#i might be aspec ... we'll see

[non-plutonian-druid]

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[5000stars-in-reach]

This may sound odd but I started queer shipping as almost a reaction or rebellion against shitty straight romances in media. I hated how if there was a guy and a girl on screen together they would always end up together at the end for absolutely no reason. Like, why is there this half-assed romance plot shoehorned into the end of this action movie? It was like it was impossible for them to be friends, their relationship had to be romantic. Oh no, they smiled at each other, time for them to get married and kiss! Let's suffer through this god awful, awkward as hell, sex scene because two members of the opposite sex shared a meal. Guess what, friends can eat food too. I'm tired of shitty romances ruining a great friendship. I was even forced to watch awful rom-coms that had zero chemistry and zero likeability for years and I am so done with this shit.

So anyways, since we live in a world where gay people exist and I'm queer, I decided to apply that hetero logic to characters of the same gender. I felt like, if we can't have a guy and a girl who get along just be friends then we don't get two girls or two guys being friends. I'm just applying what I had been taught for years and consistently shoved down my throat more broadly.

Despite enjoying romance, I still love to see good depictions of friendship in media between all genders and would love to see more. I think we don't see enough deep platonic relationships that feel real, believe, and grounded. Like relationships that are strictly platonic and feel very platonic. For me, devotion and/or spending time doing a group activity isn't enough to make an interesting platonic relationship. I want to see examples of friends having inside jokes, knowing and understanding each other's quirks, I want them to have gone through tough times together and supported each other throughout. I want to see and feel the characters platonic chemistry. Clance & Max as well as Jo & Greta from A League Of Their Own are some standout examples. There are also a lot of platonic relationships dynamics that feel boring and overplayed. Or the individual relationships get drowned out in a group dynamic and just kind of fade away in the background.

For me a lot of shipping is about spite and not necessarily romance. I still enjoy it and have fun but I don't only want that. I do still want to see platonic relationships that feel 100% platonic. If there are romances that have a lot of romantic chemistry, then I want platonic relationships to also have platonic chemistry.

“we need more platonic relationships in media” your inability to turn off your shipping brain is a You problem

[unnecessarilygrandiose]

this is something important about heartstopper that i think needs to be said, to aspec people specifically:

please be kind to isaac and the aroace representation we'll get come thursday.

aroace rep is something we get very rarely, especially on the screen. i can think of exactly two shows with aroace characters, and one of them is heartstopper. so it's not unfair of us to hope that we each get to see our experience represented in isaac.

but like. that's simply not going to happen.

isaac is one character. he can only represent one kind of experience about what being aroace entails. and every single aspec person has had a different experience with realising their identity and coming to terms with it. everyone has a different relationship with the complexities of their sexuality and labels.

and y'know, it could be disappointing to expect something from a character you thought was representing you and see them be something very different. hell, i can bet anything that at least a few aspec people will be completely disillusioned with whatever we'll get.

but 'i didn't like this' doesn't automatically mean 'it was bad'. maybe it means that 'this didn't represent me, which was sad, but it did represent some people, and it was a cornerstone in aroace representation in mainstream media as a whole, which is good.'

(i mean, i'm not saying there's a zero chance it'll be objectively bad and harmful rep, but the chance of that is extremely low, since alice is aroace themself. also, loveless is an amazing book)

i feel compelled to say this because we know that it's going to be a while before isaac is comfortable with his identity, which can be upsetting to watch because the 'you can't be happy without romance and whole without sex' is pushed pretty hard onto us on a regular basis, and there's this sort of defensiveness where we kind of want any fictional aroace characters to be immediately accepting of themself because no, we're actually very happy and completely whole without those things, thank you very much. this was the main criticism of loveless by many aspec people— that it didn't represent them because georgia struggled so much with her identity.

but. just because you personally didn't have to face that (and good for you!) doesn't mean it's not a very real experience many aroace people go through every day.

just because our first mainstream media rep of being aroace isn't an easy, feel good story, doesn't mean it's not important.

be as disappointed with isaac as you want if he doesn't represent you—but please still be kind to him. if we're too harsh in our criticism, the creators who worked on this story might feel discouraged from creating more aroace characters and stories.

more aspec rep, especially aro and aroace rep, is important! more rep means more variety! it means a greater chance of all of us finding stories we love and resonate to! but if we don't get everything we want the first time, please let's not call it bad and demotivate the very people who can give us more.

[femdemon]

While I'm posting about my experiences with transandrophobia, I feel like people are weird about headcanoning characters as transmasc specifically. Like, obviously, there's your regular old gender and sex based bigotry a lot of the time about headcanoning any character as being anything other than strictly cis, perisex, and gender conforming, but people who allege to be progressive and open-minded get really weird and hostile about transmasc folks specifically seeing ourselves in fictional characters.

Like, okay. I've seen people say, "If you're only headcanoning overtly feminine characters as transmasc and overtly masculine characters as transfem, and you yourself are cis or whatever, maybe you should ask yourself why and whether or not you might have some internalized binarism you need to work on." And this is true, and good to point out! But then I've seen other people take this very good and true message and do some medicalism, gender essentialist bullshit to it like, "Yeah! Stop headcanoning feminine characters as transmasc altogether! Especially if you're a gender non-conforming transmasc person who heavily relates to the character in question and see a lot of yourself in said character. Don't you wanna be taken seriously by Normal People? Don't you wanna be seen as a Real Man? You can't headcanon this character as transmasc, then. Obviously, they're a trans woman, actually, like it's practically canon. In fact, you're Committing An Erasure if you headcanon this character as any gender other than a trans woman, and this is a crime that can never be forgiven and must be punished with Shunning until you admit that you're wrong."

And, like, I'm not saying that this never happens with other headcanons, I've absolutely seen it happen with other queer identities, I just see it a lot with respect to my own gender and I feel like it's bizarrely frequent. Why exactly are people so threatened by even just the idea that a character could be interpreted as transmasc? Why do people get this heated about basically any fiction or insist that it has something to do with representation when it was never canon to begin with? Some random person online who definitely isn't the author isn't in control of the story or characters, and it does nothing to the canon for them to have an opinion or idea about it that you don't like. I know that not everybody has gotten the "fandom isn't activism" memo yet, but even still, it just strikes me as really strange to sort of gatekeep who's allowed to relate to certain characters, or even just imagine them in ways that are different from fanon.

