aromanticising your faves since 2017

As in, they killed 41% of all the Jews on earth in just four years.

As in, this was called the "Final Solution" because it was their solution to the world's "Jewish Question."

The problem was that Jews existed. The question was how to save human societies from the Jews' inevitable corruption.

As Hitler wrote in 1919:

"Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.

"In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations."

That is Nazi talk. That is white supremacy.

It is impossible to end white supremacy if you don't know that Jews are still one of its favorite targets.

I don't think it's possible to even fight white supremacy if you're using some of its jargon, oblivious to the rest of the dogwhistles, and in agreement with it that Jews are a privileged, powerful oppressor class.

If you specifically just mean evil, or fascist, or racist, or queer-hating, then say so.

They were the end result of 2000 years of Christianity and every culture created or influenced by Christianity.

They were what happens when, after millenia of people in power insisting that the Jews are the source of all evil, and the poor aren't suffering because of greedy aristocrats but because of greedy Jews, and the people aren't rejecting our ideas because our ideas are flawed, but because of the Jews and their vile corruption, and we only lost the war because the Jews betrayed us, and our economy is only failing because the Jews betrayed us, a group rose to power who fully believed all of that.

The Nazis did not point to the Jews as the cause of every flaw they saw in the world because it was easy, but because they thought it was true.

And they got as far as they did because those ideas were so imbedded in not only Germany, but every culture created or significantly influenced by Christianity--very much including Islamic and Arabic cultures--that people around them may not have wanted to live under Nazi rule themselves, but what those guys had to say about the Jews generally seemed pretty reasonable.

Law. Do I even need to mention it?

Religion. Duh. For instance, in 1946 the Catholic church disciplined a priest for saying "hey the Kielce pogrom was bad". Although to be fair this was in keeping with their official policy of "the Catholic Church is apolitical and 'don't kill Jews' is political". Apparently, we also caused our pogroms "exclusively" by our officials' behavior (to be fair this was an unofficial publication).

Literature. Ezra Pound. T S Eliot. Shakespeare. Roald Dahl. Dostoyevsky. Jonathan Swift. Tolstoy. Carlyle. What do these figures have in common? All of them were antisemitic. (In the case of Pound, a literal Nazi, but that's beside the point.)

Language. In many languages, including English, the word for 'Jew' is a synonym of miserliness and being a cheapskate. This occurs in other languages, sometimes with (less common?) synonyms: Albanian (along with 'cowardly'), Belarusian, French, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Russian, Swedish. Sometimes it means other bad things: Danish ('to steal'), Dutch (someone dishonest), Kabyle (a coward, but specifically female Jews; Kabyle is a North African Amazigh language). But let's focus on English. English with its Svengali (instead of being satisfied with just manipulator, say), its Shylock (in addition to usurer), its Judas (dissatisfied with traitor). Its cabal (from kabbalah, the Jews must be up to something with their calculations). Other examples abound.

Nature, surely, would be blissfully--nope. The 'Wandering Jew' plant is a real plant.

Natural disasters would cause problems for us, and of course there was the 'Jewish lightning' myth, that we'd set things on fire for the insurance money. (Some insurance companies wouldn't insure people whose last names ended in sky or ski, which presumably got a lot of Poles also). I was once absently reading a book of old humorous dictionary definitions, The Foolish Dictionary by Gideon Wurdz. I made it about three pages into the non-introduction content (screengrab from archive.org)

And it was just casually thrown in there as a joke. I don't know why this made such an impression on me when I was first unpleasantly surprised by it years ago -- I know it was normalized, I know most people would've smiled and kept reading. I just...it's something about the utter lack of attention given to it. It's on the bottom of a page, right after Argument ("Breaking and entering the ear, assault and battery on the brain and disturbing the peace.") There's no indicator, no WARNING -- ANTISEMITIC "JOKE" COMING. Nothing. Just the entry, and (if it was physical) a page to turn.

Antisemitism. Runs. Deep.

I'm not policing shit though?

