#aromantic rep

[roseredsnow]

This is your week till Acolyte reminder that Vernestra Rwoh

Is canonically aroace and she was been confirmed aroace since 2021 by her main writer Justina Ireland, the tweet doesn't work for me but the article and a link

Please do not ship her, you can have any other characters in Acolyte and any of the at least 13 confirmed sapphic characters in the High Republic, let us have our rep for once.

Edit: Forgot to include the word aromantic was also used in the character encyclopedia.

[loveless-arobee]

Writing Loveless Characters

(Pt: Writing loveless characters)

Because I want to see more of them but non-loveless people often don’t have any idea where to start, or how to write them respectfully.

Loveless / heartless people are welcome to add their opinions! This is by no means a complete post, I'm just trying to give a starting point.

I’ll also discuss the decentering of love in stories a bit, even if there’s no explicitly loveless characters present. So if you’re interested in that, read on!

Definition

(Pt: Definition)

Let’s start with the simplest bit. What does it mean to be loveless (or heartless)?

Being loveless means not experiencing anything that could be described as love, feeling a disconnection from the entire concept of love, and/or it refers to the rejection of the idea that people need to experience love.

A lot of people who use the loveless/heartless labels are also neurodivergent and may feel a connection to this label because of that, but not all.

Being loveless can mean multiple things for one person, too. If you want to read more about the meaning of being loveless from a loveless person (me) you can read this post (link), or scroll a bit through the loveless aro and heartless aro tags.

What is love?

(Pt: What is love?)

Because we can’t go on without clearing up what this word actually means.

Love is just a label for an emotion. Nothing more. Love is not an action, actions are actions. Love is not a choice to care for some one, that is simply the choice to care for someone. This choice can be made completely without love, for example out of compassion, or because of a feeling of responsibility.

So, in short, "love" is just a label that a lot of people have decided to use for a specific emotion, and that label might not fit everyone.

Building a character

(Pt: Building a character)

For this, I can’t give a 100% conclusive answer, obviously, because all loveless people are different. Here’s just some things to keep in mind:

To respectfully write a loveless character, you should just throw out the idea that feeling love is necessary to be a good human, to care for other people or animals, or that not feeling love makes one immediately an asshole who doesn’t care for other people’s feelings.

Being loveless, in and off itself, says nothing about how a person acts. It only means that they don’t experience love (or any other part of the definitions above).

Things to avoid:

I can only think of two things you should definitely avoid doing, and that is connection lovelessness to being evil in any way, shape, or form. Also, avoid making your loveless character non-human if the rest of you cast is human (if all your characters are fantasy-races, that’s fine, probably just have a character, even just a minor one, of that same race who isn’t loveless, just to show that this isn’t a trait of this species that differentiates them from others, or make that very clear in the narrative.)

Yes, your loveless character can be evil, or morally complex, but you shouldn’t explain their villainy with them being loveless.

Yes, your loveless character can be emotionally distant, cold, or un-empathetic. Those words mostly describe me in some way. But again, you should decouple all of those things from being evil. Empathy doesn’t make a good human, and not experiencing empathy doesn’t make a bad person. Same with having shallow emotions.

But with all of this, you should still think about why you want to write them in this way. For example, do you want to write a loveless character with low empathy because you want to represent people like me, who are neurodivergent and don’t experience much empathy, and are also loveless? Or do you want to write them because those are things that make them more unlikable, or show their villainy?

Do you want them to experience shallow emotions to represent people who feel that way, or to explain away their lovelessness with "no normal person would feel this way"?

Do you want to write a loveless villain because it makes them more complex, and allows you to explore their emotions to a deeper level, or because you equate not feeling love with being evil and being evil with not feeling love?

Because there’s a very big difference, and your intentions matter a lot here, because the way you think about your character influences the way you write them.

Things I’d like to see / ideas to include

Besides "really, any loveless person who isn’t demonised" ofc.