It kind of feels a lot like that thing people do where they're like, "Oh, the aces and aros want some characters they can see themselves in, we'll just give them the aliens and robots (never humans) and such, that should be enough." And then when we're like, "Okay, yeah, I can definitely see a lot of myself in this beloved robot character," suddenly it's all, "Nooo, beloved robot character couldn't possibly be aspec! You buffoon!!! How dare you!!!" It's like, even when we do get "permission" to have headcanons and characters we see ourselves in, we still don't really have it. And then I wonder why I'm always so drawn to inconsequential background characters who contribute nothing to the plot - I've totally been conditioned into it because liking and relating to the main cast is forbidden, I guess.

I know this is a very niche, small problem in the grand scheme of things, but it bums me out. Especially since a lot of this is coming from people who consider themselves allies and stuff, and we already face so much backlash just for daring to suggest that we have unique struggles. Not even when we're having fun storytime with our fan fiction do we get a break.

[variousqueerthings]

Benton Fraser being aspec part 3: my personal favourite HC -- being aromantic, asexual, loveless, and very very kinky (oh what a surprise to anyone who knows me a little bit)

wrote a little bit about different ways one can approach aspec headcanons/reads, and a bit about why fraser can very easily be read as aspec without specifying about where exactly he might land on said a-spectrum.

a representation of fraser and victoria

so now my personal favourite framing, with the caveat that at the end of the day the way i read fraser-as-ways-he-would-personally-identify is as "benton fraser (constable depending on where in the timeline i imagine him, because in my heart of hearts he eventually leaves the mounties)." that is, i imagine a fraser who is technically-a-man in the sense that he's been told he is a man and it works as well as anything else, and a fraser who does not think about his sexuality at all and likely never would, because to him the only thing that matters is what he does, not who he is or how he feels

so the above description is more one i would use as a framing device than any way the character would describe himself

with all that, the main things that i think about in terms of one (constable) benton fraser is that his sense of self/identity isn't really about "being" so much as "doing," and also that he looks outside of himself for clues about how he should behave/feel about things

1. LOVELESS FRASER

the "loveless" part of things is very much because of the episode "you must remember this" in which he openly asks questions about love, how one is supposed to know and act in terms of love, and the cues he gets (mainly from ray) are quite mappable onto how he internalises his relationship with victoria (here be the cues, scroll down to "you must remember...")

it's an interesting different way to look at lovelessness, because i think a lot of people hear that word and translate it to "unfeeling," which, to be clear, also fine in a character, but not what it means, and if one takes it with fraser, it instead explores an idea that one can be deeply feeling but out of step with people around oneself (which, that's canon), which can lead one to look for external cues and validation to an extent that one becomes quite vulnerable to being used by people, because it becomes less about "what do you want out of a relationship" and more "how do I need to act so that someone thinks I am Good and Worthy and Doing Things Correctly."

basically, fraser's total lack of boundaries can feed into this read, because he does want people in his life and he clearly imprints on anyone who gives him attention (mark, victoria, meg), but with ray... it's a little different

with ray he's pretty much mask off from the beginning -- ray sees many of fraser's oddest traits in the pilot already and still goes to canada for him while bandaged up and in a neck brace after saving him from an explosion. i think this is also why fraser is different with him: he wasn't trying to build a relationship with ray to begin with, he was just trying to find his father's killer, so ray's approval didn't factor into how he acted -- heck as far as he was aware he was going back to canada at the end of all this (alas). fraser was a mix of "full weirdo detective nose-to-the-ground mode" and grief and ray saw him stripped bare and invited him back for dinner with his family... that was real bones for a relationship!

(we'll get to meg... and kink)

so. loveless: fraser as a person who doesn't feel an internal sense of love as concept and so looks for external cues about how it's meant to manifest, because he knows in an academic/logical way that this is what people base relationships on and he's lonely (aromanticism-as-philosophical-concept could save him... speaking of....)

2. AROMANTIC FRASER

putting this second, because in many ways it plays into lovelessness, but there are also differences. basically it's the question of whether he feels a romantic connection with people, and... maybe

there's victoria and meg, obviously, and there's ray vecchio, and i know a lot of people ship him with ray kowalski (i won't get into that, because i haven't seen s3-onwards at point of writing), but mainly for me i think fraser exists in the sphere of "secret third thing" -- that is, he wants connections with other people, Society(TM) decrees that relationships feel and look a certain way, he's probably read all of jane austen (another headcanon), he -- again purely academically going by the two corsages he buys for a date that he knows isn't even really a date but you've got to behave a Certain Way -- knows about The Rituals Of Courtship...

if he could let go of all of that and just be left to his own devices without judgement/people thinking he's an oddity, i don't think he would care about labelling. because i don't think he cares about labelling in the first place. (goes back to "sure he's a man but only because people have told him he's a man so guess that'll do, but really he's just constable benton fraser)

in a lot of ways i don't think so much about What Exactly Ray And Fraser are, because they simply... are. which is how fraser would see it as well in this version of events. ray on the other hand, that man is having weird dreams at night and struggling with his deeply repressed bisexuality.......

did fraser want to have a romantic relationship with victoria? i just... don't buy it. i buy that he didn't know what he wanted and wanted someone to tell him what he wanted (which she did), and that the idea that someone wanted him so badly appealed to a part of him that’s used to being used and discarded, and that there was a story he could tell himself about what was going on that mapped onto stories he might have read… but I don’t see him as being present in a lot of this. I see him outside of his body, looking at what’s happening and saying “ah yes, this is like something I’ve read/watched/heart about, and ray told me this sort of thing only happens once in your life,” and of course there’s the ever-hanging spectre of wanting to “fix” her, of feeling like she’s his responsibility, of feeling guilty of having abdicated that responsibility the first time around, even though it really never should have been his burden to bear and she was bad news before him and is most likely going to continue being bad news after him. He wants to fix everything and if he fails he’s Failed