I'm saying "leave SOME room for a queer orientation that's already invisibilized in real life". I feel like that can coexist. I feel like there's a difference.

But yeah, acting like offline is any more welcoming to us than online is naive reasoning. Or turning one's gaze away from our erasure across the board 'cus it's convenient that way.

The large, large majority of people's dismissal of us is ruinous for our self-perception ONline AND OFFline, so there's literally nowhere for us to be. And idk. Having a little bit more diversity on top of the existing diversity shouldn't be that hard.

As a trans-androgynous person, what the hell is this? Are we not allowed to be happy about who we are???

i’m NOT that old. i’m only in my 20s and i’ve known i was aroace for less than ten years. but sometimes even that is enough to make me feel ancient. i remember when there were just, basically no dedicated aro spaces. very few aro blogs on tumblr. impossible to find aro merch, barely any aro creators on youtube and the like. we hadn’t even unified around the current flag yet, in fact we were a couple iterations behind. ace stuff too, there were a lot more ace blogs and youtubers etc. than aro ones, and AVEN was already a long-standing thing, but still far less than there is now.

i’m sure if i was a bit more persistent and a lot less 15 and scared i could have found more out there, but the point stands that aro communities in 2014 were extremely insular. offline, i was the only aro person i knew, and i was deep in the closet. i only learned about being aro by accident, and i had to navigate it on my own. it took me more than a year to actually say it out loud, to myself in the mirror, because i couldn’t externalize it. there was never a moment of relief at realizing who i was. it was a dawning understanding of something i always knew, and then it became my deepest secret, because there was nobody i could tell who’d understand. i didn’t make aro friends online until much later.

the aspec community online, on tumblr especially, was decimated in those intervening years, and i had the “benefit” of already being closeted during those times, so i avoided the worst of the harassment that people who were openly aspec online were getting. but it did push me further into the closet and leave me with significant issues. but then, things got a little better. aro blogs started popping up. in fact, i won’t name names because i’ll embarass us all but if you’re seeing this and you ran an aro blog in 2017ish, thank you, because you are literally the reason i decided it was safe to be openly aspec on tumblr again, and here i am.

of course, nothing is ever perfect. every community has both internal and external problems, and we’re still working on ours. we’ve got a lot to fight for. and every time i think about all the culture and terminology we lost in the mid 2010s, i do get a little sad. but during pride month this year, i drove past a storefront that had pride flags painted in the window, and i almost started crying on the bus, because one of them was an aro flag. it was the first time i’d ever seen an aro flag in person that i didn’t own.

Because, like, okay. It's 2026. There's rising queerphobia of all stripes--which is undeniably one reason I'm thinking about the lateral violence of it all, and we'll circle back to that--but the media environment of today does still makes it more possible than ever before to find and enjoy queer fiction. And this is critical to what I'm about to say next, so I hope those of us that grew up in times where that was not true can sort of table our thoughts on what things were like when we were kids.

My point it, if I'm an adult who isn't in the closet (and even if I am in the closet, plausible deniability is higher than it was pre-2010 or so!), I can go see a gay movie. I can go buy a gay book. There are members of the community, like kids/teens or people in unsafe situations that might not have that freedom, but at the very least, finding the gay media isn't the hard part for anyone. Heated Rivalry is one of the biggest TV shows of the year (and the books that it's based off have since seen a huge jump in popularity, too), queer romantasy is flourishing, and even classic queer media is getting revamped (pun intended) in series like the Interview With the Vampire TV series. And if, for whatever reason, none of the current professional stuff is doing it for you, Ao3 has approximately 8.4 million M/M stories and 1.7 F/F stories--which isn't the greatest ratio for the femslash fans, but is still nothing to sneeze at. And that's not even getting into the many gay podcasts and audio dramas, self-published books, comics (indie and otherwise), and other, nicher options. Long story short, if you only want to watch, read, or listen to media with prominent gay characters in it, you can establish a very healthy media diet, with everything from fun, trashy romance to acclaimed TV miniseries to weird podcasts to RPG actual plays, and everything in-between. This has very much not always been the case, so it's really cool we're here!

