#i think i lost the plot maybe

[luvo27]

just so we're clear: the reason i used so many words to describe the steph &/ cass relationship in the fic that does not exist is because the theme of that nonexistent fic is about the wonderfully complex nature of aspec relationships and how language serves and also fails to accurately describe them and the way that the world can try to impose a type of relationship in an attempt to either understand or make more palatable what is not something that can be easily understood, and so boiling it down to steph/cass or queerplatonic steph/cass or steph&cass would go against what i'm trying to do, even if the fic in question literally does not even exist. so why am i still talking about this nonexistent fic?

this is an excuse to talk about my feelings regarding aromantic and asexual representation on ao3. (note that i say on ao3, and not in fandom in general because this is me talking about my specific personal experiences, which mostly take place through ao3)

BIG DISCLAIMER THAT I WENT BACK AND ADDED IN BECUASE THIS WENT OFF THE RAILS: this is based on PERSONAL EXPERIENCE and FILLED WITH MY BIASES and was written IN A HAZE. (that being said this is something i've thought a lot about over months if not years.)

that tiny disclaimer aside, it goes without saying that fandom as a whole is primarily motivated by shipping, and so fanfiction on ao3 is primarily focused on shipping as well. shout out to this one time i was in high school and reading fic and someone asked (with good intentions) what ship i was reading for, and when i answered none, they asked (again, with good intentions,) what the point of doing that was. this, as you might imagine, made me feel weird to say the least! anyways, go on ao3 and the majority of fandoms will have an m/m pairing in the top most written. go into a small number of fandoms, and an f/m or f/f ship will hold the top spot. (femslash in fandom is a completely different topic) how many fandoms have platonic relationships at the top?

anyways i got curious so working off the knowledge that i have i did some quick looks at a handful of different fandom tags. fandoms which had platonic relationships at the most popular that i expected: dream smp and teenage mutant ninja turtles (all media types). honestly i was a little surprised to see that platonic relationships were at the top for both batman (all media types) and batman (comics), and I was expecting umbrella academy to have a platonic relationship at the top, but it was actually Dave/Klaus! in dr who and related fandoms, there aren't any platonic tags that break the top 10. and ohoho, here's where we get into it: dimension 20's top written relationship was fig/ayda, followed by riz/fabian in second place.

luvo, why did you say here's where we get into it? well, i just talked about the way that fandom focuses on shipping over platonic relationships, but i'm here to talk about aro/ace characters! in ao3's advanced search, if you look for fics with 'asexual' in any category, there are as of 1/7/2025 a total of 67,515 works. looking up 'aromantic' in any category whittles it down to 26,845 works. out of the over 14 million works posted on ao3? (number pulled from wikipedia) these are small numbers, but IT GETS BETTER. if you click on the AROMANTIC TAG, the top written relationship in the AROMANTIC TAG is a SLASH SHIP. (Alastor/Vox, Hazbin Hotel at 533 works.) sort fics under the aromantic tag by kudos, and the first fic under the gen category instead of m/m or multi is the 6th work down, and overall, gen works account for 6,950 out of 18,413 works under the aromantic tag.

my point being, only a small number of fics written with platonic relationships add to aro/ace rep in fic, and following that, when aro/ace characters ARE represented, it seems to be...how do i put this...typically with a shipping lens?

let's take a step back. I want to ask the question of how many canonically aromantic and/or characters exist. just. exist. wikipedia has a decently respectable list of asexual characters in fiction, as well as a much shorter list of aromantic characters in fiction. quick disclaimer that some medias are not represented such as podcasts (jon magnus archives?) or ttrpg shows (riz gukgak?)

what i will point your attention to is: how many of these characters are made explicitly aromantic or asexual within the text of their media? answer: not a lot of them. the majority of these characters have their sexualities confirmed in behind the scenes type things, such as Victor's (Arcane) voice actor saying he's asexual in an interview, Lilith (Owl House) confirmed asexual? or aromantic? over a charity livestream and twitter, Max (Miraculous Ladybug) confirmed asexual in a tweet, etc etc. kudos to Todd and Yolanda (Bojack Horseman) for being confirmed asexual in the media they're portrayed in! these all taken from the asexual characters page, the trend follows in the page about aromantic characters: namely, that if characters are aro/ace, typically explicit confirmation of these identities takes place outside of the media they're portrayed in.

why is that important? because without an explicit confirmation, it makes it a lot easier for denial of these identities to occur. yes, maybe it was the intention of the creators, but look. once a story leaves the author's hands, it belongs to the audience and intentions often have little to no bearing. additionally, if you're reading this then you probably understand that people will also deny coding characters as being gay or bisexual without an explicit onscreen kiss or declaration or some such. and why is this important?