I like also that his relationship with meg in canon (so far) is very vague and difficult to nail down for the both of them, it simply contains an acknowledgment that they Do Work in whatever way they work, IF they wanted to have it be that way. I also read meg as her own flavour of ND, it’s just that where fraser’s comes across as excessively polite and old-fashioned, hers is super blunt (oh we adore a woman who sounds like she accidentally makes children cry even though she doesn’t mean to) so anything they were I think could exist without all that societal baggage, if they just let it happen naturally… we shall see (me like, oh look it’s hawkeye/margaret 2.0)

i also have several different reads on how a story could end. There's the version where he stays in chicago, where he goes back to canada, where ray comes with him to canada – meg fits into various places in this read, because she’s kinda giving aromantic AF as well to me, so i read her and fraser's relationship as very open to shifting/ending when/if fraser were to leave, as one might imagine a fairytale character would eventually do

I’m a big angst person, so fraser disappearing as suddenly as he arrived appeals to me, but so does ray and fraser finally go out and build a cabin together ( @gjdraws has great ideas for that)

3. ASEXUAL FRASER

My specific version of asexual fraser is: 1. disconnected from his body (ties back to earlier things about “having identity,” a body is for Doing Specific Things, sex is not a priority in the things he needs to use his body for)

2. similarly to everything else, divorced from the idea of identity – whether he has sex with anyone doesn’t mean he’d define himself as gay, bi, ace, het, unless someone told him this was what it meant. (Ties into the earlier idea that fraser looks for external clues/orders as to what he is in comparison to Society and Culture). And he wouldn’t identify with a subculture as identity, because that would require actually feeling an identity

3. veers between sex repulsed and neutral – a certain grey-aceness to it – that is, the act of putting his body in a sexual situation is mostly a strong No with additional ick feelings accompanying it, but he’d be willing to do it and able to possibly even enjoy it given the right circumstances, which are heavily tied to......

4. KINKY FRASER

1. obviously, have said several times, I read Fraser as one of the subbiest characters I’ve ever come across in fiction. His whole raison d’etre is to serve, he clearly likes having clear orders, he reacts with what can only be described as a Shiver when meg gets up in his face, he lets victoria call all the shots from first kissing to how things go down in bed, heavily suggested he likes it when people put fingers in his mouth (and also generally he’s a very orally-oriented man outside of a sexual-or-kinky context), he clearly lives a life of incredible intense sensory stimulation, which lends to an interesting autism-connected-to-kink-and-stimulation read, he seems to only allow comfort after a certain amount (a lot of) pain, tying to ideas of “earning,” and to kinks like humiliation and praise, basically "fraser getting a good grade in [insert context here, including giving/receiving pleasure]"… did I miss anything…. Maybe......

2. sex as service and sex as stimulation feel to me like far stronger drives for fraser than sex as attraction based (attraction really doesn’t seem to be a thing he gets on a general basis). That is, tying into ideas about being praised/doing well, and into blocking out outside stimulus/overstimulation potentially through pain

3. if fraser in this read is someone who wants to do well, who seeks validation, who doesn’t think he deserves comfort unless he’s earned it, who relates to people and bodies (including/especially his own body) in non-normative ways, and who likes clear guidelines, then sex can absolutely play into all of that. It doesn’t have to, there are a lot of ways to play with this idea

4. the show already has done some of this, first in relation to meg and him having this interesting back-and-forth where they’re both really into how the other treats them (on his side, she’s blunt and demanding and sparing with praise and quick with corrections and knows exactly what she wants from herself and what she wants from him – on her side he takes orders easily, tries desperately to please her, gets flustered when she gets into his space, is old-fashioned but not chauvinistic in his attitudes, and is all about deferring)

5. ray and fraser also have a lot of this, in that fraser will put himself in incredibly dangerous situations and know that ray will save him/take care of him, which is a first in fraser’s life. Ray also pays him/lends him a lot of money in various interesting contexts, one time dresses him up in his clothes in order to go undercover together, and is his general guide for normative situations. Which, fraser in many ways feels like ray's. especially the first one is so interesting, because you’d think Big Strong Hero Man would be the one who does all the saving, but not that often honestly… (ray’s smile when fraser saves him from drowning really is something, baby boy you are down Bad). But I wrote a bit about fraser-as-martyr and ray-refusing-to-let-him-martyr-himself, which sums it up for me

6. basically: meg is the stick, and ray is the carrot (the way this reminded me of A Specific Scene in a fic I’m writing about these three…)

7. also @gjdraws has literally just given me some interesting things to think about in terms of Making fraser centre his own pleasure (potentially through receiving a blowjob) and the ways fraser might respond to being so self-aware of his own body without being able to Do something other than feel pleasure..... is interesting in all of this above context, considering fraser-as-martyr and wanting to do well for others and what ray wants is for fraser to feel good.............. well how do you square that fraser!?)

5. CONCLUSION FRASER

this is one version of aspec fraser, and even within that there are a lot of different frasers!

I might do another little imagine with different variations on aspec fraser. This one is just my favourite starting point, as a series of questions: what does it mean to be walking parallel to most people who seem to understand intrinsic concepts that you fail to grasp, but have learnt (through books and movies mainly) are at the core of “being human” – how does it make you vulnerable to getting hurt by bad faith actors (like victoria) – how can it make you feel like you’re not “enough” not good enough, not human enough – how can you create relationships on your own terms without having to bother about defining them using everyone elses terms (ray and meg)

I think those are some of the biggest building blocks for how I read fraser generally, and the terms above mainly exist to give some semiotic cultural context for me

[justanotherhh]

Hi! Love your blog! I have a question:

Maybe it's because I listen to a lot of crime podcasts, but I have never associated psychopathy with being aro and/or ace (despite or maybe because I'm on the aroace spectrum myself?). Is this one of those things where there are people out there equating – I imagine especially aromanticism – with being emotionless? I feel like I've mainly heard the – also horrible – comments of aroace people being "like robots". Then again, I'm not "fully" aroace, nor have I had the need to be super open about it, so I don't pay much attention to this stuff.

