allos-aro

[allos-aro]

Fascinating (/neg) how people in aspec spaces will generally understand that for some aroaces, they cannot separate their aromanticism from their asexuality and shouldn’t be expected to do so (correct), but won’t extent that understanding to AroAllos, and expect us to censor ourselves and neatly separate our aromanticism and our allosexuality as to not make anyone ~~uncomfortable~~

Like sorry but there is simply no ~pure~ ~sexless~ ~comfortable~ aromanticism within me, just like there is no ~pure~ ~romantic~ homosexuality within me. My aromanticism is influenced by my allosexuality just as much as my sexuality is influenced by my aromanticism. There is no dividing line. My aromanticism is about sex and allosexuality and my allosexuality is about aromanticism. I don’t have one set of "aromantic experiences" and one set of "allosexual experiences" that I can nicely and neatly separate to only talk about one of them at a time as to not make anyone "uncomfortable".

Even more fascinating (/still neg) when they’ll understand it in one direction – that aromanticism will have some influence on one’s experience of allosexuality – but not the other way around. That seems to be unthinkable, that one’s aromanticism can be influenced by the experience of sexual attraction.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that aromanticism can be influenced and affected by allosexuality, including in a way that makes them inseparable? Why are you all expecting AroAllos to cut ourselves apart when we exist in spaces that are supposed to be for us just as much as they are for you, just for your comfort? Why do you expect that same understanding of us towards you, but won’t extent it back to us?

[allos-aro]

Look at this polo shirt I saw today

[allos-aro]

being sexually attracted to a people without the romantic attraction (eg. aroallos, bisexual hetero/homo roms, etc) will make so many people think it warrants the worst purity culture ass shit i stg. like no that bisexual homoromantic man is not misogynstic for not romantically liking women. no that aroallo is not just a whore that sleeps around and breaks hearts. you all need to unlearn this shit. being lgbt is not some cutesy clean thing. there are going to be 'unsavoury' identities. there is going to be identities that you think are 'too weird'. my advice? get over yourself.

[allos-aro]

amatonormativity: a romantic partner should be the most important person in EVERYONE'S life

NOT amatonormativity: MY romantic partner is the most important person in MY life, but i understand this is not the same for other people

allosexnormativity: EVERYONE should have sex and sex is something EVERYONE needs/wants/should want

NOT allosexnormativity: I PERSONALLY enjoy sex and love having sex because it makes ME feel good, but other people dont feel the same and that's okay

platonormativity: having friends is important for EVERYONE and EVERYONE needs/has/should have friends

NOT platonormativity: having friends is important to ME and I PERSONALLY love having friends, but there are people who dont and theres nothing wrong with that

faminormativity (is that the word?): family is important for EVERYONE and EVERYONE needs to have their family

NOT faminormativity: family is important to ME and I PERSONALLY need my family with me, but other people dont feel the same and i understand that

lovenormativity (again, not sure if this is a word): EVERYBODY feels love and there's something wrong wiith you if you dont

NOT lovenormativity: I PERSONALLY feel love and love people, but not everyone does and that's completely okay!

NOT amatonormativity: i dont have friends/have any desire to have friends, i am happy with other relationships/no relationships at all

NOT platonormativity: i dont have any desire to be in a romantic relationships, and i am happy with my platonic relationships

NOT allosexnormativity: i like hooking up with people and having one night stands or friends with benefits

NOT faminormativity: i care about my family deeply and am close with family members

NOT lovenormativity: i feel love for people i care about

it's not normative to personally enjoy something, so long as you respect that other people simply arent like you and aren't going to like the same things as you. taking down normativity is a two way street, allos and aspecs need to do it. support your local aros, aces, apls, afams and other aspecs today! remember to challange all normativities, and to not enforce other normativity by saying how bullshit other normativities are!

nothing is universal. romance is not universal. sex is not universal. friendship is not universal. family is not universal. love is not universal. nothing is universal.

[allos-aro]

shoutout to afamilials!! it sucks how ubiquitous the expectations to like family and familial bonds is, and also how forgotten you are in the community. you dont deserve to be forgotten! your needs are impmortant!