- characters being open about not experiencing love, and not being judged or "fixed" for it.

- The narrative not treating lovelessness as a bad thing, and other characters just simply respecting their boundaries.

- A character with boundaries around the word love in general, doesn’t have to be loveless, and them being respected. Some people just don’t like hearing "I love you"s all the time.

- Just generally decentering love from the narrative (see more below)

- ND loveless people who fit the "bad stereotypes", turning them on their head (like me, hi.)

- not repeating respectability politics ("I might not feel love but I still care for people, I’m just like you!") This is not to say that loveless people don’t care for other people, just that it shouldn’t be shoe-horned in as a way of "showing that they’re still a good human being, despite not feeling love". They can just care for other people normally, without making it seem like something special or strange because they don’t feel love.

Questions to ask

To get a better understanding of your character:

- Why does this character identify as loveless, or could be identified as loveless? What does it mean to them, personally?

- How does being loveless affect their relationships?

- How does being loveless affect their view of the world, and other people?

- How important is their lovelessness to them? Is it something they’re proud of and show openly, or just something that’s a part of them that comes up when it gets important, but is otherwise just "background noise" for them?

- How do they feel about being the "target" of different kinds of love? Does love in general make them uncomfortable, just specific kinds, or do they not mind other people’s feelings towards them?

- Adding to the point above: Do the other characters respect their boundaries? If not, why? Does it add something important to the story?

That’s the most important points I can think of rn.

Decentering love

(Pt: decentering love)

Even if you don’t have a specific loveless character, this can still be done and often times make for some more interesting stories and characters that mostly haven’t been told before.

What do I mean by that?

Well, first off all, almost everything in most modern books is about love, contains love, or centers love in some way. There’s barely any new books coming out that don’t put the main characters in romantic relationships, even if they’re not in the romance genre, and if they don’t, these books are usually about the importance of platonic (or familial) love instead.

Im not saying these books shouldn’t exist. What I mean is that not everything has to center around love when there’s so many more emotions and experiences that could be written about, but instead we have millions of books that basically have the moral "You’re only worthy of humanity in the context of you relationships to other people, your only importance comes from finding people who love you / who you love, or character finds happiness through love (either their ~one true romantic love~ or platonic love)", because they obviously couldn’t learn to be happy with themselves, or that they didn’t need to center other people in their life constantly, or that they can be a complete and happy human on their own, too.

People can exist without basing their whole self worth on other people’s emotions towards them, and their emotions to other people.

To decenter love, you need to take the concepts, and ask "Why?" Why does this character need to be taught to accept themselves by falling in love? Why does this character need love to be happy, why can’t they just be happy as they are? Why should not loving make their life miserable, and why is the only way to fix it to find love, possibly even change themselves to finally be accepted by other people, instead of accepting themselves as they are, and finding community, if that’s important to them, as that?

You can even write about human connection without centering love, or about love without centering it, and portraying love as this universal, perfect good thing that makes us human and that everyone experiences. That is completely possible!

It can be just simply making sure that the narrative makes clear that this is these characters experience, and not a universal one. That there’s people who don’t feel this way. People who don’t love, don’t need love, and feel happy as they are, without relying on other people to make them happy.

Decentering love can also be about finding other ways to explore human connection. Relationship that are deep and emotional, but the characters don’t use the word love do define it; characters who are looking for community, for support, and giving community and support to others even if they don’t love them, maybe just because it’s the right thing to do, or because it’s the way they’d want to be treated, or because they have a deep seated care for humanity as a whole that they don’t describe as love.

There’s so many more emotions, so many more types of relationships, that deserve to be explored. Don’t limit yourself to just love and romance, or just (queer)platonic relationships as an aspec writer. You can write about sexual relationships, or about completely non-typical relationships that don’t really have a good term to describe them.

