#but the wording on a lot of aro posts has gotten to a point where i am not comfortable interacting with them

[recurringwriter]

i need to speak up with this because it's getting grating as a bi arospec.

Please. Think before you say that someone writing a character as demi-, grey-, or elsewhere on the aromantic spectrum is only doing so to 'appeal to the alloros'. When you say that, you sound exactly like the people who call bisexuals 'fakers' or 'basically straight' for wanting to see or think about m/f pairings. I do not want to see the community that should be supporting me, a greyro, pulling the same gatekeeping shit that still hurts me and my bi friends.

I do not mind if you hc this character as repulsed. More power to you, enjoy your headcanons. But you will not tell someone that they are doing it wrong for exploring the idea of romance with that same character. 'It's only when the allos do it--' can you tell? Do you have a magical scrying orb that tells you who is aro enough to write a headcanoned-as-aro character in a romantic relationship? Do you remember how bisexuals get called 'straight' for enjoying a m/f pair? Do you see how others within the arospec community might think that you're calling them allo when they hear you saying that? That this makes them feel unseen and unheard?

I'm sure it's very alienating if you want to be a part of popular fandom, and I could never understand that. But think about how you alienate your allies and siblings when you say these things. Our existence isn't to please anyone else, the same as yours. So stop talking as if it is.

[arotechno]

Jughead (2015), Issues 7-8: Discussion and Commentary

Boy oh boy am I excited to talk about this arc!! These two issues hold a very special place in my cold little aro heart.

(By the way, do you see that? I managed to get a digital copy from my library via Hoopla, which means you are spared from my shitty phone grabs. I’ll fix the previous post, don’t worry. Try clicking on the screenshots if tumblr blurs them. And try Hoopla, if you’ve got a library card and have been looking to read these.)

Fed up with him sitting around the house playing video games all summer, Mr. Jones forces Jughead to get out of the house and do something outside. Jughead finds Archie at the pool where he’s working as a lifeguard, and convinces him to take time off to go camping in the woods with him at their friend Dilton’s cottage.

They take Archie’s car out to the woods, only to find that the lake is overrun with Reggie’s over-the-top relatives at the Mantle family reunion. Horrified, Jughead and Archie go out on a hike to get away. This is where things go downhill—literally.

Jughead calls Archie out for his growing fixation with Veronica Lodge, whose father is the one trying to clear out Fox Forest. Archie immediately goes on the defensive, but Jughead, understandably, really doesn’t get it. And here’s where we see that this is a divide that has been brewing between them for quite some time, even if Archie seemingly had no idea it was happening.

The boys end up getting lost, which only serves to fuel their frustrations. It occurs to Jughead, some time later, that the lake they’re camping at is not that far from Camp Lucey, an all-girls summer camp. Shocked and hurt, he accuses Archie of only agreeing to go on the trip to pick up girls, and not to hang out with him. He tackles Archie and they tumble down a hill into the woods below.

This is a really interesting story, from an aro’s perspective. Jughead can’t relate to Archie’s teenage obsession with girls, and it isn’t something they can bond over like other friends may have been able to do. On a simple level, all Jughead really wants to do is hang out with his best friend, just the two of them, just like old times—back when they were younger, before Archie’s interest in girls seemed to take over his every waking moment. Importantly, Jughead never objects to Archie’s romantic pursuits on principle (he does have an issue with Veronica, but that has to do more with her father’s actions than her). It isn’t that he wants to stand in the way of Archie’s happiness—he just feels left behind, and that’s something I think a lot of aromantic people, teenagers especially, can resonate with.

Eventually, Archie and Jughead run into Mr. Weatherbee of all people, who begrudgingly offers to help lead them back to camp. It’s at this point that we get one of my favorite moments in the entire series, one that I have waxed poetic about on this blog before and probably will again.

Archie insists that he is in fact here to hang out with Jughead, and that he’s just being dramatic. Jughead, on the other hand, insists that Archie’s the one being dramatic with his love triangle problems, to which Archie replies:

“Look, I’m not going to apologize for being a normal guy, I—”

And Jughead’s reaction to those words has stuck with me since the first time I read this. He’s shocked, hurt, and clearly a little angry that Archie would say something like that. And it’s a subtle moment, one that you might not even feel the gravity of if you didn’t know that Jughead was aro. What’s most important here, though, isn’t Jughead’s reaction, but the fact that Archie is clearly in the wrong, and he knows it. He tries to backtrack immediately (“Jughead! I didn’t mean it like that! Wait!”), but Jughead ignores him, as Mr. Bee has already gotten them lost again.

This singular page is, to me, a deeper and more nuanced portrayal than many works with “on-the-page” canon aromantic characters. This arc isn’t about Jughead being aro (in fact, none of the comics particularly are). But this is a meaningful incorporation of Jughead’s orientation into his daily life and his relationships with other people—namely, with his best friend. Although Jughead is being somewhat harsh with Archie, never does the narrative place him in the wrong for feeling abandoned, hurt, or angry because of Archie’s words and actions. Even Archie, his best friend, is capable of saying things that hurt him, and his words in this scene are never excused or justified by the narrative.

It also means a lot to me that Archie apologizes the second he gets the chance to, and that Jughead is quick to forgive him and explain that he just misses the time before Archie was so obsessed with girls. I wouldn’t want the story to just turn into a feud between them. You know when you’re on a trip with your friends and you get lost and you’re tired and frustrated you just end up airing your grievances and coming out of it with a new understanding of your friendship while trying to solve the mess you’re in? That’s what this arc is.

Anyway, after a run-in with Reggie’s relative and Mr. Weatherbee’s old high school bully Ted Mantle, the trio manage to make it out of the woods—after several hours of walking until the sun has come up. There, they find that Camp Lucey has actually been renamed, and is now a camp for elementary school girls, where Betty happens to be working. So after all of that, Archie just ends up making a fool of himself, like usual. Mr. Bee’s wife drives over to rescue them and brings the boys back to Dilton’s cottage, where she remarks that she’s heard a lot about Archie and Jughead, and that they’re inseparable.

At its core, this is a story about friendship. It’s about the difficulties that come with realizing you can’t always relate to each other, and you can’t always read each other’s minds, and you sometimes say the wrong thing without meaning to. It’s a story about growing up, but not necessarily growing apart, and being able to reconcile your differences.

Archie assumes that after all of their bickering, Jughead would just want to go home and not hang out with him anymore. But turning back now would be contrary to what Jughead wanted in the first place, which was just to hang out with his best friend.

All’s well that end’s well, and Jughead and Archie patch things over and vow that they will always be best friends. It’s a wholesome moment, and reflects a common struggle for aspec teens that I rarely see addressed in media, if at all. Sometimes, it feels like your friends are all moving on without you, and sometimes they don’t even realize it when they’ve been neglecting your friendship. It takes communication to work these things out, and I’m happy to see that illustrated here.

This arc is my favorite, I think, and there’s reasons for that even outside of the aspects I’ve already detailed here. The kids getting lost in the woods on summer vacation is a fun way of framing the deeper story, and there are a lot of funny and endearing moments in these two issues. (Archie falls on his face, a lot, and Mr. Weatherbee is stoically exasperated with both of their antics.)

These are the last issues written by Chip Zdarsky. So shoutout to him for some of the most nuanced representations of aromanticism in fiction to date, even if he never wrote the word down on the page (I’ll get to that, don’t worry). But these are the first issues illustrated by Derek Charm, whose art style I love (no offense Erica Henderson), and the rest of the volume has a lot of other good aro moments in store. Until then, here’s himbo Archie:

See? Pure of heart, dumb of ass. You can’t be mad at him for long. (He falls into a hole later on the same page.)

Yeah, me too.

[dude-trust-the-cloak]

Hi! I saw your posts over on your art account about being aplatonic/loveless and I've barely heard the term before (just in passing on a couple blogs but not used by anyone who identifies with it) but I think it might fit me. I was just wondering if you had any good sites to research more about it. If not it's ok I'll definitely try to look into it too but there's probably a lot of false information out there about it to sift through so it'd be nice to have a starting point.

Thanks :)

Hi, thank you! It makes me really happy that my comics have already started to help people not just learn about the community, but also themselves.

I’m going to be honest, I’m not really sure if I have any great sites for more information. I first heard about aplatonic through word of mouth, and then found more information by googling it. The first result for me was the LGBTQIA+ Wiki. It seems that they’ve changed a lot of their pages since then, however, and I don’t think the aplatonic page has as much useful information as it once did. They got rid of any mention of the alternative flag, and they took away all the quotes from the original coiner of the term. His quote about what aplatonic meant to him is what first resonated so much with me, and it was a key part of why I identify as that now. They also cut from the official definition all mentions of not feeling platonic love, which sucks, because that’s a large reason why aplatonic is part of my identity. (I also feel little/no platonic attraction, but still!) Their explanation is a lot more sparse, and I don’t really see it as an amazing resource any more. Going back and looking at terms now, it seems the wiki is also completely gotten rid of their loveless aromantic page, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

Also, keep in mind that while experiences can overlap, being aplatonic and being loveless are two separate experiences and identities :). The problem with being such a small community is that there’s not a whole lot of places to get information. I’d definitely recommend this essay by K. A. Cook about hir experiences with the word “love” as a loveless aro, and how the idea that “love makes us human” is harmful. Otherwise, I’d just recommend reading other loveless/aplatonic people’s experiences, and how they define that identity for themselves. Tumblr is a place where you can find stuff, and while I’m not part of of it, r/aplatonic on Reddit seems to be a pretty sizable community as well.

Doing a google dive into it, I found some stuff? There’s this post from AUREA, and for kicks, the og post from AVEN that coined the term. I remember reading his post, particularly when he said “I have friends and care about them; but love is a powerful word, and one I cannot apply to them,” and being like “oh my god it’s not just me.” Other than that… that’s all I really found for aplatonic that wasn’t tumblr. Others than some Reddit posts, and a whole lot of tumblr, I got no hits for loveless aromantic.

As for misinformation, the first thing I can think of is this. Aplatonic is NOT an aro exclusive identity, as well as all of the other points they hit. Let’s not make this an identity that excludes people who aren’t aromantic. Alloromantic people can still have a complicated (or nonexistent) relationship with platonic love and attraction.

Whew, I think that’s it! I really wish I could be of more help, and have more informational content, but unfortunately I don’t. If anyone else knows of some great resources, please feel free to comment them!

[therealvinelle]

Hi! I was reading through your meta (which is reeeeally interesting) and noticed you said you don't like Eleazar? I was wondering why that was?

Tumblr ate this ask when I had almost finished it and I hate everything. Also, thanks for the compliment, I’m really glad you like my things.

Now to try and remember what I wrote about Eleazar…

I think Eleazar is a disagreeable person whose gift wasn’t useful enough to warrant a place in the Volturi guard, and Aro jumped on the Carmen-shaped excuse to give him an honorable discharge.

To start with the gift, we see him use it twice and neither time is particularly impressive.

Siobhan Siobhan has the power of reality manipulation. Her gift is noticeable enough that Carlisle is certain she has it, so when he gets Eleazar and Siobhan in a room together he pulls Eleazar over to see if he was right. Eleazar squints at Siobhan. And he squints. Finally he says, «I’ve got nothing.» Now, gifts are an iffy, complicated matter everyone has their own theories about, but I think that at the end of the day we can all agree it’s a binary, you’re gifted or you’re not. Some gifts may be weak, but those are still gifts. And maybe someone will touch the gray zone of «is it a gift or is Johnny the vampire just really good at juggling?», but Siobhan has the power to manipulate reality, and she must do it a lot for Carlisle to have come to suspect it in the first place. She has a definitive and powerful gift. And even if I’m wrong about gifts being binary, if Eleazar wants to be useful to Aro he should still be able to say: Yes, this person has a gift, or no, this person does not have a gift. Sadly, he is not. When brought before Siobhan he says «She could have a gift, she could also not have a gift.» This means he hasn’t detected her gift, which is bad enough by itself. Being able to tell if someone has a gift or not should be a dealbreaker. The way he answers, though, that she could very well have a gift he doesn’t know about, makes it clear that people having gifts he couldn’t detect has happened enough for him to be open to the possibility that the gift there, and he can’t see it. In other words, Eleazar isn’t reliable for detecting gifts and will give Aro false negatives.