Anyway, while I agree that calling Alastor an "evil psychopath" is simplifying things something that frustrates me in parts of the Hellaverse fandom in general....or just fandom in general, tbf...I don't think considering him to be on the ASPD spectrum is incorrect?

Enough rambling and onto my main question: in your opinion, should I always clarify that when I call someone a psychopath and that person also happens to be aro and/or ace, that the two things are not correlated? I don't want to accidentally imply something hurtful/feed into a horrible social mentality. P.S. I want to be clear that I don't want to imply that all people with ASPD are murderers/rapists etc either. Though clearly Alastor is the former. Of course they're not. And I can only imagine how much of a struggle living with such a disorder might be.

hello hello, thank you for the questions. i shall try to be methodical and not rambly (we'll see how it pans out)

yeah there's a big ableist and queerphobic cliché around "emotionless" characters being psychopaths who don't love -- basically it's an oversimplification of psychopathy and often conflates it with being psychotic, and of course, it assumes a correlation both between psychopathy and being evil, and being aspec -- especially the kind that's further down the end of repulsed and loveless and aplatonic -- as being evil (with "love" being the opposite of these things, which, tangent, do have a whooole other post on with this show, because it's done some very fun and potentially future-interesting things on love and sex)

the key here is that aro and/or ace is often never spoken of in narratives when this happens because well... people don't know wtf that is, so it's got that similar flavour to "oh well buffalo bill isn't transphobic, because actually the character isn't trans, the cisgender psychiatrist said so!" (actually... whole other thing on that too, but not on this blog... basically jame gumb is underrated and i root for them every time i watch the movie), but it's the Idea that "love makes you human, and sex is always assumed with love, and if you don't feel those things, it's a clue that you're evil, and the shorthand for that is psychopathic" -- generally the person writing this has never actually researched the words psychopath or psychotic, it's not about being interested in those concepts in characters, it's just a synonym for Bad

and yeah, the "like robots" fully ties into this -- the other side of the coin is aspec people as children, but alastor sooo far doesn't seem to be read this way, although the whole "but if he just discovers how to do Love/Touch/Sex in [insert whatever is wanted for this narrative] he'll become better" does play into some of those tropes too, that there is inherently something mentally ill about being aspec, and that being mentally ill is a sign of Badness (there really is a whole Essay i could do on this, and the general overlap between aspec-writing and trans-writing but! i will resist!), and it's about whether or not the Badness can be cured. if not, he's a psychopath, if yes, it's through normative relationship structures/fundamentally changing the character

it all comes down to actual curiosity -- hc'ing alastor as ASPD is totally fine (i also hc blitzø from helluva boss as BPD) and can open up a lot of doors for interrogation and interest, it's whether someone is using mental health as shorthand for shutting down further interaction with the character (think Psycho's "ah yes, this character is schizophrenic and has mother issues, hence why wearing women's clothing, the end"), or if this allows further play with the character, opens up potential doors, considers the character as rounded, rather than one-note. some aspec people do have a history of trauma or have personality disorders or are autistic, but is someone actually interested in exploring the rich variation of queerness within a character, or are we "explaining it away" as something that's merely a symptom (often one that is imagined to be fixable)

generally, im so into poking at villains and i think alastor is one of the juiciest characters ive had to play with in awhile, mainly because it feels like a lot of his writing is intentional and isn't me deciding to delve into the motivations of [slasher/monster/villain/etc] that doesn't actually exist in the text -- and i think alastor definitely does have some Stuff that could be unpacked from a neurodivergent and mental health perspective, even and including parts of his aroaceness

so in the end, picturing him on the ASPD spectrum and even linking that to aroaceness... I mean, totally chill. al-old-pal does have low empathy, and a pattern of reckless, violent behaviour, and fundamentally views relationships differently from the norm. im making arguments that he hasn't been able to create the kind of intimacy that works for him, except for perhaps with rosie and maaaaybe mimzy and niffty (@creepysora has had some very cool ideas of him connecting in alternate ways that work with his way of being and boundaries), but that doesn't mean he's suddenly More remorseful or empathetic about how his actions affect others

it's about whether or not one is using that as a way of minimising or pathologising aroaceness, and/or as a way of making aspec identities all about self-hatred (and that in turn fuels villainy), and/or generally as an explanation of his villainy as some inherent degeneracy, and/or using the word "psychopath" to mean something completely different from what it actually is... that's when we get into sticky territory

and in the end, it can be hard -- something that's perfectly reasonable to one person, could be crossing a boundary for someone else and we just have to live with that, so don't wait on my blessing, i just think as long as one's caring and curious it's heading in the right direction. i watch a lot of horror, and i can usually recognise when something is well-meaning and something is lazy, and even times when it's the latter i can still find enjoyment (think angela from sleepaway camp -- on the flipside the movie they/them was well-meaning and a complete miss in its final political statement)

i recognise also im bringing up a lot of trans villainy as-example, rather than aspec villainy. that's a. because my special interest is trans horror so go figure and b. because that overlap is soooo real

(another example, not horror unless you're a karate kid 3 truther, is the character terry silver, who is never stated to be aromantic, but whose villainy on the later show cobra kai is intimately tied to an unspecified madness that includes low empathy and... no love, vs all the happily monogamous (het) relationships around him. he's not aromantic, he's not diagnosed with anything, it's not of interest to the story that he may be mentally ill or have PTSD or be aro and possibly loveless or that he may be gay -- because yes, he's coded that way too and that overlap is also real, and a whole other tangent i could go on -- it's just subtext to add to the villainy)

now another tangent, but loosely connected: was reading a transcript of the 1974 TS/TV conference (the first of its kind that was organised in the way it was) -- a series of talks over the course of a weekend discussing trans rights, especially in healthcare, and it fully contained a section of someone saying that "true" transsexuals can be recognised because before they physically transition (into binary genders)... they're asexual. because they hate their bodies so much that they can't feel sexual attraction to others. lot to unpack there, but really in this little conversation as example, what i mean is that the roots of pathologising aspec identities run very very deep, including within the wider LGBT+ community, and since alastor is quite a complex character that has done some very bad things, it's worth really thinking about what headcanoning him as one way or another says about the character for oneself. what does it add? what does it potentially demonise or minimise? what does it allow?