putting the pieces together: characters can be confirmed as allo lgbtq+ through physical acts portrayed explicitly in their stories. characters who are aro/ace, well. more often than not, they can't. they're relegated to being coded as such, and confirmation, no matter how strong the coding, can often be easily ignored or possibly never even heard of.

do not get me wrong, I GET IT. Characters exist in settings where they don't have the word aromantic, or maybe it wouldn't be in character for them to say it as such. I UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY. one of my most popular fics i've posted is about Riz Gukgak and his struggle with internalized aphobia. the words aromantic or asexual do not appear ONCE in the fic. In the sequel, A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CHARACTER has to say the words, and RIZ NEVER ACTUALLY CONFIRMS HIS IDENTITY. I UNDERSTAND THE STRUGGLE.

let's continue down the riz gukgak train. here are the facts: a sizable number of fans of dimension 20's fantasy high would say that riz gukgak is heavily aro/ace coded, with scenes such as:

making up a fake partner ("Clearly you haven't been kissed yet." ... "Actually, I'm dating somebody in the Baronies." Fantasy High Sophomore Year, Sophomore Start, 1:26:55)

being told that he is afraid of his friends leaving him for romantic relationships, (“The years will go by, and everyone will find someone that matters more to them than you do.” - Fantasy High Sophomore Year: Fearful Symmetry, 46:24)

telling his dad that he doesn't want to have sex ("yeah, I don't know... it just isn't happening yet? Like, not even just the act is not happening yet, like me wanting to do it." "It's not happening?" "It's not happening yet. And my friends are all like, [whispered] super horny." - Fantasy High Sophomore year, My Green Heaven, taken from a conversation around the 33 minute arc)

additionally, in an adventuring party episode of a spinoff series, the seven, Brennan Lee Mulligan says that Riz is asexual. ("...in a scene, Murph's character lies about having a partner, like a romantic partner, because Riz is ace, is asexual." - Adventuring party, season six episode eleven at 31:22 )

with all the love to my friends over in the d20 fic server for hunting these quotes down for me. truly my life is made all the better by the d20 fic community in a way that i will never know how to describe

here are some more facts! late march of 2024, with the release of the episode Baron's Game, I was lurking around the fhjy tag on tumblr. given the nature of the internet, there was discourse about riz and his identity, or his lack thereof. apologies to my d20 friends reading this who i love a lot, my rendition of a summary of said discourse follows below:

"if he's only coded to be aro/ace, that doesn't make him actually so. Brennan Lee Mulligan isn't the person who plays Riz, and him saying that he's ace is in behind the scenes content for a different show. Additionally, he only says that Riz is asexual, not aromantic. And even if Riz is aroace, aroace people can still be in romantic and sexual relationships, or a queerplatonic one!"

"why does it seem like everyone is ignoring the fact that riz is aroace? Kristen Applebee's sexuality (lesbian) would never be erased to ship her with a guy, so why are so many people doing it to Riz? Writing Riz in queerplatonic relationships is inaccurate because he's shown to be uninterested in relationships resembling anything like romantic ones, it seems like people are only interested in writing queerplatonic relationships as an excuse to write aromantic characters in the ship dynamic they want to," etc, etc. you get the gist.

let's get something straight about my stance on what people can and can't do with fictional characters: you can do literally whatever you want forever. ship riz in a romantic and sexual relationship. don't. whatever. i do not care. i do not care. he's not real. he's a fake character. he is a character. he exists for the audience to do literally whatever they want with him forever. i'll argue for someone's right to ship this character in whatever way they want. if they go down i go down with them-

ahem. sorry. my overall stance on fan creation crept into this thing that's supposed to be about how aro/ace characters are represented in fandom. whoops.

no, but let's talk about that. so, my personal interpretation of riz gukgak is that he's aroace and both romantically and sexually repulsed. i'm fairly confident in saying that my interpretation is supported by canon. some of my friends interpret riz and fabian seacaster's relationship as a queerplatonic one and they write fic about it, and i've read some it it, and i enjoyed it a lot!! and their interpretation is also supported by canon!! some people will interpret riz as simply being a late bloomer! or demi! or whatever! and guess what!!!! this will also have basis in canon!!!! gasp. shock. it's almost like stories exist for a wide variety of people to interpret them however they want to and i'm back to my philosophy on how we interpret stories in general stay on task luvo this is already too long.

