionally we will miss a filled prompt due to the post not showing up in the tag and/or an @ not making it onto our activity feed. So if you have posted a filled prompt and it has been 48 hours or more without us reblogging, that means we didn’t see it, so you can go ahead and submit or direct message the link to us and we’ll get to it as soon as possible.

Q: Can you add [trope] to the trope list?

A: Probably. As long as it is succinct enough to fit in a space on the bingo card. We would love for the masterlist to be continually expanding. We also want to ensure that all aspects of this event are inclusive to gen writers and to aromantic-asexual characters, due to the fact that they’re so often overlooked or left out of fandom events and activities, so no prompts that inherently require the protagonist/whumpee to be alloromantic and/or allosexual (Unrequited Pining, Cheated On, Left at the Altar, etc.) will ever be included in the masterlist.

Q: Can we make our own cards, or do we have to get them from you?

A: In order to keep track of who’s participating, we ask that you specifically request a card from us. The mods are active, and should be prompt in getting you your card. If you’d like to make your own, feel free - we don’t own these tropes. However, if you make your own, don’t tag the completed fic as #badthingshappenbingo. Only cards made and distributed by us are included in the event proper.

Q: Do we have to post the fics we write for this event?

A: It’s not required. You can request a card for personal/private use if you’d like.

Q: Are there any prizes?

A: Bragging rights, a spot in the Hall of Fame, a sense of accomplishment, and a boost to your grand total fanfic word count. That’s all the reward you need, right?

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timerainseternal · 3 years

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Who’s your favorite character of tua and why

I enjoy most of the characters in Umbrella Academy, but my favorite is Five! As for why, there are a lot of reasons, but I think, writing-wise it's because I don't know what he will do at any given moment, but I trust where he's going. This is a difficult balance to pull off, but I'll try to explain exactly what I mean and why I feel that way.

Firstly, I don't know what he'll do, which makes him interesting to watch. He's full of contradictions in many ways, he's very resourceful, and he's written as someone who is extremely smart. (Though another thing I find interesting is that unlike with many other "genius" characters, intelligence--as in knowledge or ability like with his scribbling-on-the-walls math--isn't his primary trait, at least not to me. Before that I would say that he is at least determined, as well as resourceful in a way that isn't linked strictly to book smarts. Instead, he's driven on sustained desperation that "geniuses" never seem to get in media, and even though he's so smart and generally competent, his plans often or always fail, which I actually made a whole post about. Even further, we know he's 58, so his knowledge is based not only on natural ability, but also a lot of work and time, which is also not the general presentation. We know he's smart, but figuring out time travel took him a whole lifetime.) Anyway, even his power set is...fluidly defined. I don't know what plans he will make, or what side effects will follow--only that, based on past experience, side effects will follow. As such, I'm very entertained watching him constantly pivoting and coming up with new ideas and plans, especially since I think he gets more plot turns than anyone else in the series, or at least is a more active force in those turns.

His choices also showcase the desperation that is at the core of him, and the moral greyness that comes from it. He's not bound by normal considerations like most of the others are; often, he doesn't even consider them. What might be off-limits to others isn't off-limits to him (which is like his powers in a funny kind of way). But really, it all stems from the fact of having lost everything with his 45-year stint in the apocalypse and the loneliness that comes from that. It's an interesting philosophical thought experiment. What are morals in a dead world? What are a few thousand people compared to the end of humanity? What are we if everything else gets stripped away?

And for Five, the answer is not in the violence we've seen him commit, but instead the love he shows. He was presented as a prickly genius who is smarter than everyone and knows everything (like he says to Allison in ep 1) and who is also a time-travelling assassin hardened by decades in a wasteland. We expect competence, cold calculation, and a near-complete lack of empathy. But then we meet Dolores, and we learn that he's doing everything for his family, and we see that everything he does is for love of other people. Specific other people, sure, but love nonetheless. And he isn't cool about it, isn't aloof; he's lost it all before, and he's desperate, and nothing he does--despite what most shows tell you about geniuses--really fixes any problem completely, and especially not the relationships that got broken when he left.