Bella This is an aside but as it’ll inevitably come up later in my blog I’ll just drop here that I think Bella’s gift is something more complex than a shield. She has prophetic dreams, hallucination!Edward, and there’s a weird inconsistency as to who is blocked by her and who isn’t. I think her gift is self-preservation, and the shield is one of its manifestations. Anyway, onto discrediting Eleazar. (I’ll be pretty closely paraphrasing what happens in chapter 31 of Breaking Dawn, but since the interaction goes on for several pages I’m not going to clutter this post by pasting all of it.) To his credit, he does notice Bella right away, and he identifies her as a shield based on the fact that he gets this sense of nothingness from her. This is all he can do, however, and I can’t stress that enough. He assumes that she can block Edward, but he’s shocked to learn that she can block Aro. He’s just as surprised that she can block Jane and Alec. He has to interview her to deduce exactly what her gift does, which again has nothing to do with his gift. Anyone could ask questions, in fact Aro found all this out two books ago, without the help of Eleazar. Eleazar then starts musing aloud about who-would-win in a Renata vs. Bella showdown (more on that later), which is as tactless as it is revealing. The guy genuinely doesn’t know, and it’s because he doesn’t understand their gifts well enough. Eleazar’s power means he can tell Bella that she has a gift, and he knows roughly what it is. He muses that usually he can’t even tell that much, which again is quite damning. He can’t tell her exactly what she does without a game of 20 questions first. She gives him more information than he gives her, which he then regurgitates back to her with slightly different wording, and everybody claps. «My god, Eleazar, you’ve done it again!» (No, really, this is pretty much what happens. Eleazar brought no new information to the table, yet he blew Bella and Edward’s minds.) It’s all fun and games to do this for Bella and Edward, as they for various reasons genuinely didn’t realize she had a gift. For Aro, who figured this one out on his own, one begins to wonder what Eleazar was bringing to the table.

Carlisle Bonus bullet point! I’ll make this one brief. I believe Carlisle in canon has a gift he’s unaware of (Yes, I have a post planned, but it will get ugly long so god knows when it’ll come), which makes him another one of Eleazar’s gift detection fails. In short, I think he’s extremely charismatic, able to win over anybody. To list a few examples - he has an extremely diverse set of friends who in Breaking Dawn are willing to lay down their lives for him, Jacob muses how his instinctive hostility around vampires doesn’t apply to Carlisle, and vampires are terrifying to humans (don’t be fooled by the movies, people) yet Carlisle is able to work as a successful doctor, meaning his patients don’t mind being exposed to a killing machine even when they’re at their most vulnerable. He’s able to keep his family of sociopaths in line. There’s not a single person in the Twilight ‘verse that dislikes him. (Billy and Caius excepted, but Billy has no direct exposure to him until late Eclipse, and Caius is responding to a coven that’s potentially threatening the Volturi) People are free to disagree with me on this one, but if I’m right (and I have a lot of book quotes as well as a theory on what gifts even are to back me up on this one. I’m right, damnit!) then Carlisle is another gifted vampire Eleazar failed to detect.

So. We’ve established that Eleazar’s gift will yield false negatives, and that he can’t tell you much about the gifts he does detect.

I think his power is to point out the obvious.

Which means that Aro’s eyelid was twitching slightly, but alright, Eleazar could still be useful.

Unfortunately, there is the matter of weighing up your pros with your cons.

The Volturi are, at the end of the day, a group of people who live in a commune together. Coven, guard, evil minions, call them what we like but they’re exposed to each other and some sense of agreeability is required. And Chelsea is not omnipotent.

More, I imagine that in a coven as large and old as the Volturi, they’ve developed a culture of their own. This means that newcomers will need social awareness and a willingness to fit in.

Eleazar, from what we see of him in Breaking Dawn, appears to lack both.

It’s in the way he speaks of the people he used to work with. It’s utterly impersonal. He tells us how their gifts work, no more and no less. When he speaks of Aro, he speaks only of actions Aro took and orders he gave, nothing about the man’s personality. Now, considering the context, he was speaking in a context where Jane’s thoughts and feelings were far from relevant, but it’s still notable.

Also notable is the fact that he has no issue contemplating a Renata vs. Bella scenario, even though this would mean the deaths of two people he worked with for years. Perhaps it’s a thought exercise, but it’s not a thought exercise I would have gotten into when it was days away from becoming reality. If Renata can’t deflect Bella’s power, she and Aro die.

I’ll put it this way - I don’t think he’d do a «who would win» like this involving Carmen.

At no point in the book does Eleazar show any concern for the eventuality that members of a guard he used to be a part of may get killed.

It seems he didn’t form personal relationships with the rest of the guard. I suspect he considered himself... if not quite above them, then still someone who could evaluate them. Their gifts is what he looked at in them. I also think it’s likely he asked Aro not to use Chelsea on him, which in turn would have made him stick out even more as there’s nothing making him and Volturi Guard Member X just click in the way I imagine Chelsea can be very helpful with. Which in turn means that the other guard members will feel close to one another in a way they’re not close to Eleazar.

Also… he’s just a douche. I’m sorry, but I don’t make the rules and the whole guy radiates douche. I can’t even point to a specific quote in the book, it’s just is.

I don’t think this guy never really fit into the Volturi guard, and his gift wasn’t useful enough to keep him. Aro was thrilled to have him at first, but as time went on and Eleazar proved to just not be all that, he eventually realized he had to get rid of him.

Because as others have pointed out before me, the Carmen excuse makes no sense. There would be no problem in one more vampire in the castle, yet Aro wouldn’t let her in and Eleazar had to choose.

It was a solution that sent Eleazar on his way with his ego intact, and no hard feelings towards the Volturi. More, Aro is on record doing this with it’s-not-you thing with at least one other vampire. Laurent wanted to join the Volturi, had nothing to bring to the table, and Aro used past association with the Romanians as an excuse for why Laurent couldn’t join rather than tell him to his face that he was useless. With Marcus, Aro, and Chelsea around, the Romanian connection isn’t a problem, meaning Aro was bullshitting.

TL;DR: Aro is the kind of person who’d lie and say his grandma died if he doesn’t want to go to your party, and Eleazar is the kind of person who’d say «My condolences».

[antiloreolympus]

May I ask why you dislike LO? I enjoy reading the series, and there are faults in the writing (as no series is perfect) and I have my own gripes with it, but overall I just really like the myth of Hades and Persephone.

I'll admit there were things that made me uncomfortable when I first started reading it (and they still kinda do) like Persephone being a teenager while Hades is, what - 40-60ish? The timeline (of the story taking place over the course of only a few weeks, when a Lot of stuff is going on), Hera the goddess of marriage having an affair, Demeter being an overbearing mother who financially takes advantage of her daughter, some of the flashbacks (like specifically the one where a much younger Kore meets a drunken Hades and falls on top of him while naked? And its played off as a meet cute)

But thats besides the point - I'm curious as to why you don't like LO and/or the creator of it I guess?

Also your posts are showing up in the lore Olympus tag - (and I know there's probably a seperate "anti-lo" tag but I also wouldn't be surprised if angry anons came into your inbox for spamming the tag of the webcomic they like with criticism, because apparently thats what people do on this hellsite instead of just blocking). And, of course your entitled to critique the series, but I'm sure some people are not going to be happy about that. (I say this as a person who enjoys critiquing media, like netflix's spop reboot, and have had angry anons come at me before, so stay safe out there).

Also, sorry this is so long.

Heyo! And I understand

I'll take this time to get into why I don't like each character as it's one of the reasons I don't like LO as a whole:

(Some I removed because there isn't much to say about them)

Main Characters:

• Hades - Man in his Late 30s to Early 40s actively pursuing a 'teenaged girl'.... He acknowledged that this was wrong at yet pursues her anyway? Plus, he's perfectly fine with slave labor and using his power/status to get his way. His character is also inconsistent when it comes to Minthe because one minute he can stand up for himself and the next he's terrified?

• Persephone - An overly sexualized teen who acts like a child. She also killed people but it was because of a 'feeling'. She still committed murder and yet it's framed as a "well, it's not her fault" but I'm also supposed to believe this 19-20 yr old would make a great and feared queen.

• Hera - Not only does she treat the lower class like garbage but she's also a hypocrite (the affair). Plus, she just randomly goes back on her word about Hades being a creep for no reason.

• Eros - Put a girl in some random dude's car and gave her "apology donuts" as a sorry gift 😒

Antagonists:

• Minthe - She was coded with bpd which wouldn't be a bad thing if she wasn't so demonized by the story.

• Apollo - How come this dude is one of the most prevalent people in the story and we don't get a strong motive for him until season 2? Even then, we barely know anything else about him. I get the whole "well, he did this so I don't want a backstory for him" but at least give him a solid motive. One that comes from him directly.

• Thetis - One of the sweetest people gets turned into a homewrecker for no reason. Even then, people gloss over her being verbally manipulative to Minthe.

• Leto - Also verbally manipulative to her daughter. How comes RS decided to demonize the goddess of motherhood, too? There's really no justifiable reason for that.

Others: 

• Hecate  - Also switched up about Hades and Persephone. Let's not forget her hitting Hades 3 times and him having to tell her to stop.

• Artemis - I get letting her brother in the house but Eros and Hermes? That's just inconsistency right there.

• Demeter - Got demonized for the 5973th time 😔🤚

• Aphrodite - Also rude to the lower class but it makes more sense as she's Aphrodite. Still rude af though.

• Hermes - Man got mad at Thanatos for "messing with his money" as if he didn't cover the whole thing up with Demeter      

• Hestia + Athena - Just hypocrites and the fact that they're supposed to be (aro)ace goddesses.

• Ares - He and Persephone also made out when she was 18 and I assume he was way, way older. Plus, him simping for Persephone in front of Aphrodite was an odd move.

• Hephaestus - This issue has more to do with RS's writing because how the hell did he hack Apollo's phone from Persephone's sim card alone and why is that just never explained?

• Daphne - Excusing nepotism as if Thanatos doesn't work in the same place as Persephone

Now, onto the story:

Its pacing is slow but also extremely fast for what it is. Everything (excluding flashbacks) has taken place over the course of 2-3 weeks. Persephone literally gets SA'd the day after the party. But then you have to think about how Persephone and Hades are probably going to get married like a month after their second meeting. We haven't even gotten to the trial yet and it feels like we never will with how slow everything is. LO honestly isn't made to be like a regular webtoon, it's made to be binged like a Netflix show or something. That would be fine but I can tell from interviews that it wasn't RS's intentions.

Also, RS herself? Yeah, don't really vibe with what she says a good portion of the time

I'll show some examples:

Not all of them are bad, just very weird

Besides the wonky art, she does have potential but LO doesn't really show her skill. Hopefully, she does learn from this comic though.

About the hate, I honestly don't care that much anymore as it really doesn't change much. I respond but only because I find it funny/entertaining when someone tries to tells me what to do with my own freetime.

[noahstayed]

Sorry if you've already answered these questions but I still want to ask them so...

1) Are you going to make another book after Earthshine?

(If the answer is yes; (and you don't have to answer this one,) Are you going to do a time skip or will you go the 'the condom broke'?)

2) Will Edward have a mate (If yes; will you create an OC or simply pluck a character from the twilight saga archives are revamp them?)

3) If you do make a version of Breaking Dawn, will it have the same premise (Ie. Wedding, Honeymoon, (I typed hUMANmoon and then corrected it, don't know why my fingers went there.) surprise pregnancy (or not? Because Carlisle is a DOCTOR) turning, then the Volturi going all "We must kill the child!"?)

4) With regards to question three, in the (honestly, and sadly, unlikely) ( completely forgot what word I was going to type, and It as too much trouble to type that so I'm just going to use another word that won't flow as well) situation (I'm so unhappy with this word, my stomach is turning something fierce, man.) that you DO go the standard "with the other book as a very, very, loose guideline) Would you go the route of OYH or would make an entirely new plot?

