#also.............ur assuming i'm not arospec myself

[thegeminisage]

Why do you tag aro posts with asexuality? I don't want to seem rude but Aros deal with a lot of erasure already from alloromantic aces :/

hi anon

asexuality/aromanticism as we know it rn is still a really new deal. back when i began blogging about all this (and even longer ago when i first began learning about asexuality) “aromantic” wasn’t a thing - or if it was, it wasn’t a thing i knew about. for a long time, the split attraction model wasn’t like a Big Deal to the ace community - you had your aces who didn’t like romance (and they were “all the way” ace) and your aces who did (and they were in the gray area lumped in with demisexual people, and gray aces were also not a thing people were really into? ironically we got called fakers and broken and the like, gatekeeping on AVEN was really ugly back then). that is totally different to how we do it now! which i think is good! the way we do it now is better probably! stuff changes!

but. i’ve had this blog for 8 or 9 years. i think i opened it up in 2010. the ace flag itself is only officially like 8? i think? years old. like just impress upon you how NEW stuff is and how OLD i am and how i was existing being my beautiful asexual self on tumblr before we even had a FLAG

so yeah, in my mind, aro & ace were just two variations of the same thing. i IDed primarily as asexual (and still do) and that’s how people referred to aspec folks as a whole so that’s the tag i used

changing tags on this hellsite is impossible. there’s a couple of extensions and websites that will give it a try BUT i have had very little luck with them when it came to tags with lots of posts and tags that are common words. one time i tried to replace my tag for a single word - i don’t remember what it was - and every time that word appeared in any tag whether it was with words or not it got replaced with the entire long phrase, which was a NIGHTMARE to clean up manually. another time i tried to change my personal tag, but the site kept running out of steam before it got to the end. it’s a big blog. something like 97k posts. i think my asexuality tag is like 50 or 60 pages long. i’m sure as fuck not changing those manually, and i’m too leery of automated tag changers not working and forcing me to clean up messes to do it in an automated way, so i’m stuck with this one if i want everything in one place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

fwiw, i would love for my tag to be “aro & ace” or something like that. on posts with a lot of aro content i try to say in my tags “sorry thats my default tag it would be aro & ace if this site didn’t suck” but uh sometimes typing a disclaimer on every single post gets exhausting and so then i Dont! sorry. i am only one mortal imperfect human being who gets tired of typing shit sometimes