#aro i meant

[cipherinator]

Also

[sunbloomdew]

do you ever see a person and you are overcome with incredible fondness? and you just think "oh." but not in a romantic or sexual way you are just filled with warmth and it makes you happy, it just does. and you think "i'm so happy you exist. i'm happy you are somewhere out there in the world, doing your thing". it's love but also not entirely

like people are lovely and i feel it in my entire chest like a burning candle that smells like roses and a sunny day

[razzygoat]

Yeah, man, those are decidedly not the same thing at all actually

[mossy-aro]

ultimately i think my insistence on aro positivity honestly is as much a political stance as a personal one.

when i say aro positivity is crucial and that i dislike doomer-ist posts that express sentiments like 'I hate being aro so much I wish I was dead instead’ it's not because I don’t think there can and should be a space for negativity and acknowledging self-hate, or the many ways being aromantic can really suck sometimes. i find that to be very important!

that being said. there is smth here about how self-hate posts are sometimes just arophobia that we inflict on ourselves. and when we put that out into the ether it (intentionally or not) can become arophobia that we inflict on other members of the community. i think there absolutely needs to be a place for negativity and the expression of anger and frustration and self loathing even - these are all good things to talk about because these are things that we experience. that being said, it can also be genuinely upsetting and triggering to people to have what is essentially arophobia shown to them and then have that be validated by other aspec people. your personal thoughts can affect your wider community on a level you may not anticipate. and i understand it i truly do! it took me so long to be able to recover from accepting being aroace - it threw my entire world off kilter and made me question everything about my place in the world.

but my insistence on aro joy and positivity is because ultimately i do believe that building is at the core essence of it all. that ultimately discussions and the purpose of community should be about construction, not destruction. and this is both a personal and a political stance. talking about how much you hate yourself and cultivating online discussions/spaces where negativity about aspec identity is the main and only theme is destructive - if that’s where we let the conversation end. these thoughts can and should be used as a vehicle to look for a path forward!

joy and positivity create a space where the focus can become on forging a path forward, on construction, on community building instead of tearing ourselves and others down with negative thoughts. it’s not productive or healthy when it stops at a place of negativity - it becomes actively destructive to the essence of community.

and i do think that this is especially poignant considering the fact that being any kind of queer, but especially aromantic (and/or asexual) means forging a path for yourself and making your own happiness where there is no obvious way forward. our communities exist mostly online (right now, anyway), there is little recognition of our existence in the real world, the effects of amatonormativity are both pervasive and actively dehumanising, and there are legal, economic and social structures in place actively making our lives more difficult. yes that all sucks! it’s good to acknowledge that. we need to in order to change it. but more importantly, that’s not the end. we are still here and our happiness, our future is for us to determine. even if we can’t change the laws or society, loving yourself and understanding aromanticism as a political identity (as well as personal), as a radical worldview, and as a protest against amatonormativity is essential for both community and personal well being. the personal is political.

tldr. i guess my point is that as a community, we should focus on building, improving, and nurturing ourselves and each other (construction) as opposed to destruction. we should recognise aromanticism and asexuality as political identities as well as personal ones and rely on community and self-love in the absence of anything else as a form of protest and political power. destruction (the recognition of everything that is wrong) is essential as a starting point - but where do we go from there? we rebuild.

[lazylittledragon]

ok i swear i'm not going to talk about my breakup forever but the thing that just keeps bothering me:

i know that not getting what you need in a relationship is a COMPLETELY valid reason to end it but also. i feel like having a very vulnerable moment where i opened up about my struggles with intimacy and being relieved that i didn't have to keep doing things i wasn't comfortable with, then being dumped a YEAR later because of my lack of intimacy. is something i should be allowed to be very hurt by???

[aromanticduck]

Being aromantic is like knowing most of your friends will one day move to Paris, but you don't want to live in Paris. And if you ever get sad about how much you're going to miss them when they go, people just try and tell you that you too can find a place in Paris! As if the problem is not having a house yet or being unable to sort out your transport, rather than not wanting to live there at all.

[redysetdare]

I think i just need to express that the culture surrounding QPRs right now made me think that i couldn't have strong bonds with my friends. Society told me i cant have strong bonds with friends because that was only for romantic relationships. Then i went into aro spaces and this idea was reinforced using QPRs instead of romantic relationships. it was "You can still have strong bonds with people without romance! It can just be a QPR instead!" "QPRs are MORE than friendship so you can have STRONGER BONDS than you would with friends."

it made me think that the relationships i wanted with my friends HAD to be something other than friendship for it to be as strong as i wanted. If i wanted to be the first person in someones life i had to enter some sort of committed relationship. if I wanted someone to care about me as strongly as i did them then it would have to be a relationship that was "more" than friendship.