so. recap. there aren't a lot of aro/ace characters who exist. often, their sexualities are reliant on coding due to the nature of the identity, and confirmation if it exists is often found behind the scenes instead of in the media. relatively, there isn't a lot of aro/ace fic on ao3. within that aro/ace fic, there's often relationships tagged with the typically romantic and/or sexual slash.

let's talk about aro/ace characters written in relationships of the romantic, sexual, and queerplatonic variety. mostly the queerplatonic variety. look, the thing is that sometimes it's easier to write a good story explicitly about being aro/ace if it's also a story about finding a queerplatonic relationship. sometimes it's easier to write a good story about being aro/ace if it's a story about finding a romantic and/or sexual relationship. writing the story comes down to the same reason so many aro/ace people struggle to find their identities in the first place: how do you find something that isn't there? sometimes, you do that by focusing on what is there.

let's keep going down this train. there aren't a lot of aro/ace characters. there are a hundred million different unique and complicated ways to have a romantic, sexual, queerplatonic, or straight up platonic relationship. Every single story written about aro/ace characters in relationships of any kind will resonate with someone, whether that's the person who wrote it, or someone who will read it. people write fic about characters in queerplatonic relationships that are exactly like what would generally be considered a conventional romantic relationship, and the only difference is that the characters refer to it as a queerplatonic relationship. thinking ungenerously, maybe this fic was written by an allo writer who just wanted to write a ship. The thing about fanfiction and its growing popularity, is that i would put money on the fact that this has happened, and at least one aspec reader stumbled upon it and their mind was blown and they felt seen.

the first fic i ever wrote with an aroace character tag was 1.8k words, posted over a year ago, and quite honestly i don't think it's very good. i wrote a second fic with the same character tagged as aroace again almost half a year ago, and again, not one of my personal favorites. but I got comments on those fics where someone felt seen, and were happy that they got to see this character be aroace, and were happy to see that this character got a happy ending, if a nontraditional one.

and remember when i brought up the slash fic under the aromantic tag? if you look under the tag Queerplatonic relationships, at the time i'm writing this there are 14,400 works. 5,941 of those are gen, the rest fall into m/m, f/f, m/f, multi, and other. the thing is, there isn't a signifier for queerplatonic relationships. a lot of the time to indicate one, authors on ao3 will use &, /, or a combination, or whatever. the fact of the matter is that the words romantic, platonic, and queerplatonic are doing so much work to carry such a wide variety of how a relationship is expressed, and even if there was a symbol to indicate queerplatonic relationships, (which there are in some places. the comic fan fiction author archive uses ~ to indicate qprs,) there are a hundred thousand different ways for qprs to look like.

um so. i started writing this like maybe 2 or 3 or more hours ago and i don't even know if i have or have ever had a point and this is extremely rambly and not organized in the slightest, but if i do have a point, it's something like:

there aren't a lot of aromantic characters. there aren't a lot of asexual characters. there aren't a lot of aro/ace coded characters. there definitely aren't enough to encompass the incomprehensible number of ways that people can experience or express their identities, and there are never going to be. the human experience is too wonderfully diverse for that, and it's too difficult to distill into the pitifully small vocabulary we have. my point might be to touch grass. by which i mean, don't like don't read, and remember that people are just that: people, with lives and worlds and perspectives of their own, and some of them you will never be able to understand, and sometimes you're not meant to understand them, and they are deserving of love regardless.

[mafuyuakgae]

even if I came to love humanity in the end, there’s no proof I was ever here, right?

[technically-human]

Bisexual crisis Crystal edition

[peace-hunter]

tfone au where OP is created as the last of the primes but way after them, a sparkling born at what were thought to be the last days of the war against the quintessons, the beginning of a new generation of peace after eons of war. a child meant to be loved and raised knowing nothing of war nor sacrifice.

he's kept mostly out of the spotlight by his siblings, who don't wish to expose him to everyone's optics so young, and want to wait until the war is done and over to properly introduce him to their people.

except of course the primes are betrayed and murdered by sentinel, the war is lost and everyone who knows and cared for the truth is either banished or outright killed in order to suppress it.

and the high guard, the ones the primes trusted the most, the ones that were supposed to protect them, the ones who failed in their most important duty, have to make a choice. to take the last prime, their last hope, with them to the surface, a hostile environment where there's little to no supplies and where they'll be hunted down by both sentinel and the quintessons as the biggest threat to their regimen.

or hide him in plain sight. place him where sentinel won't think to look for him. one more sparkling among many. and hope it will be enough to keep him alive. pray to primus that he'll protect his last child long enough for them to come back for him when it's safer (even if most of them have already lost their faith on him when he allowed the rest of his children to be massacred like that)

they almost lose their resolve when they realize they will have to take the little one's cog away in order to make him blend in with the rest of the newborns (and oh do they burn with murderous intent when they see what sentinel has done to their people but it's not the time yet-) but in the end they decide an impaired little prime is better than a dead one.

