#and as an ace person it's been a wonderful experience seeing different takes on alastor's asexuality as well! makes me feel really warm ���💖

[sleepyvinegar]

their swagless looks and autistic personalities have captivated me 🥹🫀

[hazelfoureyes]

hello love! i hope this question isn't too personal/straightforward (if it is, please just ignore it, there's no pressure to answer it!)

I just wanted to ask how you found out that you're aromantic? I thought I was asexual for a long time (turns out I am not at all) but I still wonder if I'm aromantic sometimes... I have never been in a relationship either and don't really have an urge to change that but I do find myself longing for physical contact once in a while?

sorry, this got kinda long, i hope you have a great day and take good care of yourself! 🩵

Trying to make Alastor display more romantic tendencies and struggling because I’m just writing down my own confusion on the subject 🫠

let’s get real on main, ya’ll!

It’s really hard to pin down being aromantic, because you’re trying to identify a feeling you don’t have. Like entering a very lovely room and living there your whole life, and then someone walks in one day and says, “We took out one item before you moved in. What item is it?”

There’s nothing missing from my room, as far as I can tell?? The fuck do you mean??! Yes I see my neighbor has a salad bowl but I’ve not once needed a salad bowl and honestly I’ve never enjoyed a salad in my goddamn life. Never had a meal and thought, “know what this needs? A salad.”

‧˚₊꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶︶︶꒦꒷‧₊˚⊹

Researching Aro/Ace spectrum for writing tipped me off, because I kept googling “What makes someone aromantic” and getting frustrated, “Yes yes but what differentiates them from people like me??”

and then all these memories bubbled up in my mind

❥When everyone began dating in middle school, I said to my mother, “I have friends, I’m too young for sex. Why would I date?”

Because I didn’t know there was something else people got out of dating.

❥I would have crushes on people, and they’d asked me out, and I’d be so confused. No no—- I—- no, I just have a crush on you. I didn’t realize “crush” meant something different for them.

❥My sister lamented her best friend and her began having sex, and she wished they could have a relationship. I was so confused— fucking your best friend? That’s a relationship minus the titles. Again, didn’t realize there was more people experience.

❥What’s a romantic dinner? My friend listed all these things— alone, dancing close, looking into each others eyes, holding hands, deepening that connection. My dumbass said, “candles.”

❥If someone tried to maintain eye contact during sex and start talking to me about love, I’d kick them in the neck. The idea of someone looking at me longingly, trying to “make love”, makes my skin crawl.

❥Even now, if you ask me, “What’s the difference between your partner and your best friend? Why date person A but not person B?” Well person A is the person I’m sexually attracted to, my penultimate best friend, and I don’t get tired of their presence. I love them both dearly, truly love them. But I don’t (can’t?) feel a different love for my partner than I do my friends. It’s the same feeling for me.

I can’t help you figure it out, but I hope you find yourself happy to be as you are whichever label fits. I tried to give lots of examples of how my aromanticism appears in my life, hoping maybe you and relate to any of it. 🥺💖

[prince-liest]

Your Angel/Lucifer fic was wonderful!! I’ve also read most of your 666 series and remember in the notes of one of the stories that you mentioned something about Alastor being aroace and that’s why he experiences things the way he does in your fics. I felt like that was portrayed very well!! I also felt like Lucifer not being that way, being overtly attracted to Angel was well written!! I was just wondering how you’re able to write both sides of the coin as well as you do?? I’m asexual and I don’t think I even realized I was writing all of my NSFW fics from an asexual perspective on things until I compared some of your works. I guess that kind of attraction just feels so out there for me it’s hard to imagine anyone feels that way?? I’m not sure lol…

In any case!! I was wondering if you had any tips on accurately portraying an allosexual character?? I feel way out of my depth now that I’ve realized there is a readable difference.

AH, thank you so much! It's funny that you say that because I was just thinking about how writing NSFW from Lucifer's POV after Alastor's POV is actually really funny to me given the sharp contrast in how they experience sex and intimacy. I'm glad that they come through properly!

When I write NSFW from the perspective of an allosexual character (which is most of my NSFW), I'm not really thinking, "Hm, this character is allo. How does that affect things?" Rather, I'm still very much just writing what I want to see. There's a text post that was going around the other day that said something to the tune of, "When I say that man is fuckable, that does not mean I want to fuck that man. / I want someone else to fuck that man for me." and I'm definitely channeling that, hahahaha.

Not all aro/ace experiences are the same and not all allo experiences are the same, so a lot of it comes down to how I think a specific character would feel as a whole rather than their sexuality alone. I wouldn't write Vox the same way I'd write Lucifer, either, and a not-insignificant part of Alastor's detachment comes from him being an asshole on top of being aroace, haha.

Nonetheless, some concrete things about how I write these particular characters differently:

When you are writing in third person limited like I do, what you describe is often a reflection of what the character is paying attention to. I spend relatively little time describing Vox's body from Alastor's POV. Describing Alastor's body from Vox's POV would be, uh, a time, let's just put it that way.

Lucifer very much thinks that Angel Dust is hot, and he will admire him, both plainly and when Angel takes advantage of his obvious attraction to do something cute

Lucifer wants to touch Angel Dust for reasons of "I think it would just be nice to touch him" rather than always for a specific goal (eg. Alastor mostly touches Vox to get fun reactions)

The goal for Lucifer is sex with Angel, not sex, and Angel is helping that happen or even messing around with Angel, and sex is helping that happen

When you're a guy who's mostly been having sex in the context of a loving, committed relationship for millennia, sexual contact is intimacy is vulnerability is emotional connection, and all of those things can get really tangled up in one another.