the neat thing about hellaverse is the sheer amount of queer characters meaning we can go beyond "if x character is Bad this represents Every person within this group" but with alastor being (so far) the only character who's not doing the whole love-and-sex game (although i think striker counts in this as well, personally + listen... sir pentious givin' real demi vibes. and if we're looking for a link between trauma and asexuality, well, angel is right there. and, and, and...), it does bear going the extra length to learn about -- especially since a lot of people really don't know that these biases even exist in the first place, which leads to a lot of unthinking perpetuating

i think a good place to start would honestly be: "would this feel like a queerphobic and ableist coding if the character were gay? trans? bi?" not because we're totally over queerphobic writing in general (lol, can you imagine), but as a starting point: are we treating aspec identity in text in a way that makes the idea of being aspec in and of itself degeneracy?

but like. hell yeah villains. hell yeah neurodivergency, mental illness, low empathy, lovelessness, unhealthy coping mechanisms, Bad Mean Queers, cannibalism, and characters you just can't quite suss out. big into a fucked up little guy

how did i do on the ramblyness

[primeduo]

as an aroace it's weird people equate us to misery in trying relationships. like, we're not miserable... I have a partner I love very much... I just define that love a bit differently to others... but we don't have romantic struggles because I don't exclude myself from romantic activities and enjoy being around her. like. it's not oh we try a relationship and it fails and we're sad. sometimes the relationship is just funky and special emotionally and different. I'm tired of people equating the discovery of being aspec as some sort of sad thing meaning we'll be alone forever

YOU GET ME i was sad when i realized i’m aroace because society so highly values the whole Romantic Attraction stuff. and i had to break up with my partner at the time over it (who fun fact actually realized they’re aro and we’re still close friends in the same friend group) and it was just very sad for me. it felt like i was broken and it was a lot of internalized arophobia that haunted me for like a year prior before i finally accepted i’m aroace

but now i’m in a qpr and omfg i could not be happier i’m literally messaging my partner about how happy they make me and it took me a bit to realize that hey, i might not be able to experience romantic or sexual attraction, but i still experience so many others and i’m fully capable of loving !! and just because society views friendships as less than romantic relationships doesn’t mean that’s true whatsoever. being aspec be it aro or ace or both is a very beautiful thing and seeing so many fics about one-sided yearning or misery and angst paired with being aro is like. i get it but sometimes i just wanna read something Happier !!

i still struggle with internalized aphobia but it’s gotten a lot better and the realization that all types of relationships are equal be it platonic romantic familial etc Being aspec should be a great time and not always written as like oh this poor fella cannot love :(( what will this small guy ever do now without a heart :(( being aspec has its ups and downs but is Great and i gotta be the change i wanna see (opens google docs)

[friendshapedplant]

Streaming "I Just Want To Be Single!!" demo Wednesday? at 7pm EDT!

"Wednesday?" Cus I might push it to Thursday, we'll see!

Well I streamed a Homosexual VN demo earlier this pride month, so why not stream an Aspec VN as well? Balance it out, get some good ol aro rep up in here!

I only know the basic outline of the mechanics and the like of this game, so this will be a trip for everyone involved! Yahoo

(game is by @tsunderestudio if u wanna check out their tumble and I recently reblogged a post bout the game :3)

twitch.tv/friendShapedPlant

[agentplutonium]

Fic WIPs I want to post in 2024

I wanna hold myself accountable more than anything so here's some fics/concepts I want to write in 2024. I don't know if any of them will get done we'll have to see.

1. Like Real People Do

This is kind of a cheat since I already started it, but I really want to finish this fic in 2024. It has been in progress since last September. I love it it is my child however it is time for this guy to get off of my wiplist. It's already 35 k, and we're still six (+?) chapters away from the end. If any of my wips are getting finished this one is a priority.

2. Biting the Hand That Feeds

This fic I just started last? month? something like that, but where its shorter and I like the concept there is a high chance that I will finish it. It's a Milo/Sweetheart 1920's AU that Dizz introduced me too that I am putting my own spin on. I am actually in love with the concept and I wanna see if I can get that whole "can't be together but like fuck do I care" vibe down since this is the first time that I'm properly writing it ^^

3. Milo/Sweetheart Mafia AU

This one is another one that is probably (hopefully) going to be done sooner rather than later. Veau actually handed me this concept attached to Copacabana (at Copa) by Barry Manilow and I am so excited to play with it. The song in general fascinates me, I liked it before now but I listened again a few nights ago while we were talking about it and really listened to the lyrics and it has such a fascinating story it tells. I haven't picked out the themes I would be writing JUST yet (I just started developing it on the 24th) but there's probably gonna be something there.

4. My Tank fic that is based on songs from Stick Seasons (We'll All Be Here Forever) by Noah Kahn

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but the concept fascinates me. Ever since that album came out I have never been able to detach it from Tank no matter how hard I try. So, the natural response is to write a fic until I hate myself (/lh/j). It would revolve around the relationship that Tank & Milo/Sweetheart would have before, during, and after Quinncident/Darlin moving away. This one has themes of different connections on person can have, and how those connections can age as someone grows up and changes, and what its like to navigate someone returning after so long and changing so much.

5. My SpiderSneaks AU

this is just me indulging in my other hyper-fixations. In this fic, I'd be taking the plot of The Amazing Spider-Man and twisting it to fit into Milo/Sweetheart. I forget what other details I have, but it's a concept I've been sitting on for a while. I'm just obsessed with spiderman guys that's really the only reason this exists. However I would love to write out themes of the struggle between purpose and love/happiness. I feel like that's a fitting thing to imbed into a spiderman au that doubles as a milo/sweetheart fic. The two of them are easily put into that "must do good" role, and their relationship seems to balance that out a little bit, but I kinda want to play with it in regards to Sweetheart.