Yet even despite all that, he's also predictable in a way that lets me trust him. Obviously, as an audience, we see how pressing and devastating the apocalypse is. It's the end. Yet none of the other characters understand that the way we do, or the way Five does. His ultimate goal is to stop that from happening and protect his family, and given his life experience, I know that there is nothing that will stop him as long as he's around. I trust that his character will make decisions towards an end goal that I agree with as the audience, and that as long as that remains true, I know that even if I don't know where he's going with a plan, I can at least trust his intent. Even with the Commission, where he worked as an assassin and presumably murdered innocents, the end goal is great enough that it makes sense. Moreover, though, is that once we see that his motivation is for love and to protect, not from a place of sadism or superiority, and that he will even listen to others to find a less violent workaround (as with Luther in s1), I trust his intentions even more.

That's part of what makes the murder of the Board, and then the aftermath, so interesting: it's a study in contradiction, the urge to be violent and feel seen and effective and successful, contrasted with a sense of guilt and remorse and an understanding that it's not the best version of himself. He's warring with those instincts, but the writers have portrayed him in a way that allows for understanding and sympathy.

For another thing, as I think @the-aro-ace-arrow-ace mentioned, given his unique standing as both 13 and 58, he can't really have a romantic relationship to pull him away like the others can, nor do I think he would if he could, considering the timespan the show tends to give him. He's not really in the mindset for romance at all, and especially not a romance that would distract him from his goals. Not only was Dolores an extension of his own mind for a long time, but also was one he was willing to abandon, first going with the Handler, then again towards the end of season 1. Not only does this make his goals less likely to be swayed from what I, as an audience member, consider to be important, but also romance as the sort of "love at first sight, I will prioritize you over everyone else without any real merit behind it" is always a bit flimsy to me. Maybe I'm a little too aromantic to get it, but I generally find it a bit distracting at best unless done really well. (I did like Raymond and Allison as a couple. I thought that was done really well, where they had time and chemistry and respect for each other, and I enjoyed the time they spent together. It doesn't hurt that Allison is my second favorite, but it stands well even besides that. It's just a good relationship.)

Finally, all of that plays into Five's relationships with others. He isn't good at being a social creature (understandable), yet that's what he values most: his family. He wants to be empathetic--and in many cases he can be--but he's battling his own inability to be understood. He doesn't even fully understand himself in the world he left when he was a child. In a very real sense, he can't do what has become most important to him--not that his siblings are the best role models for communication. It makes sense, then, that he was able to seemingly connect with Reginald. Five wants to connect with the people he missed and felt like he wronged, no matter if he actually was in the wrong or not. He so often gets ignored/misunderstood/considered crazy that even as someone just watching that conversation, it felt cathartic for him to be listened to and taken seriously, even if I think Reginald is the absolute worst and that the best thing for him to do would be to stay dead. Five thought he was being the most rational of his siblings in that supper, but he didn't realize that his biases were as strong or stronger, and just had a different root. His relationships with others are his strongest desire/goal/motivator, but he has such a distorted perception of the way the world works on a daily, interpersonal level and also who he is in that world, that he can't really make it work right, and that's really neat to watch.

In my mind, also, what Five is looking for isn't actually his family from 2019. It isn't even his family from 2002, or at least not just them. I think that what he wants is to be who he was when he left, before he got stuck in the apocalypse. He wants his family because he loves them--I don't doubt that, and I don't want to discredit it--but also because I think in some sense he believes that if he can just be with them again, he can make things the way they used to be, the way he used to be. He's kind of like Luther in that regard, except that Luther is beginning to move on, and Five is stuck in it. The tragedy in this, of course, is that he's the time traveller here, and no matter what time he goes to, his only choice is forwards for himself. He can't go back, even if he reaches the exact moment he left. This, of course, is speculation--or analysis, if we use the kinder term--but I think it shows how much can be read into his character based on his choices and narrative arc, and that in itself is interesting whether it was intended or not.

So, that's an overly long answer to your question! It's Five because I think he's interesting, and I think he's interesting because the writers have backed themselves into a corner where he kind of has to be. I hope that was what you were looking for!

#asks #tua asks

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lazywitchling · 4 years

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You know what’s scary? I came to tumblr in the height of fandom blog vs hipster blog, when superwholock was first getting started, before Disney had a choke hold on the entertainment industry, back when it was fun to get really really into tv shows and base our whole personality on what media we consumed. Looking back on it, it was... not a great way to be, but goddamn did it save me.

Not like in a dramatic “saved my life” way, but I mean.