As an aro/ace person I... can't do that with stories about people like me. Like I really, seriously can't do that. I guess if I was content to enjoy less media, maybe, but I love stories, which I'm sure a lot of people on this website can relate to. And I love participating in fandom, too, so sometimes I do want to be into something that's big enough for me to chat about it with other people, or get more than a handful of kudos on my fanfic. So at the end of the day I don't limit myself, and that's honestly a good thing! It's great to be into things about characters who don't exactly share your identities, too.

But like. This year I've bought* exactly one book with an actual, canonically aro and/or ace character in it--the short story collection Tales From the Folly, which is a part of the Rivers of London series and features the aro/ace character Thomas Nightingale. (*I say bought, because I'm yet to actually read it--I'm sorry, Thomas!). That's it. I've enjoyed various other stories, but as far as ones with people like me go, I've gotten my hands on exactly one. And it's not for a lack of trying! There just... hasn't been much on my radar. This is a huge reason I've gotten so excited about Project Hail Mary recently--it doesn't have any canonically queer characters, and the original author definitely didn't intend to write the main character in a way that resonated with so many aro/aces. But it's a story without any canonical romance of any kind, where as a result, I can watch a fun movie and pretend for a little bit that Ryland Grace is like me. There are so few aro/ace characters that most of what we get. Playing pretend.

This is where I think some of the wires are getting crossed. When people hear someone like me say "I'm really exhausted by all the emphasis on romance and shipping in fandom," I think what some of you are hearing--because it's historically been true, and we're at a scary time in the world where it feels more and more like it's threatening to become true again--is "I want there to be fewer gay stories." When what I'm really saying is "I want there to be more aro/ace stories--or at least stories where I can pretend the main character is like me." And to even further hamper understanding, when aro and/or ace folks say we want stories about people like us and we hear other, allo queers object, what we aspecs often hear is "I think people like you aren't worth telling stories about"--even though many of you have valid reasons for liking the stories that you do, too.

I think that those of us who belong to older generations (especially millennials and above) can all probably relate to what aspecs are experiencing here on some level. There was a point in time where gay books were extremely limited, and gay characters in TV and movies were unheard of. Even as things crept in a more progressive direction, the Bury Your Gays tropes meant not everyone could enjoy the stories those characters showed up in. That was really hard for a lot of people, and I never, ever want us to go back to that. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that gay media just isn't at that point right now. Media with actual aro/ace characters in it.... kind of still is. It's different, because society is in a very different place, and also cishet people have historically demonized aromantic and asexual people with very different tropes--the heartless villain incapable of love, the cold lover that the protagonist abandons to be happy with someone else, the boring stuck-up prude, etc. And there are people, especially in the indie sphere, who are making some good stuff. But at the end of the day, I have a lot fewer choices than you do. Which is why it really hurts to get told that my headcanons and readings of canon--which are most of what I have--are actually problematic.

Anyway. None of this is groundbreaking. It's been said before, by people more eloquent and more persuasive than me, and it'll probably be said again. It just feels worth reiterating, considering some of the blowback I've been getting to expressing this sentiment. Because I really do think a lot of us want the same thing--for everyone to be able to enjoy whatever kind of stories they like most about people like them. (Without losing sight of the fact that media can be a great way to understand the experiences of people of other experiences, of course). When the scales are so unequally weighted, however, it gets really messy to talk about.

Like, you mentioned PHM as an example of a story that doesn't have romance or sex in it, not because the characters are canonically aroace but because those just weren't parts of the story, and said that it was better than nothing because you could at least pretend that the characters were aspec.

And I think a lot of allo people tend to think that an aro story is just a story that doesn't have romance in it, and an ace story is a story that doesn't have sex in it, and from that viewpoint it seems like you're advocating for taking things away from stories.