Also, if you do go with the same general outline, (which is unlikely since Irina isn't with Laurant in newmoon but with Charlie, so there's no bitter feelings and she won't immediately go to the kings before she's heard Carlisle's explanation.) How would you make that work?

5) I know you said that if you do make a fourth book you would just use the dhampire from OYH, Elisha, does that still reign true? Or are you planning to make a new character entirely?

6) If you do make a fourth, and go the OYH route, would you still make Elisha Emse's mate, like in OYH? Or will you go with Garette?

7) Also, since you have previously made an ff about Garette and Bella having a brother-sister type friendship would we see that and get to see Garette claim her as his sister and charlie as his father, and everyone goes along with it? (Honestly, I REALLY want this to happen, especially since I've spent the last hour scrolling through your tumbler and stumbled upon the 'I'm older than my father' post.)

8) Really, all these questions border on the main one of "is there going to be a breaking dawn/part 4-5 (depending) in your rewrite?" but if you do, would Carlisle buy Isle Bella as a honeymoon present of would that be in the oneshots book (that you'll hopefully be writing after this is over) as like a "Have fifteenth anniversary" thing?

9) Are you going to write a book full of random one-shots you couldn't fit into your story? I REALLY HOPE SO.

enthusiastically hope so. :) (that's really a tense smile with eyes SHINING with hope. Just informing you that you'll be crushing my heart. Brutally. With a stake. No pressure :) )

10) If you don't write the fourth book will we get an epilogue with the wedding five years later? Like, with Bella being SUPER nervous?

And finally, 11) (I really want a war to showcase Bella's awesome vampire powers (because you've stated (in a previous Tumblr post) that you'd give Bella her BAMF!Bella OYH powers)) So if there's a part four, even though the Volturi is "lawful" and like, has a brain, in your series, can they like have a brain fart where they go. "He's making an army," Or just straight up CANNON!Aro with his need for power be like "It's an immortal child, and it needs to be destroyed." But really be thinking, "They're growing too large, already their numbers rival our own, they must be put down! This is the perfect time!" Like the (cowardly) power-hungry and villainess we all know and love. Kinda.

I have other questions but those can really wait lol.

I basically want breaking dawn and the third (Do you count Charlie's book as part of Bella's story or as a stand-alone since you weren't really progressing the plot very much (also a very good way to have a time skip in your main)?) isn't even done yet.

I don't know if you can tell, but I've been reading this series for three days straight (new fan!) and just started your OYH series and I'm just filled with a desire right now. Like, I typically hate sex scenes in a twilight book (but that's because I was a child when these movies came out (saw them all in theatre!) and still was when I read the books, so Bella is SACRED lol, and It just makes me uncomfortable to imagine her in those positions (it's like a trauma okay?) but I really enjoyed your stories (even if I basically glossed over your sex scenes and read through them quickly) and could actually sit through your sex scenes (mostly, because it wasn't INTENSE! Like, a lot of rewrites turn breaking dawn into literal Porn and sully the books for me because they basically remove a lot of plot to make room for Bella's sudden appetite, and while, yes, you gave her an appetite and... I am just really enjoying your stories and how you write so Thank You.

Okay, I've let you know your appreciated and put out my question into the tumblr universe so now I just have to wait for you to see this and maybe respond.

I hate waiting.

I haven't gotten an ask in a while and AJKHFJKHD Listen!! THE FACE I MADE AT HOW LONG THIS IS??? Superb!! I'm honored you've taken the time to write this all out so I'm gonna try to answer you as best as I can!!

Right now I'm 100% sure that there will be a couple of Novellas/Novelettes directly after Earthshine. The Renee Story, the Charlie Story, and the Roommate Story which all will get maybe 40k and mini plots that are far more focused than Charlie's first story. Charlie's new story will be focused on his relationship with Carlisle too, so that should be fun!

Edward having a Mate is still up in the air at the moment. Since he is still very young, I don't see the need to really give him someone so quick when other characters have waited WAAAY longer. As for who it might be, that's also still up in the air in case I want to do a short story with him that's a part of a series of Novellas after the main books

If I do make a BD rewrite IT WILL have wedding/honeymoon/surprise pregnancy then it will PRETTY MUCH go off the rails from there because the Pregnancy will be VASTLY different. Carlisle is a Doctor and Bella isn't an idiot. They won't be in Washington either.

Again. The first half will be loosely based on the book and then just go completely off the rails because, Like you said, the Volturi have brains and I LOATHE an 'idiot' plot where people are required to suddenly become stupid for the story to work. As for the OYH route, I will be borrowing a couple elements from OYH but the conflict will be very different.

Elisha is baby and there's no way I could make another Dhampir at this point. Not with how much I love him.

The aging process will work differently in this fic for Dhampirs, so this question is irrelevant since Elisha will be a child for the entire fourth book. As for when he's older, Its still up in the air for this series. He deserves to be baby and I very much dislike the trope of age faster = mentally develop faster because that's BS.

We'll see, I love Bella and Garrett, but there's A LOT I'll have to cram into the last book so we'll just see.

As much as I'd love to answer this, I'm covering the honeymoon in the fourth book so you'll see what happens in there ; )

I HAVE PLANS for random one shots. I REALLY DO. I just has so little time to work on the main story so I might write some when Earthshine is done! I have a name for the one-shot collection already too and some Ideas!

I very much plan to write the fourth book you'll be fine. Bella will not be nervous, she'll be WAY more anxious about it going right. Mostly her nerves will be from anticipation and excitement because she'll be 23 and be very secure in her forever with Carlisle.

There will be a fight in book four that will not have the Volturi turning stupid. Don't worry about how.

Charlies little story is a Novella so I don't count it as a book.... GOD hearing you plowed through the series in so short a time is MIND boggling. I get people telling me this occasionally and I NEVER stop being amazed by it!

As for the sex scenes, yeah, I didn't want this to be erotic literature. I frequently scream that 'THIS ISN'T A SMUT BOOK' because them having sex is just a normal healthy thing that happens in relationships and wanted to show that. The sex scenes I write tend to be glossed over anyways so I'm glad it was readable for you. I get feeling frustrated and wanting more plot, but there are plenty of people who prefer the very explicit smut.

If sex scenes aren't your cup of tea, that's fine. I don't view Bella as pure and innocent though. It teeters dangerously on the Madonna/Whore dichotomy to act like she is. I get wanting to preserve the innocence of your childhood through her. That's not me though. Bella/Carlisle's relationship is highly sexual in nature within SoG and that's ALRIGHT too!

Thanks for the super long ask!!! it was great to read and fun to respond to!

[storytellerofuntoldlegends]

words fall flat (like cymbals crashing)

A/N: apparently the only fic I have motivation to write anymore is for the Mandalorian. anyway, have this INCREDIBLY self-indulgent fic with aroace din djarin, aro cara dune, and a heaping helping of hurt/comfort and mandalorian culture. enjoy! (title is from Constellations by The Oh Hellos)

Summary: Cara checks up on Din after the events on Moff Gideon's Imperial cruiser. Problem is, neither are them are very good at talking about emotions- but Cara figures out how to comfort Din in their own way.

Warnings: emotional hurt/comfort, awkward conversations, sort-of coming out, platonic cuddling, hugs, implied crying, bittersweet/hopeful ending

-

Din was distant after the jedi- Luke kriffing Skywalker- had taken Grogu and then their little haphazardly put together rescue crew got back on Fett’s ship. Not that Din was all that reachable of a person to begin with, Cara noted. But now he was even more withdrawn, and he seemed almost fragile despite all the armor he wore. Cara was sure she’d never forget watching the way Din’s hands trembled as he put his helmet back on- kriff, he had shown his face. Cara didn’t actually see his face, just the back of a surprisingly curly head of hair (out of everything, she never pictured her stoic friend with curly hair). So on top of losing his kid and unwittingly earning the right to Mandalore’s throne, he had broken his code as well. Surely he was not as put together as his gruff, standoffish behavior implied.

Hence why Cara was more or less lurking in the shadows near where Din was sulking in the storage unit aboard the Slave I. Fett had advised to “let him alone, Marshal,” in that rough and indifferent-but-really-he-was-fooling-nobody tone of his. But Cara felt that the last thing that Din needed was more space from people he cared about, so she stepped out of the shadows and closer to where Din was sitting on top of a storage container. At first glance, she thought he was cleaning his weapons, but as she came closer she noticed he was fiddling with a small silver ball- the same one that Grogu had been so attached to. Then, strangely enough, he pressed the ball to his helmet, just above its visor and where his forehead would be beneath it. Cara suddenly felt like she was intruding, and from the way Din jolted and scrambled to put the ball in a pouch at his side, she definitely felt like an intruder.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-” she started, but was cut off with a wave of Din’s hand.

“It’s fine. I’m- I’m glad it was you,” Din replied, sounding uncharacteristically shy. Cara smiled softly, walking closer and taking a seat next to him on the storage container.

“I just wanted to check in on you, after… everything,” Cara finished lamely. Din huffed out a breath that could have been a laugh, a sigh, a sob, or some mix of the three.

“Thank you. I- I’m- he’ll be safe. With the jedi,” Din said, sounding like he was more trying to convince himself than Cara. A chuckle escaped Cara’s lips, despite everything.

“Trust me, there is nowhere safer than with Luke Skywalker for Grogu. I never knew him personally, but the guy’s a rebel hero. It was his shot that destroyed the first Death Star, and he had a hand in overthrowing the Emperor and destroying the second Death Star. Plus I think his sister has a seat in the New Republic Senate now. The point is that he’s powerful, and that he has powerful allies. Grogu will be okay,” Cara assured him. Din let out another breath, and this time it was definitely a sigh.

“Thank you. That… that helps,” Din replied, sounding much more at ease than when Cara had first checked in on him.

“I’m glad,” Cara said, affectionately clapping him on his knee- and startled a bit when Din jumped at the touch.

“Sorry-”

“Don’t be, I guess I forgot that Mandalorians aren’t exactly touchy-feely people,” she interrupted him, giving him a soothing smile.

“And I am certainly no exception,” Din muttered under his breath, but as Cara was sitting so close to him, she heard it anyhow.

“What do you mean?” Cara asked, brow furrowed in confusion. Din swallowed nervously and seemed to shrink in on himself a bit, which would have been comical if every fiber of his being didn’t seem to be etched with embarrassment.

“I’ve… never really desired any sort of closeness. As teenagers, my fellow foundlings seemed to be interested in finding someone to be close with, but those sorts of desires never really occurred to me,” Din explained awkwardly.

“What sort of desires?” Cara asked with a raised eyebrow, somewhat understanding what he was getting at, but she wanted to be absolutely sure. Din fidgeted for a moment or two before making an irritated sound.

“I’ve never wanted any sort of intimacy or romance. Not even with Omera. Sure, the idea of having someone to come home to and start a family with sounds nice, but…” Din trailed off, sounding just as lost as when he had taken off his helmet to say goodbye to Grogu.

“But in reality it feels wrong,” Cara finished, understanding where he was coming from, at least a little bit. Sure, there were… ahem, other desires that were appealing to her, but romance? Definitely not her thing. Din’s head shot up at Cara’s words, struggling to form words of his own for a moment or two.

“You- yeah, that’s it,” he said, dumbfounded.

“I get how you feel- at least on the romance part. Although, uh, intimacy, as you put it... that I’m more down with. And I’m definitely more of a casually affectionate person than you,” Cara replied, cringing internally at her choice of words. This wasn’t something she really talked about a lot, and it felt like everything was coming out all jagged and lopsided. But fortunately, Din seemed just as out of his comfort zone as she was, and therefore didn’t mind.

“I mean, I don’t mind affection. It just surprises me, is all,” Din said sheepishly. Cara slowly reached out, gently grasping Din’s hand when he didn’t move to stop her. She gently rubbed her thumb in soothing circles on the back of Din’s hand, and he all but melted at the touch. Kriff, if this is how he reacted to some hand-holding, he’d probably implode if she ever tried to hug him.

“When’s the last time you’ve gotten a hug?” Cara blurted, startling Din out of his calm reverie.

“I… I mean, I would hug Grogu sometimes, but his arms are a little small to really hug back. He could always return a kov'nyn just fine though,” Din said fondly.