I could go back on my main blog and find my pro-republican posts. I could find my anti-trans posts and my “well okay, gay people can be gay at home, but I don’t want them out where I can see them.” I could find those. They’re back there, years ago in my archive. Because that’s all I knew. That’s all I heard. My community - I mean my real life one, my local area, my friends, my church group, everything around me - is very... monoculture. There aren’t a lot of people around here who don’t look like me, have the same economic background as me, raised in the same beliefs I was... it’s just a whole lot of carbon copies of me. So I thought... “ew, how can someone be gay? That’s gross. They’re going to go to hell.” Because what the hell else would I think? That’s all I knew! And I thought “that boy wants to be a girl? What’s wrong with him? He should see a doctor.” And I thought “why do some people not go to work and the government just pays for them to eat? That’s not right. They shouldn’t be lazy like that.”

And then fuckin’ fandom. It wasn’t fandom directly, but when I got really into a show, I’d follow so many blogs that posted about it. Fan art, discussions, gifs, episode recaps, ask blogs... and inevitably, some of those blogs would drop the occasional political post. Mostly about how we needed marriage equality in the USA. And I thought “well. I don’t agree with that, but their fandom content is good, so I won’t unfollow them.”

It’s how I got exposed to more and more people. People who didn’t think like me. People who didn’t think like my parents. And they weren’t just political posts, sometimes it was just blogging. An artist I like would post about finally getting started on T. He was so happy that he was finally getting T. And I started to think things like “well, she— I mean, he sounds happy. So I’m happy for... him.”

More people. More stories. And I slowly stopped thinking about other people as political issues or religious problems, but as just... people who were trying to live their lives.

It was slow, and it was rocky. I still participated in church discussions that involved phrases like “hate the sin but love the sinner”. It made sense... until college, when I was face to face with people who weren’t like me. Looking at the man in my theatre troupe who was talking about his partner, I couldn’t make the “hate the sin, love the sinner” mentality work. I just couldn’t. I knew I was supposed to, but I just knew that trying to say “he’s a good person, but he just needs to stop being gay” didn’t work at all. I couldn’t hate what he was without hating who he was. And I just couldn’t, because he was my friend, dammit!

Marriage equality passed. My Facebook feed turned into the proverbial wailing and clothes-tearing from my church friends. And I very slowly... very quietly... started to post the “let’s remember that we shouldn’t hate other people” stuff. The very subtle nudging, still Christian-focused stuff that was juuuuust starting to lean left. Not too over the top, not overtly in support, because I was supposed to be one of them, a member of the church, I had to play along with the mentality.

Playing along got exhausting. Someone would deadname Caitlyn Jenner, and I’d consider for a moment that I should just let it go, that I should just pretend that it was fine. But... what about my artist friend? Would I be okay with someone deadnaming him? No, I would not. And if I was pretending I was onboard with deadnaming Caitlyn, would I have played along with deadnaming my friend? Just so I could fit in and be comfortable? So I corrected them. Her name is Caitlyn.

I learned to listen to more people. I learned why “I don’t see color” wasn’t as good a mentality to have as I thought. I learned that “feminist” wasn’t a dirty word, and it also didn’t mean what I thought it meant. I slowly learned that I was one. I slowly learned, and still learn, how to further expand all the things that covers. I learned about intersectional feminism. I learned about white privilege. I learned about so much and so many people because I was actively listening to them, I was hearing their stories, and I cared about them, wanted them to have good lives, wanted them to be able to make choices about their own lives without people like me saying “I know better.”

I learned about myself, too. At twenty-six years old, I figured out exactly why I was always so baffled when my friends talked about sex like it was this big important thing. Surprise: asexual. A second surprise a few years later: somewhere on the aromantic spectrum as well. (Where? Idk. I’ll tell you when I figure it out myself.)

The point is... it was less than a decade ago that I was exactly the type of bigot that gets chased off everyone’s blogs. I was the everything-phobe, the one who would specifically vote against any type of aid, because bootstraps, amiright? I was a whole-ass bigot. Bitch, I owned a confederate flag ring, and I’ve never lived in the south. (It’s in a landfill somewhere now.) I only learned because I first heard from people not like me, and then I learned to listen. I participated in communities that were diverse, not because I wanted the diversity, but because I wanted the content. The diversity was a side effect. And it’s what saved me.

And it fucking terrifies me how close I could have been to being some alt-right and/or terf radical new-nazi or whatever. Because if I had got on this site about two years later than I did, I’d have been caught right in that echo chamber of radfems and nazis preying on anyone they can get their talons in. I was so close. And now I see these radfems pop up in my notes, and it’s like... that could have been me. That was me at one point. I had the ideology, I just missed the identity of it all by a few years.

