#Which is why I never told her that I thought I was on the aro/ace spectrum back when I identified as aromantic

[canichangemyblogname]

Do y’all know anyone who doesn’t actually know how to have a conversation, all they know is how to interrupt or derail a conversation? Like they keep talking over you to tell you their opinion on something (often unrelated), even though the conversation doesn’t call for an opinion. There was no, “What do y’all think,” but they still gotta interrupt, speak very loudly over you and tell you some very wrong opinion. Or you’ll be talking and then they just start up a different topic. And when you call them out on that the response is, “I’m not interested in that.”

[ketterdamskaelishprince]

ada's spectre, and why i'll likely always feel sad about it

here is the promised analysis/talk about ada's spectre. going to preface this by saying i obviously don't know the true intent behind everything and her design, i just like to look, giggle and then make sad little observations which just help me love this silly webcomic even more. so if you disagree with me on something– totally ok! i love to learn and i love to see different interpretations.

there's also a few bits i missed out because i wrote this all last night in a bit of a haze, and i cannot be bothered to expand on some of my ideas, especially when it's just stuff like "BROS SO PARANOID AND RAW RIGHT NOW".

anyways, here we go :) @mugcereal this one's for u pookie <3

so i think with ada's spectre, we first need to look at the instance as to how she gets it, because that always makes things way more sad!

to specify, she turns into her spectre at episode 69, and i think it's really sad how she does it. she basically gets a string of roasts from prospero that go along the lines of calling her "conceited" "twadry" and "... and stupid!" – effectively throwing back in ada's face what she believes everyone thinks of her.

(obviously, as a very big and glaring sidenote, i believe prospero is aro/ace or just aromantic so OBVIOUSLY i am not bashing him for this. bros told her so many times that he doesn't want to be with her, let alone to be touched. that is a flaw in ada's character and is a reminder to us on the importance of boundaries!!!!)

so, ada is basically there, collapsed on the floor in a robe– effectively showing the most intimate and private part of herself as an insecure and lonely girl. and that's when she transforms.

i think it's interesting to understand how this most likely links to her life and how she died. so we know she was killed with an axe, most likely by the man she fell in love with and worked for, and how prospero's words in this situation, hurt her just the same as the words before her death. why?

because they remind ada of what she knows and fears she is: just a stupid, fake and cheap person who will never have the same status and respect as the people she pretends to be and surrounds herself by.

i think it's also interesting that she's clutching her stomach/torso here, and correct me if i'm wrong but that could be a potential signal to the part of her that was axed to death (?). no idea if that's a good shout or not but it's what i first thought!

anyways! now we move onto her spectre design!

first of all, her spectre design eats. like just a personal side note, i love it. it's just so gorgeous and i don't care if she's terrifying to some because to ME? to me, she's my gorgeous little pookie who can scream and show people their worst fears and she looks amazing whilst she does it <3

ok anyways, actual design.

to first understand her design, i thought i'd show you what banshee's traditionally in folklore look like!

typically, they are described in two ways. the first way is a youthful women with long black hair, blue eyes and just super pale. this description could also lose the blue eyes and just keep the black hair– either way the first depiction of a banshee is a super young woman.

this is not the one we're focussing on today folks!

we're going to focus on the second depiction. a hag/ old woman, with red cheeks, a grey cloak and a green dress, often seen to be combing her hair. banshee's throughout folklore are known to wail, scream and cry when a family member had died. to most, the banshee was a sign that death was coming to your household and they are known in myths and folklore as a predictor of death.

now, hold onto the green dress and look at ada's design real quick for me.

here we see a lot of green, which yay! definitely shows signs it comes from the second depiction. i think, on top of it being a nod to the second depiction, i think it could also be an allusion to something else: jealousy.

green symbolism in media can often vary, from meaning new life, luck and also jealousy. and i think if we take in the things ada screams whilst in her spectre form, such as this from episode 82:

you see there definitely is some sort of jealousy there, but this isn't something i necessarily want to focus on, it's just an observation i made that may or may not be true!

anyways, to continue, i want to look at ada's outfit when she's a banshee. i'm going to basically be making my notes i took last night look nicer.

(keep in mind that when i wrote these, my ideas were literally bouncing off my brain and sometimes they're a bit contradictory, but i think that's the beauty of my crack theory analysis!)

i think the act of almost showing her bones to the outside, there's a level of rawness to ada we don't usually see. her spectre form essentially gives her the power to scream out her anger, and by seeing her bones it's almost as if to say this is the ada she doesn't show people. this is the ada that she keeps to herself because god forbid anybody love her (because in life and death it's become abundantly apparent to her that nobody does seem to love that ada).

but then, what i thought was also a super cool thing as how the bones almost act like a corset!

then i got sad because i looked at the bows, and because something dawned on me and it made me start to frown. there was a sad realization to me as i looked at ada's spectre design that even in this all powerful form, she hasn't lost her insecurities, they just become more prevellant. because for all of the traditional wrinkles, hag-like appearance a banshee is meant to have, ada barely has any.

obviously this could be in part to character design and stuff, and yeah probably– but let me be sad!

because ada carries her frills and bows from life here because she doesn't want to be ugly, she doesn't want to be this creeping monster who rips apart people. because if she's not got her intelligence or status or anything going for her, she has her appearance and by god she's not going to let that go to waste. so here her spectre form is, a banshee.

so what must ada do? she must takes her frills and keep her insecurities, her fears and her crippling need to be loved.

another aspect which is super interesting is the stitching on her body. one one hand, it could be an allusion to her violent death, suggesting the man she fell in love with didn't just stop at axing her once, but just kept on fucking going (which, you know: fuck you, whoever you are).

but on the other hand, it could be a metaphor for ada's thinly veiled facade she puts on of being a prim and proper lady (which we actually, interestingly enough, see she looses a lot the more time she spends with montresor– opting to take parts of his language like "ain't" and "beggin'". this sort of leads on from previous ideas people have made of ada willing to change herself to be loved. she swaps civility for the wild wild west all for a bit of love).

ada offers up parts of herself in this metaphor. that's what she always does. she offers herself to the rich man she fell in love with, she offers herself up to prospero (again, look at the. side note. bro wasn't wrong for rejecting her he literally can't like her) and she offers herself up to the acolytes and she fucking barks for them (because i'm not over that).

piece by piece, she strips away everything she is until she literally is just skin and bone. and once she's torn herself apart, she needs to stitch herself back together– because it's against the facade she's put on to look so broken and messy. and so she repeats the cycle again, giving more and more until she is literally hanging on by a thread.

her powers are also super cool. traditionally, as i said, banshees wail when a family member is soon to die/has died, and is often like an omen/predictor of death. so yeah, ada having a banshee scream makes sense. but the whole 'fear itself' is also super cool. i kind of like that she has this– because its sort of satisfying for her, the girl who's been pushed over but still comes running back, to watch as people become paralysed with fear. idk, retribution or whatever.

i'm going to leave you with this not very profound thing i wrote last night (and then just some other mumblings):

i think that although spectres are super powerful and also just a very fantastic concept, they're also fragile. spectres are quite literally the monster inside of you. yet here ada's monster is, and with all her bows and revamped dress of a banshee (or potentially an allusion to her life as a maid) she tries desperately to be anything but that. because to here it's ugly and it's too much of her on display. and with some much of you on display comes the very fear that if you are hated, disliked or something repulsive, you no longer have anything to blame on anybody else. you just have yourself to blame.

(as morella says here in episode 88).

i'm not saying ada isn't deeply flawed, because she is. she has so much fucking baggage and insecurities that they literally forbid her from doing the right thing sometimes. i don't think she's a good person, but i also think that she has the opportunity to be a good person/ do a semi-good/ non-bad thing, and all she has to do is take it. but i also think it's nice how that's shown in her spectre design.

and, you know, if none of this makes sense, that's also fine!

anyways, yeah. somebody tell me never to make a random analysis at night again because it's a bit of a bitch to translate in the morning.

[aro-comics]

Maybe More People Are Arospec (Part 3)

Maybe More People Are Arospec, 3/3 - The Alloaro Edition, in which we cover some alloaro specific (negative) tropes that I personally believe is the reason why there are so few people who identify as alloaro 🙃

I both have everything and nothing to say on this one, because the topic at hand hits home harder than I want to admit 😔. I think it's important to acknowledge the harm that constantly enforcing these ideas about sex without romance as being inherently emotionally drainining, a sign of emotional immaturity, or predatory, etc. probably damages the self-perception and self-worth of most alloaros greatly. Of course,:I understand that NOT ALL highlighted are inherently related to being alloaro - but the way these ideas are framed, especially in the split panel, imply sex without romance is the root of the problem, which in reality it is not. A lack of communication, respect for other's boundaries, or being flat out a predator is the actual issue here.

Anyway, I do understand the intersection of different issues that lead to the ideas that I referenced in the comic (elaborated more in the comments). I suppose the solution, as usual, is more education and more nuance surrounding the discussion 😅😉

I'm so glad to finally have this last part of the series up! I hope you enjoyed the ride, and for sure let me know if there's anything else that I haven't covered here you think also keeps people from realizing that they're aromantic 💚💚💚

[Image Description:

Slide 1: Celia sits on a green armchair in a living room. "Actually, let's make this take even more spicy - maybe a lot more people are alloaro in particular."