“Cove-what?” Cara asked, head tilted to the side in confusion.

“Kov’nyn. Sometimes it’s called a keldabe kiss. I had learned it from my Buir- the Mandalorian who found me and took me in. It can be a violent action, but I’ve mostly known it as an affectionate one. It… might be easier to show than to explain,” Din replied, seeming nervous again.

“Then go ahead and show me. If you want,” she said, hurriedly assuring him that she didn’t want to force him into anything he wasn’t comfortable with. Din took a deep breath, then reached out with his free hand and rested it on the nape of her neck, fingers gently tangling in her hair. He carefully pulled her forward until her forehead was resting against his. The moment her skin touched the cool beskar of his helmet, it felt like something had snapped into place- and dimly she realized this had been the same thing Din had done with Grogu’s silver ball.

“This is a keldabe kiss. It’s a form of greeting between Mandalorians and their loved ones,” Din said, shifting as if he was going to move away, but Cara grabbed his forearm with her free hand and halted his movements. Din let out a soft, almost broken sound, and Cara moved on pure instinct. She shifted closer and threw both arms around Din’s shoulders, now practically in his lap and forehead still learning against his helmet. Din responded in kind, one hand still firmly buried in the hair at the base of her neck, while his other arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her entirely in his lap. He let out a shaky sigh that could have been a shallow sob, but Cara didn’t comment on it. If Din needed to be held as he cried, Cara was more than willing to do so for him.

-

The Marshal and the newfound Mand’alor had been absent from the cockpit for far too long, in Fett’s opinion. So he entrusted the controls to Fennec, and made his way to the storage unit that the Mand’alor had been hiding away in. The sight that greeted him, however, was one that he never would have predicted. The Mand’alor, looking incredibly vulnerable for a man in pure beskar armor, had the Marshal in his lap, holding her close as he leaned his helmet against her forehead in a keldabe kiss. Fett smiled in spite of himself. Whatever happened, whether Princess ended up with the Darksaber or not, Fett was glad that the current Mand’alor had someone he could rely on.

-

post-fic notes: this whole fic was an excuse to write aroace din, keldabe kisses, and platonic cuddling between a man and a woman. the aro cara just sorta snuck up on me, as well as boba fett being a caring and concerned pal. oh also i personally hc fett as being the type of person to not call people by their first name unless he has a strong bond with them (you can read his relationship with fennec here however you'd like, although i like them as just buddies). i also hc his reaction to din getting the darksaber as "oh you're the king now, cool"

anyway thanks for reading, also pls reblog cause validation is my lifeblood

[lizardrosen]

@eirenical also asked "..and omg is it terrible to want to know about literally all your Les Mis, Narnia, and Star Wars WiPs?? Because I kind of want to know about all of them. XD" on my wip post

Les Mis

SINGING THE SONG OF ANGRY MEN is just my catch-all les mis doc from before I transferred everything from Word to Scrivener, meaning everything in there is before reading the book. I was probably really unfair to Cosette because i thought of her as competition for Eponine's happiness. Anyway, have a e/R fic i wrote based purely on dash osmosis, and complete with misspellings!

resurrection? was just a really strong image i had to write out and was always curious what the larger story would be. Basically Grantaire is smiling soppily at Enjolras and then thinks "That was before they died" and is sad and thoughtful about The Ideal.

Gray Is Okay - turns out I've already posted this one on tumblr! Grantaire and Enjolras talk about pronouns and convictions and uncertainty!

brietbart online - short fic where Enjolras gets himself worked up over right wing newspapers because “It’s good to know how the enemy thinks” and Grantaire helps him calm down. (Pretty sure this one was inspired by someone being Very Extremely Wrong about one of my favorite episodes of star trek, and then I noticed the source) This wasn't very good writing and it wasn't really going anywhere, so I'm never going to post it.

“Please Come Inside” - Enjolras is greyromantic and mostly he just loves all his friends, but he has a queerplatonic relationship with Courfeyrac which slowly develops into (possibly?) romantic attraction, and he's very confused and upset by this internal change and has to Process.

from my vague notes:

at some point they end up at a chinese restaurant because courfeyrac calls it "the ultimate comfort food" enjolras always makes a token protest when they go, but he secretly loves it just as much or more because salty foods are his weakness "we don't need to change anything we're doing," courfeyrac says as he stabs at an egg roll with a single chopstick, "or we can. Uh, your choice. But no matter what I won't be ashamed of you, and i'll trust that you aren't ashamed of me." (courfeyrac is not aro-spec, but he did introduce enjolras to the term) and they talk about their feelings and enjolras's main fear, besides that he's not aromantic at all, is that he'll be forcing courfeyrac into the closet, because even if whatever-he's-feeling is close to what someone else might call romantic, he still Can Not bear to have himself called a boyfriend courfeyrac mostly just wants enjolras to be comfortable, and he's willing to take whatever form their relationship eventually comes

Friendlier Skies - this one's my les mis space au, with a bunch of shorter stories that all fit into the same solar system. One of my favorite elements is that the Gorbeau Building has been remixed into a ship that accepts literally anyone as passengers with no questions asked.

And the Narnia and Star Wars are going under a cut!

Narnia

Gallivanters is an AU where instead of being from Narnia, Caspian is just a Spanish transfer student at the boarding school where Edmund and Peter are, and they have a bunch of nerdy adventures. I'm pretty sure Caspian/Peter was endgame in my head, but i never got that far.

once a king or queen was just my catch-all Narnia doc. Lots of Edmund, lots of Susan, and one ficlet where Susan Pevensie and Carrie White talk about the family they've lost and the girls they don't need to be anymore. I swear I remember writing a lot of Jill and Eustace too, but it must have gotten lost when transferring computers.

Theory of Narnia - technically not a WIP anymore, but I used the plot of Narnia to write an essay explaining different Theory of Knowledge concepts for extra credit in high school. It had footnotes and everything!

To Fill Different Lives was a passion project for several years! It was supposed to be for a fic exchange in 2010 but it got too big for me and I had to drop out. It's Jadis after the Last Battle, recounting her history to no one because there's no one left. Many things about it make me cringe looking back at it, but I still looove this opening:

I have lived for a long time, long enough to fill several different lives. Looking back, I begin to realize just how similar all of these lives have been. Each time, I had power, but needed more. Each time, I chose a color and assumed it as a part of my identity. And each time, there was a boy.

Star Wars

There Will Be Light - oops, I already posted this one on tumblr too! Luke has bad dreams after Obi-Wan is killed, and Han comforts him. Not meant to be shippy but it definitely could be!

Qui-Gon lives (and somehow everything is worse??) - never got past the "vague chatting" stage, but our conversation started with this

lizardrosen: you know how qui-gon tells padme something like "i can only defend you, i can't fight a war for you" ? and then the jedi order DOES fight a war for the republic eirenical: YES. lizardrosen: how *pissed* would he have been if he'd lived to find out about kamino and the clones and all of that eirenical: *nodnodnod* I think about that a lot, actually. About how Qui-Gon would have dealt with the war. Somehow, I think it would have either broken him completely... or broken his compassion for others. AND I'M NOT SURE WHICH WOULD BE WORSE.

and then we talked about how qui-gon and obi-wan and anakin are a really solid trio for a long time, so it takes a long time to break qui-gon's compassion, but it happens hard, and "obi-wan and anakin are never quite able to be the dynamic duo; they'll always be three minus one but they try, they try so HARD"

Obi-Wan after Revenge of the Sith is just what it says on the tin. He's sad and alone and trying to connect to Qui-Gon, but not quite ready for him even when he does finally show up. This one also has a really good opening paragraph!

Everyone Obi-Wan loves is taller than him. Everyone he has loved? Used to love? No, he loves them still, even those gone from the world, or out of his grasp. He would have grown to love Luke and Leia too, tiny as they are, if given half the chance, which is exactly why he cannot allow himself to take that chance.

[greatneedtotakeanap]

i binge read

the finale, episode 15 - the tower of nero

!!!SPOILER ALERT FOR THE TOWER OF NERO!!! this post under the cut will be completely riddled with spoilers, as it is a personal account of my views on the book as a whole. 

it will be spoiled!!

(obviously.)

I’m almost too heartsick to write this omg. It’s been such a long, heartwarming journey, and it came to such an electrifying ending.

I’m quite proud of Apollo. I knew I was going to be, but the way he realized it, the way he realized everything... how Nero’s abuse mirrored Zeus’ and affected him just the same, how much of an asshole he’d been because of it. He made the conscious choice to change, and he decided he could love. He was capable of true love, he was capable of moving forward and being better. And he was. I was just,,, I was so proud of him. Seeing him mature was a really eye-opening experience, especially in this book, when he talked so much about the small complexities of Nero’s abuse, how every move was calculated and how it affected Meg. We’d seen wisps of discussions of abuse before, mostly in the lightning thief (smelly gabe) but we’ve never before gone into the complexities of emotional abuse. The way it was described was fantastically clear, in a way that undoubtedly painted Nero as the true villain, but also gave us the chance to see him try and convince his children that he was good. Apollo breaking down his every move was good for the audience to distinguish the meaning behind his words. Fantastically portrayed. The way it helped him realize his own abuse, too, was good.

And Meg. My sweet darling Meg. What an absolute baddie, I swear. She made the same decision - she went back to Nero to fight him, to test her own strength and power of will. Her decision to drop her rings and refuse to dual wield anymore was strange to me at the very beginning, but I understood it later. It was her refusing to use the weapons he forced her to use, to even defend herself against him. It was her turning her back on the methods he’d armed her with and deciding to take her own path. “The Beast is dead” is the rawest f-ing line in this entire novel, the Beast representing Nero’s psychological abuse. “I killed him” - she liberated herself by believing she was better. I’m so insanely proud of that girl, too. She’s come a long way as well.

Okay. After that analysis, let me just say:

THE GAYS WON.

I spent this entire book terrified that Will Solace was doomed. There was a line in the prophecy about the terrible ending of ‘Apollo’s flesh and blood’, and I figured that meant his offspring - his son, rather than his human form. I kept muttering to myself ‘Will’s gonna die Will’s gonna die and it’s gonna BREAK Nico’. I was just so worried. I didn’t think anyone, even William Andrew Solace, could survive Rick Riordan’s patented Blond Boy Curse.

But he was fine in the end! As fine as you can be. Solangelo boyfriends lived to fight another day. And their development as a couple was also quite nice. I loved their dynamic. We only saw a little of it in the hidden oracle. Though it was great there too, we were able to go more in depth and explore how they truly function. Nico’s dry sense of humor combined with his whole lord-of-the-darkness aesthetic x Will’s genuine compassion and joking nature combined with his glow-in-the-dark-ness was fantastic to see.

Speaking of Solangelo - they not only got stronger as a couple, but as individual people as well. To be completely honest, we really haven’t seen much in the way of Will Solace. He healed, he was nice, yeah, sure, but what about him? What was his personality like outside from other people? In this book we find out. He’s kind, compassionate, easily flustered, overly protective. He craves parental approval, hence him repeatedly referring to Apollo as ‘dad’ and being so watchful over him. He gets embarrassed when asked to glow on command and upset when people mistake him for a lamp. He’s impulsive and a little hypocritical - he follows his instincts (being led off into the tunnels by a random voice) but gets very worried when Nico pulls the same thing. He’s a fantastic character, and his contrasts to Nico and the rest of the ton crew were great.

Nico - he seriously was the hero of this book. Or at least the secondary hero. He saved them all so many times over - he took everyone through shadow travel away from the bulls, he met the troglodytes, saw an opportunity, prepared an offering to said troglodytes because he saw an opportunity, became an underground ambassador, later saved Apollo’s life again by turning a germanus into a skeleton. He led this quest, and you can pry that from my cold dead hands. And that one paragraph about him enduring all this shit?? MASTERFUL. He’s had such a boatload of trauma and still he stands. One of my very favorite consistent Nico traits is this: no matter where he is or what he’s doing or how he feels, he ALWAYS takes the chance to talk with those who feel alone, because he knows what it’s like to be truly fighting one’s battles alone and he’d never wish that on anyone. It’s consistent, too: him being the only one to talk to Hestia at the hearth in Camp Half Blood, him talking to and befriending Bob the Titan, him talking to the troglodytes. And I have really gotten to see his progression firsthand, sped up - I read the Titan’s Curse in my binge read series maybe two weeks ago, back when he was this hyperactive ten-year-old with a Mythomagic obsession and now he’s this prince of darkness saving people with an adorable glowstick boyfriend and man. I love this kid. If he wasn’t my favorite character in this universe, he is now.

