#(im actually demiromantic but i like the other way of phrasing more)

[abstractpenny]

Im not demiromantic, I just require a friends to lovers arc.

[rxttenfish]

im thinking about merfolk relationships again and

so, on top of their hierarchy of relationships and complex social nesting structure, they, overall, are VERY polyamorous as a group. like, to the point to where their degree of polyamory was a huge driving force in their evolution, and you can absolutely see evidence of this in even their physical features which i cannot discuss here.

however i think it’s important to clarify that, within merfolk, said polyamory presents WILDLY different and has a huge range between different individuals. there are different models for this polyamory that pop up based on relationship hierarchy, status, individual, etc etc etc - and there are certain types of exclusivity that will pop up from time to time as well, both differing among individuals but also even over lifetimes.

like for miranda specifically, she’s what we might call demiromantic. which means, for a merfolk, she’ll have flings and be intimate with people who she’s not as close to, but these relationships are often limited in scale and in time, and if they start getting “too close” to her or demanding “too much” of her, she’ll break it off. in comparison, she’ll only have continued and extended relationships with those in more intimate social relationships with her, effectively only truly wanting and able to form more longform relationships with those who are within the “friend polycule” that i’ve brought up before. the social mobility of her relationships are more limited and you’re less likely to ever be cared about again after she’s had her fun, unless you belong to a continued and close relationship to her that already exists. likewise, she might go for periods where she’ll refuse to have relationships with those outside said “friend polycule”, or even where she’ll only ever be intimate with one person inside the “friend polycule” who she’s gone exclusive with.

and of course, multiple combinations of this are possible. there are merfolk who won’t have relationships with anyone within their “friend polycule” and merfolk who have no preference at all, or those who will switch it up.

in a way, a lot of these are defined by time, and even moreso because while sex is a more open issue for merfolk, it also comes with some unique aspects to them - such as the fact that sex is seen as a political agreement as well as a personal one, and thus one of miranda’s sexual partners could argue that she showed them political favor by doing so. this is even more complicated by the factor of how sex is used to resolve arguments and fights by merfolk, and thus its factored back into their complex social dynamics. i’ve joked that merfolk hate sex stops being hate sex when they cum - but its not unheard of for a merfolk to refuse to fuck someone on the basis of they’re still angry and don’t want to resolve the issue yet, or that they’re still CONVINCED that they’re in the right.

its also part of why miranda comes off as both promiscuous in her actions and sex-averse in her words and phrasing - it’s discouraged for her, as a royal of a significant title, to EVER openly discuss who she’s fucking and if she wants to fuck someone if they aren’t already in an existing legal agreement with her family or with significant favor from the vanderbilts already. resorting to innuendos and dressing it up as something else is fun too, yes, but it’s also a legal albi and something she can default back to if they ever decide to make what’s just personal fun for miranda into a legal ordeal that she has to clean up.

ironically this is why most royal couples seldom actually fuck. they’ll do it, sure, but they’re so often positioned against each other and given conflicting interests and ambitions that it often becomes an issue of..... they’re having an argument and neither party wants to resolve it. ironically they’ll say they fuck far more often than they actually do to buff up how they’re presented in the courts and being seen as more in-agreement with each other than they actually are.

but considering how the royal families operate within the community system of the merkingdom, this isn’t much of an issue regardless, and having any given royal couple get along isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. if anything, it can even be encouraged, depending on if said family wants to present itself as more fair and capable of handling complex issues, by having conflicting interests being balanced within their court without unfair bias to either.

in turn, being too invested in your partner can be considered a conflict of interests, as effectively a means of “mixing up work and pleasure”, and being too devoted to a single person and not to the family line as a whole.

in an entirely different turn of events, this is ironically why bellanda and miranda come off as less close than they actually are when in the courts - as their genuine connection and bond can be seen as an unfair bias and thus reason to suspect that they’ve passed up other, equally or more, qualified people and opportunities, because they gave an automatic pass to each other.

