45 silver worms in a trenchcoat

Sophia, the ghost from 1875 who haunts a lamp I got at Brimfield: I wasn't wondering. why would I be?

me: ...but climate change is making it worse even since I was a child. and I had to explain climate change to you last week

Sophia: yes but haze and smoke in the city is normal, isn't it? coal fires for cooking (even in summer), gaslights burning, and so forth

me:

Sophia: the nature is different, but I'm quite accustomed to the concept. and this will last how long?

me: until tomorrow probably

Sophia: after which the air quality will be...?

me: excellent, I imagine. it's really good here 98% of the year, and good the rest of the time barring a few days like this one

Sophia:

The person backstage at the Masquerade who let us know we could wait on the back ramp in case we won an award, because I wanted to make sure Scribe could join me onstage in case we won something (CAME IN HANDY, TOO....)

The guy in the elevator we were waiting for who was also a wheelchair user, which meant there wasn't room for Scribe to get on that one, but who made us laugh out loud by telling her "This elevator isn't accessible enough for the both of us"

The fellow registration volunteer who saw me in my Grace cosplay and went "Oh my god..... it's Ryan Gosling" and proceeded to call me that for the entire time we were manning the registration desk (Though he did call me my actual name when we ran into each other checking out of the hotel today, haha)

The older man who always blows us away with his fiddling in the music circles at the local cons who ran into us after the Masquerade and literally jumped up and went "YIPPEE!" when we told him we'd won for Best Workmanship. (We'd been finishing Rocky's hands while listening to everyone in the circle the night before)

The other Grace cosplayer who was handing out tiny vials with different "strains" of astrophage and taumeoba who told me I was going to have to engineer nitrogen resistance from scratch when I pulled the native Adrian taumeoba strain.

So: repurposed vaguely Kinseyesque scale describing your aromantic and/or asexual protagonist's awareness of and relationship to their own aromanticism/asexuality:

Unaware That This Is A Thing People Can Be. Type specimen: Carl from Dungeon Crawler Carl. Has never once considered that "not wanting romance or sex" is a thing people could feel, let alone identify as. He is normal, which means straight. It's just a coincidence that his relationship with his girlfriend was a disaster and now he's just way too busy in this new nightmare dystopia world for any of that! Anyway!

Aware They Have These Feelings, Assumes Everyone Else Also Does. Type specimen: Doug Eiffel from Wolf 359. Firmly believes that his aro-allo experiences are universal and everybody else is just better at acting like a functional human being than he is. Being a huge movie nerd also leads him to believe that "romance" as we understand it is massively exaggerated for drama in movies and people in real life don't actually do and feel that stuff any more than they mind-meld or can use the Force. He's just a fuckup at everything; why wouldn't relationships be included in that? For most of the show if you told him about aromanticism he would NOT be comforted about it, he'd probably take it as a diagnosis that his fuckup-ness regarding relationships was innate and incurable. (This doesn't have to be negative; this is also where Andy Wheyface from Arden falls and he is having a GRAND old time.)

Aware They Have These Feelings, Realizes That It Sets Them Apart From Others, Doesn't Conceptualize It As Part Of An Identity. Type specimen: Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary. His reaction to other people having sex is mostly "why would you do that." His single attempt at a serious romantic relationship didn't work out and he has a nagging sense that there is something in him that can't maintain serious relationships; attributes it to cowardice and fear of commitment. Ironically he does know what asexuality is. He's a middle school teacher in 2020s California, he has absolutely gotten LGBTQ+ Sensitivity Education at least in "pamphlet listing queer identities" form, he for sure has students with pride flag pins on their backpacks and pride stickers on their notebooks, and he is also not immune from the Culture War Bullshit around gender in schools. Knowing that asexuality exists did not even slightly lead him to apply this to himself.

Aware They Have These Feelings, Considers Them Significant, Attributes Them To Some Existential Feature Of Their Existence Rather Than A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries. Murderbot is very confident it does not want anything to do with romance or sex, and it attributes this to Being A SecUnit, and romance and sex are Human Things SecUnits Don't Do. Has not yet realized that this is an itself thing and not a SecUnit thing. Probably willfully at this point.

Considers These Feelings A Significant Aspect Of Their Selfhood, But Doesn't Name It. Type specimen: Sister Carpenter from The Silt Verses. Clearly confident in who she is and what she wants in her personal relationships, recognizes that as something that makes her different from others and out of step with what others expect from her, and is basically like, that's their problem. She knows who she is. Sometimes other people try to make it her problem but she has so many other problems that societal amatonormativity keeps getting pushed lower and lower on her list of Problems.

Recognizes Themself As Aromantic/Asexual As A Personal Identity. Type specimen: Nova NoStar from InCo. Clearly considers this part of her identity, but is allergic to talking about her feelings even at her therapy android's insistence and besides that's not anybody else's business is it?

Publicly Identifies As Asexual And Describes It With Period-Correct Sexual Orientation Language. Type specimen: Sally Grissom from ars PARADOXICA. The only character I've ever heard come out as asexual and lay out the definition in terms of sexual orientation and attraction to another character on-air that made me go "yeah she would do this, this is in character for Sally." Strongly feel like she would be an active commenter on the 2010s ace blogosphere. Would get in an argument about the correct definition of asexuality on AVEN.

If you need to have a big scary threat to a whole planet, go ahead. That’s great. However. Please be aware that the planet under threat does not always have to be Earth. If the characters we love have ties to a non-earth planet, threatening that planet is, in fact, sufficient. Viewers are capable of feeling the stakes when the planet is not Earth. It doesn’t have to be All About The Planet The Viewer Lives On. The Planet The Viewer Lives On is not being threatened by a space laser in real life anyway. It’s Ok if your main character from planet zebrathorax wants to pull out all the stops to defend planet zebrathorax. In fact, it’s pretty bad if you have a side character from zebrathorax and they seem weirdly ok with zebrathorax being left undefended to defend Earth. Your characters can even want to pull out all the stops for zebrathorax even if they’re not from there, since presumably they’re good people who can empathize with the zebrathoraxians. The emotional stakes are maintained.

Also. We know you’re not gonna blow up earth in this movie. We are not worried about earth. Zebrathorax is a much more legitimately suspenseful choice.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.