Also, even though with this book Rick has closed the gateway to this world (sad), the end alluded to a possible journey through Tartarus again to look for what’s been calling him, but this time he’ll have Will. Rachel Dare even whispered a prophecy at the end, probably pointing to it (but we’ll never know for sure). Will and Nico through the depths of Tartarus - now that’s a series I’d want to read for sure. It’s really too bad we’ll never get to see it in canon. Sigh.

SPEAKING OF CANON.

Another way the gays have won: Piper Mclean.

She has a canon girlfriend!! We really struck gold. I figured she was aro//ace when reading the Burning Maze - her whole monologue about being forced into love - but it turns out she’s just wlw!! I love this, I love this. We seriously won with this book.

Other noteworthy thoughts I had while reading below:

- The scene with Apollo defeating Python and hanging on the edge of Chaos was great. Especially when the goddess Styx came out. I was wondering how all of his broken oaths would serve him and come back to haunt him. It was quite well portrayed. A serious rip to the Arrow of Dodona though. I always loved it,,, a lot. It made me laugh and sometimes grind my teeth in frustration, but it was always a nice presence.

- Apollo’s return to Olympus was better than anything I ever could have hoped for. I was really hoping that returning would give him a new insight, not just of being mortal, but of Zeus as well. And it did. It did! I’ve said it before but I am quite proud of him. His new perspective on the Olympians was refreshing. You can really see the change in narrative if you go back to the Hidden Oracle.

- It is always always always nice to see Sally Jackson. Woman of many talents, including novel writing, blue chocolate chip cookies, and excellent seven-layer dip. She was my favorite character at the beginning of this binge-reading frenzy (as stated in the first post). Now she is still very up there. Definitely top 5.

- Why does Estelle have Percy’s green eyes?? I thought Percy had his father’s eyes????

- Grover knew about Jason dying. If Grover was on the cross-country field trip with Percy and Annabeth, and they didn’t realize Jason was dead until they got to New Rome, then was he just sitting on Jason’s death this whole time??? Rip to Grover, he must have been seriously traumatized for THAT to have happened.

- The last two chapters were basically just Apollo making his rounds and wrapping everything up, so Percabeth isn’t just in a perpetual cross-country ride and Piper doesn’t live out her life forever in a grief-stricken taxi. I’m glad those chapters were there, though. Nice to see everybody again in their element.

Okay but you don’t understand the fear in my heart. I seriously thought Will Solace was a goner. I cried out of relief because he DIDN’T die. It just makes me love the two of them all the more.

This post has been way too long already, but I gotta add an obligatory outro - I read these books once as a little kid, and the past two weeks has been amazing getting back into them. It’s been magical and wonderful, falling in love with these characters, and I’m so sad to leave it.

[mindareadsoots]

So. Peridot.

sigh, this is gonna be a mess.

So, in case you hadn’t heard, Maya Petersen said on twitter this morning that Peridot is aro/ace according to “Word of St Paul”

My opinion, honestly, is that it’s not really evident in the show so you can headcanon Peridot however you want, and that could be the end of the post right there. Full stop.

As for Lapidot, I don’t see how this post changes anything. Lapis is also adverse to fusion, so accepting that Peridot is aro/ace doesn’t even change their dynamic all that much (although put a pin in that for later, because we’re going to have to come back to that). And anyways, Word of God can not and does not stop people from shipping things.

But much like Peridot’s character development, ending things there would be abrupt and unsatisfying, so we’re going to go deeper than that.

Asexuality and Fusion

The big elephant in the room that I want to get out of the way first is that I don’t have a problem with Peridot being aro/ace. There’s some evidence for it (and some against it, but we’ll get to that later), and overall I like it as a character beat for her. It’s a fairly rare bit of representation, so it’s nice to see.

However, I have a HUGE problem with them tying asexuality to Peridot’s disinterest in fusion.

Fusion has always been much more than an analogue for sex. If it wasn’t, then we’d be talking about how Steven and Connie are too young for fusion, and Steg is incestuous. And we don’t want to go down that road. That’s a dumb road.

Fusion can represent loving (Garnet), platonic (Smoky Quartz), or familial relationships (Steg). It can represent budding relationships (Stevonnie) or alliances of convenience (Bluebird Azerite).

Fusion is a versatile metaphor, but it’s that very versatility that works against it when connecting it to asexuality. Because now you’re basically saying that aro/ace people can’t have any meaningful relationships, and that’s clearly not the message that they want to send with Peridot. This could be cleared up if Peridot’s stance on fusion and what it means for her relationships with others was actually examined in the show, but it hasn’t been.

Word of God vs The Work Itself

So is Peridot a good representation of asexuality within the show itself?

On the whole? Maybe, but at best it’s unclear.

That’s why I can’t say whether or not Peridot discovering her asexuality is a good or satisfying character beat in the show. It’s not in the show at all! If you’re looking for representation, we can do better than this. This show has done better than this.

The only scene you can really point to where Peridot shows an aversion to fusion is in Log Date, when Garnet offers to show Peridot what fusion is like with a firsthand experience. 

This moment later got a callback in one of the children’s books talking about fusion, complete with the alien boxers she wore in that same episode.

The problem is that this scene happens very, VERY early on in Peridot’s character development. Log Date was a flashback episode to before Message Received, so Peridot still considered herself loyal to Homeworld at that point. That whole scene - indeed, that whole episode - was about Peridot experimenting and learning how to be more than just a tool for Homeworld. She didn’t have her meep morps yet. She didn’t have her metal powers yet. 

In fact, after Too Short to Ride came out, I remember seeing speculation that Peridot was afraid that she couldn’t fuse and so she broke off with Garnet out of embarrassment.

More importantly, it would have been wrong for Peridot to fuse right at that moment, regardless of her sexuality. She was still getting to know the Crystal Gems. She didn’t have an established relationship with Garnet or really anybody in the cast at that point, so seeing her fuse then would have been meaningless. The scene very clearly set up fusion as something for Peridot to explore later, once she has found somebody who she is ready to fuse with.

And shortly after that episode, Peridot would meet...

Lapis

Let’s call a spade a spade. The real reason why people are upset about Peridot being labeled ace is because of Lapidot, and I think that’s a perfectly valid reaction. It isn’t ace-phobia or erasure to say, “Word of God tried to sink my ship, and I don’t like it.”

I’m not going to go through all of the moments hinting at a romantic interest between Lapis and Peridot, but, ya know...

They’re there.

And they were clearly put there on purpose, as expressed by storyboarder Jesse Zuke back when they were working on the show. 

In truth, I’m not interested in re-litigating whether or not their relationship actually became a true romance, because it’s irrelevant. Either way, the most important relationship the two of them had was with each other. Peridot being ace doesn’t take way from that, but it does leave Lapis in an awkward spot in one specific way.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, Lapis has displayed an aversion to fusion, which could make her perfectly compatible with an aro/ace Peridot. However, there’s one very important difference. Unlike Peridot, who came into her asexuality from thoughtful introspection (or so we’ve been told) Lapis’s problem with fusion comes from a traumatic experience. She isn’t aromantic by choice, it’s a wound that’s still fresh.

So - and again, this question applies whether you ship Lapidot romantically or not - if Lapis is working through the trauma of a bad fusion experience, but the character she’s closest to doesn’t want to fuse, then where does that leave her?

This comes back to that first big problem with the tweet, which is that this shouldn’t be a problem. There is no reason why Peridot can’t have a platonic fusion with Lapis while being aro/ace, but it’s clearly not going to happen in SUF, and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen ever.

There are other candidates, of course. Lapis also has a very close and trusting friendship with Steven, she seems to be getting along well with Bismuth in the limited time we’ve seen them together, and in Why So Blue, she even made a potential new friend in fellow Lapis “Freckles” Lazuli. 

But even so, the most on screen relationship development she’s gotten has been with Peridot, and now that character development is just kind of in limbo.

In Conclusion

I don’t really have a conclusion.

I just wanted to convey that this whole situation is kind of a hot mess.

I really would like to see more aro/ace representation, and if any character in SU was going to get that label, then Peridot would be a good candidate, but this was just a bad way to get there.

It’d be one thing if we actually had an episode about Peridot exploring her asexuality. Then we could actually judge how well it plays out. Now it’s just sort of vaguely unsatisfying and it’s left a lot of people arguing about what they think it means for Peridot and the characters around her.

That’s almost certainly intentional on the part of the writers. The crew has said that they don’t want to lock down any canon ships (besides Garnet, obviously) because they don’t want to ruin headcanons. And the whole point of the episode Little Graduation was that Steven (and by extension, the audience) is not necessarily privy to every character development that happens off-screen, but you can’t say that, and then also put your thumb on the scale with tweets like this.

Honestly, I’m expecting the followup tweet any minute now of, “Don’t harass people for shipping/not shipping Peridot,” because tweeting out character details after the fact is just kicking the hornet’s nest. Maybe we’ll get a graphic novel or something where Peridot outlines what fusion means to her, but until then, let people ship what they want, and be good to each other.

[aromagni]

Change Through the Aro Renaissance (Carnival of Aros, September 2020)

I have both witnessed and participated in many changes of the aro community.  I remember being a baby aroace in 2015 and mostly lurking as I followed many aro and ace blogs.  Back then, it seemed the aro community was mostly the aroace community, more linked to ace, not yet having developed its own identity.  I remember trying to find more ways to engage in the aro community and stumbling upon aroplane, which was an aro forum before arocalypse, but I think it was inactive and I’d looked for forums during the absence between the two.  After lurking and solidifying my confidence in my identity, I’d kinda drifted away from actively participating in the community at all for a little while, so I’m not particularly aware what happened in between; I’m vaguely aware the arocalypse forums were created in 2016, but it seems in my absence from the community in 2016-2017, much of what had been there had become lost, presumably decimated by the tolls of exclusionary discourse.

In 2018, I was in college where I could be more outwardly queer, and I started seeking out community more.  On one hand, engaging with college queer organization made me want to bring more visibility to ace and aro things, especially aro….during this time, I met many alloro aces who I couldn’t relate to, which started pushing me towards centering my aro identity more.  I remember wanting aro-spec awareness week recognized at my college and in trying to do so, realized the arospecawarenessweek tumblr had become inactive, for they had not updated the date that year.  I started following more aro tumblr blogs and joined the forums and then joined an aro discord server that spring, and that was when I started to truly engage in the aro community.

It was exhilarating interacting with other aros, both on discord and then how we carried that over to tumblr.  I fondly remember the coining of arogender and subsequently developing the flag for it.  We all followed and reblogged from eachother and it made it energizing to engage in the community because we could feel confident that the effort we put forth to create things would not be wasted, because our content was shared amongst ourselves in our tiny community.  Many of us blogging starting then had not really participated in the aro community before; many of us were my age, late high school to early college student aged, treading into actively participating in community for the first time, and thus our knowledge of our history and our terminology was distorted by time and viewed by the remaining crumb trails on the internet.

This was the time when our community was reborn, reborn from the ashes of the discourse and created into something new, a more independent aro community brighter than we’d ever been before: This was the aro renaissance.  In fact, “aro renaissance” is part of the blog title we used when we made aromantic-official in May 2018.  I’d had the idea because I noticed most of the older modded aro blogs of old had become dormant, and it would be good to have some sort of group ensuring the continuation of events like Aro-spec awareness week and maintaining resources like a glossary.  At the time, we were thinking small in the context of a tumblr blog, but it was a start.