I don’t have a “byf” list on my blog for a reason. I don’t go through my followers and weed out the terfs and the nazis and the bigots. If they’re in there, fine. I want them to see my words. I want them to hear from someone who doesn’t think like them. I want them to hear from someone who used to be like them, but then learned (and is always learning) to be better.

And yet when I see them in my notes, I’m obliged to weed them out. I feel guilty when it’s a young girl who has clearly been targeted by the radfems on this site, teaching her that she’ll be stronger if she hates everyone they tell her to. Of all the people on this site, she’s the one who I most want to keep out of the echo chamber. But I also have a responsibility to make sure the people who follow me, the people who I follow and reblog from, don’t get caught by the shrapnel. A radfem liking my post just means I have to pay closer attention to what I say and make sure I don’t fall back on old mentalities. It keeps me accountable. But a radfem in my notes means she’s in the notes of my friends, in my reblog chains. And it is my responsibility not to turn a blind eye when people around me can get hurt.

But goddamn, if ever there was someone who needed a community outside of that circle of bigotry, it’s that fourteen year old girl who proudly calls herself a terf. And I really hope she finds one. I really do.

#also dont reblog this one please #goodnight westley ill most likely delete you in the morning

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redbeardace · 5 years

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Aromantic. That’s a thing. Okay.

[This is a submission for the February Carnival of Aros/Carnival of Aces.]

The Carnival of Aros is now a thing, and this month’s inaugural topic for it has me thinking.

Mostly thinking “What in the hell do I know about aromanticism?” or “Who do I think I am trying to talk about it?”...

Let me back up a bit...

When I first discovered asexuality, my perspective on everything changed. The word fit. It explained so much. Things made sense now.

But when I first heard “aromantic”, there was no connection. That’s a thing. Okay.

It described me, I guess. Sort of. But it wasn’t a word that I needed. It wasn’t really even a word that I used. Someone else actually had to call me aro before I bothered applying the word to myself at all.

It’s sort of like my middle name. It’s there, but I generally don’t think about it too much. It doesn’t even feel like it’s really mine, but other people seem to care about it every once in a while.

Is it even mine? Am I even aro? Gray? I don’t know. Was that any of that love? Am I just applying that term because that’s what it seemed like it must’ve been? What is love, anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?

Right. So. Where was I?

My natural and clear connection to asexuality drew me to it, and compelled me to get involved. I created websites. I wrote a book. I’ve been interviewed by major publications. I marched in parades and I’ve started including hitting up ace meetup groups as part of my travel plans. (Still need to make it to Vancouver someday...) I shared my story with anyone who’d listen and quite a few people who wouldn’t.

On the aro side of things? I mention it once in a while and once declared (to myself, at least, I don’t remember if I said this in public and I’m not interested in looking it up) that there should be an “Aromantic Archive” site, but that I wasn’t going to make it. And that’s about it. Hell, even when there are things that I do which are clearly more aromantic than asexual in nature, I’ll often label them as asexual.

Okay, but why?

As I alluded to earlier, when I was on my Search™, I found all my answers with asexuality. There was nothing left to look for. It was all there, everything explained. It’s clear to me now that’s obviously not the case, but at the time it was enough.

Another large factor in my disconnect is that the few times I went looking for more information about being aromantic, I didn’t find anything. Nothing that was especially useful to me, at least. I think there were a few forums that had one or two posts a month, and a few blog posts here and there, but all of it just seemed to be the same ace people I’d see other places talking about pretty much the same things. Here on Tumblr, there was always plenty of stuff in the “aromantic” tag, but virtually all of it was just ace content that was tag spammed. Aro community? What aro community?

I think the only aro blog I followed was the Aromantic Aardvark. Because that was the only aro blog there was.

Recently, I’ve tried to find more specifically aro content and aro people to follow. It exists now. But I find it hard to get into because it still feels like the same stuff I’m tired of re-reading in the ace community. It’s just on a green background instead of purple there.

Representation Matters, So Why Is It Hard To Do?

I find that whenever I do something that includes the aro flag or relates to aro topics, it’s often a deliberate and specific act of inclusion, and often only because I feel obligated to do so. I feel similar when it comes to demi topics, but the major difference is that I have no indication that I’m demi in any way. With aro things, it’s like I’m ignoring a part of myself. But for some reason, I don’t care that I am.