Slide 2: She looks down. "Alloaros are more likely to be labelled as heartless, or feel that on top of being 'broken' there's something predatory about themselves -"

Slide 3: "There's this idea that people who only want sex, and not romance, are the kind of people you want to avoid. Who don't care who they hurt. You know the trope - "

Slide 4: An illustrated example of the stereotypical trope. Shown is a house party where two characters are interacting. A taller man leans over a clearly intimidated woman:

"Hey Babe, you alone here tonight?" "Umm …" "Come on, don't be so cold, why don't you loosen up a little?" "No, uh-"

An arrow points to the man that says ""the predatory-college-fuckboy-frat-bro-trope"

Slide 5: Another series of examples, this time illustrated from Celia's childhood. The panel is split into three as you progress through the years. In each section Celia watches a television show.

1: "You can't trust him, ALL he does is sleep around - he's never settled down" 2: "Sorry I'm only looking for something casual right now …" "You're scared of commitment" "No, I-" "You're just using me!" 3: "At least it happened with someone who's loved her and been dating her forever", this is in reference to a teenaged character having sex the first time.

In this last section celia says, forlorn, "There's something wrong with ME, isn't there?"

Slide 6: Celia speaks to viewer directly. "I sure as hell didn't want to admit I was Aro because I knew I wasn't Ace."

Slide 7: "So yeah, those are my thoughts. I've told my allo friends about my theories and they …"

Slide 8: "… didn't exactly believe me." Celia is shown video chatting with her friend, saying "So those are my theories as to why romantic attraction is probably less common than we think, and why there's probably way more Aro people! People are probably too embarassed to admit it because stigma or never even realized it!"

Friend awkwardly says "I … I'm sorry I gotta say I don't agree …"

Slide 9: Celia holds her finger up to her chin, pondering. "Maybe it's just an Aro thing."]

[antebunny]

So there's a subgenre of fics in the Harry Potter fandom wherein a person conceived while one of their parents is under the influence of a love potion will become aroace at birth. The origin, afaik, are two insidiously awful decisions of JKR combining: 1) she reinvented date rape drugs/roofies aka love potions, without realizing it I guess, and 2) she said that Voldemort was asexual, because she's never seen a marginalized identity she didn't spit on.

Since Merope Gaunt (Voldemort's mother) used a love potion on Tom Riddle Sr. (Voldemort's dad) I guess people got the idea that what if love potions caused asexuality? And asexuality + aromanticism, of course, meant evil. Here's an excerpt from one of those fics in which Bill Weasley explains being aro/ace to Hermione:

[Image ID]

"No. I just dated because that was what you did. I never really felt anything for them. A few kisses, plenty of hand-holding. I made out in a few broom closets, and had one very uncomfortable make-out session up the top of the Astronomy Tower that I eventually ended by pretending I heard Filch coming past on a patrol. I even tried making out with a guy once in case that was it–nothing. I never told mum about that, of course. Good wizards don't shame their families like that."

"There's nothing wrong with being gay, you know."

He shrugged. "It doesn't apply to me anyway. I'm not gay. I wasn't anything, and I was trying to accept that and be content with it. It was good enough. Until I met Fleur." His eyes lit up with joy as he spoke about her.

[Second Image ID]

"Look, the point is with her allure from being part-Veela, I love her. Like I can never love anyone else. I don't want to lose that. You don't understand what it's like to go through life feeling nothing for anyone else. I've dated people I said I cared for, but I wouldn't have died for them. Well, out of logical choice I might risk my life, but not from love. But I would die for Fleur. Do you understand? She makes me a better person. I would do anything to make her happy. I'm not alone in the world anymore."

She nodded slowly. "I see." It wasn't so much him manipulating Fleur, as him permitting her to manipulate him. Into feeling. "I didn't realise it could be that bad." She still thought he should confess, but it didn't sound like he was hurting Fleur–he really did love her.

[End Image ID]

I read this fic years ago, and at the time I genuinely had not thought about my sexuality at all. I would've never called myself aro or ace. Still, reading this felt like being repeatedly punched in the face. I kept on waiting for Hermione to say something similar to what she said after Bill made a homophobic comment. After all, she went out of her way the first time, didn't she. Instead, what I got was essentially:

Bill: I don't usually feel romantic or sexual attraction. So there's something wrong with me.

Hermione: Yeah lmao. But there's nothing wrong with being gay!

I've been (reading) on Ao3 since 2016, and in all that time I've seen plenty of subtle racism, sexism, etc. But I've never seen anything as plainly stated as this. To this day I have yet to hear any aro/ace people describe the experience of being aro/ace in any of the following ways: "How could I forgive myself if we brought a child into the world to suffer the emptiness I lived with my whole existence[?]" /"You should be unable to love." / "You don't understand what it's like to go through life feeling nothing for anyone else."

I could not understand why Bill described it as "emptiness" or "feeling nothing." I still cannot find a single aro/ace person who would describe themselves as empty. The most I have ever heard is: "I wish I was normal" (meaning I wish I fit in, I wish to be accepted by other people). Historically, many aro/ace people married and had kids, conforming to societal norms, and I am sure many believed there was something wrong with them or hoped to grow out of it. I was one of them. On a very personal note, I suspect that my father is too. I am certain that he's never heard the terms asexual or aromantic in his life. But if you think I'll ever discuss his sexuality with him, you're out of your damn mind.

Now, I know it's really easy to find this fic from these quotes. I chose to include them anyways because I think it's important to show how blatant it was. My Tumblr blog isn't exactly a platform, but for the five people reading this: please, please do not go after the author. I truly believe that they had no ill-intent. In the comments of this fic, a few people bring up variations of "it sounds like Bill is just aro/ace" and the author is consistently understanding. Here are some of the author's comment on that fic:

[Image ID]

I very much understand what you're saying. It's a tricky thing for me to address, however. For the core idea I'm playing with is basically the evilness of "love potions". And part of that is exploring JKR's idea that Voldemort, being unable to love due to his mother using a love potion on his father, was a *monster* because of that. Perhaps that doesn't come across very clearly (there's a little bit more of it in the prequel), that it's one of the assumptions I'm trying to undermine. ("Love potions are funny/romantic", "Voldemort is a monster because he could not love", "Harry's power was that he could love - he's not a monster like Voldemort", "There's nothing wrong with selling love potions to teens/adults because it's not 'real' love".)

I feel like I'm already poking at the inherent problem of framing "people who cannot love" as "monsters/psychopaths" by showing Bill and Harry's struggles with self acceptance, and Bill finding a way to love (though do note he'd been making peace with the idea he wasn't attracted to anyone, prior to meeting Fleur). I really don't like the canonical take on love-redeems/love-is-the-best-power/the-loveless-are-monsters, so I'm messing with it a bit. Exploring other people than Voldemort, ones we admire, who are also dealing with being unable to love. Does that make sense? Now, that doesn't mean I'm doing a perfect job at it, but I'm trying my best to explore that theme around the edges of my Dramione story.

[End Image ID]

The author's intention was to show how other characters, made aro/ace via love potion like Voldemort, were not evil or sociopaths. I don't know why all the characters were so aro/acephobic, but sometimes fics get away from you and you don't address everything you wanted to. I don't know why the aro/ace characters had so much internalized shame and hatred when the term bachelor has been in use for centuries, but we fanfic authors love writing self-esteem issues and I would be a hypocrite to say otherwise. I don't know why the author never tagged acephobia or internalized acephobia, but no one HAS to tag anything.

I don't know if the author ended up writing that fic where Harry comes to accept his aro/asexuality. It's totally understable if they didn't; I have failed to write many fics that I really did want to write. Sometimes it's just like that. I really, truly believe that the author had the best of intentions and is not aro/acephobic, just severely misled on what that experience is like.

My beef is not with this author. I used their words to highlight a reoccurring and popular sentiment that I hate. My real beef is that this fic is popular. This is an entire subgenre of Harry Potter fics. I actually decided to write this post because some random person on the internet said, a few days ago, something along the lines of: "Remember when JKR invented a date rape drug that turned people into sociopaths? Yeah…" (And also because I was up until 3 am last night writing a dumb trash angst one-shot about it).

I'd wager that the vast, vast majority of people who write or read those fics don't feel the same way. But the condescension is baked into the very premise of that trope. "Oh poor you, it must be so hard, so lonely going through life without ever loving another person. You must feel so empty inside."

It's actually people who say similar things that make me feel isolated. Most of the time I feel free, like I've cracked this secret code, like I'm able to see things clearly that people so hung up over sex and romance can't. Other times I feel so left out I wish I was "normal." Mostly, being aro/ace is lonely, annoying, exhausting, and liberating.

It wasn't until last year that a friend told me that some people actually do have trouble speaking to someone they've never met before, just because they find that someone attractive. I thought that only happened in stories. But I don't want to get nervous meeting new people based on their looks, I don't want to treat people differently based on how much I want to have sex with them. I wish my friends in high school had never pressured me to come out as bisexual. I wish all the other similarly liberal, queer communities I've found since didn't insist on associating sex and dating with emotional comfort. I wish I could magically stop my parents from expecting me to ever get married and have kids.

But I can't.

Anyways, that's it for today. I'm not sure what the point of writing this was. I really don't want anyone to get hurt or attacked because of it. This is not a callout, or a hate brigade, or any sort of call-to-action. I don't want people to get up-in-arms about this. I'm just tired. I suppose I just wanted to put my feelings out there, and well, this is my Tumblr.

[mommalosthermind]

I’ve gotten a handful of ‘she talks fanfic with her kids? She knows her kids preferences? I’d die of embarrassment. Wild.’

And Y’all. I get it, but also, do you know how sad that is?