and so in the chaos of thirteen dead primes and a sudden energon crisis, a little sparkling who very few mechs really knew about and even fewer had seen completely vanishes. and in the depths of iacon a mech in charge of a new batch of newborns scratches their helm in confusion as they realize they must have miscounted the first time.

optimus prime is quietly erased from any official records by sentinel, written off as dead when they find a sparkling's frame mangled beyond recognition after an attack on the base of those rebels that insist on being a thorn on his side. killing the sparkling hadn't been precisely in his plans, he probably could've found some use for it after all, but he's not particularly upset about it either.

and orion pax grows up with an ache on his spark that tells him he's missing something far more important than a t-cog and dreams of gentle and loving hands, cradling him against the frames of mechs he cannot recall the faces of.

[clowningcrows]

hot take i guess but when i watch the scene with billy and agatha where she finds out for sure he’s billy maximoff and starts tearing up, i perceive it as being bc she’s still a bit (read: significantly) heartbroken that he isn’t nicky. he isn’t hers. sure, she might’ve known from the beginning to some degree that he was wanda’s, but she doesn’t know for sure. we see that every time she panics because he’s hurt. we see that in the way she refused to leave his side when he was asleep. we see that when rio herself has to shake agatha out of it, saying, “agatha… that boy isn’t yours.” like YES logically i think she knew he wasn’t nicky, that he couldn’t be but we CAN see how painfully, hopelessly desperate agatha is to think that maybe he could be. so in my mind, she sees billy maximoff standing in front of her, finally being met with indisputable proof that he could not possibly be her lost son. how could she not tear up at that?

[nymdraws]

to give an android a heart

[screechingfromthevoid]

I made an Orym edit instead of writing or sleeping

[crookedghosts]

these mfs have been haunting me since my failed attempt at the lost trio week godswap au prompt (I'll put what I know of it under the cut)... cabin10!Leo and cabin9!Piper live rent free in my mind and they actually still refuse to reveal their dynamic to me...

this is truly just a ramble now but believe me when I say I did my best to throw this together over lost trio week and then liper got ahead of me:

Piper McLean is the daughter of Hephaestus and a set designer, who practically raised her in design workshops. Neglected by her mother and actor step father, she's prone to skipping class and picking up side projects, including stealing cars from set and fixing them up with swapped out (and probably illegal) parts to get them working again.

She gets attacked one night (there was particularly strong half-blood smell around, and no mortals in sight) and a fire starts around her in defense. Unfortunately, it gets out of control, and half of the set is burned down, with footage pointing to Piper's trespassing. In this mess, the production team finds out about her makeshift workshop built out of their property, and she's sent to Wilderness School for both the arson and the stealing.

Oddly enough, hours before this, news broke involving a vintage car she had fixed up that got stolen from the set and was used for a drunken teenage joyride.

She didn’t know it at the time, and they wouldn't know for the entire beginning of their friendship/relationship, but the rebel teenager responsible was none other than Leo Valdez, who was also sent to Wilderness School for the trouble he caused.

To be fair, he wasn't trying to go as far as he did—he just wanted to know what the limit was for what he could get away with. A son of Aphrodite and an actor, Leo's often facing unintended consequences with his charmspeaking.

Leo had always been in some sort of boarding school. He also always managed to get kicked out. Wilderness School was his last straw after he'd convinced his classmates to leave a school dance, break into a nearby movie set, steal a car, and get drinks from the gas station—all by asking.

Piper's more mysterious at Wilderness about her past, but Leo connects the dots that they're from the same set.

Leo's in awe of her sharp mind, and Piper sees through his facade, because his curiosity is genuine and he's clever in his own ways, too

Eventually they make it to camp and there's a lot of grappling with their powers. I.e. Leo "do ppl actually like me or am I tricking them" Valdez and Piper "did I ever actually connect with my mother and am I talented at all or is it just my dad's powers" McLean.

They eventually find their footing and are besties (quite possibly, they're so confused at some point that they don't know where they stand w each other and go through stages of changing their relationship lol) to the point of being honorary members of each other's cabins. Leo braids Piper's hair etc etc headcanons.

Jason joins later. He's a son of Zeus, and now we can imagine like... a BotL era, pre-Great Prophecy (#1) group forming where the trio is like 15 and everyone is afraid of Jason and The Implications so it's really just Liper showing him around. (Annabeth and Percy aren't around for this, but when they get back, Jason is grateful to speak to this 'Annabeth' that Piper keeps saying 'will explain it better later'.)