In 2017 I went to San Francisco to march in the Pride Parade with Asexuality SF. The most memorable part of that parade was when I heard screaming from the sidelines: “Oh my God! The aro flag! It’s the aro flag! I’ve never seen one of those before!” They were screaming at my aro flag, the one I deliberately and specifically carried so that it would be included. Later in the parade, I realized that since I was carrying the flag and I was taking all the pictures of the parade, that the aro flag wouldn’t be seen in any of my pictures. So I handed the flag to a friend who was marching and got a few shots. You might have seen one of them:

Inclusion matters, even if it is deliberate and specific, and even if I only do it because I feel obligated to do so.

But I still have a ways to go on that front. I am the keeper of the swag for the Seattle Aces, and there has always been ace swag as part of that. Demi and Aro stuff came shortly afterwards. A while later, I started including gray-ace stuff, even going so far as to sew a custom gray-ace flag for Seattle Pride last year. But demi-romantic and gray-romantic? There’s hardly any of that stuff in the swag box, and I only did what’s there because someone specifically asked me for it. It hadn’t really crossed my mind that yes, that needs to be included, too. It needs to stop being an afterthought.

But wait, there’s more! At least... There should be more... Shouldn’t there?

I keep sitting here, staring at the blinking cursor, thinking that I should have more to say, but it’s all like it’s locked up somewhere. I sort of feel like I have nothing to say about aroness because there’s simply not much to say about it. That’s wrong, of course, there’s plenty to say. Books can and will be written on the topic. For instance, I should have a lot to say on the subject of amatonormative alienation. But for some reason, I just can’t break through that personal wall.

And like I said at the beginning, who am I to talk about it? What do I know? Haven’t I said enough over the years? Maybe I just should sit back and let other people take this one.

Time’s Aro: To the Future!

I’ll close this with a topic that’s been rattling around in my head for a while:

I’ve noticed that a lot of ace groups have making efforts to be more specifically inclusive. Asexual Outreach’s new website is “acesandaros.org”. TAAAP recently added another A to their name. Many meetup groups have started rebranding themselves as “Aces and Aros” groups. While this is a positive trend (even though I dread needing to design a new logo and buy a new banner for the Seattle Aces and Aros to march in Pride this year...), I wonder if it’s a permanent trend. Is there an inherent link that means that ace groups are aro groups and aro groups are ace groups and that’s how it will always be? Or will we start to see dedicated aro groups spring up in the coming years? Are ace groups going to be adequate spaces for people to explore their aroness, particularly non-ace aros? What do we have to do to ensure these spaces are comfortable and useful to those who seek them out?

#carnival of aros #aromantic #aromanticism #carnival of aces #I have thought about my obsession with ace flag like purple camo #and I think that I should start a collection of aro flag camo too #but then I realize that aro flag camo is just regular camo #it doesn't help that I had the -ism word of aromanticism #let's just start calling it aroness #because that doesn't sound like it was devised by #a bunch of doctors sitting around smoking pipes in a 19th century parlor #I say good sir I fear that young mistress sally shall be lost to the aromanticism #i'm sad that I couldn't come up with a good 'aro to the knee' pun for a title

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burtlederp · 4 years

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This is your motivation to write that fic. Always fun to take prompts when they’re in the form of games you remember from elementary school birthday parties.

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We all know that some of us are here to get DARK. So, why not make a bingo game focusing on Bad Things?

These are the fics we’ll be writing.

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A: Some of the tropes are unusual, complex, or use fandom jargon. Those tropes are hotlinked on the masterlist to take you to a page or post that expands on or explains the trope. Those that are not hotlinked are self-explanatory. However, if you do not understand what one of the non-hotlinked tropes means, send us an ask, and we’ll answer and link the trope to that answer.

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rotten-zucchinis · 6 years

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some reflections on making sense, apparently only to myself

This post was written for the July 2018 Carnival of Aces on the topic “Now and Then” [call for submissions] [roundup of posts].

I’ve been out as asexual for so long that I forget sometimes that people don’t know what that means. I don’t mean strangers, because I’m still constantly having to explain things to people in all sorts of contexts that there’s no way that I could forget that. But I’ve had these conversations for many years with people in my life who apparently still don’t get it. And I’m also increasingly aware that people in various radical communities can’t be assumed to have had any exposure to ace anything.