6. The Milo/Sweetheart intimacy fic. (the one talked about in this post. )

This kinda ties into me pushing my aspec!Sweetheart agenda, but the idea of writing a fic that shows the intimacy and love these two share without defaulting to a sexual encounter is so fascinating to me. I would put SO MUCH into that fic guys you don't understand. I need it. It's not even "oh this would be cool to write" its "I NEED to write this to satiate my soul."

I do have other wips I want to work on but they're smaller and will probably act as buffers between the bigger ones. I hope I can get most of them done, especially the unfinished fics because I hate having unfinished projects. However there are themes I would love to explore in the not started ones that might convince me to start writing it ^^

[raayllum]

Hi I was the anon the asked about parallels. If you didn’t get that ask just forget about I wanted to add a question about how do separate fictional relationships romantic or otherwise with real life ones. I’m asking how to take your fandom glasses off( for lack of a better term?

I know this is probably obvious but it’s healthy to outgrow a show right and realize it was holding you back

Re: this ask a little while ago

Well, fanon/canon romantic relationships vs real ones are very different things (I am assuming that some of those are like, celebrity based, but that is an assumption so it may not make all my advice/thoughts accordingly accurate to what you're looking for, depending on your circumstances).

Characters in a story do not have legitimate agency, as they are not real. They cannot decide to have feelings for another character, nor can they decide to be with them. The writer(s) or fans must realize the potential and, by virtue of being real while the characters are not, can engage with said potential in a variety of ways. This is especially true when it comes to ascribing/projecting versus recognizing our experiences in characters. For example, I very much read and interpret Rayllum as an aspec dynamic (Callum as demiromantic, Rayla as demisexual) and Ezran (among various other characters in TDP) as Autistic as an aspec and Autistic person, but those are ultimately headcanons. At most I might argue there's coding, whether intentionally on behalf of the creative team or not, not is anyone else Wrong for not headcanoning those characters the same way. They're not real, and the wellbeing of real people always takes priority over the wellbeing of fictional characters.

Secondly, there's a wide range of shipping and what it means out there. This is because shipping doesn't always mean "these two characters live happily ever after with babies" (or even if that is the end goal, is not where the root of interest lies). I have characters I ship as in "they didn't even really date and are now longstanding divorced from one another" (Viren/Harrow), "this would never be canon but I like it anyway, and possibly ship either or both halves with other characters in canon anyway" (Terry/Corvus), or "I only ship this 10-15+ years later when they're in very different stages of their lives" (aged up Soren/Opeli or Claudia/Ezran, for example).

This also means learning to read shipping signs even if 1) the ship isn't your cup of tea and 2) how to recognize a lack of shipping signs even if the ship is your cup of tea. Just because I like a ship doesn't mean I think it is, or should be, canon, and just because a ship doesn't work for me as much personally doesn't mean it's 1) a bad ship or 2) isn't happening.

Now, in real life, most of us don't necessarily choose who we develop feelings for (although I know that can vary for people who are on the aromantic spectrum sometimes, myself included) but like

In a fic, or a book, or a show, often times we are privy to characters' direct thought processes. We'll see scenes where they are alone or not with each other. This allows us often to get a very personalized peek inside their head, to really definitively know what they're thinking (and why).

There is no real world equivalent to that; all we have is taking people at their word or at their writing, and trusting that they mean what they say. And maybe we trust that because of consistency, or time frame, or said words being supported by actions, but it is trust. It takes a long, long time for trust to turn into knowledge, in relationships.

A good example of keeping heads screwed on straight (ironically for a queer couple) might be me and my partner. We're both big Rayllum fans and ended up seeing a lot of ourselves in them as people and as a couple. I relate most heavily to Callum but Rayla is my favourite; they relate most heavily to Rayla and Callum is their favourite. And while the similarities are sometimes useful and often times funny, we are decidedly not Rayllum and they are decidedly not us.

More than out growing a show, I think (although that can happen too) it might be more useful to frame it as outgrowing a mindset. If we make any given thing - particularly fictional concepts we do not own and thereby don't have any ultimate control over, and that going a certain way - or anything, really, too much a part of our self-perception/identity, we will undoubtedly have a very hard time if/when those things don't go our way, and inevitably at least one of them. Self hood needs to be grounded in meaningful relationships with art, hobbies, trusted people, and selfhood. Ships and shows can be reflections of that, but probably shouldn't be much more - and never taken that personally

[the-white-soul]

*Flowey looks down at the floor guiltily.* I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier. I just don't want you to all hate Chara more. They really aren't that bad, even though they seem so at the moment. I don't get why Chara would threaten us to do well in the court hearing but also make it so much harder at the same time!

We have time to prepare, luckily, and so maybe we can talk to them before the day. I'm their best friend, so I'm sure they'll want to listen to me some bit if I try to convince them to help us instead! Then you'll see more of them besides the violent aspec, hopefully. There's more to Chara than that.

(Kara) "Flowey, never change. You say that you are sorry, but you shouldn't be. You found good inside me. That is one of the hardest things anyone has ever done." hugs Flowey (Kara) "Let's get back to business. Alright, anyone else wants to say something after learning we all might die?" (Dess) "I have nothing. I feel like he can't be called a good person by most. I know he is, but he's made so many mistakes." (Kara) "So have we. Now, what do we do to set up a case?" (John) "Usually, it would take years to start this, but they want it done as quickly as possible. Don't expect a fair fight. Although I've thought if they don't expect a big fight, maybe we can surprise them. The most important thing, besides the facts, is your expression. If you look scared, they'll know. I can't say that Flowey is the worst decision. You have to know Flowey they won't show any mercy. Our only hope is they forget to bring their best foot forward. We also must hope Chara doesn't screw anything up." (Dess) "If that Chara didn't befriend Flowey in another universe, I'd show them a piece of my mind." (Kara) "Yeah, and be dead." Meanwhile, in a random part of town. (Chara) "When will that flower stop seeing me as redeemable? Is it impossible? My Mom hated me after one day of being with her. That's why he thinks I'm more complex because of my Mom. I don't blame him too much. After all, she was pretty cruel. I know if she were here now, she'd be in hell. I tried to savor her death. I guess Flowey killing her is okay, too. They looked into a puddle and saw their reflection. Am I enough of anything? I tried to be loved by someone, and it didn't work. However, I tried hard to be hated, and Flowey still likes me. I can't allow that to happen. It's good that Asgore will lose because I couldn't live with someone liking me now." They picked up a Flower and started pulling off the pedals. (Chara) "He hates me, He hates me not. They continued this until all the petals were gone. He hates me not? Throws the flower into the water. We'll see about that."

