#thats my name by the way lol. feel the need to clarify cause of zephyr ghoul..

[mxsinizter]

would you feel comfortable explaining your own experience of aegosexuality?

cogs are turning in my head thanks to your ifrit/mountain fic because i actually used to identify as autochoris/aego but kind of.. scrapped the possibility once i discovered that i had a sex drive? because in my head ace people couldn't have sex drives (which, i know now, is entirely not the case) my point is; the way you wrote mountain and his shame afterwards, (as well as the definition of aegosexual on the sexuality wiki) resonates with me quite a bit. but i'm struggling to pinpoint if it's an asexuality thing or maybe something else, and i was hoping that an insight into someone's personal thoughts or experiences might help?

if you're not comfortable sharing, that's completely fine too, of course!!! i know how personal some of this stuff can get! and i'm so sorry for this paragraph of an ask, haha :')

HII! YES OF COURSEE! I'll gladly share if it can help :] no need to apologize

(This is a very long response oops, I hope I answered your questions? I am open to answering any more tho <3)

First off, yea, sex drive doesn't define it. I experience times of a very high libido myself, so that shouldn't be reason to scrap ace identities! Especially with autochoris/aego, many of us deal with a sex drive that is not on the low side. The shame part, especially for me can be tied to that! Listening to urges and 'fulfilling' them don't always end... happily for me. It brings a discomfort when it hits me that yea, my arousal made me do that, made me think that, and made me cross that boundary that kept me disconnected from it, something I found fun in theory. (you mentioned 'or something else'... for me that something else is occasionally my own insecurity or bottom dysphoria, so I get that, but I personally am sure that many of the times it mainly stems from being aego.)

With the way I wrote Mountain and that shame.. was a sort of build up of 'oh, would you look at that, my dick finds this very arousing' to 'okay, I find this very arousing' and going into a mental state where the situation is acceptable and something he wants to gain pleasure from. Then with the parts where his imagination wants to run wild, its like him wanting to gain control of what's going on and have fun with it and sort of blind himself from the fact that he was openly jerking off to it lol. (That's why I gave little details of what he was doing there and focused on the show Ifrit was putting on instead and his pov! Bc that's what Mount was fully focused on too!) So then we see that build up of "shame" have him like 'ew, I did that, my body did that and I enjoyed it'. It felt... too real? It's a sort of repulsion caused by the fact that the action is not just in your head/distant from you anymore (I really experience that). That discomfort sometimes doesn't even let you enjoy the afterglow and it sucks. So that comfort Ifrit wants to provide and telling him that he did well and that it was okay, is massive to him. Like, its okay for you to feel this for yourself and let your physical body experience it as well.

(I am for sure making a post about Ifrit's choices now, cause I think those are important to understand how intune he was with Mountain's needs and boundaries.)

But not all aegos feel this so strongly, I happen to and so I wanted to hint at it in the fic. (like even when writing fics, I'll write them, look them over once or twice for basic mistakes, then just post them bc I can't get myself to reread something like that that I created... so my first drafts are basically my final drafts LMAOO. I have a fic idea I haven't been able to write cause I think it'd take too much out of me to do it myself, but I could easily read someone else's work of something just as filthy because it isn't coming from me y'know? I don't have to think about all the mechanics of what is being done.)

I think it really helps to differentiate everything physical and everything mental, understanding what triggers or turns off your arousal, and how you experience attraction. Like you might know already when it comes to fantasizing, many aegos will experience it from the third person view and not include themselves. If they do, it's probably more of a persona of their creation that may have some resemblance, but is separate enough to not actually be them? (I am occasionally guilty of this lol) And with arousal, understanding boundaries and what is needed to reach satisfaction. Its accepting that sometimes that bad feeling is unavoidable and learning how to deal with it and making it a better feeling. Understanding how I experience attraction actually helped me settle on this identity. (I'm on both the aro and ace spec for reference.) Personality, aesthetic attraction, and how much I'd want to be friends with someone really dictates how my attraction works. So I realized I really like watching/reading and fantasizing and experiencing through others and that makes my arousal pop off lmao. Fanfics help a lot cause it brings me comfort knowing its characters I am familiar with and having control over what might be included in the sexual acts.

Going back to how I started this response - I can enjoy a piece of smutty media while my libido is high asf and be like yea, this is so fucking good. But would I actually want to be physically involved in the sexual acts I'm watching? No. Am I sexually attracted to the individuals doing the acts? probably not. A silly simple way I described it to someone else is: I'd fuck Mountain, but I also wouldn't, so watching him get fucked works just fine LOL

All that is not to say I wouldn't ever want to have a genuine physical experience with other physical bodies. I personally would and that doesn't change my identity (although does play part in why I'm specifically aego-gray). it would just take A LOT from me and the potential partner(s) for full satisfaction. (And it took me a few years to settle on all of this, so even answering this is helping me further understand.) So ya, I think I've said way too much already lol. That's a bit of my view of it and how I incorporated it into Mountain's character. It's totally okay if you vary from this and still identify with the same label. It's not a race to put a label on oneself either. I hope this insight was at least a bit helpful and interesting to read <3