Some of that is a hold-over from when it was considered a literal mental disorder. Women were fired, divorced, had their children forcibly stolen from them, were institutionalized. For reading fanfic. It was an extreme taboo with extreme consequences if the wrong person found out you were reading about Kirk and Spock, for fuck’s sake.

Some of that is just the shame the greater world or your own family have pressed deep into you over your interests. You learned not to share anything you love, that way it can’t be used to hurt you.

Some of that is an extension of folk assuming all fic is the porniest porn to ever porn, and the purity resurgence is screwing with your brain.

I get that, I do. I was the kid who’d get right in your face and out-cruel people who’d shit on things I showed an interest in, but I still won’t tell my mother what I write. That’s mine, and I shouldn’t have to fight anyone about it.

But I was also the kid who never had anyone to talk to. Never had anyone to be excited with.

Why wouldn’t I be that person for my own kids? Why would I NOT want to know what fandom’s eating them up today? Which character won’t stop clawing at the walls in their heads?

Why wouldn’t I take full advantage to give them a place where they can be happy? Excited? Where they can SHARE the things they love?

And, frankly, it’s always a wild ride to see what catches them. My eldest (14) writes the most violent things. They like to take characters and break them even more than canon did, and see all the ways they can put that character back together. Do they realize they’re exploring trauma, recovery, human relationships? Fuck no, but I do, and when we talk through it, we can talk about all those things. They like to write about love that transcends everything else. Unconditional acceptance. That means I’m doing something right somewhere, because it’s so intrinsic to how they think.

The middle kid, (12), he likes to write fantasy self insert epics. He gets to be the overpowered guy who also gets the guy at the end. He’s enjoying really breaking down the fight scenes, how the weapons work, spies and double-crossings, magic powers, shit like that. But what he’s also writing is found family. Getting angry and overcoming it. Looking at a shit situation and committing to making it better. Standing up for yourself, for those who can’t stand up for themselves. He’s allowing himself to be loud in a way he doesn’t usually in real life.

Do you know what I got when my therapy-mandated anger journal was purposely unearthed and read by my mother? I got the shit kicked out of me. My kid seeks me out. He sits in my lap as best a 12 year old who is taller than me can, and he goes, hey can we work through this scene I wrote when I was mad together?

Why wouldn’t I want to be part of that? It’s the same for what they read. I want to know. They’re excited! They have thoughts and ideas and guesses and why would I ever make them feel like they’re not allowed to be happy about the things they love?

They’re reading same-sex, bi, trans, ace, aro experiences, and those are helping them find the labels that fit themselves best right now. I want to be part of that, I should be part of that. They should know this bedrock is unconditional because it fucking well is.

I’ve been told my entirely-Blasé approach to sex is weird, and it probably is, especially in the current purity bullshit. But also: sex happens. Sex ed is so laughable here I was told tampons will kill me and I thought babies came out of the belly button until i was like ten. I’m very open with my kids about all of these things because it’s important. They need to know. They need to feel safe talking to me about it. No matter what the fuck it is.

I dunno guys. I know why so many folks’ immediate reaction is “oh fuck no I would never,” but have any of those folks considered being the wall? Keeping all that shit behind them so the next crop of kids gets to have something better than we did?

Let the kids around you be kids in a way you weren’t allowed.

TLDR: Don’t talk about things you love to people who use that to hurt you. But maybe realize you can be the person someone else goes to just to squee.

[wh0refornikolailantsov]

Prompt: “I think you're still my person. I'm just hoping that maybe one day, I can be yours again too.”

Song: The Night We Met - Lord Huron

For Tolya x Reader please!!

Follow Your Arrow - Tolya Yul Bataar

Summary: Ace & Aro/Ace Solidarity.

Content Warnings: Self Doubt And Self Questioning. Struggles With Identity In Regards To Sexuality, Relationships And The Expectations Of Others. Miscommunication Trope. Angst. No Beta/ Proof Reading.

Things had been so much easier before. Things had been simpler then too. Back when you felt like you understood your place, your direction. The heart is an arrow, Inej's voice reminds you in the back of your mind, it demands aim to land true. Your heart was an arrow alright, that much was never an easy thing to hide. Your heart runs the show and your mind follows slow in suit.

"You are all heart, dirre," Nina had told you once. "And I love that about you, but it makes it hard to be sure which way you will lean, your heart is impulsive and you have never learned to not follow it."

"You'll follow it off a cliff edge one of these days," Kaz had added, not bothering to look up.

As much as you had wanted to argue, there had been no point in denying it, you knew that then and you know it now. You will follow your heart wherever it leads you, you don't know any other way.

And yet, your heart s tugging at you, begging, screaming, demanding, you are trying your best to drown it out. It goes against your very nature, but you don't know what else to do. Your heart has never lead you wrong, and by the Saints you knew falling for the kind hearted zowa with the golden eyes wasn't a misstep. But you also know all the things those around you want. It's not that you've been overly perceptive, just that in your experience people are surprisingly honest about the things they seek. Maybe it was spending all the time with Tamar, and how freely she would speak of all the things she wanted, all the things she thought and desires, the way she would make whispers at some pretty girl at a tavern and you'd see the girl blush and bite her lip. The way Tamar would throw you and your companions a wink before turning back to her flirtations.

You knew what you were expected to want, expected to think about, and you thought that maybe you did, in moments and in flashes but they'd pass you by and you wondered if they were ever there at all.

These deliberations of wondering what was expected of you and what was wanted from you, and what was keeping you at an unwanted distance.

You could talk to Tolya about, but the idea of that made your stomach turn and your heart ache, like there was something in those words you weren't meant to be saying, something to keep hidden.

Tolya has noticed your distancing, and he tried not to wonder too deeply about all the reasons you could be pulling away from him. Your company has become his favourite way to spend his time, your presence bringing him a sense of calm and appreciation that he hasn't found in anyone else.

And he cannot discern why you have started keeping such a distance. He is sure he has done something wrong, and that's what is on his mind as he approaches you, slowly, gently, the way he would approach a wolf... or maybe a bear.

"I am sorry," are the first words that leave his mouth. They confuse you instantly.

"What for?" you ask.

"Whatever it is that I have done," he says, which tells you nothing.

"I don't follow," you respond.

"I seem to have upset you in some way, there is a rift that wasn't here before," as he tries to explain you feel your guilt bubbling over. This was your issue, and somehow you'd made him feel bad for it.

"Tolya you've done nothing wrong," you assure him. "I am the problem."

"I don't see a problem," he says, and sits next to you, "so if you talk to me, maybe we can see where we stand differently on that."

"I don't think I can be," you sigh, "there is this person I need to be, the person I am, and this person that you need me to be, or want me to be, or should want me to be, and I cannot be them. Equally I think there is probably this version of you I wish for you to be that I cannot expect you to be and if neither of us can be these people then I don't know, I felt it was better if I stepped away."

He frowns. “I think you're still my person. I'm just hoping that maybe one day, I can be yours again too.”

"Tolya," your voice is strained, you want to make him understand, no, you need to make him understand. "I am not like the others."

"I know," he smiles, "I have always admired that about you."

"No, Tolya, you misunderstand me," you say, "I... I do not want things that I should want, I don't have feelings where I should have them, and it's not about you, I think I might love you," you don't let your thoughts linger on the words, you just keep talking, "but that doesn't change anything, and I thought it might, I thought maybe I was looking in the wrong places, but I think maybe it's not as simple as that. These feelings aren't something I am going to just find one day, pick up like a new skill, I don't think I have them. I don't want the things I know people think I want, the things they think I should want, things I think I should want." You sigh. "If I had those feelings I'd have them for you," you admit. "But I don't have them, and I can't... I don't think I will have them. And I know that is not exactly something that a lot of people want to hear."

"I do not need you to have those feelings," Tolya says slowly, thinking each word over carefully, "I do not... have those feelings."

"You don't?" You ask. Then before he speaks. "Oh you don't for me, that's fine, that makes sense." His laugh is not sad but there's a tiredness in it, not for you, but almost as if he is finally putting down something he has been carrying.

"No, I just don't," he says, "at all."

"You don't?" you repeat, you feel your heart rise into your chest. You cannot believe yourself. You jumped to conclusions, you assumed things of Tolya because others have assumed them of you. Of Tolya. How had you got your lines so crossed.

"That's not to say I do not love you," Tolya says quickly, "because I think that I do," he doesn't miss the way you smile at the floor as he says this, "but I just think it's different."

"Not what others are talking about when they speak," you say, understanding him entirely.

"To love you..." he pauses, "it is like to love myself. Loving you, is an extension of me."

"What I see of myself in you, makes me love those parts of me more because I cannot help but love you," you say. He smiles.

"Exactly," he says. "I have never wanted anything more from you than what you already give."

"I want only for your company, for your closeness, for the way your eyes see me in ways others cannot."

"I only want to know that when I look for you, I will always find you."

"That I can always find home, because home is you."

Tolya relaxes. "We misunderstood eachother," he says.

"Well, it's rare," you admit, "but it happens."

"So you're happy?" he asks. You nod.

"You thought I was unhappy?" you ask.

"I thought I had done something wrong," he admits.

"I thought I was wrong," you whisper.

"I do not believe two people have ever been more suited to each others company, as when the Saints placed us here at the same time."

"And I couldn't be more grateful."

[sergeantpixie]

If you're still doing top fives---top five unpopular Gilmore Girls opinions! And top five Riverdale opinions :)

Sure! Why not :)

Gilmore Girls:

The revival really isn’t that bad, it’s just not what everyone wanted. It’s not even necessarily what I want but I enjoy it for what it is.