[aroace-cat-lady]

hi

i have been questioning myself for the past days after a talk with some of my queer friends. and honestly i don’t know what to do about it, i don’t feel comfortable with talking to them until i am sure about my feelings about being in the aromantic spectrum.

i have never thought about it honestly because i didn’t even knew about aromantic until last week. i guess the hardest part for me it’s that even tho i am 22 and have plenty opportunities to date and even have sex, i have never did any of those. i have sexual feelings and feel sexual atrattion, but i have been questioning about having romantic feelings.

i like romance, i like romantic books, movies and songs, but every time romance stand in my way I run away from it… at first I thought “well it’s clearly trauma cause I don’t want to end up like my mom” but honestly it doesn’t makes sense since I do believe that love it’s real and you can find someone who actually respect you.

i had crushes before but now that I think about i think i only truly like one person in my life, and honestly i think he is the only person who i would be actually able to have a relationship with, even if I don’t have a close friendship with him anymore. the lasts two times i became close to actually date people i ran away in the moment it became too real for me, and the funny thing it’s: i honestly thought I was in love with one of them only to literally switch to feel nothing out of nowhere.

it’s just always feels like being in love it’s not something that it’s in my true plans… sometimes I do feel I would like to get married and find someone to spend my life with but it’s just so specific?? I think way more about having someone who’s a friend first by my side, a companion in hard days, the romantic side just comes with the important stuff to me.

I do feel I like the idea of being in love, it’s just hard for me and I feel like if I am going to be in a relationship it’s going to take a lot of effort from the man who wants to be with me… and I don’t see it happening…

Am I wrong to feel I am in the spectrum? Is there someone who feels something close to what I am feeling?

Well, first of all: I know how hard it is to write this kind of stuff into the ask box of Random Tumbler User™ (been there done that, actually) so thank you for trusting me with it.

Second: you don't need to figure it out right away. This is not a mortal illness that will kill you if you don't discovered it in time. It's about your identity, a beautiful part of your person. You can take all the time you need, even if you feel that you need to know right this second. It's okay not to be sure.

And third: I'm literally no one to tell you how you can label yourself. Again, sexually is not a disease: I can't tell you Oh, you have x symptoms and x signs so you are x sexuality. Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

But, against whatever internet culture is saying these days, you can label yourself even if you are not 100% sure. Actually, the aspec communities promote this a Lot™. Labels are just a name we put to a part of us that we feel is important to put a name to. Not everyone does it, and not everyone gets it right the first few times. One of my favorite "philosophies" of the aspec community is that you can use a label as long as you feel comfortable with it. Gatekeeping labels is not something we usually do. Thinking you might be x but turning out you were actually y it's not a bad thing. It means you got to know yourself better and got to see parts of you you wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Do I think you might be aro? Well, it doesn't matter in the end what I think, only you can decide if you want to call yourself an aromantic person. And I'm sorry I can't give you a straight answer, I know how frustrating it's. But if you decide to join our community, we'll be glad to have you.

Aromanticism and asexuality are particularly hard to figure out cuz ppl usually don't know what they are. Or have misconceptions of it. Or have an ideology that tells them that it's wrong not to have these feelings. At least to me, it was hard to accept myself for who I was because of these.

Well anon, again, Im sorry I couldn't give you a better answer. I hope this helps you at least a little bit, and that you don't beat yourself too hard with this.

[ace-and-aro-support-group]

[aroaceconfessions]

---FRIENDSHIP DRAMA - True Story--- I'm over 20, I'm aroace and I used to have only one friend in my life. We were friends for about 2 years. It may sound short, but it was a strong friendship: we were classmates and we went to lots of places together besides school, even to a trip in an other country. Then as we went on separate career ways, we promised that we'll still keep in touch. I never asked them about their romantic life, but they never mentioned a partner. I wanted to see our friendship as a qpr, but first I had to come out to them as aroace... So I did it. I messaged them and told it, even though it wasn't easy. They were the ONLY one I've trusted, and the FIRST person I came out to. One step closer to be in a real, magical qpr with them. Luckily they were supportive and they already knew what ace means. Few months passed, I still really wanted to meet them again in person. But anytime I messaged, they answered very late. Like within weeks or months! I was worrying if something's wrong, but I knew that they must have lots of work, because they've always been so active and hard working. Then about a year passed with keeping online contact. There was a show I wanted to watch with them together, so I asked: what do you think of watching it? They said: "Cool, I might watch it with my boyfriend sometime!" Man. My heart was broken. They have a Boyfriend. So THAT'S why they never had time for me, ignored me All the Time, for months. Your one and only friend gets a boyfriend and you're instantly the second one. We were so close, that I thought nothing can change that. I cried so much, but now think I've been able to move on. I tried to talk with them, but they don't message. We don't talk anymore. Which I've learned from this story is that allos (usually) think having a romantic partner is much more important than friendship. I seriously want to know why I'm still very saddened of how they abandoned me though. But I hope I will get a good (irl) friend if I'm lucky enough, and I keep dreaming of meeting an other aspec who would be in qpr with me. People (if there are) who had similar experiences: I'm with you. Let's try to be positive and I hope everyone will get the life they dream of! Thank you if you've read it so far.

