#that exact same logic can be applied to Alastor

[allastoredeer]

Hmm, you know once I saw someone say Lucifer is a king and so of course he's gonna be a bottom in bed because people of power always in control and usually want not to be in control somewhere so in bedroom with their partner is a perfect place.

Lucifer from HH. Always so much in control of his life and 'monarch duties' that he wouldn't want to be the one who top in bed. What a funny joke, seriously, I laughed.

"Lucifer would be a bottom because he's a king and people in power are always in control, so he obviously wouldn't want control in the bedroom."

Meanwhile:

"Alastor would never bottom because he's an Overlord and people in power are always in control, so obviously he'll want to have control in the bedroom."

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

[ckret2]

i saw a post saying that alastor is an aphobic caricature because he’s portrayed as heartless and manipulative. is this true?? i didn’t even know asexuals were stereotyped like that

I'm gonna talk about both asexuality and aromanticism in this post because 1) creators have confirmed that Alastor is both ace & aro (the ace part was confirmed much earlier, which is why it's talked about more often than the aro part), and 2) the fictional tropes I'm talking about usually apply both to aces & aros, mainly because the creators using them typically don't separate sexual attraction from romantic attraction.

So, since you hadn't heard of that stereotype before, here is a thing that is true about fiction:

In media—particularly sci-if/fantasy (where you can have characters manipulated on a soul-deep level by technology/magic) and crime/horror fiction (where you have the ever-pervasive remorseless killer and "heartless sociopath" tropes)—characters are often portrayed as "incapable of love" as a way to indicate villainy. (Widely-known example I mentioned just a couple days ago: Voldemort from Harry Potter is described as having been born incapable of feeling love due to Magic, which puts him at odds with heroes who are shown to draw their greatest strength from love.) Often, an incapacity to feel love is also indicated through an incapacity to feel sexual desire (because most allosexual alloromantic people who aren't involved in the queer community conflate romantic desire and sexual desire as the same thing).

In most cases, it seems like the logic behind this is "if I want to indicate that this person is cruel and heartless beyond all measure, what better and more extreme measure can I take than to say that they are simply completely incapable of feeling love/desire?" and this media is usually produced by people to whom it has not occurred that there are, in fact, totally normal people in the world who don't feel love or desire, and maybe there's a better way to suggest that characters are evil than to accidentally lump them in with those people?

In cases like that, usually the character isn't even called ace or aro, especially in older media. Although I wouldn't be surprised if there are some crime procedurals that throw around "our suspect is a cold, manipulative, asexual man" because it's a clinical-sounding buzzword they can use but don't totally understand; but whenever I've seen this trope pop up, a character's purported lovelessness is never treated like a sexual orientation, but rather like a negative mental condition. A negative mental condition that just happens—in many cases probably by accident—to be described the exact same way as actual people's orientations.

I'm sure there are also examples of people going "I'm going to make this character asexual" and then going "I don't know how to write an asexual character except by making them cold, callous, and unfeeling," but I feel like that's less relevant to the background of Alastor's character than the characters who are villains that get asexuality pasted onto them to enhance their villainy.

So on to the question of Alastor.

Now, without an account from Vivziepop on how Alastor's orientation was decided, I don't know her motives in making him ace/aro. Considering that his lack of sexual/romantic desire is being talked about by the creators as an orientation rather than as a negative personality trait, I doubt that she went "I want him to be peak evil so I'm going to sprinkle lovelessness on him to enhance that evilness." Rather, I would bet that it happened the other way around: there's good odds that Vivzie created this murderous cannibalistic character with shallow emotional connections to other people, then thought about his orientation, then went, "I really can't see him ever being attracted to anyone?? Better call him ace/aro."

So, yes, I think that he does end up falling into some of the same boxes as the "loveless evil manipulative villain (who is accidentally coded as ace/aro)" trope. But I don't think it was intentional, and—more importantly—I think there's room in his character to subvert the worst implications of that trope.

Ways that could happen would be by giving him, through gradual character growth, close platonic emotional relationships & a growing conscience without removing his asexuality/aromanticism, showing that loveless doesn't mean heartless; or simply by making his asexuality/aromanticism seem understandable, relatable, and harmless, and most importantly separate from his cruelty.

There are hints already in canon that he could go that way. His brief moment of confused panic in reaction to Angel's proposition in the pilot is one of the most succinct ace jokes I've ever seen, it goes against the "loveless villain is perfectly in control of his emotions and above such shallow things as desire" trope so common to accidentally-ace villains, and it presents his "where the hell did that come from??" reaction as understandable/relatable rather than unfamiliar & alienating. And inwhat few glimpses we've gotten of his prequel comic so far, it looks like Alastor keeps doggedly trying to start conversations with people and being frustrated when they run from him in terror—showing that he wants to reach out and make some sort of connection with other people, so he still desires platonic connections even though he doesn't want romantic/sexual connections. If those trends continue, I'll be satisfied.

So, summary: is he an aphobic caricature? I wouldn't go that far. Does he have significant overlap with "loveless = heartless" villain tropes that don't do ace & aro folks any favors? Yeah, I'd say he does. Could he still end up a well-rounded and interesting piece of ace/aro representation? Yes, he definitely can—but if so, it's going to be in spite of the fact that he's a manipulative cannibalistic serial killer. Like, in terms of "positive ace/aro representation," he automatically gets 20 points docked off his final score before the test even begins—but he doesn't get an automatic failing grade.

For my part, as an ace/aro viewer, I'm waiting to see where they go with his character with eagerness, not dread.