Rory really isn’t that bad, she’s just never been as good as anyone in the show thinks she is - because no one is that good. I don’t mind that her life fell apart and she had to try again, it’s the most relatable shit in the world. Characters having to rebuild their lives is very interesting to me, though.

Logan and Rory are like Luke and Lorelai: Rory is the hermit like Luke and Logan is the sunshine-y extrovert who gets her out of her shell like Lorelai does with Luke. Logan has always had more in common with Lorelai than he does with Christopher. (Also plays into my thoughts about how Rory and Lorelai are also two very fundamentally different characters and it's unfair to put Rory into the Lorelai mould.)

Logan isn’t the Tristan replacement, Jess was. He came in the show just as CMM was leaving and stepped into the role of Forrester’s antagonist/rival. Tristan and Logan are superficially alike but Jess and Tristan fulfilled the same role in Rory’s life, the unsafe option in comparison to Forrester. Tristan and Rory wouldn’t have been anything like Logan and Rory. I like Jess a lot more than I like Tristan so in a way i’m glad it worked out the way it did with CMM leaving. Also learning that Jess’ character was only created as a way to prevent Luke and Lorelai from getting together definitely colors my perception of his character arc.

Lorelai is right and Emily is right and that’s kind of the point. Lorelai did have a miserable lonely childhood with people who didn’t understand her. Emily did give everything she had to a daughter who rejected her. The point has always been that Lorelai did not belong in her parents’ world and they don’t understand that so they can only be hurt by her rejection.

Riverdale:

disclaimer: i saw like…ten episodes of this show.

1. The switch up on Alice Cooper’s character is terrible and I hate that people love her when she was clearly controlling and cruel to her daughters, they should not have made her a lovable character.

2. It would’ve been more interesting if Cheryl killed Jason. On purpose. I don’t want to elaborate too much because I have a fic in the works along these lines but this is the entire reason I started the show in the first place: I thought Cheryl was the one who murdered Jason and I was so into that.

3. Jughead should’ve been asexual/aromantic like his comic book counterpart. Not telling the cole sprouse fans not to thirst, y’all do y’all my babies tbh, just saying it would’ve been great center stage representation that the ace/aro community deserves and rarely gets. (Which is a large part of my disinterest in bughead.)

4. Betty and Cheryl have a more interesting dynamic than Veronica and Betty.

5. idek if this is unpopular or not but like this show basically ripped off every show ever so it’s really not that unique. it’s like Glee, Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, and Twin Peaks had a baby and then no one ever told that baby "No" or gave it any structure so it grew up to be this mess who can’t commit to any storyline and just "yes and"-ed itself into the ground.

[aroaceconfessions]

Some time ago I finally came out as ace to one of my closest friends (we are like childhood friends) and I only did that cause we're taking about dating and she mentioned that one of her friends is waiting for marriage (as in some sort of inconvenience if you wanted to date them) and like I always thought that if someone would get me would probably be her, cause not only she is bi but have always been an ally and very supportive to the LGBTQIA+ community.

And it was going well, she was actually positive about it and showed real interest in trying to understand me and asking if I was aso aro or not.

Then when I said I wasn't sure about being aro or not cause even when I feel some sort of interest in someone I just ignore it and I always avoid flirting and romantic interactions in general (is a mix of not being available emotionally, anxiety and not wanting to be in a relationship where I feel pressured to have sex).

After that she just went like "I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe if you avoid and try so much to not feel romantic attraction, maybe you wouldn't know that you actually feel sexual attraction" and like, I get why she said that and I do think it could happen, but I've spent more than an entire year thinking about it and researching to try to figure myself... And like maybe the problem was that I said that "I'm probably somewhere in the ace spectrum" and not just like "oh I'm ace", so like maybe the way I phrased it made it sound very doubtful (but I only said like that cause I'm scared of saying it to people and sometimes I still doubt myself, even tho I'm pretty sure about it).

And like it made me kinda mad, cause when she told me she was bi I didn't ask if she was sure or anything like that, so why when I say I'm ace she asked me that??? Like why????

(also one or two days after that she sends me a video in Instagram of some random woman talking about how she never thought sex was important until being in a healthy and safe relationship and now it is basically a need for her well being or something like that, which mad me even more sad and mad, cause I don't even know if she did on purpose but it was just the wort moment for such a video and it just felt like a bullet to my heart).

And the worst part is that since that day my doubts about myself and my sexuality are way more common and it just find myself having those intrusive thoughts that I'm just lying to myself or that I'm just some sort of puritan....

I'm probably never telling anyone I'm ace again for a long time...

Submitted February 11, 2023

[bookishphysicsgirl]

So, story time, apparently, because my insurance hasn't come through yet which means I am yet to schedule therapy and as such am about to severely overshare and expose myself publicly on the internet for the sake of feeling a little less lonely I guess. Go grab a seat and some popcorn 'cause this one is gonna be a long one - very very long.

This is about my sexuality (aroace) and how I came to terms with it and where I am now.

TW: mentions of bullying (I guess,I don't really see it as bullying but I was told it was bullying so there), aphobia, masturbation (you have no idea how long it took me to just straight up write that word), periods, and general aro ace queer confusion.

But why not just talk to some ace people near you, if you are in such need of understanding you'd turn to strangers on the internet ? Well, there aren't that many ace or aro people around me and the few that I know are not that great to talk to, not because of their sexuality, mind you, but because they make very uncomfortable jokes and are all cis boys which normally wouldn't be a problem except that I grew up around no men and am kind of akward - especially considering I am one of the very few girls in our major, so internet strangers and possible exposure it is.

Therefore, our story begins when I was about nine and going to Adventist school - because it was cheap and the closest to my house, not because I myself was Adventist - when children started talking about dating and kissing, mostly for jokes but still sometimes seriously. When one of the girls had her period before anyone else and got caught with socks on her bra it was a pure scandal.

I couldn't understand it. I mean I understood why people would want to date and be with significant others more than the typical child that age, since I read a lot and I read anything I could get my hands on, and not always necessarily age appropriate books since adults tend to believe all books are inheritenly good for their children without checking the content.

What I couldn't understand is why would anyone be so worried about things like that so early. In all the stories I saw and the books I read the characters were at least teenagers before they started being interested. That coupled with adults around me saying repeatedly that children were being oversexualized and that it'd be better if they just focus on their studies led me to make a bet with my friends that I would never date or kiss anyone until I was sixteen. Best decision I ever made.

So as the years passed my friends and everyone else arround me started freaking out more and more about crushes and who had kissed who and when they asked me all I had to do was remind them of that bet and they'd leave it alone. Sometimes a few kids would ask me things like whether I wanted to be a nun or why was I actually trying to keep that bet, but mostly I could just completely forget about it.

However as I started getting older - at about 14 - my relatives started noticing and though at first when I told them about my no-dating-until-16 plans they thought I was very smart and concentrating on the right things soon enough I'd catch my aunt and my mom having conversations about how "something must be wrong with that kid" and "you should take her to see a doctor". My aunt suggested I might need hormone therapy.

My friends kept telling me about people who they thought had crushes on me - which usually made me panic because I didn't know how to reject anyone if they were right, kids at my school started asking me increasingly invasive and mean questions ( " have you really never kissed anyone?", "are you just in love with yourself?", "were you abused?", "are you afraid of sex?", "do you even know what a penis looks like?") and my mom kept trying to make me interested in someone.

She would try to make me look at scenes that made me uncomfortable in movies and TV, tell me stories about her sex life, show me pictures of famous people and point at random people on the street and say "aren't they cute?", anytime anyone showed even the slightest bit of interest she would practically throw me in their direction. She asked me if I wanted therapy, if I thought I needed hormonal treatments, if I was a lesbian - totally cute of her but a little off the mark - at one point she even took the whole sapiosexual thing that was going around facebook and convinced me that the reason I hadn't been interested in anyone was because I hadn't met anyone who was intellectually stimulating enough.

At about 15 she asked me if maybe I could be asexual. I think she meant it as a joke but I looked it up anyway and lo and behold there was the answer all along. I pretty much came out immediately to my family and my closest friends and was met with the usual "you'll find someone some day", "it's just a phase", "maybe you should just try it, just to check" but eventually that started to die out and they started to accept it.

I guess part of it was that they thought things would change by the time I got to college and to be honest I was still pretty unsure, but when people asked me inconvenient questions about why I never went out with anyone now I had an actual answer which, of course, led to even more invasive questions from my classmates but I tended to be pretty good at taking it in stride.

I think it was meant to be a joke of sorts, go ask uncomfortable questions to the innocent nerd and see how she squirms so we can laugh about it later, kind of how some boys will make fake crushes and pretend to ask girls they think are ugly out or keep ironically complimenting them to make fun of them, because if they believe it it's funny she was gullible and if she doesn't she can't do much because they can just say they were trying to be nice.

But I pretty much had a policy to always smile and be nice to people and answer them honestly even when you knew they were being purposefully hurtful unless you were in a dangerous situation, because a lot of the joke got lost then, specially when it was obvious I knew what their intentions were and tried to dialog anyway. And though the questions never stopped while I was in High School the jokes did. And I kind of even became sort of friends with some of those boys? They asked me to tutor them, we were nice to each other, we talked about tv shows so I suppose things got better.