Write about relationships based on compassion, on sexual attraction, on mutual interest in the same topic, on what ever other emotion you can think off. I’ve once read a fantasy book where two off the main characters were different species, and mostly interested in each other to find out more about these species, and that was interesting; wonderfully written and it’d be awesome to have something that focussed on such an absolutely non-normative bond.

Don’t limit yourself to just "love", to just what society has put on a pedestal as the best and solely most important thing that connects everything and everyone. Think of all the other things that exist. Be creative.

Have fun creating!

(pt: Have fun creating!)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.

Thank you for reading this. Have a good day, and happy writing!

[weepingbarbarianfury]

IS HOWL LITHROMANTIC REPRESENTATION OR AM I LOOKING TOO FAR INTO THIS

[angieblogging]

some aro/ace rep in media that i know of !!

*feel free to add more characters in reblogs*

yelena belova — aroace

alastor — aroace

douglas “ca$h” piggott — asexual

todd chavez — asexual

ks. piotr kozioł — asexual

gwenpool — aroace

vernestra roth — aromantic

georgia warr — aroace

ellis (loveless) — aroace

sunil jah — asexual

isaac henderson — aroace

[bookshelvesandtealeaves]

5 star reads of 2024 ↳ kaikeyi by vaishnavi patel

[elrikadraskanitsi]

El - Happy Pride month to everyone who celebrates it! I hope you are well and safe out there! ❤️

For Pride month, as an aromantic and asexual person, I wanted to draw something that means a lot to me personally. And I decided that it would be fanart of the Japanese television drama series Koisenu Futari (恋せぬふたり).

I first heard about this show from the YouTube channel The Ace Couple. They do podcasts about different topics through an Ace lens and have dedicated two episodes discussing this show. I am going to link the episodes here if you are interested (because, honestly, they do a way better job at reviewing and analysing the show, than I could):

Koisenu Futari: Is this the Perfect AroAce Rep!?

We LOVE Koisenu Futari!

The show is about the lives of two aromantic and asexual people - Sakuko and Takahashi, who decide to live together in order to escape the inconveniences of life. Along the way they learn a lot about themselves, the people around them and just life as a person, who doesn’t fit with the expectations that society puts on everyone. It’s honestly a really heartwarming series with a lot of amazing scenes. There were a lot of moments where our two main characters just stopped to express how they feel about different aspects of life and honestly, a lot of the things they said made me pause and say: “Those are my exact feelings!”. There were also a lot of scenes that genuinely made me cry. I have never watched a show that made me feel so seen, made me feel like I wasn’t broken and that there are other humans out there who share my experience. Another thing that I love about this show is that the two main characters show two different experiences of being aroace and that means a lot. Personaly, I relate a lot more with Takahashi.

If you haven't watched the show yet, I highly recommend you do so. It’s very well written, the characters are very interesting and lovable and the message that is trying to convey is very important.

This got really personal, but I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you have a wonderful Pride month!

[qbdatabase]

Daily Book - The Stones Stay Silent

The Stones Stay Silent Danny Ride Adult Fantasy, 2023, 486 pg aromantic-asexual transgender male MC

When a deadly plague sweeps the land, the priests of the Parents accuse those deemed to have incurred the gods' wrath. Leiander, unmarried and with interests unbecoming to the woman people consider him to be, flees for his life.

With the Night Demon Kevv'ach by his side and his deepest wish undiminished, he journeys to the Great Lith, said to still channel the magic of the Parents. He will beseech the gods to remake his body in the image of the Father, so the world sees him as his true self.

[angieblogging]

NEW(?) ARO REP JUST DROPPED YALL.

*i typed that and i feel like i should say new aro merch just dropped, but i won’t so i said it here in the fucking side note lol*

huge win for aromantics

they actually used the actual word in a canon source 🥹

[labcoated-lunacy]

eroticism of the machine this, eroticism of the machine that. what about the AROMANTICISM of the machine. what about the electric comfort of looking at a beautiful turbine engine and knowing that it is just like you. what about the urge to cut open your chest to prove your heart is made of wires and your ribs are made of steel. what about that

[roseredsnow]

If we're making aromantic trend today I have to bring forward the first aroace rep I knew.