I remember around December 2018, many flags were made.  There was the blue-orange aroace flag and shortly after I made an aroace flag of my own, and then an a-spec flag, and then there were other a-spec flags too I think; we were wanting to differentiate between a-spec, an umbrella term encompassing both aro-spec and ace-spec, from aroace, a specific identity indicating being both aro and ace at the same time...though there’s still some confusion between the two in terms of flag usage still.  Shortly after, there was also an aro allo flag made, and the allosexual aro community grew as a more distinct established component of the aro community; no longer was the aro community solely an aroace community, we had become an independent aro community.

In late January 2019 I’d went to the Creating Change conference, where there was the first ever aro & ace hospitality suite and I interacted with other a-spec activists, including people from the fairly newly named TAAAP (The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project).  It was refreshing seeing the advancement of aro activism as more than just a subset of ace, and interesting to see the development of activism out in more the “real” world rather than just on my corner of the internet.  I remember then hearing how they were planning to host the first carnival of aros (inspired by the longer-running carnival of aces), and since then it has been nice having carnival of aros to foster discussion of many aro topics.

I remember that first carnival of aros coinciding with a lot of clashing between the aro and ace communities, sparked even more by the specific topic of the month relating aro and ace communities.  I think we, the aro community, were frustrated at being ignored.  The ace community had continued to grow and gain recognition and visibility, while claiming to represent us as well but in a way that was more a misrepresentation, depicting aro as a subset of ace, thus further erasing the reality of our experiences.  We were frustrated and bitter, often justifiably so; even I as an aroace was frustrated with the ace communities treatment of aros at that point, and I know many aro allos were even more upset.  I think we were also still less sure footed, with our community still establishing-itself, so as a result were more defensive and scrambling for anything we could claim as our own, often misguided by the often incomplete or misinformed scraps of posts around different words and such.  (In hindsight I think there were some inaccuracies in my first carnival of aros post that february, but it was an accurate look at what we were frustrated and upset about at the time).

I remember also that February more was done to celebrate ASAW than had been in years previous, though it was still small.  I also remember some divisiveness between the aroace and aro allo sides of the aro community, which caused an unfortunate binary which subsequently emphasized the need for terminology of aros who were neither asexual nor allosexual, thus many discussions about “non-SAM” aros, and other words for that concept.  I think that continued well into that summer.

Speaking of that summer, in June 2019 AUREA was launched!  This one wasn’t started by me, but naturally I ended up pulled into doing more aro activism stuff.  AUREA (Aromantic-spectrum Union for Recognition, Education, and Advocacy) has wonderful resources including a comprehensive glossary with links (both original and archived) to sources and some flags, and also has various research and lists of other aro-inclusive orgs, including local ones.  We also publish multiple articles a month, including a “What’s Going On” article at the start of each month covering what’s going on in the aro community, and then other articles about various topics.  AUREA is everything I’d wanted when originally making the aromantic-official blog, but is so much more than I thought to hope for.  We collaborated with other activists and made ASAW 2020 even bigger than before, and we also launched an aro census, and just so many different cool projects.  It’s so cool having a good comprehensive centralized aro resource like AUREA and just having a specifically aro activism organization focusing on aro issues specifically, not just having aro included under aro & ace groups.  I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do and what we continue to do.

I feel like in the last year since AUREA has been formed, the aro community feels a lot more solidified and stable, like we’ve finally concretely established ourselves as an independent entity to be recognized.  And even though we’re more solidified, we’re still growing and creating and innovating, there’s still this wonderful energy and motivation which we continue to grow with.  Some other things have happened this year, in April 2020 we had to kinda scramble to keep the arocalypse forums going, and now I’m a mod there too because I don’t seem to know how to not be involved in things, especially because I vehemently care about seeing them continued.  (Why is it always spring? 3 springs in a row I’ve gotten involved in big ongoing aro projects like that).  Then June 2020, TAAAP pride chats started and have continued every month, which is a really cool opportunity for people from the a-spec community, both ace and aro, to gather to discuss various topics, and also to interact with various a-spec activists.  

It’s been really fascinating watching and helping to aro community grow over the past few years, and I feel like I’ve grown with it.  Through my activism, I’ve learned a lot about what I am good at and how I can work well in a team, which has helped me gain a lot of confidence about things where in-person experiences had made me lose confidence.  It’s also kinda wild when I think about the scale of it all; the aro, and also ace, communities are really fairly small, such that it’s not hard to end up doing this activism on a national or international scale.  I never really set out to be an activist, I just wanted to get involved and cared about improving things and have lots of ideas, so I kept doing things, and now I look at what I’ve done and realize that huh this is activism, I am an activist, and probably a rather prominent aro activist at that.  It’s weird especially compared to how extremely ineffective I feel I’ve been at doing any sort of activism at my college, to then think of what I’ve managed to help accomplish on an international scale online.  I feel inspired by the changes, the growth of the aro community, and I look forward to helping it grow even more.

[feuilly-cakes]

New Moon - Review - 3*

The problem with first-person narration is that when the main character is in distress you can't have fun reading the book, because everything is coloured with that viewpoint. As a result, I was more annoyed by this than I needed to be, because of the way Bella changed and also Edward's actions. It did, however, do some cool things too, in the way of important messages and descriptions of poor mental health, and also what it's like to begin to recover from that. So this was less enjoyable than Twilight, but not less important to read. Spoilers beyond this point Bella starts off on a high note, with a new-ish job at the Newton's shop and a close relationship with Edward and Alice, who are both friendly or even besties with Charlie in Alice's case. She's living the dream, and then the birthday party happens, and it all goes downhill. Edward is acting strange and indifferent to Bella, Bella is freaking out about that because she's a smart cookie and thinks he's going to ask her to leave with him, and then suddenly she's dumped, depressed, and hallucinating Edward's voice. It's not a great time for Bella. This whole experience makes her change from a strong, funny, normal girl to a selfish, hypocritical girl with zero self esteem or self preservation. As character growth goes it's not nice but it is realistic and it needed to be that way to further the plot. Let me be clear: she is still all the Bella things of the first book, but it's hidden away behind the depression and desperation and the way she can't think rationally anymore. I want to talk about Edward now, because I now think he's trash and am firmly on #teamjacob for the first time in my life. Edward is so pitiful here that he literally dumps her on the trail to some woods like a moron and then runs away and never expects her to, I don't know, follow him? He didn't think she would be too hurt by him rejecting her either because "how could you let one word break your faith in me?" I don't know Edward, perhaps because it was you that said those words? Also that's very 'let's blame Bella for my actions' of you... but I digress. After he's back he even tells Bella he "was coming back anyway" and "it was only a matter of time." Sir, if you're going to abruptly dump your girlfriend of 6 months and not so much as check in on her, then at least have the willpower to stick to that, because if this were a normal story you'd have gotten punched in the face the minute you showed up. The only saving grace for his character in this book is when Bella uses logic on him to get him to see he has hope for his own soul after all, and he begins to really come around to changing her, so there may be hope for him after all. The Werewolves I'm not going to talk about Jacob much because nothing massive stood out to me, just know that I love him and he should've been with Bella. The way he let her know he was into her and then remained her friend without pushing unless she did something was lovely, and I truly believe that if Edward hadn't been come back it would've been a perfect sequel. I am already expecting that to change in Eclipse because of the thing that he's going to do. Anyway, I also love the pack and wish we got more time with them. They call each other "brothers" and I just wanted some found family goodness and got nothing. I also wish we had gotten more interactions between Bella and Emily, because Bella starts calling herself a "wolf girl" and hanging out with Emily but we don't see that and it's so frustrating. I need a whole book dedicated to what exactly she was doing when she was spending all of her time at La Push. The Vampires. The Volturi are finally named in the scene where Romeo and Juliet is used to foreshadow the whole book. They are also used to foreshadow the rest of the book. Later we discover that they are a family of 5, with 9 main guard members plus an unknown number that changes. This is the information I always wanted to know but never did. Aro has "clouded, milky" red eyes, and "papery" skin. It isn't clear if this is from age or something else, but it kind of creeped me out I'm not going to lie. He also goes on a little tangent about how it "pleases" him that Carlisle was successful in being a vegetarian. This could have been a lie, but remember that Edward is a mind reader and would have given some indication. I actually like him in this book, he's very friendly and as soon as he gets confirmation Bella will be changed he's content to leave them be, though is a bit wistful that they won't join him. Caius is the one who tells them they have a time limit. Onto the big differences from the film -The Romeo and Juliet scene takes place in Bella's living room instead of the English classroom. As does the second half of the Volturi explanation scene, the first half of which took place in the first book. -Bella knows something is going to happen with Edward before he takes her on the walk. -The motorbike scene in Port Angeles isn't a motorbike scene, it's a walking towards dangerous men then leaving scene. -Bella and Jacob go hiking together to find the meadow, and Bella finds it on her own after all that hiking practice. -The werewolf reveal scene where Bella smacks Paul doesn't happen. Bella and Jacob deliberately meet them somewhere, Bella doesn't smack anyone, and Paul loses it anyway. -Jacob gets a grounded Bella in further trouble by showing Charlie the motorbikes they rose together many times, not just once. Parts I actually liked, because it wasn't all bad. -Bella stands up to Edward about her truck stereo in the beginning. It was a good moment. -Bella says that the birthday incident wasn't Jasper's fault at all. -A funny moment: (when Sam Uley introduces himself less than a year after she met him on First Beach:) "There was nothing familiar about his name." (And yes, I checked and she definitely met him, age 19, never learned how to read...) - Chapter 6: Friends. The whole page where Jacob and Bella are giggling and tripping over themselves and each other had me beaming. Such a happy section. -"I wanted to be fierce and deadly. Someone no one would dare mess with. Someone who would scare Sam Uley silly. I wanted to be a vampire." -There's a part during the voting scene where Edward grabs Bella by the face and she's talking to Carlisle and hoping he will understand because it was hard to talk properly the way Edward was holding her face. The mental image I got... he was squeezing her cheeks to the point she was doing fish lips and it nearly had me in tears. -Also with the voting scene, Rosalie votes against Bella, but she has no aversion to being her sister, only a vampire. Bella then tells everyone she feels the same about them as they do as her, which hurts Rosalie, and Bella realises that could be taken the wrong way. She didn't mean it in a bad way and the fact that Rosalie got hurt shows how their relationship is already developing from the first book. I found this part interesting and lovely to see, as I used to see it as a very abrupt friendship in book 4. There was no outright offensive language in this book, however there were several instances of questionable and uncomfortable behaviour, so I'll be listing them below. -When telling her about the birthday arrangements Edward and Alice don't listen to her protests, and pretty much force her into going to a party she doesn't want. It's creepily reminiscent of the prom incident, only with much worse results. -The Port Angeles post-cinema scene. Bella endangers her own and Jessica's life just to hear a hallucination of Edward. She then decided they were "probably nice guys. Safe." and just walked away, after realising they weren't the same men who wanted to r*pe her in book 1. She then thinks that Jessica is upset because she "must have really offended her" and not because she risked her life and well-being on a whim. The whole mindset Bella is in here is obviously not a healthy one, and I think we as readers are supposed to understand that and empathise with Jessica, but I can't be sure, and either way it's really bad and reckless behaviour. -Bella describes Leah as "exotic" which is not only weird but incorrect. Leah is native american and therefore the opposite of exotic. Leah isn't an animal, she isn't unusual or from far away, she's a person living in the place she was born, and it's beyond weird to call a person 'exotic'. -Jacob is back at it with the weird hatred of his own tribe. Pre-werewolf anyway. Before I get into it, I'd like to remind you that Jacob is not a real Native American because he was written by a WHITE woman, and therefore anything he says is a reflection of Stephenie Meyer and not of an actual Native American person. Now that's out of the way, Jacob is telling Bella about Sam Uley's behaviour, and while doing so he says this: "They're all about our land, and tribe pride... it's getting ridiculous." In the context of the book only, he's talking about how Sam's pack (though he doesn't know it's a pack yet) have become "protectors" and he thinks it's weird. In the context of who the author is, however, it's a bit more complicated. This line makes it seems like Stephenie Meyer may believe having lots of pride in your tribe as a native american person is ridiculous, and it skirts a dangerous territory. Remember she is a white woman and who clearly hasn't done research into why native american people are protective of what little land they have left and what culture hasn't been taken from them through genocide. This is your reminder to seek out native american voices, and especially Quileute voices in this circumstance, and learn their opinions and views on these matters. -Quileute is described as "an unfamiliar, liquid language." I couldn't find any video or audio of this language except the alphabet, and so I very much doubt Stephenie Meyer found something 14 years ago. It's my opinion that just like with the legends, she made this up and slapped the Quileute name on it for exploitative reasons. From what research I've done no young person would've known the language fluently anyway because it was dying before 2000 and is barely being kept alive. It wasn't hard to find this out, and as someone who was set to make millions off this book she should have done her research. -Bella's attitude regarding Gianna. She's horrified by her desire to become one of the Volturi, to be surrounded by vampires, and it doesn't seem to click that Bella herself has that same desire with the Cullens. She looks down on Gianna just because the vampires she desires are human drinkers and not animal drinkers, and it's clear she doesn't think of them as the same. All of the Cullens have killed humans or drank from them, so Bella is extremely hypocritical here. -"I mean, 'Fine, I'll move out.'" Bella holds this ultimatum over Charlie's head when he doesn't want her seeing Edward. She's being selfish and childish here, not caring that he's trying to look after her. When Edward left she was ruined, and Charlie is trying to stop that from happening again. Her actions in this scene are horrible and show how little she cares for Charlie, the man who looked after her while she was broken, who is her father. This is where we truly see how selfish Bella has become over the course of the book, or perhaps since being in a relationship with Edward, as in Twilight she would have never said this to Charlie. She may be an adult but she is sure acting like a child. -Finally, the vote. After it takes place, Bella demands Alice turn her immediately, and refuses to listen to reason when Alice tells her she can't just do it right away. She then turns to Carlisle, putting him right on the spot, and demands the same. He agrees but it's not right or proper behaviour, but unfortunately it's behaviour we come to expect from Bella by the end of the book. The switch from vote to demanding she be changed was jarring, and it really rubbed me the wrong way.