[lehdenlaulu]

Thank you so much for the VC and asexuality post. It's 100% how I feel about the whole thing. I wish the rest of the alphabet soup would support aces for once but that might be too much to ask. We'll just support each other. Ace solidarity rah rah rah ;)

My genuine pleasure! ❤ But yeah, like I said, I understand that it's difficult for allosexuals to understand our POV in general since for allosexuals sex/sexual attraction is a natural and important part of life, and therefore its (relative) absence in a canon is probably a huge thing to adjust to and something you'd feel compelled to work around in fanfic etc.

I get it. But I must say the dismissive and even mocking tones I've seen have still been... disappointing. I also understand that the mere existence of the show has been facing some rather... uncalled-for criticism to say the least and therefore some backlash is understandable. But the insinuations that anyone concerned or disappointed about the changes to the canon 'rules' is somehow prudish, homophobic, and/or reading the books 'wrong'? Yeah. Not cool.

Personally, I'm more or less a sex-neutral aspec and don't mind it in fiction, visual or otherwise, so it being a thing in the show doesn't bother me that much outside of those concerns on what it might mean for the character dynamics. But I definitely feel especially for the sex-repulsed side of ace fans. I'm obviously at the same time happy for other LGBTQs (especially being also some of those other alphabets myself) who are thrilled to see 'proper' gay/bi representation on screen, it's just sad that we're apparently once again being dismissed from the conversation. *sigh*

[justanotherhh]

@girlbossradiodemon: Queerness as an insight into humanity. I am curious what that means.

heya, hope it's ok to move your question to a new post, because it gave me an opportunity to ramble about something I've been thinking about -- so we'll call this post:

hazbin hotel, aroace alastor, and complicating redemption

cannot remember how i phrased it in the original post, but the main crux of the idea about queerness as humanising is "when does horror and villainy use queerness as a shorthand for Other/deviant and when are those thing subverted"

in terms of alastor specifically, aspec identity (especially the kind that is on the repulsed side of things) is often used -- without people knowing they're even describing real experiences and identities -- as a way of describing a lack of feeling, a lack of empathy, a lack of connection with other human beings, as a way of signposting "this is going to be a Bad Guy, look at this person who can't engage in the Universal Human Experience Of Love (sometimes with the prerequisite desire for sex, and sometimes it's the just-wanting-sex-but-not-love that's the Evil Code)"

note here, of course, that a lack of empathy also shouldn't be a shorthand for evil! the word "psychopath" generally needs to be put on a high shelf for anyone writing anything unless they can prove they know what in the world they're talking about!!

with alastor, when reading with the aroace hat on, we get an insight into how he does relate to other people. rather than going "he's so evil he can't love," it's opening up questions about what sort of connections he does form with people, and how those are complex, and possibly there's a lot of backstory there -- that's part of the whole story we're seeing with pretty much all the main characters: "misfits who have struggled to form connections because of their specific brands of Weirdness (and also they're in hell)"

now something im interested in with him being aspec, is how the show also to an extent deconstructs the ideas that being alloromantic and allosexual are necessarily indicators of goodness, and could go a lot further in future, if it wanted to -- this works better because almost all the characters in this show are queer (and tbh, until niffty is confirmed to be allorom, i am hc'ing her as aro), and so there's much less risk of falling into the trap of "deviant sexualities vs normal sexualities" that even some shows with queer characters fall for, because they still set up monogamous, allosexual relationships as More Correct vs Other Kinds Of Queerness That Is Bad

in the hellaverse, being kinky isn't semiotics for evil, being poly isn't semiotics for evil, being arocoded isn't semiotics for evil, etcetc.

being aspec is a difficult pill for a lot of people to swallow, including other queers, especially aromanticism, and so it's neat to consider the potential of portraying depictions of love and sex that are healthy (charlie and vaggie, pentious and cherri bomb, etc) next to depictions of love and sex that are unhealthy/toxic/abusive (valentino's and vox's ways of interacting with these things) next to depictions of not-love and not-sex that are complex and (i hope) indicators of how to get to know a character better, rather than villainising or simplifying a character. that maybe initially a character like charlie (amongst others) might not get it, but that's something she needs to sort out, not alastor

it's another way the show could go a step deeper into deconstructing how we take in ideas about "goodness" in narrative and in life based on simple clichés, for example the idea that "love redeems you" -- well, what if you don't love? and what if you do love, but that's not an indicator of goodness at all? is "love" in fact an all-encompassing positive force in the first place? why do we place it on this pedestal?

in many ways the potential of alastor through being aroace, reminds me a little of how we see angel in season 1. he's introduced a Certain way -- as shallow, as someone who doesn't put the work in, as someone who "doesn't care," -- and these narratives are enforced diagetically and non-diagetically by showing that he's an addict and a sex worker. a lot of the scenes related to drugs and sex work and kinky sex are funny (crack is expensive), and/or are met with disgust by the main characters (the sex dungeon), are considered things he needs to overcome in order to be worthy of redemption (the roleplay with sir pentious)...

and then those things are pulled apart, and both narrative and characters go: "what's wrong with being a sex-worker? what's wrong with being an addict? hell, what's wrong with liking sex???" and through that "why does he need to prove himself to be redeemed?" and i predict, eventually, already heading in that direction "why even need to be redeemed when the problem is the black-and-white morality of pure goodness/badness to begin with?????"

and i think alastor being aroace could play a cool part in that. it's not love that makes alastor human, and it's certainly not sex. it's how he interacts with not fitting into those normative boxes, and how other characters, hopefully, eventually, will learn to see things from his perspective (at least, in this case)

the whole the idea of "queerness as an insight into humanity" is something both hazbin and helluva do really well, because of their portraying queerness as a given, as the thing that it simply is how these characters interact with the world -- whether good or bad or somewhere in between, the characters' queerness invites us to ask questions about them, and i think some characters offer that opportunity even more starkly than others...

i mean alastor of course. keeper of the aroace Themes.

so yeah. aroace as humanising. love doesn't mean goodness. what even does redemption mean?