Roshanna Chatterji in the movement comics!

(Yes she only says asexual but from context it's clear she means aroace)

The Movement follows a group of teens (early 20s I think a couple) fighting back against police corruption in their area, unfortunately there's only 13 issues.

But Roshanna has been seen in last years (possibly year before) pride comic in the corner of group shots and did get a page in DCs big book of pride so she's not completely forgotten.

Other members of the group are also queer or from other marginalised communities.

TW for sexual assault, abliesm, homophobia and religious trauma.

[loveless-arobee]

I read the most wonderful trilogy I’ve ever touched; best book in the world, perfect to my taste like it’s written just for me

Took a look at fandom for the books, maybe trying to find some good stuff about it. Yknow. Fandom stuff.

There’s like five people talking about the series. (Understandably, I’ve only found it by chance too. It’s not very known.)

But every single person ignores that one of the main characters is canonically aro and ships him with the other two main characters. Even though it’s very much in text stated that he’s not interested in relationships. Like, that was made very clear from multiple perspectives and everyone involved respects that.

…I’ll just never go into fandom spaces ever again. Poor Vargo. Fandom is destroying this man more than his childhood did tbh.

Anyway if you’re into fantasy with morally gray characters, some found family and a slow-starting but extremely escalating plot, with a non-partnering AroAllo main character (only one of three, the other two aren’t aspec but honestly as an aro person the romance was written so good too), consider reading the Rook and Rose Series by M.A. Carrick. I wanna talk about it so bad but my sister won’t read them and no one knows this book.

I love this trilogy. Favourite books rn fighting with Iron Widow in my head, though Iron Widow still has a chance to win with the sequel lol. (But Vargo will forever and always be my favourite character of all time.)

The covers are also fucking beautiful. (Alt text is not the best I’m very tired but I tried.)

[angieblogging]

okay so, i need someone to explain one thing to me, so when it comes to ace/arospecs who feel sexual/romantic attraction why is there such a huge push when characters are aroace for them to date or have sex or be like on the grey-spec?

because i feel romantic attraction, im orchidromantic and asexual i feel no sexual attraction, so i can relate to those who feel romantic attraction but i also feel uncomfortable when it comes to romance centred around me aka dating and well everything with romantic intention that seems too real i suppose.

the thing i don’t understand is why are we talking about aromantic and/or asexual characters like we can just pick a sexuality for them, especially the ones that show no interest/disgust or any negativity in sex and/or romance. considering that while yes arospec is a thing and acespec is a thing, aromantic and asexual are also a specific sexuality where one feels no romantic or sexual attraction.

you can hc any character that feels romantic attraction as grey-aro and tbh no one can prove you wrong or right unless it’s like hinted at. so what’s up with taking the non-partnering aro/ace rep?

here’s one microlabel character i know:

also this post in no way means to say microlabels don’t deserve representation in media, im just confused as to why it’s becoming normalised to take repulsed/averse aro/ace characters and turn them into something they are not.

[octever]

Come look at our aspec rep in major media!

Aroace

Aroace

Ace

Aroace

Ace

Ace

Ace

Aroace...

[agrebel18]

saw someone on here the other day say that we don’t need aromantic and asexual representation in media because that’s a “sanitized” identity like BITCH WHAT????? IF YOU CAN ONLY SEE ASPEC PEOPLE AS CHILDREN THAT IS A YOU PROBLEM.

[cepheusgalaxy]

Wish more people understood the difference between "shipping this aro character because i want to explore their aromanticism and where they stand in the spectrum" and "shipping this aro character because i don't care about their orientation".

[fallenrain40]

the MORE aphobia i see in fandoms, the more annoyingly in-your-face aroace i'm going to get. i aint gonna sit back and let aroace get erased, aphobia is literally just repackaged homophobia.