[raavenb2619]

Some Thoughts on Love

This is a submission for the December 2019 Carnival of Aros, on the topic of "Love". This post has been crossposted to Wordpress.

My relationship with love is deeply influenced by my asexuality and aromanticism, resulting in a complicated, confusing, contradictory mess. It means both a lot and a little to me; I like and dislike considering my thoughts, feelings, and experiences to be love; and outside of aspec spaces I'm rarely included in conversations about love that allow me to fully express myself. Where do I even begin? 

Society often treats "love" as interchangeable with "sex/romance", and from that point of view, everything's simple: I don't feel love. However, in aspec spaces, we often see a distinction between these concepts, which adds a bit of complexity. We can talk about multiple types of love, like sexual love, romantic love, platonic love, familial love, and more, and then make a checklist of which ones we feel, right? Except, putting feelings into discrete boxes doesn't always work, and it's not always clear that a particular feeling should even go into a box labelled "____ love". In fact, I often go back and forth and contradict myself over whether something "is" or "does" or "should" or "can" count as "love". 

I've felt platonic and familial love before, but those moments when my subconscious decides with utmost conviction yes, this is love; yes, I deeply love you right now are few and far between. Outside of those moments, I don't concern myself with the question is this love?; I'd much rather use other words to describe my feelings of care and affection towards people. 

But at the same time, I like the particular way in which it's slowly becoming socially acceptable to say "I love you" to friends, because it allows me to influence how society thinks about love. I like it because it's a way to demonstrate care and affection towards friends without suggesting that the recipient is tantamount to a romantic partner without the romance. I like being able to tell my friends that I love them and have it be understood that my love is not a totality, that it's not in pursuit of a partnership. My love has the space to be casual, it doesn't have to be intensely deep, and I think that's great. 

When it's understood to be platonic, I like being on the receiving end of "I love you" from close friends. However, I have difficulty saying "I love you", and I don't really know why. It might have to do with the relationship between me, society, being aroace, partnerships, and love; I want to be able to love my friends in the way that feels most natural to me without being locked into a partnership, but despite the slow shift in meaning and usage, the phrase "I love you" might be too entrenched in the idea of monogamous sexual/romantic partnerships for me to comfortably use it. My difficulty might have to do with how, even when a close family member says "I love you", I don't always think of responding with "I love you, too"; I've gotten a bit better at saying it, but only after a lot of conscious effort to respond "properly", and I tend to be the second person to say it, not the first. My difficulty might have to do with something else entirely, or it might be a combination of those and other things. The asymmetry in saying or hearing "I love you" definitely adds some confusion and complication to my relationship with love, but it's mostly isolated to that one phrase. 

Regardless of whether it's easy for me to tell them or not, the friends and family that make up the people that I love matter quite a lot to me. So when people try to exclude me from the idea of "love", it hurts because they're delegitimizing my feelings. They're saying that they don't "count", likely with the unstated implication that my feelings are "less powerful/important", simply because my feelings don't fit into the conventional narrative of what love should be and look like. It hurts because, while not everyone shares this sentiment with me, my potential to love and the fact that I do sometimes love is meaningful to me on a very personal level. 

But at the same time, that ability to call my feelings "love", my connection to love, is only important on that personal level. In other contexts, it feels like my love exists on the same level of not-super-important as most other things about me, instead of being placed high upon a pedestal. When someone suggests that love is in some way a core component of being human, I'll lean as far as I can into how my asexuality and aromanticism disconnect me from love to try to get them to stop their dehumanization, to realize that their rhetoric and way of thinking hurts real people. I don't consider it voidpunk per se, since the focus isn't about rejecting my own humanity; rather, it's just a peculiar instinct to put myself directly in harms way in the hopes that doing so will stop the harm altogether. And when people insist that I can still feel platonic love, when they deny me my agency to opt out of the idea of love, I disavow any platonic or familial love to lean even farther into my disconnection from love. At the end of the day, I wouldn't exactly call myself a loveless aro, but I so readily group myself with them when they face dehumanization that I wouldn't really call myself the opposite of "loveless", either. 

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

SO YOU WANT TO TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT GENDER AND SEXUALITY.

Throughout my college career, I volunteered in a campus organization whose goal was to provide an opportunity for people to learn about gender and sexuality through facilitated Q&A panels. I loved it, and wish that there was more of an opportunity to create those experiences in the world at large. I’ve gotten some requests to share my experience, so here’s a write-up for the key points if you want to try and run one yourself.

These panels should be controlled, planned events for a cohesive group. I have done panels for classrooms, clubs, Greek organizations, and even a university staff department. They have a structure, a beginning and an end. You will be revealing a lot of personal information, so being comfortable in that role is a must. The state I live in has legal protections for gender identity and sexuality in work, education and housing so I never felt threatened opening up. You are under no obligation to do a panel if you do not feel safe.

Facilitating a Panel:

There is always a facilitator, and anywhere from 2-5 panelists depending on the size of the audience. The facilitator’s job is to organize and manage the event. They are the point of contact for the organization that requests a panel, they maintain control of the situation and ensure both the panelists and the audience feel safe and comfortable. They also make sure the pace keeps moving and can cut off a conversation if it gets too long or repetitive and not enough questions are being answered.

Ground Rules:

At the beginning of the panel, the facilitator lays down several ground rules. Both audience members and panelists are expected to abide by these rules at all times for safety and civility.

Rule 1: No Outing.

Ask if anyone in the audience knows what outing is, and if not introduce them to the concept of sharing parts of someone’s identity without their permission. Explain that this is a big taboo in the community, both for respect of privacy and for personal safety. Tell the audience that they are free to take away the stories and the general ideas expressed, but the names and identities behind them will stay in this room. This applies to audience members’ identities as well; they can be assured that the panelists will not share them.

Rule 2: Give Respect to Get Respect.

This one seems simple but is important to note. Aggressive or confrontational behavior does not lead to comfortable conversation or open minds. Let the audience know that the panelists are people too, and can choose whether or not they are comfortable answering a question. Just as the panelists are expected to maintain civility, so is the audience.

Rule 3: Assume Goodwill.

Trust that you the panelists are here to teach, and they the audience is here to learn. Ask the audience to use the most respectful language they can and assure the audience that the panelists will not attack or demean them for it. It is alright if someone does not know what words are respectful or offensive, trust that they’re trying and are open to being corrected.

Guidelines for Panelists

Start with your story. This is usually ~3 minutes long, and serves as an introduction to you. It can encompass a coming out, a realization, a meaningful moment, any combination of the above. My story talks about the rocky path to realizing and accepting I was asexual. At the very least, introduce yourself and give your pronouns. A good story will ‘drop breadcrumbs’ or introduce ideas for the audience to ask about.

After all panelists have told their story, the facilitator will open up the room for questions. These can be related to panelist’s stories, questions they had previously, or questions about current events. If audience members are unwilling to raise their hands you can try providing paper and pencils for anonymous questions. Cracking a joke about the 30 seconds of dead silence usually helps to break the ice, and once one hand is raised then usually the ball gets rolling. This is now your time to shine.

Speak from your own experience. If there is a panelist who has an identity you do not, they are the expert and it’s not your place to talk over them. You are the expert on yourself as well, so don’t let yourself get talked over. It is OK to not know an answer, just speak honestly. You can speak from research you have done or general experiences from people you know, but be sure to clarify that this is something you have learned from somebody else and remember to respect “No Outing”.

This is not the time or place to gatekeep. If you are an ace/aro/bi/pan/trans/NB exclusionist, I urge you to either keep your mouth shut when the topic shifts towards those identities or reconsider your place on the panel. Your job is to allow people to take an open, accepting stance towards non-straight and non-cis identities, not spread close-minded rhetoric. If you share an identity in a way that is different from another, say you are a dysphoric trans person for whom dysphoria is a large factor in your identity, you may speak from your own experience that way. However, you should not express that people who do not share your identity are not valid in theirs.

Be on your best behavior, no matter the question. This part can get hard, but it’s where “Assume Goodwill” comes in. Easily 99% of people in this situation will be respectful and just want to learn. They may not know what language is correct, or may only know offensive words for a certain idea. Correct these before you answer their question and explain why those words are harmful, but don’t shame them for not knowing the right language. You can ask clarifying questions if you don’t know what they’re getting at (or if you want them to realize what they’re getting at).

There will, rarely, be people who come with the intention of inciting anger or throwing insults or worse. At this point, they are not coming in to learn, so your goal is to make an impact on the other audience members. Respond to questions of religious intolerance with statements that that is not a belief you share. Request that they follow the ground rules, remind them of “give respect to get respect”. The facilitator of the panel or the organizer of the audience (if a classroom, the teacher) should intervene to ask them to leave if they cannot abide by the ground rules.

You can choose not to answer a question and can choose whether or not to give a reason why. “That’s too personal” is plenty. As an asexual on the panel I got more than enough questions about my sex life, whether I wanted kids or wanted to get married. These were questions I did not answer, instead offering a larger view of the community. I would explain how asexual people all had their own comfort zones and defined their sexuality differently, and while some decided they would like to be alone others can and do engage in all types of partnerships.

Unpack, unpack, unpack! Talk about the question that audiences are really asking when they ask who the man or the woman in a relationship is. Bring up heteronormative standards! Bring up sexist expectations of relationship dynamics! Bring up restrictive notions of gender! Bring up privacy concerns! A very simple question can reveal a lot about how someone’s personal biases shape their view of gender and sexuality so do your best to break it down in a way they can understand.

Try to define any words you are using. Audience members often won’t know what ‘cisgender’ means, or the difference between sexual and romantic orientation, or what dysphoria is. Try to keep them in the loop and be ready to provide definitions if the need arises. Again, defer to those who hold the identities in question before you answer and don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know something. 

Closing the Panel

Refer the audience to resources to continue their education. Offer both in-person places like a campus LGBT services center and trustworthy online resources like AVEN for asexuality. Establish a point of contact between the facilitator and the audience if they feel comfortable doing so- can the audience email anyone with further questions?

After the audience files out, gather with the other panelists and facilitator for a recap. Talk about what you think went well, what you think could have gone better, if you felt comfortable or not, if you felt talked over or if you felt like you talked too much, and how you think you could improve in the future. This is best for a team that may meet again, but even for a one-off event I feel it’s important.

That’s the start of it.