[allos-aro]

I think the problem with a lot of people who don’t like the idea of "platonic attraction", "familial attraction", and other types of attraction that fall outside the standard acceptable framework of what counts as attraction (like sexual, romantic desire, etc.) being labeled as attraction is that they don’t really understand what attraction is—or even the concept of orientation (oh the fucking inability to grasp the logic of a compass). They also tend to see things like the desire to build a family, make friends, etc., as innate things that everyone is just born feeling, rather than as things that are socially constructed, you know?

We can talk about whether these attractions are directed toward a gender/genders, since family and friendship usually don’t come with a gendered connotation. But I don’t really see why there’s so much resistance to labeling them as forms of attraction.

[allos-aro]

The justification for opposing “family should not be automatically assumed to be the most important relationship in someone’s life” should not be “well, some people’s families traumatized them”.

I could talk about how a lot of people with familial trauma don’t recognize that sort of thing as traumatic at all (the “what do you mean this isn’t normal? are you seriously telling me this doesn’t happen to everyone?” reaction). I could talk about how trauma is seen as extremely competitive, and how so many people constantly compare themselves to others who are “more traumatized” and think “okay, those people have the right to value familial relationships less. but I certainly don’t. I didn’t have [insert thing] ever happen to me.”

But mostly I want to say that this doesn’t actually do anything to challenge the relationship hierarchy. All it does is add an asterisk to that hierarchy. “Everyone needs to value and appreciate their family*”

*Unless you’re one of the “tragic cases” we’ve approved as being exempt

The truth is that no one has an obligation to their family. No, not even if they were raised perfectly. You don’t owe your family for doing that. They chose to do that once they had a child. That was their choice that you don’t need to pay for with love. Putting familial relationships on a pedestal isn’t any more justified than putting romantic or sexual relationships on a pedestal.

It’s like if the justification against the amatonormative centering of romantic relationships was “some people are stuck in abusive relationships because they don’t know they are allowed to not have a relationship”. That would be a positive benefit of anti-amatonormativity. And those perspectives do need to be shared. But true breakdown of the centering of romantic relationships means that someone can be offered a relationship by a “perfect partner” and still be valid in turning that down if that’s not the kind of relationship they want in their life.

The same goes for the breakdown of “family first”.

[allos-aro]

Friendship Test

Friendship Test is a 10+ hour long narrative-focused RPG maker game that follows a friendprogram, a robot built to be a perfect friend, as they travel a mysterious lab and encounters multiple Programs in need of help (and friendship). But perhaps being the best friend you can be isn’t truly what FriendProgram wants… Is that so wrong?

This is a story that focuses on lovelessness, aplatonicism, aromanticism and many other aspec identities, as well as neurodivergency.

I hope my game is fun even if you don’t know much about these topics, hopefully it can even help more people find out or understand different aspec identities better!

Friendship Test is already out!

You can check out the trailer (and many previews!) in the official youtube channel. If you’re unable to play the game yourself, full playthroughs will be provided there too.

You can play the full game on itch.io, completely for free!

You can follow this blog or the official bluesky account for any Friendship Test-related news and content.

This is a 1 year long project I made for fun, to learn and to create a story that matters a lot to me, I’m very excited to share it. Thanks for reading and see you!

[allos-aro]

Btw, being aro, ace, aroace, or another identity that falls under the a umbrella is one of the most queerest experiences I've ever heard of. Like, society has ingrained into pretty much everyone that you need to be in a romantic relationship and have sex? And you go AGAINST that??? That's fucking AWESOME!

Loveless aros, you have everyone, even the aro, ace, and aroaces communities talking about how "B-but, aros can still love!! We love our friends!! Not like those monsters who don't!!" and you're still you, and continue to be awesome??? Amazing!!

Moral of the story: aros, aces, aplatonics, afaimials, and others that fall under the a umbrella are queer as hell and are awesome and fuck aphobes

[allos-aro]

Whenever I see aphobia this is all I can think about. If you think loveless people are "psychotic" or "narcissistic" or "broken" I know how you actually feel about disordered/disabled people. Just telling on yourself with this one chief.