I thought I wanted a QPR because i was told the only way to get that care and security that I wanted was to enter into a relationship that was "more" than friendship. because friends didn't care that much. because friends didn't live together their entire lives. because friends were never the priority relationship wise. and it took me years to realize that i didn't want any partnership and i shouldn't have to be in one to want these things from a friend. these things CAN be something friends can do. but i found that out on my own. because the aro community kept saying "you want a QPR" when i just wanted a friend who finally saw me as a priority in their life.

[buddys-ramblings]

I like that I’m Aroace and coincidentally, orange, green, blue, and purple happen to be some of my favorite colors

[moookar]

guess who remembered he is a fan artist and can draw literally anything he wants

[training-trio-irl]

Saimota Week Day Seven: pre-canon / post-canon / free space

I just barely made it for Saimota week, but I made it nonetheless!

Chapter 6 but Shuichi gets help from his emotional support boyfriend from beyond the grave

@saimota-week

[thefandomenchantress]

Wait a second. (Spoilers for Chapter 2 Episode 13)

I always knew that Ace being a smartass about what the word for carousel is was important!!

The killer actually does misspell responsible as “responsibel”, meaning Teruko actually can use their comments as evidence that none of them would make this grammatical error. In fact, Ace does it twice.

Which means that Ace is 100% not the culprit, right??? RIGHT???

No but seriously making a point to show Ace is a stickler for grammar twice is very funny and also kinda weird. Drdt hides important stuff in jokes sometimes, so part of me does wonder if it will somehow be relevant to the case.

Time for a random shot in the dark as to how that would happen:

Maybe people start to get suspicious of Ace, since he saw the contraption that Nico may or may not have tried to kill him with, had a chance to grab the tape, and has been directing suspicion at people all trial. And when they get to the note and explaining how it was written, someone says that Ace would totally be dumb enough to misspell responsible.

Teruko doesn’t want them putting all their eggs in the Ace Did It basket, and knows that she didn’t see Ace grab the tape when he was getting up off the floor, so she is searching for contradictions. Cue the random guess mini game as she looks through the evidence for anything that can prove Ace isn’t the culprit. The wheel lands on Spinny Thing, and Teruko remembers this moment and tries to use it as evidence. It, at the very least, buys her time to figure out actual reasons for Ace’s innocence other than “Guys don’t just rely on Ace’s stupidity to explain any and every contradiction in logic this causes”.

Anyways yeah I wanted to point out that there is a small chance that this joke could actually help prove Ace’s, Charles’, or Nico’s innocence. They know big words and they wouldn’t misspell responsible haha.

Also, on the truth bullet it says “Carousel” but Teruko says “spinny thing” out loud. Which makes me think she was just mad about Ace correcting her earlier and, despite knowing the real term, used “spinny thing” just to piss him off.

[earth2audiee]

sometimes i wish i wasn’t aroace solely because i will never experience crying in my bed blasting music after a breakup

[love-too]

I can do polls??? Amazing

[confused-canid]

Me and my stupid ass trying to decipher what someone meant by saying "Aro/ace" when talking about the general aspec community and aros and aces and if that means that they're practically the same thing to them and interchangeable and they just do not care about aroallos because aroaces are seen as "pure"

Or if they meant "aro and/or ace"

Y'all NEED to remember that aroace is NOT the umbrella term for both aros and aces

chat. Idk just say and/or please????? Plz 🥺??????

- Local aroallo

[kissimirrit]

i drew this back in 2016, 7 years ago, during the height of anti-aspec hate going on.

there's a lot i could say about that time; the harassment i faced, the cruel things said about me and those like me, the erasure and the pathologization of our existence, etc. but what i remember most profoundly is the burning kinship i felt for other aspecs, and the desire to fight for us.

and, in my spite, i was determined to love and take pride in my asexuality and aromanticism in the face of all that hate, because i refused to succumb to feelings of self-flagellation any longer.

i think about this time often. how it was the catalyst for me to learn to love myself. i loved my asexual and aromantic siblings, because i loved asexuality and aromanticism. because i loved myself. because i loved what i am.

because i'm aroace.

happy pride month.

[thelonelynindroid]

His only deanfense