I’ve been at this so long, making sense of my own life, experiences, and all sorts of ideas and concepts, that I forgot sometimes that other people aren’t on the same page with me-- that they wouldn’t even be able to locate the page, let alone read it if they could. I’m very much not new at this anymore. But that means, I’m not speaking the same language as most people I interact with. And too often, I forget that.

Having the discursive tools of the ace community has been really powerful and has helped me make sense of myself and much of my experience. But a big part of that power for me comes from the way these things can integrate into and/or reshape other discursive contexts I occupy-- contexts that are already geared toward fundamentally changing the society in which I exist and dismantling the power structures that sustain it. The flip side of that, though, is alienation from a lot of people. There aren’t a lot of other people who can share in that.

For the most part, I’m kind of only making sense to myself.

moments of context

Recently, after my sister came with me to participate in a Pride march, it came out that she had no idea that I was aromantic [like this], despite basically my entire life of not dating anyone, and my doing significant non-romantic (non-sexual) relationships. And perhaps more importantly, despite the many conversations I’ve had with her about QP stuff and about family members not taking my relationships seriously because they’re not romantic... That’s not exactly what I’d call “easy to miss”.

And my mother apparently didn’t know that I was sex-averse, which led to some interesting dinner-table conversation with questions that I think other people were not comfortable hearing being put to me or with me having to answer. My mother has attended workshops (plural) that I’ve facilitated and panels I’ve been on where I’ve discussed these things. I don’t understand how she didn’t know. So I have to wonder what it is that people actually take from my explanations.

The other day, someone I know in person who’d recently got a copy of my relationship anarchy / shiva zine [here] mentioned looking forward to reading it, but phrased that in such a way as to suggest they thought there was a lot of substantive content to grapple with. As this is someone I know through anarchist spaces and who’s very well-versed in all sorts of radical political theory, my first thought was that they must not have looked over the zine because I doubt there’s all that much content that would be new, other than perhaps details about Jewish stuff (and my family). But on second thought, I realised that they might not have more than a passing familiarity of the concept of asexuality and had probably never encountered words like amatonormativity. And I was left to wonder, how would a text like that read to someone who hasn’t been steeped in ace community discourse?

When I table at zine faires, that zine doesn’t tend to get picked up by people who aren’t already familiar with ace things... I always have other educational materials... and on the occasion the title strikes someone’s fancy who’s new to asexuality, we have a conversation about it first, and I make sure they have other reading materials. And yet, I sill don’t know what people are going to make of that. I really have no idea what people will take from my words.

some reflections

Back when I first came out as asexual so many years ago now, my aromanticism was just part of my asexuality in such a way that it didn’t immediately need to be articulated.

It took me a while to claim “aromantic” or (very dark) “grey romantic” (and not just because this was before we had the language of “grey”-- and before AVEN’s triangle had a gradient). These things are complicated [like I’ve discussed before]. But I knew right off-the-bat that I wasn’t interested in dating and also that I was interested in (and had been doing) significant non-romantic (and non-sexual) relationships. And these were asexual things for me. As I’ve discussed before [e.g., here in response to someone], aromanticism has always been part of asexuality for many aces, in a way that asexuality is not part of aromanticism. So I came out as asexual, and had a lot of people not believe me for a long time [e.g., as I’ve discussed before here]. But I never felt the need to come out as aromantic in the same way, because people already knew how I was doing significant relationships and were already giving me a hard time for it-- it’s not like they didn’t know. I’d assumed it was obvious, and ground I thought we’d covered.

My earlier years within asexual/ace community were a time before there even was a non-ace arospec community-- our ace language was necessary for that to come into existence later on. And while the ace community was quite deliberately set up to fit neatly into contemporary sexual orientation politics, it was still a time before “attractions” were mapped onto compulsory “orientations” and “identities” as a matter of course [as I’ve discussed here], which are constructed as independent of each other [as I’ve discussed here] in the neoliberal nightmare appropriation version of the split attraction model. (It's not that people didn't call themselves romantic and aromantic-- ace of hearts and ace of spades are old-school community symbols-- because they did, and people used terms like gay-A, bi-A, straight-A. But a lot of us didn't use such labels and there wasn't an expectation that they're somehow necessary in the way there is today... albeit with somewhat different sets of labels.)