At 16, even already wearing the label ace, I was finally without the bet excuse for not dating and without it to hide behind I was forced to really confront my feelings. My friends mostly seemed pretty ok with my identity and didn't pressure me much but they did keep trying to get me to "be mature" and say or do things that made me uncomfortable - but then again these things weren't always related to sex, sometimes they were just trying to get me to swear - or making dirty jokes that I didn't want to hear. At that point my mom had moved on to trying to convince me to at least try to touch myself and telling me how good sex felt and that I'd really be missing out.

But even though I now didn't have my self-imposed silly rule and a very close friend who I really liked was actually interested I still felt no need to be intimate with anybody. There was not a lick of desire anywhere in my body, but I was still pretty conflicted. I knew I had never had a crush or felt lust for anybody but I had always loved romance books and movies and I squealed when two characters got together and I loved cheering for my friends in their love lifes and going to weddings - I could go to a wedding every weekend honestly - and I had always generally been a hopless romantic "in love with love" type of person.

At 17 we had to make a seminar about minorities and since my friend group had the only queer people in the entirety of the school so naturally we were assigned the LGBTQIA+ community. That was the first time I ever read about the distinction of romantic and sexual and platonic attractions and I swear it was like suddenly the entire world clicked in my brain and everything made sense. My friend's ears were probably bleeding by the time I finally stopped talking about it but I could be at least a little more grounded in my asexuality. At least I knew I could maybe still have those things I liked so much in fiction, I could still maybe one day not be alone and have someone to raise a family with, someone to decorate for Christmas with, who would help me in the bad days and who I could share good days with. Who could grow old with me so I didn't have to retire alone and helpless.

After that I was pretty confident, I was in no hurry to find romantic love and just kept thinking that if was going to happen it would just happen. But it did get me thinking about my limits. What would I be willing to do if I ever did get a romantic partner? Would I be willing to do it with anyone who wasn't a romantic partner?

I think it is worth it to note that I was reading smut since I was 13yo. This wasn't exactly because I went out seeking for it, in fact the first few times I came across it I was a bit disturbed, I'm not going to lie, but I was desperate to read new things, kindle had free things to read and sometimes those things had undisclosed smut. At first I skipped it, then I realized I was missing plot and started skimming it and eventually I was just reading it just like you'd read anything else. So despite my friends repeatedly attempting to make me more mature and teaching me the lingo I am 60% sure I was far more educated at that point (when no one had actually done anything more than kissing) than they could have possibly been.

So I did know about things and how the plumbing worked, I just didn't know if I'd ever be willing to test mine. One beautiful day, when no one was home and I was 18 and reading I wondered "maybe I could just try doing it myself, just to see if I even feel anything." And I thought I'd done it wrong, because I didn't scream or pant or do any of the things that the media usually describe, so I tried again that night,and the next day.

Soon I found that not only did it help me relax enough to sleep, something that had evaded me for years on end, I had a pretty high libido because I suddenly could recognize what before I couldn't identify as arousal, and it happened a lot, at random times, but one thing I noticed was that it never had to do with anyone. It mostly happened whenever I started worrying or thinking about sex and sexuality itself but never because of an actual person. I dealt with it pretty often, never thinking about scenarios with myself or things like that, just shadows, or colors, or movements or reading something.

But the fact that I was doing it and that I was doing it so often suddenly put my sexuality into doubt, could I really be ace with what I did alone at night? The fact that I was doubting it so much and that I had over the years built so much of my self within the fact that I am ace made it so I was too scared to even tell anyone about my libido just in case telling them would make them doubt me again, make them invalidate me or tell me I would eventually just magically wake up allo. To this day I have only ever told one person I know personally, and that was on a really bad day.

But I did do something similar to this I'm doing now and posted to AVEN and after very big welcome cakes and assurances that everything I was going through was completely normal and that it didn't make me any less ace, which felt like a balm on an open wound, I calmed down a little.

So, this one day there was a kareoke pizza party at my uni and this guy sings Moana and I sing Moana and we start talking about the merits of the translation and he ends up asking me if I wanna see a movie that night after the party (it was an in-campus party so it didn't end too late) and I as the clueless dork that I am started going around asking if anybody else wanted to come with.

Nobody did which I thought was strange but ok and so we went to the 24h room of the library to watch it and for about 2/3 of the movie I was completely immersed, not even noticing what was happening around me. However, suddenly I got the strange notion that maybe he was getting a bit too close. Like he was trying to do something. Weird.

But I thought that before and it was nothing, and I thought it was nothing when it was something so clearly I am not the best at reading signs from people. And like he was pretty cool, wonderful person really, so he offered to take me to my door and I said yes because I am terrified of walking alone at night and in the middle of the way he did a real movie move and kind of went bumping his hand with mine until he could kind of naturally hold it? That's when my brain went "oh crap."

I had until we got to the door to make a decision. I did like him. But the more I thought about the idea of actually kissing someone the more icky I felt but maybe I should just try it and see what happens? Like everyone keeps telling me to do?

So we get in front of my building and he turns towards me and I look up and I can hear my heart pounding and I just go "sorry, I'm ace." And run as fast as I can towards the door. Yup. Left him cold and did a dash and hide. Not my greatest moment.

Anyway I felt very embarrassed and kind of sorry so I sent an apology text and explained and he said that actually he was totally cool with it and if I wanted to he would love to date without needing the whole physical part. And that seemed like a good idea.

I hated it. Every single minute. Again it wasn't him. I like him, we are friends as much as we can be friends without me akwardly wandering whether I'm leading him on all the time. But the situation, it was just the worse. I just couldn't think of ever doing it again. With anyone.

So, yeah, probably Aromantic too. Which was a surprise.

But the funny thing is that if she wanted to I would marry my best friend in an instant. Not to go on dates, or kiss or for physical intimacy but just so we could officially be there for each other. So I guess my platonic attraction is pretty strong. And there are people I see that I just really like the look of, so aesthetic attraction is also present. And I usually know just by looking at someone that I really want to be friends with them.

But sometimes I still stop and go "is what I'm feeling for this person actually romantic? How do I know?". But I guess that is what being aro or ace or really just queer in general in a world that wasn't really made for you is, constantly second guessing yourself. We just need to learn that that's ok and it doesn't make us any less who we are.

Anyway, hope this helped anyone struggling in their own journey or let people who've already been through this know that they are not alone. Because you are not. We are in this together.

Ok, love you all, bye!

[bigmack2go]

(Ridiculous-)

-Things that i think the newsies would get cancelled for if it were modern era:

Crutchie

His name. He blew up in quarantine and only streamed gameplay and sat down. He only ever explained his name like,,, once or so and that was way back, the succes came slowly and so he never felt the need to explain it again. After a while some pointed out his name and i like,,, blew up! He was on the twitter trending page for a whole week! But he was only cancelled for a day or two(?) before he uploaded a video laughing tears. The mother fucker probably used it as clickbait on the preview banner pannel thingy (wtf are those called??) and in the title. I mena,,,, imagine!! “!SPEAKING UP about the recent ALLEGATIONS! (EMOTIONAL) (CW: CRYING)” and probably ant like “(real) (not fake!)(fuck clickbait)” or something. He would troll the shit out of social media for it

Ike

Probably like queerbaiting or some shit. Like he’ll go “holy shit, i’m so gay!” And people will go “I THOUGHT HE HAS A GF” and hotshot is just watching the whole thing, making fun of him for D A Y S while he’s cancled and she’s like “hOw dArE yOu bE bIsExUAl?!”

Hotshot

That exact thing i just said. Because she wasn’t including pan people, poly people and all the other sexuality’s when she was making that joke.

Race

Cheating. On Spot. (See also-> my spralbert fic) ofc he didn’t actually cheat but some people foubd and old clip of when he was still less known and didn’t know he would blow up like that and people pretend that poly people dont exist. He probably had a big thing and then he “cancelled them back” (his words not mine) or something like that.

Spot

For staying with Race even after he found out he “cheated”. People said he was only with Race for the money.

Albert

For being the person that Race “cheated” with

Jack

For saying “i wanna kiss you so bad right now” to a guy and apparently making fun of gay people with it. That shit was just like an hour or so tho at the highest.

Katherine

For her father lmao

York

Having a problematic mod. People say shit like he’s just ignoring that fact. But he legitimately just did not now. He wasn’t online for a solid two days and when he was it was to stream so he had to find out by chat, but he thought chat was joking and so one thing led to another and uh yeah. By the time hotshot called him asking why he was joking about that sort of stuff and he realised that it was true, the tag was already trending.

Romeo

Let’s be honest, the fucker prolly said something like “you’ find the right person eventually” or be like really penetrant like a Karen that refuses to acknowledge aro/ace people exist. But like for fun. Like,,, jokingly. This guy is literally aroace. It prolly went pretty much the same as for Crutchie.