[allos-aro]

hey bracken! I have an interesting question for you and I apologize in advance for rambling 💀😭 I'm aro and sometimes I get really into questions like "what is romance?" "how do you define romance?" and certainly there isn't any one right answer, but at the same time... what is an answer that only can encompass romance/romantic relationships? I've been reading this book called "the other significant others" which is about some case studies of people that have very deep platonic relationships that blur between "just a regular friendship" and a romantic relationship. from what I've got so far, it seems like commitment is a large part of what "romantic attraction" is but the deep platonic partnerships also have high levels of commitment that are not romantic. maybe there isn't a straight answer for "what is love?" (baby don't hurt me) or "what is romantic attraction?". but if there isn't, then what is the aromantic identity? what do I/you/other aros not feel that makes us different than allos? I hope this is not too philosophical for u but I am excited to hear what you have to say and thank u for listening to me 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ maybe being aromantic is just obsessing over what romance even is. no allo could ever write this ask /j

hi, darling!

well. isn't THIS the question of all time. i will assure you, anon, that i have been searching for similar answers for years and years on end, and i have still yet to find a response that is satisfactory to me. i am constantly asking people... and yet... i made this poll a while ago asking people to describe romantic attraction separate from sexual or platonic but what i got mostly was people talking about how awesome it was to be in love. which was not really what i asked. you know how it is...

to my understanding, it's similar to the way that we understand gender (<— guy who is trans and aromantic voice). gender's a social construct, right? there's sets of characteristics that we might ascribe to certain gender categories, but ultimately, there's nothing that definitively divides men and women; nothing that is exclusive or innate. as a nonbinary person, i look at that and it is continually perplexing to me that someone might genuinely feel like they align with one of those made up, vaguely arbitrary categories. but there are trans people who know they're meant to be one or another, and trans people who know they aren't; everything about it is socially constructed, but some of us have a sense of something inside of us that propels us toward or away from certain aspects. something significant enough to affect our senses of identity. so i think romantic attraction might work in a similar way. it's a category that doesn't have distinct definitions, or clear lines to keep it separate from anything else, but some of us just know it's not for us. doesn't include us. doesn't describe us.

as far as i'm concerned, every human experience is unique, and we are all just using words as approximations of how we feel, as attempts to describe something in terms that others will understand. categories like "aromantic" are words that encompass a variety of experiences. what attraction feels like for someone is different from how it will feel for someone else. the lines between platonic and romantic and sexual will fall in different places for every person, if there are even lines at all (i think there's an ask in my inbox somewhere asking what i mean when i say that there is no actual difference between platonic and romantic... i will get to that eventually i promise. in the meantime i forever stand by this post).

what makes something romantic attraction is the decision that it feels like romance to you. and since the alloros won't give us a SIMPLE DEFINITION of what that is... 🙄 i suppose we all just remain aromantic in the meantime. lmao <2

[allos-aro]

Being aroace is so funny because sometimes I'll go to sleep thinking to myself "do I lack something fundamental to the full human experience" and then I wake up the next day and realize it is not that serious

[allos-aro]

I had to make these memes featuring the Ace King himself. Congrats to everyone on the aromantic and/or asexual spectrums for dodging the nuclear warhead that is modern dating.

[allos-aro]

ok community poll bc i'm starting to feel old

* as in, you knew the term you use and you identified as such

** your discretion at determining if discourse was active during the time you started id'ing as ace, but the broadest interpretation would be tumblr's creation through the start of the pandemic. (personally I'd say it 'ended' in 2019, but I'm not sure of a year for the start)

yes the categories are uneven in year span but i'm going off of major community landmarks

[allos-aro]

my rather specific aplatonic experience is regularly guiding random new players around in videogames so they get a good experience and because its fun :D and then they ask to be friends D: and i just gotta smile and nod and accept the friend request and log off until theyre gone and hope they forget i exist.

.

[allos-aro]

have you ever thought about how amatonormativity is so prevalent that it twisted the word "relationship" to generally mean "a romantic relationship" in normal conversation. saying "I'm in a relationship" should be an inane statement. everyone is in relationships dipshit it came free with your membership card to a social species. but alas

[allos-aro]

Alloaces aren't valid just bc 'we can still fall in love' like non-ace people. We're valid bc asexuality exists and is not a lesser state of being no matter how much or how little romance we participate in. We're valid bc we don't 'have to' engage in romance to make up for the little sex and sexual attraction we have. In fact we don't need validity, just freedom and the right to express our sexuality just like everybody else.