I've streamlined a lot of it into just code-switching into the characters' heads to the point where I don't really keep these things explicitly in mind, so I hope that this was at least a little helpful!

...Also, honest to god, I've just read a lot of porn, and most of it is obviously not of ace characters. Over the years, you pick up what you find hot, LOL.

[concubuck]

Actually curious (sorry if this has already been answered) what inspired you to make a succubus alastor?

Several things!

Reason number one: I am ace/aro! Alastor is the first ace character I latched onto as a character I could see a facet of myself in (while prior ace characters, who kinda disinterested me, just sorta made me go "oh that's neat I guess"), and because of that, I like playing around with his sexuality and exploring his psychology in different ways in different fanworks.

Sometimes that means "I'll write him as asexual/aromantic in exactly the same way as me." Sometimes it means "I'll write him as a sex-neutral ace having sex for the first time and being really bored by the whole thing bc that makes a lot more sense to me than all the 'naive virgin Alastor introduced to the wonders of sex' stories I see." Sometimes it means "I'll write him hypnotized to temporarily feel allo and focus on what's going on in his head as he slides in and out of hypnosis bc I think it would be interesting to feel allo for a day as long as I could turn it off."

And then sometimes it means going "My orientation affects not only my internal identity, but also my life goals and interests, how I approach my relationships with other people, and how I understand the culture around me. If I suddenly magically became allo, I'd feel like a fundamental part of my personality had been ripped off of me. So I'm going to inflict that on my favorite character."

I've seen a fair amount of Alastor shipping fanworks that attempt to make him demi-ace or demi-aro by, like, treating him like a Disney princess: he lives a pure, chaste existence untroubled by thoughts of romance (except perhaps for longing that he could experience it too) until his One True Love comes into the picture, at which point he naturally slides into very allo attraction for that one person, and the fact that that's the first person special enough to win his heart is treated as something romantic. And like, if people wanna do that, okay, that's their business, fandom is for wish fulfillment, I'm not gonna stomp on their fun. But it rings hollow to me. I've seen enough media that portrays the inability to love (sexually or romantically) as unnatural and a horror; I want to take a character for whom lovelessness is natural and portray forcing desire on him as the horror story.

There's a reason I wrote that he loses his asexuality* at the same time that he loses his humanity. I wanted to make them equivalent to each other.

(*although he hasn't technically lost his asexuality. Really, he still does meet the definition of ace—you may notice that he never expresses actual attraction to other characters, with the possible dubious exception of other versions of himself—but "ace cursed to feel incurable horny until he fucks" is far enough from where he started that he no longer sees himself as ace.)

Reason number two: I stumbled across some demonology lore somewhere idk when, over a year ago, saying that some texts on demonology claim that particularly impressive sinners might get promoted out of the general population of sinners to join the devils responsible for inflicting the punishments on sinners.

I've yet to track down the source of that particular nugget, although you can see evidence of it in Christian lore; for instance, King Minos of Greek mythology decides where souls go in Hades after death, and he's imported into Christian mythology with the same role in Dante's Inferno—which makes him a dead human who's been given judicial power and an important governing role in Hell.

Plus you've got Lilith—who usually I try not to dig too deep into, since there's like, basically no way to stick Lilith into Christian lore without it simply being straight up appropriation of a Jewish figure—but the fact remains that she HAS been put into Hazbin, and if they do ANY exploration of her backstory at all, the odds are better than not that they're going to stick with the "human who became a demon" backstory rather than making her an OC who just so happens to be named Lilith, which means her existence indicates there's a precedent within the Hazbin universe for former humans to be promoted out of their humanity.

I headcanon that one of Alastor's primary motivations is to become extremely powerful, but not as a way to control others; rather, as a way to free himself from anybody else's control. He's not unfettered as long as he's still an eternally convicted criminal stuck in a giant prison where an execution squad swoops in once a year to kill a random swath of the population. "Become a full demon and be freed from the sinners' imprisonment" would appeal to him, particularly since we know that the magical potential of humans caps out well below the potential of high-ranked demons.

Succubus seemed like a sensible position for where ex-humans would have to start out in Hell's hierarchy: it's low but not rock bottom on the social ladder, they physically resemble humans more than any other group of demons we've seen, and they're the only group of demons we've seen entrusted with jobs on Earth that involve socialization with humans. Myths about demons even claim they're reproductively compatible with humans (albeit via sometimes convoluted methods). So I decided that's where ex-humans have to start.

Reason number three: my asexuality manifests as "I don't wanna have sex, people don't attract me, even imagining myself in sexual scenarios grosses me out; but I dolike imagining imaginary people having imaginary sex." I wanted to manufacture a reason why it would be IC for Alastor to act OOC enough to have a lot of sex, but in a way that would still let me focus on plot development and characterization and angst because pure substanceless smut without an undercurrent of Character Study bores me after the first, like, two replies.

(And yet, for all that, thus far none of my actual kinks have made a full appearance on this blog. Unless you count the fact that Alastor's miserable. I'm pretty sure "giving my favorite characters a miserable time" counts as one of my kinks lmfao.)