IRL, a panelist undergoes a 2-day training and practice panel before they are considered a panelist. This post is 1500 words already, so I’ll leave it there, but let me know if there’s something I can explain better or if you want more resources or examples! 

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: Frozen, Frozen 2, and Why There Are Songs In Musicals

Mild spoiler warning: this blog post discusses the first half of Disney’s Frozen and includes a summary of the Frozen 2 song “Into The Unknown,” while otherwise avoiding spoilers from Frozen 2. You have been warned.

I’ve been trying all afternoon to figure out a proper citation for this saying I’ve heard about theatre, but I can’t place it. If you’re an awesome theatre nerd who knows who said it first, then please let me know!

The saying is that characters in musicals sing when their emotions are just too big to be expressed in words alone. If words aren’t enough, then they sing. If singing isn’t enough, then they dance.

This saying occurred to me while I was trying to figure out why some songs in Frozen 2 hit me just as hard as the songs of Frozen, while others didn’t. Objectively speaking, there isn’t a bad song in either film. It all comes down to the way that the songs handle emotion.

Two questions cover the rest of this blog post: Is the emotion expressed in the song intense, or humorous? And is the song the result of an emotional build-up, or is the song the primary evidence we have for that emotion?

As a first example, let’s talk about “Let It Go” from Frozen.

Before we even hear the opening riff, we’ve already seen Elsa grow up. We saw her early traumatic experience of accidentally hurting her sister, and we saw all the years she spent since then repressing herself, shutting herself off both physically and emotionally from the rest of the world to hide her magical powers. But now, Elsa’s secret is out, and she is alone on a mountaintop. For the first time in over a decade, she can try out her magic and see what she’s capable of. Over the course of a four-minute song, Elsa finally lets out her emotions, which have built up to the point where they are much too big for words alone. She expresses sadness and pain about the years she spent hidden away, and a powerful joy at finally being free.

The emotions of “Let It Go” are undeniably intense. There’s a reason that this song resonated with so many people even before the film was released. We may not have known exactly what Elsa had been through, what she was trying to hide or who she was hiding from, but we could tell what she felt. That’s what happens when a song is the result of emotional build-up: the audience feels that emotion in a serious way, appropriate for such an intense mood.

On the other hand, Frozen also has “In Summer.” Mere seconds after we meet Olaf the snowman, he sings this song about how much he loves the idea of summer. We haven’t gotten any emotional build-up for this; we haven’t seen Olaf wandering around longing for summer. Instead, the song itself serves as evidence of how much Olaf loves summer – which in the grand scheme of emotions is pretty humorous.

The result is utter hilarity. “In Summer” throws a dramatic level of emotional investment into this character before we’ve really had any chance to emotionally invest in him. If Olaf simply said that he liked summer, it wouldn’t have had nearly as big of an effect as it did when he sang it. His singing is evidence of heightened emotion. The humorousness is only heightened by the absurdity of the idea of a snowman enjoying summer. Audiences laugh and fawn over Olaf. It’s a much less intense experience than “Let It Go,” but that’s the point. “In Summer” is a moment of levity in the film, focusing on the comic relief. It does what it’s supposed to do, and it works well.

Funny songs do well without emotional build-up. We can just enjoy the moment, laugh, and move on.

Intense songs, on the other hand, generally need that build-up.

When Frozen 2 came along, the song released to YouTube well before the release of the film was “Into the Unknown.” This three-minute song is one of the first scenes of the film, following Elsa’s late-night conversation with the mysterious voice she’s been hearing.

A lot happens in this song. Elsa tries to brush off the voice, saying that she’s done with adventure. She expresses fear of what will happen to her and the people she loves if she follows the voice. She voices suspicion about the voice, wondering if it is a trick. And then, two minutes in, she suddenly changes her stance – wondering if the voice is someone like her, saying she doesn’t really feel like she belongs in Arendelle, and chasing after the voice with an impassioned plea for it to not leave her behind.

“Into The Unknown” is an intense song. It’s catchy as heck. Idina Menzel and Brandon Urie hit some impressive high notes.

But it really doesn’t hit me emotionally nearly as much as “Let It Go.”

While “Into The Unknown” is musically excellent, it is not the result of emotional build-up. This song is the primary evidence of the emotions it expresses.

We’ve seen Elsa look a bit confused and worried about the voice, and we know she hasn’t told anyone about it. However, before this song, the film does not show us Elsa feeling out of place in Arendelle or having any opinions at all about the pros and cons of another adventure. The intense emotion of the song does not feel grounded in anything outside of the song; all we can do is take it at face value. Unfortunately, this left me spending more time wondering why the heck Elsa changes her mind about the merits of following the voice so quickly (going from “I don’t hear you” to “Don’t leave me” in a matter of seconds) than I spent actually enjoying the song. I felt this way when I first heard the song, and again once I saw it in the movie and realized there wasn’t much context to go off of.

The emotions Elsa is feeling here are too complicated to be expressed only in this three-minute number. It’s not like Olaf’s simple love for summer. Elsa’s feelings needs more time and build-up for the viewer to completely buy in.

And then there’s “Show Yourself” – a song that I love.

In the name of avoiding spoilers, I will not explain what the song is about. All I will say is that this song is the result of an emotional build-up that spans the entire film. And man oh man does that build-up pay off!

Of course, this analysis is entirely based on my own personal feelings about the songs of Frozen and Frozen 2. As a storytelling geek, I place more importance on how a song fits into a story than I place on the musical quality of the song itself.

I firmly believe, however, that there is a tangible difference between a song that is the result of emotional build-up and a song that is evidence of emotion. There is a place for both kinds of songs, just like there is a place for songs that are intense and songs that are humorous. But there are situations in which one kind of song works better than another.

What do you think? Which songs from Frozen or Frozen 2 hit you the hardest? Do you think you’ll grow to love or hate the songs with ceaseless repetition? And how long until Disney announces a Frozen 3? Reply or reblog with your thoughts!

Subjects in my notes cut from the final blog post:

“For The First Time In Forever” is both intense and humorous (two words which sum up Anna as a character pretty well). It is also both the result of emotional build-up (Anna’s loneliness as seen in the film to this point) and evidence of emotion (her new desire for romantic love).

Just like how “In Summer” is sung for the sole purpose of showing how hilariously much Olaf loves summer, “Fixer Upper” is sung for the sole purpose of showing how hilariously much the trolls love Kristoff, flaws and all. The stage musical ups the emotion even further by throwing a huge dance number into the middle of the song. Words and singing alone were not enough!

Everyone in the movie theatre laughed through “Lost in the Woods,” a song which shows us just how big Kristoff’s feelings are. I’m tempted to say that we laughed in large part because the idea of a guy being emotional like that goes against American social norms. We laughed in small part because of the reindeer singing back-up.

I’ll be happy if Elsa is canonically any kind of queer, but “you are the one you’ve been waiting for all of your life” is such an aro/ace mood.

[insertedgyfangirlname]

Vent post ahead!!!

You don’t need to read this post, I just wanted to have my thoughts written down somewhere in the world and out of my head.

(This post is about my first time coming out to anyone and does contain aphobia, specifically arophobia, so please don’t read if you are sensitive to this!!!!!!!!)

July, 2019 (yes this is very recent). I’m at a mission trip with my church and we have completed all the tasks for the day so everyone is hanging out around the church we are staying at. Some people are downstairs where all of our beds and luggage are but me and my closest group of friends (with some mutuals) decide to stay on the main floor.

We are sitting in some couches that we have arranged into a circle and there are about 5 different conversations going on. Me and my best friend (who for the sake of anonymity we’ll call Sarah) are just talking to each other one on one. There is a pause in the conversation where the thought that nearly every LGBTQ+ kid has enters my head..... should I come out to her?

Sarah knows me really well, so the second that thought comes into my head she notices and asks if I’m ok. There’s a long pause. I tell her that I have something important to tell her. Keep in mind that she had told me that she’s bi only a few weeks ago. After what felt like the most excruciating few seconds of my life, I told her “I’m Asexual!!”. she looks shocked but also understanding. There is a knowing smile on her face and she offers some comforting words. She puts her hand on mine in comfort. “So, who are you romantically attracted to?” are the next words out of her mouth. I wasn’t quite planning on coming out as aromantic as well as asexual but the feeling of acceptance she was giving me gave me the courage to say “Actually, I’m aromantic, so no one”.

The understanding smile on her face is immediately replaced with something else. it takes a couple seconds to pinpoint what it is and this is where things go downhill.

Her face was one of pity. She pitied me for being aromantic. Something I couldn’t control and was perfectly content with being.

SERIOUSLY???!!! THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS??? I’d always heard stories about people being belittled and pitied because they don’t feel romantic attraction but I thought she would be different. She should’ve understood!! She has to understand!

“Oh my gosh! That’s so sad! Don’t you feel lonely? You have no idea what you’re missing out on”. She gave me every line in the aphobic book.

At this point I’m trying to hold it together. My body is shaking from her words and how she felt SORRY for me!!

I quickly explain to her that “No, I don’t feel lonely” and “No, I don’t think I’m missing out”.

Her hand of “comfort” feels like it’s there to console me for losing a loved one instead of saying she accepts me.

I’m not sure she ever realized how hurtful her words were but I do hope that one day she sees the pain she caused in my heart. I had never! ever! told anyone! about my identity and she was PITYING ME FOR IT!!

We continue the night with me feeling like crap and her probably thinking she was completely supportive. I end up telling one of my other friends (his name can be Jack for the story) about my aroace identity and he just said “Oh, ok. That’s cool. That means you don’t like anyone, right?” “Right” “Alright, cool.” and with that he resumed his conversation with some of our other friends. We almost told one more of my friends but he was saying some very homophobic things so we didn’t. A few minutes later, Sarah says she was heading to bed early.

I’m sitting there stewing in my thoughts and how I was probably never going to come out to anyone else. So far I’d had one negative reaction and one indifferent reaction. Not great.

One of the freshman girls (I’m a sophomore so I didn’t know her) who was on Jack’s team and kinda knew him was sitting on the couch next to mine. She had obviously overheard me and my friend’s talk because she called out the words that were probably what stopped me from never talking about my orientation and pretending I had made it up.

“I’m asexual too”.

I was snapped out of my thoughts of unintentional rejection. I stared at her in shock because A. I didn’t know her and she just straight up came out to me and B. she had said it loudly and everyone else in the circle momentarily glanced at us but ultimately ignored it.

She moved over to the couch I was sitting and we started talking. I learned her name was, for the story, Jenna. She was (and still is) asexual and biromantic. We quickly ended up bonding over other things we had in common (like P!ATD, MCR, Umbrella Academy, etc.) but the conversation remained mostly on us being ace.

Turns out Jenna had been rejected by people in the same way that I just was. She also talked about how she thought that what my other friend had said was wrong and that I was valid, aromantic or not.

Her openness and willingness to share made my confidence shoot back up. My pride was back.

I’ve only come out to two other people in my life since then (I know, soOoOoOo many). One (her name can be Lily) had just told me she was a lesbian earlier that day and was talking about how much she hated aphobia and how they should be allowed to live how they want and don’t need romance or sex. I told her that I was aroace pretty quickly after that.

At a party where I knew no one, there was a mutual friend that I was chatting who slipped she was pan accidentally. She had a brief moment of freak out but I told her I was cool with it and would keep it secret since I knew how it felt. I never talked to her after that.

I’m still friends with Sarah, Jenna, Jack, Lily, and even that one homophobic kid (but he’s changed a lot since then and is much more accepting towards LGBT people).

The reason I’m posting this is because 1. It is important that people realize how hurtful they can be with aphobia and 2. my mind has been torturing me with that moment all week.

I never fully recovered from Sarah’s words and they are often a source of doubt for me.

She still pulls that same pitying face when my aromanticism comes up in conversation and I try to ignore it but my heart breaks more each time.

All I want to say is that aphobia sucks. Jenna has gotten threats about correctional rape and one guy even tried to follow through on it. I’ve had guys try and forcefully kiss me since I had told them I don’t like boys.

It’s things like this that makes me so mad that people are trying to block aces and aros out of the community.

we are real and our pain is real

alright. I’m finished.