[illfoandillfie]

hi i hope you don’t mind me being nosey but i was wondering if i could ask a few things about u being aro? i kinda just wanted to know how u figured it out? and also do u still get feelings for people but choose not to pursue it? sorry if i’m kinda intruding i don’t mean to, just curious

i dont mind at all darl! (actually...lowkey i love when people are curious about it lmao so feel free to ask more questions) also this is going under a cut cause it got longer than i meant it to lmao

figuring it out wasnt easy and it took a lot of self reflection and like months of questioning and doing research and then worrying i was getting it wrong. Basically i first considered the idea that i could be aro when i was approaching my 25th birthday. A friend of mine (the only guy i’ve had any sort of a fling with) had announced he was engaged and i was completely down on myself wondering why i couldnt get a single date when he was off getting engaged (not that i even Wanted to get married i just would have liked some attention). I figured there had to be something wrong with me or something about me that was broken. And then i saw someone i followed at the time reblog a post about being aro. I’d seen the phrase a little before but never really considered it as fitting me but i’d also never really paid attention to what it actually meant. 

I don’t remember what the post was exactly, it’s probably somewhere in the thousands and thousands of posts i’ve liked over the years but there’s no easy way to check so . Whatever it said it felt relatable enough that I went and googled aromanticism to try and figure out what it was and if it fit me. Because I was already in a headspace where I’d been thinking about my lack of a romantic history already, a lot of the stuff that i read had been stuff i’d been thinking about anyway. Like Reader said in Platonic when she was talking about how she figured it out, I’ve never had a proper crush. I spent months thinking about it after my friend told me he’d proposed. I have very vivid memories of literally deciding to have a crush on a boy in primary school because it seemed like i should (again, i included that directly in Platonic lmao down to the boys name and everything). And every guy I’ve had an interest in since has been either a brief physical attraction that i forgot about as soon as I wasn’t seeing him regularly or something that I deliberately manufactured either in an attempt to fit in with the people around me or because i was kind of bored. Even the cute music teacher at work last year like he was hot and i wouldnt have said no to a kiss or whatever but i just didn’t have any feelings about him beyond that. 

While I was trying to figure out if I was aro I read a lot of websites. The AVENwiki has a page on aromanticism and I think also has pages on some of the aro-spec identities like greyromantic and demiromantic so that was a good starting point for definitions. Google also gave me a few different forums and stuff where aro people were talking about being aro. A lot of aromantic resources are tied up in the asexual community though because that’s where the language and everything was first suggested and what it evolved from. I don’t think that necessarily helped me feel comfortable using the term aro to describe myself because i’m pretty confident i’m not ace but the more I looked into it the more stuff I found from people who were allosexual but aromantic. Anyway, I spent weeks just googling “aromantic” and seeing what came up  and rereading what i’d already read and resisting the fact that a lot of it fit me. Then I spent a while trying to find like a quiz or something that would just give me an answer. I found a few quizzes but all of them assumed at least one previous relationship so none of them were any use to me. But gradually I started feeling okay with calling myself aro. I think part of my hesitation was probably also because knowing I was aro didn’t feel like a solution it just felt my damage had a name. The other part is that romantic attraction is not easy to define which makes it hard to identify if you feel it or not so the part of me that wanted to be Normal kept being like ‘well if you dont know you cant call yourself aro’. But I thought about it a lot and I read any aro related post that crossed by dash and then ventured into the tumblr tag and found some helpful discussion stuff in there and then I started calling myself aro just quietly, only in my own head. It took a long time before I felt okay admitting that I was aro on my own blog but obviously i got there in the end lmao. That friend, the one who got engaged, he’s the only person i’ve told irl though. 

as to your second question....

I don’t think I feel romantic attraction. Truthfully, as i said before, it’s hard to know for certain and there is a possibility that i could form a romantic attraction to someone one day but i think it’s very unlikely. Other forms of attraction are different though. I can be attracted to people physically and sexually. And I think I could possibly be attracted to people in a platonic “man i’d really like to be their friend” kind of way though it doesnt come up very much because im not really one to like meet people. I like my own company. 

But i’ve never really acted on any sort of attraction or feelings for others. I was definitely attracted to CMT but I never acted on it because it seemed like too much work. The was a guy who worked at a pop culture collectables shop a few years ago who i thought was very cute and I did contemplate asking him out but it just never felt like a real option and I sort of just ignored it until he left the job. So yeah I guess I do get some sorts of feelings and then choose not to do anything with them, but they aren’t romantic feelings. But like right now I’ve got no interest in anyone (apart from ben and roger but i guess they dont really count lmao). None of the teachers at work interest me and i havent met anyone else recently and it really isnt bothering me. Theres a guy in IT who i could possibly see myself fawning over a bit cause he’s handsome and has an unusual accent but he’s got the same name as my brother so i’ve already ruled him out as a no go lmao. 

Anyway, hopefully that answered your questions! If there’s anything else you want to know or you’d like me to try and explain something more fully my inbox is always open!