But--I'm assuming--a story with actual aro or ace representation is a story that adds something, namely a character who is canonically aro or ace. And--again, I'm assuming--it would not have to be a story about Aroace Alice and Her Aroace Struggle, although it could be that; but it could equally well be just be about Alice and reflect the ways in which being aroace affects her life an an international spy or dinosaur hunter or college professor having a midlife crisis or whatever Alice's story is about. But either way, it's not a story-without, it's a story-with.

I guess the simplest way to put it is like. A story like Ursula K le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness doesn't exactly have trans "representation" (in that transness is a social and cultural phenomenon separate from the speculative gender system she explores in the novel), but it does nonetheless have a lot to say about gender, in a way that definitely resonates with some trans/gnc people. Specifically, it shines a light on gender in a way that is of interest to people who want to have important conversations about the topic, and that makes it important and/or interesting to many queer folks. And in the same way, stories without explicit aromantic representation can absolutely say some very important things about relationships, particularly platonic relationships, especially when they show characters choosing to prioritize and value explicitly or even implied-to-be platonic connections.

So to return to my example above, I liked Project Hail Mary in part because I felt like I could pretend the protagonist was like me. But while the movie doesn't actually have anything explicit to say about aromanticism or the experience of being aro, it does ask another really interesting question -- namely "What if you were someone who was always sort of isolated and didn't have a lot of connections, and then you made a friend (who, it should be noted, already had a bond with a romantic/reproductive partner) who cared about you so deeply that they made it clear they valued you just as much as their partner?"

That's aromantic catnip! And not just because it's sort of a fun wish fulfillment fantasy, but because it raises super important questions about who gets to be significant to you and what it looks like to have friends who also have romantic partners that still value you. And so even though it's not a story with explicit aromantic representation, it's chock full of aromantic resonances.

And this is exactly where things get snarly with fandom. Because aro and/or ace people are in a weird position where there are very, very few characters that represent us, but there are still some stories that feel important to us all the same. So we don't really get to "claim" them as ours, but it still hurts when all the fandom wants to do is to seemingly erase the themes that feel so significant to us by making those stories romantic or sexual after all. To other queer people, it looks like we're getting upset over nothing -- that's not that character's canon identity, so why do we feel like we get to lay claim to them? But what we're really struggling with is watching stories that genuinely have interesting things to say about relationships get interpreted in a way that erases that -- and especially in the absence of actual canon aromantic and asexual characters, that really hurts.

I don't know what the answer to all this is. Obviously it's not particularly kind (or feasible) to tell other queer people they're never allowed to insert queer romance into stories that don't have any. But when the ratios are so skewed in favor of the people who do want to do that, and so skewed against those of us who would rather we talk about the stories as-is, it really starts to feel like nobody cares about us, and that our narratives aren't seen as important, or valid, or even queer -- not just in fiction, but in real life, too.

Part of why it isn't talked about is because of the method of detransition isn't always so black and white and it gives prisons a way to hide what they're doing. A devious and immoral slight of hand with the beurocracy.

When trans men are OFFERED to be put into the mens section, it's specifically as a threat. It's "Hey, we CAN put you with the other "men" but you know how men are....right? You KNOW how MEN ARE...right?"

There is a threat of rape and exploitation there far above what other inmates experience.

My pod mates were super chill with me being trans. Rules are different and you can't get offended easily, but it was the guards who kept touching me up, it was a guard who stabbed my hand with a pencil and gave me a scar there, and it was a guard who raped me.

So it's not just that trans men are being denied hrt and forcibly detransitioned.

It's that they are being told they have to pick between forced detransition in an environment where it will be AFAB bodied people exploiting them or they stick to their hrt and are in an environment where AMAB bodied people will be exploiting them.

These kinds of threats are big for trans people who are incarcerated. Many prisons and jails avoid it by just putting the person into lock down their entire stay (like me. My cell was 16 hand by 12 hands wide. I could walk my cell wirh 3 large steps. Sucked)

"It's not hurting anyone" until it is, y'know