#it's just. like. I'm very Badbrain today and I've really got a habit of scrolling specific tags to bypass the Poison Brain

[thedreadvampy]

glancing over the Discourse tag, as is my wont while having the Bad Mental Healths

and I have seen no less than three parts about how my fucking Martin post is full of ~aphobic dogwhistles~ about how being ace is infantilising and I simply wish to scream. is all.

we can and will talk about whether a) I have a history of inadvertent aphobia (got that ask waiting for me to have the spoons to go through it, and shout out to that anon for being the first person to follow through on asking me specific answerable questions about My Stance On Asexuality) and b) whether that post was written in a way that left it carrying a lot of implications

but I can say 100% confidently that I wasn't trying to nefariously hide my desire to say that ace hcs are infantilising, because I DID have ace/aro people in mind while writing that post. as an exception. like I literally explicitly Was Not Talking About Ace Headcanons, I was very specifically talking about writing Martin as someone who wants sex and/or romance but has never had it. (I also wasn't calling it infantilising, per se, I was talking about how it feeds into the minimisation of individual agency, desire and capability for fat queer characters)

now. we can talk about the validity of that take. we can talk about the assumptions going into that. and whether I expressed it clearly. but like. man I can very entirely promise you that this was not coming from a place of Man I Hate Ace People. like. I recognise that this doesn't hold much weight but I did, in fact, try to make it clear Within The Post Itself that I wasn't talking about aro/ace hcs so it's wild af that the narrative around this out there on the Discourse Tag appears to be 'this whole post is a malicious attempt to sneak aphobia under the radar' like lol! nah! I just Apparently wasn't explicit enough in contextualising my thoughts but I'm pretty sure I said that this Wasn't To Say that aro/ace Martin was a bad take but to criticise the ways that Martin is written in the context of a romantic/sexual relationship. and I simply cannot wrap my head around this one bc people prefer to believe that me throwing in a line in a reblog saying "Martin Fucks" is proof that my Whole Post is a Malicious Aphobic Dogwhistle and I'm lying in the OP when I said "this isn't about ace/aro Martin", than to believe that I am telling the truth when I say it's not about ace/aro hcs but chucking in a single poorly thought-out line in a reblog that I haven't adequately contextualised. Like I'm prepared to meet people where they are on how they experienced the post, what harmful implications it has, and what I can do better, but I'm pretty unimpressed by the degree to which people are applying this Knowing Attempts To Mask Vicious Aphobia narrative. like fuck man I simply cannot be arsed.

(this is not to say I cannot be arsed with the entire thing. I'm in a pretty euch headspace atm but I do want to work through the criticisms people have. but this absolute bad-faith reading I simply cannot be bothered with. I'm not gonna change anyone's mind and they're not gonna somehow convince me that I was being Consciously Malicious because. I was there in my brain when I wrote this. I may be aphobic, selfish, bigoted, whatever, I don't know, but I do know I'm not doing it On Purpose With Malice Aforethought)