We’ve now moved into a context where it’s socially relevant to create hyper-specific identity labels [as I’ve discussed here], where something effectively becomes sacrosanct through articulation as an identity [as I’ve discussed here], and where it’s horribly taboo to recognise how systems of marginalisation act much more broadly than just on internal “identities” [as I’ve discussed here] or “internal experiences of attraction” [as I’ve discussed here]. (These are very anti-materialist times...)1

And we’ve now had time to see things like the assimilationist clawing back of things like QP relationships into “romance light” [e.g., as I’ve discussed here] or meagre attempts to side-step the issue of resisting the assimilationism via troubled concepts like “aplatonic” [as I’ve discussed here].

And these are things I’ve had to resist, both in my own life and as I interface with ace discourse in various places. These are things that not everyone wants to resist. And that means, I’m often very much not on the same page as many fellow aces around me-- especially as those who tend to regularly participate in ace-specific things. (There are of course aces next to whom I don’t seem so “out there radical” but I mostly encounter them in other spaces, spaces more explicitly about changing the world, spaces that don’t view liberal ideals as avenues for liberation. And it’s far too infrequent we have the opportunity to speak about our liberationist ace agendas.)

Because I’ve been involved in ace community for so long, it’s hard to keep track of how things shift-- (of the many a’s relevant to my life,) when did the A that defined my existence shift from “asexual” to “aroace”? And what was that change? It wasn’t *me* changing-- it’s not like I ever changed how I do intimacy and relationships-- it was the discursive landscape that changed.

But I am cognisant that the discursive landscape I reference is the discursive landscape specifically of the ace community. To the outside world-- to people who didn’t understand the diversity of what asexuality could mean-- the only changes were in opening up orders of possibilities: the change of it becoming possible to be so many more things. I guess despite my efforts to provide adequate explanations to people in my life, I was never able to make people understand more than the reductive definitional shell of asexuality. We were never speaking the same language.

And I am reminded of years ago when I first had conversations with family members about being neither a woman nor a man-- before I had the language of non-binariness. I had to use a metaphor with shiny and fuzzy cows, in which I am tree. I would have thought those would have been memorable conversations. Apparently not. People can forget what they can’t assimilate, what doesn’t make sense. But eventually, when the language caught up and became something they could access, they were able to remember, even if they still deadname and mispronoun me. Even if they don’t really understand what it means.

At this point, I’ve spent so much time thinking through ideas that it’s almost hard to have a conversation-- something comes up, and then I have to do so much explaining. Heck, when I wanted to explain textual intimacy to someone, I ended up having to write more than ten thousand words *before* I could even start [e.g., here].

For the most part, I’m kind of only making sense to myself.

I don’t know how much of that is new, and how much is just a new recognition of the degree to which I always was only ever making sense to myself.

Footnote:

1 cw for anti-ace hostility

This anti-materialist framing is what makes it possible for The Discourse TM to even make sense. I’m not interested in talking about that specifically-- I’ve written before [here] about how things like people’s experiences with homophobia and heterosexism don’t divide up neatly according to identity let alone by “experiences of attraction”-- but there’s a change in the shape of some of the general anti-ace hostility that I think is worth mentioning.

We’ve seen a radical shift since I was a teen: When I was in high school, people gave me death threats and told me to kill myself at least partly because they could tell that I was asexual and none of us knew that was a thing [e.g., as I’ve written about before]. Now, people are harassing high school students, giving them death threats and telling them to kill themselves (online) at least partly because they’re asexual and everyone involved knows that’s a thing. Fortunately, that kind of harassment tends to be largely online, but there’s a parallel here that is striking.

#carnival of aces #july 2018 carnival of aces #ace #aroace #ace discousre (in the literal sense)#reflections #some of the context for this is a neoliberal nightmare #things change but they don't change

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groundramon · 6 years

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I’ve noticed this troubling trend of tumblr of...forgetting aromantic people exist. I know ace discourse is a Hot Topic (not the store) right now and people will intentionally exclude or include ace people in LGBT discussions for whatever reasons they have for participating in the discourse, but....did you notice how it’s called “ace discourse” and not “ace/aro discourse”? I suppose I should be happy nobody’s making jokes at the expense of aro people like they are at ace people (er, there are still jokes, but...) but it still hurts that we’re so overlooked.

Positivity posts exist for us, but they’re few and far between compared to other groups and we’re often excluded from most discussions. When we are included, we tend to be lumped into how “MOGAI is so problematic” discussions and that’s about it.