Tommyboy

Cheating.(but like at a game) Come on lets be honest . This mf would have the whole dream sCaNdAl procedure and you know it. He acedentally cheated and then get death threats for it (which, just to be clear, even if dream had cheated is just— like,,, idek)

Myron

Tried to kill a pigeon once when he was like seven or something

Elmer

Being involved in a russian spying scandal or some shit. Dont even ask! The best prt is that this is the only one where the internet was being justified. Not only dod all the evidence ACTUALLY lead to him (and it wasn’t something little like cheating) butthe reason for that is that it was actually him. Now obv it wasn’t on purpose bla bla, someone put a wrong server adress or what-not idek but like,,,, it was fair for people to want to cancel him…

Buttons

Capitalism. He probably told someone they had to pay if they wanted him to make them a piece of cloth or whatever. (Obv this is exeragated. The internet is not actually that bad… mostly. And he probably did go about it a little worse and people probably didn’t actually cancel-cancel him as in like,, career threatening but yk. It was still a little ridiculous)

Davey

Defending church. He’s like “GUYS IM NOT EVEN A CHRISTIAN WTF!? Im just saying, let people believe what they wanna believe. unless that specific person uses their faith as an excuse to disrespect, discredit or discriminate you, they are not a bad person for their faith”

In case you’re wondering, this happened in the same context as-

-Jojo

Jojo told his coming-out-to-the-nuns story and how he wasn’t too scared (and some other stuff) and then people said that he was pretending the church never was problematic. (Ive never phrased a sentence to say less of what i meant than this one but im tired and i have the excuse that English isn’t my first language so gimme a break)

[ilovedthestars]

it's the first aro visibility day, ever! It's also my first pride month where I consider myself to be part of the aro community. there's something about that that I find very satisfying, almost comforting. this is new for me, but in some ways it's new for all of us. it's nice to feel like i'm not figuring myself out all alone.

i already did questioning round 1, back in middle and early high school, and came to the conclusion that I was queer (i used queer to describe myself more often than gay or lesbian, but that was the kind of queer that i meant.) i figured out that i thought girls were really pretty, and couldn't really see myself ending up with a guy, and could sort of see myself dating a girl someday, and once I got that figured out I thought I was mostly done. orientation solved, check! just in time to join the high school QSA and wear rainbows during june and joke with my friends about how everyone we knew was queer.

in retrospect, i definitely sort of knew that there was more going on, even when i went thru that first round of questioning. i learned about aspec identities in middle school, via the internet. i distinctly remember a late-night text conversation with a friend in which i told her I thought I might be demisexual (i think my own sexual and romantic orientations were tied together in my mind at the time, and still sort of are, although it's more complicated now.) I was maybe twelve years old, and had never had a crush, and had stumbled upon some words that maybe explained why I wasn't even sure what a crush would feel like. My friend pointed out that lots of people don't have crushes until they're older, and it didn't necessarily have to mean i was aspec. I don't begrudge her this--at the time it was comforting to hear. I think I sort of put the idea away on a "more data required" basis, and didn't think hard about it for years.

it wasn't until within the last six months or so that I started seriously thinking about the possibility that i might be aspec again. i found a fandom community that was full of proud aspec people, and conversations with them started to ring some bells. I read Angela Chen's Ace, which also described some experiences that clicked with me. it occurred to me that while girls are pretty, and the abstract idea of a romantic relationship sounds like it could be fun, i still have yet to actually think "i want to date this specific person." it's always been a pure hypothetical, maybe-one-day thing. i started to think--okay, so maybe i might be some kind of aro or ace. possibly. perhaps.

so now i'm still deep in the quagmire of questioning round 2, trying to fit together "girls are pretty" and "i think would hypothetically date someone" and "i don't actually know if i've ever felt romantic attraction in my life" into something that I can understand. i still feel weird about calling myself aro--i don't feel like I'm certain yet. i think i'm just starting to get to a place where i feel comfortable saying that i'm somewhere on the a-spectrums. but i'm really grateful have found a community where I feel like I can be uncertain and still be included. thanks to the people who have helped me down this road so far--you know who you are, and i love you.

happy aromantic visibility day, and happy pride, to all the aros (and possibly-aros, and maybe??? aros, and i-think-i-might-be-aro-but-i'm-not-sures) out there 💜

[tetsunabouquet]

You know as a bisexual I keep noticing a trend of monosexuals talking about us and to an even worse extent, the asexual/aro community with a level of ignorance and disrespect we never give monosexuals. There are a few LGBT+ YouTubers I follow that I like, but the moment they start talking about non-monosexuals I am pretty much typing at least one comment trying to clarify on it, that in turn never gets noticed and I find myself repeating the same comments over and over again in the hope they actually understand our point of view on things. Like, don't talk about bi culture when you don't know a thing about it! I know what the butch lesbian aesthetic is because I am part of the WLW community, but I don't claim in depth knowledge or knowing about butch side of the community because that is just such a 'lesbian' space and not really my thing as a bi woman. We bisexuals also have preferences that don't always but often match with one another's because some things are just so very bi. Think roller derby and rock stars. I do feel grateful for being raised by an ace who got hooked on LGBT culture at a young age. Back during the 80s and 90s, people didn't care about labels so back then the LGBT community actually was more accepting of people like my mom who never even had an orgasm before and couldn't hold a boyfriend for longer then three months. Nowadays, people will immediately jump to the conclusion my mom had some sort of sexual trauma which is somewhat insulting. No, sexual trauma is probably the only trauma my mother didn't suffer as a child. Grandma was an abusive alcoholic, but she kept her hands to herself in that regard as far as my mom told me. Thank you for assuming you privy, rude monosexuals. She's had multiple partners throughout her life, she tried. She can't and actually doesn't really cares about having an orgasm. She feels fine without it. Why does a lack of sexual desire immediately mean people have to have had some trauma or medication that stunted their sexual development? Why do I have to know details of my mother's failed attempts at having a sex life in order for me to say my mom is ace without people jumping to all kinds of assumptions about her. You monosexuals really are rude when it comes to ace people. It's almost like they really are the new thing the LGB pick on, where before it were the gays and lesbians picking on us bisexuals, telling us we were still weren't sure about ourselves, that we simply needed to embrace being a lesbian/gay man and all the biphobic nonsense you can still find in corners of the internet. Even as a kid, I caught onto the biphobia like Willow from Buffy being made a lesbian instead of a bisexual, the show's creators even stated they did it out of fear for biphobic backlash. As a bisexual with an ace mom, I stand in solidarity to all those who aren't monosexual and say I see the pattern. We're aliens to monosexuals and the internet is exposing some of you people's rude thoughts about a sexuality so drastically different from yours.

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: Pride Asks!

It may be August, but I’m a big believer in Pride Year, so today I’m going through the list of questions I found on this post and answering the ones I feel like thinking about!

(Turns out I felt like answering all thirty-four of them. Have fun!)

1. Which labels do you use?

I am greyromantic and demisexual! I also use aromantic and asexual, or aro-ace.

2. Do you like to use the term queer for yourself? Or just LGBT, etc?

I’m here, I’m queer! I understand why some people aren’t comfortable with reclaiming this word, but it works well for me. You can’t leave out the A when you call it a queer community.

3. Which pronouns do you use?

She/her

4. Are you "out" to your family and friends?

Yep!

5. Are you "out" publicly?

Yep!

6. (If you're out) do you wish you came out sooner? Later? Or was it the right time?

I wish I’d known it was an option sooner. I couldn’t have come out before I knew about it, so I suppose it was the right time. But I wish I’d spent fewer years thinking there was something wrong with me.

7. Are you the "token" queer person in your family?

No, but when I came out, I didn’t know that there were other queer people in my family.

8. Describe your gender without using any words traditionally related to gender:

My gender is “respect me!”

9. When did you realize you weren't cishet?

In middle school, I knew I wasn’t feeling the same thing that my peers were describing when they talked about crushes. But it was easy enough to dismiss it as just another thing that was different about me. I was already anosmic and autistic, and always the first Jewish kid that anyone had ever met. I assumed I was “straight but broken” for the longest time. I didn’t even really believe that I could be asexual the first time I heard the word, in college. I joined my school’s Feminist Union, and that’s where I learned that there are more options to sexuality than straight or gay, more options to gender than boy or girl, and that romantic and sexual attraction weren’t the same thing. I went on Tumblr and followed as many queer blogs as I could find – I was determined to learn everything I could about all the identities, so I could be the best ally ever! One day, I saw a post with the word “demisexual” in it, and I Googled it. I read the definition, and it clicked.

10. Something that gives you gender euphoria (whether you're cis or trans):

When people call me “sir” or “ma’am.”

11. Favorite (or just one you love) piece of LGBT media?

Technically You Started It by Lana Wood Johnson. I wish I could reach back through time and hand this book to my preteen self.

12. Name some queer artists/bands or songs you like most:

“For Me” by Dearlie and “Never Been in Love” by Will Jay stand out. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but “Good Thing” by Zedd and Kehlani is SO aro.

13. Do you choose to reclaim slurs, why or why not?

Every word we use to describe ourselves has been used against us pejoratively. If I find a word works for me, I use it. If someone asks me not to use a word for them or around them, then I won’t use it for them or around them.

14. How do you think other factors like neurodivergency or upbringing have impacted your identity?

I’m Jewish, anosmic, and autistic. I understood from a very young age that there were things about me that made me different from other people, that other people wouldn’t be able to see right away. Once they realized that that difference existed, they would doubt me, question me, negatively judge me, and distance themselves from me. In a way, that all prepared me to realize and accept my asexuality and aromanticism.

I also give my parents a lot of credit for never putting any pressure on me to date when I was a kid or a teen. In hindsight, my childhood home was a very safe place to be aro-ace. Queerness wasn’t something we ever talked about, so it’s not like they encouraged me to explore, but they never discouraged it, either. When I first told my mom I thought I might have a crush on a girl, she immediately hugged me and told me she loved me, and that was the end of the conversation. I knew I could come to her and my dad with whatever new discovery I might make about myself.

15. How has your identity changed over time?

I went from “I have no idea” to “straight but broken” to “panromantic demisexual” to “greyromantic demisexual.”

16. Do you attend Pride in person every year?

No. I’d like to, but there’s a pandemic going on out there. And I live in Florida.