I've not yet decided what this means for the Grace siblings or for there to be a Greek Jason with Percy being the child in prophecy's question (or is he?) but I do think Leo and Piper are the only ones who could get Jason through it. They'd be the most open to this mystery kid, I think.

Thematically they'd still be these misfits who happened to have overlapping/questionable pasts. (cars and Hollywood, man....)

Leo I think particularly would know the dark side of the acting industry from his community and his dad. all 3 of them trauma bond <3

Jason doesn't know who's who for a minute there (re: honorary cabin members) but eventually the Blob of them all are considered honorary cabins 1, 9, and 10

Ppl joke that he's not the prophecy kid bc he's not a child of the big 3. He's obviously from Aphrodite's cabin bc he's with Leo all the time etc

[foundnthestars]

the hearing aid saga continues... do we think stan wears one or two hearing aids? cause this plot point might require he be more hoh/deaf than perhaps canon implies... but damn it, i will make this work. i'm bending canon at my will.

[legionofpotatoes]

everyone hates crunch and everyone wants the new dragon age to have 4x the scope with 8x the quantum content

[raymanrambles]

The Scrapped Rayman Comic Pitch: Rayman Rewired!!

Hiiiii! Sorry for not posting on here for like. almost 2 months whoooops! Anyways, i am back hopefully consistently!!

So, this is about the Rayman comic series that was pitched to Ubisoft by Dave Cook & Steve Gregson sometime either during or before 2020, we don't have an exact date unforch. It was titled "Rayman Rewired" and was about Rayman travelling to other Ubisoft games.

The plot synopsis followed Rayman getting upset that he didn't get a game announced at E3 (you can tell this pitch is from a while ago), so he sneaks into Ubisoft's servers and switches up their queue to make him priority, but ends up messing up and unplugs it, causing a big portal to open and sucking him in while also putting the different game worlds at stake of being deleted.

And yeah you get the gist, Rayman teams up with different heroes in different games to undo all this, with this resulting in Rayman appearing in all these games to players, boosting his popularity and causing Ubisoft to make a new Rayman game at the end. Shame it's a work of fiction.

A few pages were also made as apart of the pitch:

Guys look it's Ramon and Bullfrog!

Yeah u could say that multiversus story or "story which is actually about how rayman is neglected by ubisoft" is kinda generic but idk i think this would've been fun if done right! Also y'know just being a rayman comic series in general like how has that not happened yet. Plok got one!!!

Source: https://twitter.com/davescook/status/1321419840305987584p

[worstloki]

My issue with Thor not ‘realizing’ why Loki was acting off in Avengers 1 isn’t that Thor didn’t recognise Loki was acting unlike himself—Thor did note that—or that Thor didn’t figure out what was wrong—he did try asking—it’s more along the lines of Thor giving up, and that he accepted Loki was bad now within two days while knowing something was off when Thor himself behaved just as bad for much longer before without any specific compromising event.

[protect-namine]

.

[eloquentsisyphianturmoil]

The refugees in Sirion hearing the grind of metal and angry shouts and thinking it’s happening again.

[eyeswaitingfortuesdaynight]

speaking of comparisons, tesilid argente and yoo joonghyuk are both tragic regressors, but i genuinely think tesilid gets more of a raw deal than yjh

yjh may have had to go through 1800+ regressions but a) he chose to do it (even if he doesn't remember at the time) and b) can make his own decisions. like he has free will and can express his emotions and stuff

not only does tesilid not choose to go through his regrssions and has it forced on him by an uncaring god, he also has to police his own actions (and possibly emotions/thoughts??? can't remember exactly how throughly the stigma monitored him) lest his stigma act up and decide he's committing a sin and punish him for it

yjh can let off steam by murdering people/constellations and tearing down the star stream system and has clear goals and a plan of how to end the regressions, even if both change over time. but tesilid basically has to grin and bear it while he's fed shit from literally everyone around him unless he's willing to act up and be both be in pain and become weaker. also i don't think he has any idea of how to end his regressions other than saving the world?? i need to finish reading the novel lol

no wonder tesilid went completely and homicidally insane in a fraction of the number of regressions that yjh went through. i would too if i was forced to act like a goody two-shoes while going through hell

[keykidpilipili]

Me: I'm going to check stuff on the author of the Journal for an Atlantis KH fic.

Atlantis wiki: *doesn't cite any source*

Me: Okay then! Disney Wiki?

Disney Wiki: *also doesn't cite any source*