Pride flags will include the gay, lesbian, trans, bi, pan, ace, nonbinary, and sometimes even agender/genderqueer/other nb gender identity flags, but they rarely include aromantic as an option. I’m not saying you HAVE to make aromantic pride icons, not by any means; this isn’t referring to “hey, here are some lesbian tsuchako icons!” or even “hey, here are some ace pidge icons!” because both of those are icons meant for specific groups. But when it’s obvious that someone is well-meaning and trying to list all the semi-major LGBT groups, it stings just a bit extra because you KNOW they’re trying to be inclusive but they still didn’t include your group. Not like they’re a bad person for it by any means! But that’s the point; they didn’t do anything intentionally wrong or really wrong at all, but it still hurts. And that’s one of the worst kinds of pain of all.

And I know, “oh ace/aro people arent being killed and raped and denied housing and discriminated against in almost all aspects of your life!!!” first off, only one of those is something that doesn’t happen to us (being killed) so fuck you. (And dont bring up “well its because of heterosexual culture/sexism/ect” because heterosexual culture IS part of our oppression and sexism doesn’t play entirely if at all into those three things.) But secondly, that’s...kind of the point? Notice how I said ace/aro people; ace/aro people face (or...faced - I’ll get to that in a second) similar amounts of oppression that’s reflected in similar ways, often utilizing the same language. And yet asexual people get all this pride and recognition, and we get nothing?

I said we used to face the same amount of oppression because while asexuality has become somewhat known nowadays, aromanticism is still virtually unknown. I can tell you that right now because my autocorrect is calling aromantic and aromanticism a misspelling but saying asexuality (and asexual, however that was a word before it was used for the sexual orientation so I dont count it) is a word. See, there was a time when asexuality and aromanticism were considered the same thing, but people were quickly like “no, they aren’t! they’re separate!” So now we’re at the point where society has learned a little about asexual people and is aware that they can have romantic partners. But in the process, we left behind aromantic people. We said “oh, what about the asexual people who CAN have partners?” before we got people to accept those who can’t - and don’t fit into gay positivity or straight privilege because of it - and now I feel like we’ve largely abandoned those who can’t. I recognize it’s important to give acknowledgement to the fact that ace people can be alloromantic, I really do! But we keep forgetting to acknowledge that asexual people can be aromantic, too. Because to us it seems like second-knowledge, when it really...isn’t to the world at large. So we changed our activism, and now nobody knows about asexual aromantic people.

And don’t even get me started on how ignored allosexual aromantic people are. I’m sorry but I really don’t feel qualified to write about their experience because I really don’t know much about them. I’ve never met an allosexual aromantic person that I know of (or have had an in-depth conversation with them about something like this, anyways) but please keep them in your mind when talking about ace/aro activism as well.

Say what you want about the ace community’s relationship with the LGBT community, but the ace community is even more intertwined with the aromantic community than it is with the LGBT community. There’s no possible way to separate the aromantic from the ace community. And yet currently, I’m...really feeling like the alloromantic asexual community has let the aromantic community down significantly. You’re getting media attention now, but you’ve forgotten that many of the people who pioneered this and normalized it were aromantic asexuals - or even aromantic allosexuals - and now you’re more focused on validating your own existence than validating ours. I’m not saying you can’t reblog a good ace discourse post because it doesn’t mention aromantics or can’t enjoy your ace pride icons or anything of that matter. But when you’re speaking in your own words, or making your own icons, please try to think of us and how these issues affect us every once in a while. Basically every aspect of ace discourse applies to aromantic people as well but neither side seems to acknowledge this - and when they do, it’s almost always the ace exclusionist side, which isn’t a good thing. We have our positivity, and please keep that coming! But don’t be afraid to exclude us from tough conversations either. We’re here and we want to be included. So please include us.

- Sincerely, a very tired asexual aromantic nonbinary person

PS if you want to make aromantic pride icons but don’t know which glad to use, the most commonly accepted flag is the green/yellow/white/gray flag. But we’re not going to be picky on which flag you use; we’re just happy you thought of us! ;v; (might wanna be careful about using the green/white/gray flag that doesn’t use the yellow stripe though, as that’s very similar to the agender flag and I get mixed up a lot myself |D)

Allosexuals and alloromantic aces reblogging this would be greatly appreciated, comments/opinions and questions are fine but please be respectful and understand where I’m coming from first

#stormy speaks

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