17. Have you ever attended Pride in a big city/ large metro area?

I went to Orlando Pride once with my then-boyfriend. There was a big, colorful parade, I bought a demisexual pride flag, and someone gave me a pair of rainbow sunglasses that I wore til they broke.

18. How old were you when you got to attend your first Pride? Who did you go with?

I think that Orlando Pride I mentioned was my first Pride. I was twenty-four or so.

19. Do you feel safe and accepted in your local community?

Safe enough, and accepted enough, given that it’s Florida. I stay in the Disney bubble enough that I don’t feel the need to constantly look over my shoulder. I have a girlfriend I love and friends I adore. That said, while no one locally is actively out to hurt me, it’s rare that anyone besides my girlfriend and a few key friends is actively out to understand and support my queerness, either. I try to find other aros and aces to hang out with in person, but it’s hard.

20. Do you feel like you "fit in" with the queer/Pride community overall?

I feel like I do. But I don’t think that they feel like I do.

21. What message would you give to your younger self?

Everything about you – everything you feel, everything you experience – is just as good, just as valid, and just as important as anyone else.

22. How do you usually celebrate Pride month?

These days mostly through TikToks.

23. Do you prefer loud parties or quiet?

Game night!

24. Do you practice any religion, if so how does it play into your LGBT identity? Do you feel welcomed by your spiritual community?

I’m Jewish. Masorti/Conservative. Like I said before, being Jewish in a predominantly Christian area prepared me in a way for being aro and ace. People struggle to understand it in similar ways; people are nice to me until they learn about it in similar ways. My community is pretty chill about it. They know I’m queer. My girlfriend and I met at synagogue. It doesn’t come up much, really. They’re more interested in the fact that I’m a twenty-something in a congregation where everyone is either much older or much younger than me.

25. What queer discourse frustrates you the most?

“Aces and aros aren’t LGBT!” “You’re not queer enough!” “You’re not oppressed enough!”

We have nothing to gain from shutting each other out, and everything to lose from perpetuating hate.

26. How do you feel about the term partner rather than husband/girlfriend/etc?

Partner is a great word! One of the ways my aromanticism shows up is in a fluctuating romance-repulsion. Sometimes I’m happy with romantic behaviors and ideas, and sometimes I’m really not okay with any of it! Right now, I’m calling my girlfriend my girlfriend, but sometimes that word doesn’t sit well with me. When we first announced our relationship on social media, I called her my “person.” I’m a big fan of having more words, more options, for how to describe the many ways our lives and relationships can be. “Partner” is great.

27. What gender-neutral terms for yourself or others do you use (i.e. joyfriend)?

My person. My partner. My friend. Babe.

28. Do you experience both romantic and sexual attraction? Do you experience them the same across any gender(s) you are attracted to?

Great question! I experience both at times, rarely. I’m demisexual – I only experience sexual attraction towards someone after I have an emotional connection with that person – and I’m greyromantic – I sometimes experience romantic attraction to others, without a clear pattern to it. Gender has never been an important factor for me. I’ve been in love with he’s, she’s, and they’s, and it comes and goes the same either way!

29. Are you currently partnered, or if not are you interested in having partner(s)?

My girlfriend and I have been a romantic couple for about three months. We were friends for about two years before that. I want to build a future together with someone, to make big life decisions together, to create a home together and have each other around for hugs whenever we need them.

But I feel fine when I don’t have that. Who I am when I’m in love and who I am when I’m not in love – it’s both me. I’m whole either way. But I know what I want.

30. Are you monogamous or polyamorous?

Not sure! I’ve never been in love with more than one person at a time, but I’m pretty sure I could be. I think it would be amazing to have more than one person you have that kind of understanding with and can count on like that. But I’m comfortable with monogamy. It’s not like my romantic partner is the only important person in my life; my family and friends are just as important.

31. Post a pic in your pride gear (or it can just be a selfie or anything else lgbt):

I don’t have any good pride pics right now, but I found this picrew I saved, like, two years ago:

32. Do you do arts and crafts? Post a pic of a project you've done:

I’m a writer, so have a poem instead:

I am yours to sit up with past midnight I am yours now to hold very near I am yours to give flowers and chocolates I am yours when I tell you my fears

I am yours when you soothe all my worries I am yours when you calm all my rants I am yours here beside you for always I am yours since you gave me the chance

I am yours when I tell you you’re silly I am yours when you tell me the same I am yours now to keep us both mindful I am yours in both sunshine and rain

I am yours when we meet in the morning I am yours when I tell you goodbye I am yours, though the allos will tell us That love without sex is a lie

Incidentally, I’m working on a book of Aromantic Asexual Love Poems. If you’ve read this far and you’re interested in beta-reading a queer poetry book, please reach out!

33. What about your LGBT identity do you feel proud of/ want to recognize/celebrate?

The freedom! The freedom to not know what’s going on with me, to be inconsistent, to figure out what’s best for me and my relationships, to build my future day by day by day. Recognizing my aromanticism and asexuality has opened so many doors for me and given me so much hope!

34. What are you needing most right now (what would make your life easier or more fulfilling in regards to existing as queer)?

More people who are neither aro nor ace mentioning aro and ace people in queer contexts. We can’t be the only ones speaking up for ourselves. Y’all need to be positive and noisy about us, too. That’s how we know we’re safe with you.

[bookofmirth]

please share your stranger things thoughts i’m curious 👀

okay but I am not going to tag this because I don't want people yelling at me! I am disagreeing with posts that have 5k+ notes so... I will put everything under the cut and still tag it as spoilers.

Fair warning! Stranger Things 4 spoilers below.

(Sorry it got long-ish, I have a lot of thoughts. I liked the season overall, btw. I know a lot of people are pissed about how it went but I'm not!)

The second - the second - that Mike told El he loves her, I was like oh shit. Here we go. That fandom collectively just imploded.

While I understand why people ship it - why wouldn't we want Will to get everything he's ever wanted? - I never thought it would actually happen because I saw no hints at all that Mike is queer.

I didn't feel either way about it happening, for context. If Mike/Will happened great, if not great. I'm not super attached to... probably any of the ships at this point, other than lumax. I've never really cared about Mike/El, at this point breaking up Nancy and Steve in season two feels like a mistake they are now trying to fix, I guess Joyce/Hopper is alright. My point is that I had no horse in this race.

Is Will queer? Obviously, and idk why people are mad that he didn't come out. Like what would that even look like? This is 1983-1986, remember. What community does Will have, as a queer person? What role models in his immediate, personal life? How do people around him talk about queerness? (A friend pointed out that they were also in the middle of the AIDS panic, which would have a major influence on how Will sees his own queerness, if he could even define it or label it in the first place!) I understand that there are fantastical elements to this story, obviously, but they are still living in our world, in our 1986.

It's super easy for people on tumblr to be like "just come out, just say you're gay!" but we have basically this whole website as support to do that, we can find communities online. When Robin "came out" she didn't actually say anything either? She just said "Steve" and gave him A Look until he figured it out. Call me crazy but these two characters can exist being queer without wearing their "I'm gay, ask me how" buttons to work/class every day.

So yeah I personally don't think there was any queerbaiting because, as a bisexual who has watched this show since the beginning and probably rewatches once a year, I am satisfied that Will is indeed queer and Mike is not and Robin is. I don't need a ship to happen, I guess, I just need the queer characters to actually be queer, and I think that Jonathan's talk with Will in the pizza place set that up perfectly to happen in the final season! Because now Will knows 100% that he can live his life, figure out who he is, and perhaps find someone to be with who is not his straight best friend. I don't think that anyone is arguing that Will isn't queer. (I keep using "queer" instead of "gay" because I did lowkey think he was aro/ace for a while, and he hasn't put a label on it. He's probably gay because that was some serious unrequited pining, but anyway.) We know he is! So are people mad that he and Mike aren't happening? Because ships aren't a guarantee. That particular ship not happening is not queerbaiting. It also reminds me of e*riels sorryyyyy I had to say it, it's just another example of making mountains out of molehills!

Like I said above, Will is obviously queer, and they have set him up to live his best queer life in the last season. I don't feel "baited" in the slightest.

(Side note, I don't pay attention really to interviews or articles or whatever is said outside the show itself. Much like any interview or event with Sarah J Maas, I don't rely on that event to tell me things that the show/book hasn't already told me.)

Now, Eddie. His death was sad, I cried both times (because I've watched the episode twice haha) but it did make sense, to me. He felt guilt for having left Chrissy behind, though obviously he couldn't have done anything about that. He couldn't have saved her, but like Max's guilt over Billy, that doesn't make him feel any better about how he responded to the situation. His death was not pointless? When he and Dustin went back to Hawkins, they would have ceased being a distraction for the bats. The second they leave, the bats would go back to the murder house, where Steve, Nancy, and Robin were trying to kill Vecna's body. They were supposed to be a distraction for a reason, they weren't just on a field trip to the Upside Down. So Eddie stopped, realized he was running again, and that doing so would actually in this case have been leaving other people in a lurch. (Now that I am writing this, I wonder if Steve had an influence on Eddie's decision to stay and fight. Something to think about.)

One more thing, but I also don't care that Vickie was kissing her boyfriend? The girl could be bi! Bisexuals exist y'all, and the fact that people are annoyed that a potentially bisexual woman was kissing her boyfriend,,,,... it just grosses me out tbh. Is Rickie their ship name, btw? So yeah, bisexual Molly Ringwald is gonna hopefully be a great girlfriend for Robin.

idk, some of the criticism I've seen just doesn't totally make sense when we still have another season coming. And when, like with Will, I feel like these things are going to continue/be resolved. I was watching something a while back and Oliver Stone was talking about the movie Wall Street, and how being a director means knowing that the viewer is absolutely going to misunderstand your intentions. I think there is a lot of that going on right now.

I liked this season. Some of the memes making fun of it had made me laugh. I'm not trying to be an active member of the fandom, I just have a lot of thoughts. (If this somehow gets outside of my usual fandom/followers, just FYI that I don't hesitate to block a bitch.)

[wota-tenebrarum]

This is mostly for me

I just wanted to write something out, I guess. Not like, well, so don’t expect some kind of thoughtful essay or anything. But my quest to stop being so lonely ties in very closely with my aromanticism so I’ve been thinking about that a lot. The reason I never thought of myself as aro until recently was because for a long time I like... didn’t know that was a thing. I haven’t had the butterfly feeling in 20 years, and that was back when my hormones were all over the place because I was literally, like 13 years old. I had a girlfriend in the summer of 8th and 9th grade, and even then I distinctly remember thinking after going for a swim with her and a friend “oh her friend is kinda cute too, can I also date her???? is that a thing??????” And I also remember watching sitcoms and movies where people regularly have relationship problems and thinking “this is so easy to fix, I would simply not behave this way.” Like, every romantic conflict in media looked to me like the characters were overthinking everything. None of it made any sense. Then there was the time I went on a date in 11th grade with a friend of a friend from kung fu class. Well, I didn’t really realize it was a date until much later (burgeoning aro things I guess), but still. It was a date. And I did think that girl was pretty cute, and she was physically stronger than me which I remember being REALLY excited about. But that never went anywhere, because even after seeing her again and like, bumming around a mall for a little bit, I still didn’t feel like we were on a date. I didn’t feel like, a spark or whatever. I just felt like I was hanging out with a friend who was hot. Then about ten years ago I was studying abroad here in Japan, and there was this girl I thought was cute, so I started talking to her. And again, she just felt like a friend, but I felt like... like that’s just how it goes? Like you start just by hanging out like normal, and then the butterflies come later. But the butterflies never did come with any of these people. There are sooooooooooo many times I can think of where someone was DEFINITELY interested in me, but I never picked up on it because I never understood romance from the beginning. A friend of mine who I did end up having a lot of sex with was apparently into me the whole time and may still be almost 4 years later, uh oh (another friend let it slip), but I never felt the same way and honestly never realized she did either. For years I’ve just kind of assumed I had a sex-related mental or personality problem because I was so heckin’ horny all the time but absolutely never felt the butterflies. It made me worry that deep down I was predatory or misogynistic or something. This problem was further compounded by the fact that ace and aro get lumped together all the time. Because lol, I’m definitely not ace, but even after I learned the word “aromantic”, it didn’t feel like it was for me because I’m not asexual. For a time I also had an asexual Twitter friend who was sex-repulsed to the point that she thought all allosexuals were disgusting, predatory trash who should die (it’s why we don’t talk anymore), so like, yeah. Exclusionary and hostile ace discourse really fogged up my picture of what I am for quite a while. Only after moving to Japan did I figure out that aros don’t have to be asexual, because I was explicitly told so, and only recently did I even learn the term “alloaro”. But I’ve still got no idea how to explain this in Japanese, much less how to find somebody here who’s cool with it since Japan’s still a little behind on the queer identity stuff. Years of not understanding what I really needed has left me with no idea as to how to find people to have sex with, and it’s actually something I really, really enjoy so I’m kind of stressed. I really like being physically close with people I trust and helping them have a great time. A point of pride with regards to my unfortunately limited sexual experience is that every time I’ve managed to do it, the other person felt very well-loved (as a friend, from my perspective at least) after it was over. I’m not saying I’m like, a pro, but I’m saying the other person will definitely feel like I really value them and am excited about the chance to be physically affectionate with them specifically. Like, I’m apparently good at validating people in this particular way, and it’s something I want to be doing more often because it’s quite personally fulfilling and one of the only situations in which I feel real confidence. And also I love 2 nut lmao But like, yeah, because I don’t really have the tools or social skills for casual sex, I’m sort of left in this weird grey area where I have to rely on the possibility of a friend one day blurting out “hey wanna fuck”, which is how I managed to get the experience that I do have. How do I find people to have sex with?????????? Especially here in Japan, most likely via my second language that I’m quite good at translating but a bit less good at speaking? What the fuck do I do? I lack fulfillment; my soul is withering lately and validating people through sex is something I think would help me a lot. And I see absolutely no problem with just like, going on Twitter and shouting into the crowd of friends and fellow idol fans that follow me “ayyyy anyone DTF???? No-strings-attached sex available now! I literally just want to make you feel good and have a good time doing it!  If u cute, please let me know if you have ever thought about me in that way, even in passing, I’m totally down!”, but like, I know most people would be really put off by that. But like, what the fuck do I do??????????? I don’t know any other alloaros to ask about this, either. I’m just sort of stuck. Somewhat related story: I used to talk regularly with this cosplayer/indie porn lady who used to flash me in public and ask me dirty questions, and I didn’t pick up on her interest AT ALL because again, I don’t really have the tools to do anything with that. If she had just said “hey let’s bang” I’d have been THERE in an instant, but because her interest was communicated through (extremely obvious) hints, I didn’t pick up on it. Because I am stupid and unprepared. I could have been having so much freaky sex this whole time, you guys, and my stupid, socially inept ass was just like “lol she’s so free with her body that’s great I love that for her. I wonder if she’d ever give me a shot.” And she didn’t! Because I missed my chance to notice she was trying! CCCCCCCCC:

[thedysphoriadiaries]

Entry 17B - 3 March 2023, 3:20pm

Well... I went out to eat again.

As if I ever learnt from my own mistakes.

I hate how my brain just focuses on the women around me. I hate it. I don't want to be a predator. It's disgusting how I keep glancing at school-going girls, some of which haven't even entered their teenage years. I deserve the title of a pedophile for doing this.

Honestly, I... kind of give up. If this is what I have to live with, so be it.

I haven't had a shower in a week, or at least a couple of days. I cannot bear to see myself. I can't even look in the mirror anymore. I do not know why I am alive.

...

I asked my brother to imagine a version of him who wanted to be a girl. He couldn't do it, the same way I couldn't imagine a version of me who was comfortable being a guy.

What in the fuck is wrong with me?

The other people around me constantly deadname me, but that's on me, since I didn't give them my preferred name, and to be honest, I no longer care that much about it.

I'm not comfortable being referred to as a guy, but I know that I'll never be a girl. My frame (my physical frame, and my frame of mind) literally prevents it from coming to pass. I hate myself for it.

I will not take that anger out on others. I will... support them, maybe not vocally, but from the sidelines. Give them acceptance, where I never found any in myself. I will keep screaming into the void; the void serves the same purpose that a beam dump does for a laser - it vents excess things out safely. If it wasn't for this and all the sleeping pills I've been taking, I'd be throwing things around.

Speaking of that, I wonder how Avery (am I misremembering his name?) is doing? He used to rant quite a ton back when I was a part of a trans group. No, I'm NOT going back. I just wonder how he's doing. Wouldn't be surprised if he told me to fuck myself. Yeah sure, let me just rip that dead thing out from between my legs and fuck my ass with it.

...

Even now, the thoughts of how masculine I am are beginning to seep into the activities that I do for fun. Yes, I'm able to play riffs from Polyphia, but what good is it if I begin to think about how masculine my arms are as they move about while I play the guitar?

Why am I like this? Why am I so hopelessly attracted to the thought of going through life as a female?

Would things be better if I was gone?

If I was an only child, I would have gone a long time ago. Since I have a brother, I'd be traumatizing him, and I could make him suicidal, which is NOT something I want to do.

Funny how I love others but beat myself up over and over again every single day.

Funny how I'm self-aware of this, but refuse to seek help. Maybe the only help I'll seek is a bullet to my head. I've destroyed far too many things to be left alive. And no, you're not going to report this to the authorities. It's not like you know my legal name.

...

I can't help but keep thinking of a letter a redditor sent to her spouse. Being called my chosen name only brings up how different who I want to be, and who I am, are, and I hate that. I don't feel like I deserve that name. Yet, I so desperately crave to be called a good girl.

No, this is NOT an invitation for you to call me that.

If you do decide to call me that, go fuck yourself. Spare me the pain of knowing that I'll never be what I want to be. I'm just some lunatic with a couple of loose brain screws.

I'm thinking of hiding behind the label of aro-ace. Even if I could feel anything, I'm too damaged to feel proper sexual attraction, much less romantic attraction. What I feel towards women is NOT romantic attraction. If these feelings persist, eventually, I WILL succumb to the same envy that being with my ex-partner brought upon me. My partner does not deserve that fate. They do not deserve a disgusting pile of sludge envying them.

I cannot keep living like this, but it is the only life I know.

I don't know why this life has to be so long. I feel like I died years ago.

... I wonder why I keep writing this. Is it for attention?

It doesn't matter. I can only hope I make it through conscription, so that more parts of me can die for others' comfort. And after that, once those important to me have gone, go by myself.

As some sick pedophile with loose brain screws, I've done far too much damage to ever redeem myself.

...

Ok, rant time's over. Go away. Shoo.

And no. No hugs.

Leave me alone. I'll go sleep, or play some Polyphia riffs.