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"I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret."
β Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Referring to someone as your βpartnerβ sounds as if you are deliberately obscuring their gender and may subtly out you. βMy exβ, however, is entirely unobtrusively gender-neutral. #breakupallrelationships
really love a corruption arc where the character is trying way too hard to make it work but they're in over their head and it's uncomfortable and embarrassing and they're swallowing their own puke every time they do something awful and damp with sweat and trembling but insistent that they can do this, they want it, they're not a child, but it's like they're playing dressup in clothes that are too big for them and trying to convince their own reflection in the mirror that they fit and it's just no fun to watch at all
+ then they find inside them a capacity for cruelty far more upsettingly vicious than anyone could have imagined and decide that because they enjoy how unafraid it makes them feel for the first time in as long as they can remember it must have been their true nature all along instead of something that had to be starved in the dark until it grew desperate enough to claw its way out πββοΈ
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nobody UNDERSTANDS this post!! this is NOT about feeling BAD and watching your COMFORT show!!! this is about feeling FINE but then CHOOSING to watch a show that makes you want to KILL YOUR SELF
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this isn't really the same thing as intentionally/unintentionally a-spec characters but it is interesting thinking about how intentionality does dramatically change how characters read regarding a-spec identities and themes.
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.
X. Their Culture Conceptualizes Intimate Relationships In A Fundamentally Different Framework Than We Use. Type specimen: Breq from the Imperial Radch Trilogy. Whatever model of gender and sexuality the Radch is on it is NOT ours. Breq is still not interested though.
#interesting these are all scifi it makes me think there's something in the water there that allows for broader aspec theme building #probably because social norms are often imagined differently in scifi (tags via @variousqueerthings)
This is a really interesting aspect that I was definitely thinking about when I put this list together, because it began as an expansion of this post and I was freely mixing characters that are canonically and intentionally written as aro and ace, and characters who were not at all intended to come off that way but really do to me and/or a lot of people. But it's true, and I think that speaks to something about how different genre narratives prioritize things that lead to these readings!
A lot more thoughts about this under the cut:
So first off, the whole list is SFF because that's the majority of what I read/watch/listen to, lol. I could have made other choices - talked about Jean Valjean or Sherlock Holmes or Kerewin Holmes or Georgia Warr or Miles Edgeworth - but I really love 1) sci-fi and 2) audio drama podcasts so I have many more in-depth thoughts about those. (I mean not to say I don't have in-depth thoughts about Les Mis or Ace Attorney but--anyway. Also I haven't read Loveless or The Bone People so I can't actually say much meaningful about those.)(Okay I haven't read Dungeon Crawler Carl either but I'm on the library hold list. But I believe my friends lol)
But when putting together the list it was interesting to see the patterns emerge. One of the big ones is that the lower tiers of the list are consistently not-intentionally-written-as-a-spec, male, and - and this is the big one that made me think about what it means for a work to "come off as" a-spec and especially unique to a sci-fi context - the first three characters have their primary committed, emotionally intimate, important relationship be with with a non-human entity. Princess Donut (an uplifted cat), Hera (an AI whose body is the space station), and Rocky (a spiderlike rock alien), respectively, are not only non-human but non-humanoid at all in a manner that makes a sexual relationship categorically impossible, and due to amatonormativity, that presupposes that a romantic relationship is therefore also off the table. And there is something real there about such people not wanting a romantic relationship with the protagonist, due to not being human and not having that framework be their primary mode of connection, but also due to their nonhumanness, being presented as non-viable options as romantic partners for the human protagonist. (Yes I know about shipping. I'm talking about narrative framing.)(This also isn't quite as true about Eiffel and Hera - due to the audio medium, Eiffel as a human man and Hera as a disembodied voice coming from the station itself have equal "stage presence" in a way that any other medium could not have managed, which is super cool. However their actors Zach Valenti and Michaela Swee have been friends for years and were deliberately not interested in playing the relationship as romantic for "it would feel weird to be making kissy noises at my friends" way.)
So I do think sci-fi gives a lot of opportunity to (re)construct social norms, I think that's a good observation! And sci-fi also gives plenty of Plot Stuff to write if you set out just, not wanting to write a romance subplot so you don't, which I think is also going on in all of these (I mean, I know that was a conscious choice in Wolf 359!). I also genuinely think that having a protagonist who consistently prioritizes his friendship with an entity very different from himself without expecting it to turn romantic, over the possibility of other relationships that could turn romantic, is doing part of the work when I look at these characters and go "hmm I'm getting a-spec vibes."
(Obviously that's not the whole of it. Among other things we point to in a-spec readings of these characters, all three of them also have failed romantic relationships in their pasts that are very easy to interpret as "failed due to putting heteronormative pressure on themselves they didn't actually want" which is a big part of what lands them in the lower numbers of this scale, and the contrast between the romantic relationship they didn't actually seem to like or want very much vs. the genuine fulfillment they feel with their nonhuman and also not male BFF is definitely fueling the aro / ace reading too! And like there is definitely some willful reading against the probably-intended implications of how straight men talk about their exes. That is also part of what's happening here. Eiffel and Grace manage not to be obnoxiously bro-y about it or blame their exes for it.)
The three characters representing higher tiers are the opposite on all three metrics: intentionally-written-as-a-spec, female, and their primary committed, emotionally intimate, important relationship are with another human (or rather, Star Trek-style humanoid alien, in Hatov's case). We don't need to read into the character's struggles with heteronormativity and freedom in platonic relationships that they feel no pressure to make romantic because that's categorically off the table - the authors are writing the characters as a-spec on purpose and are interested in how that affects their relationships with other people in a conscious way.
Murderbot right in the middle is a hinge point in a couple ways, both being agender and having a committed, emotionally intimate, important relationship with both a human and a non-human intelligence. It's also definitely leaning hard on "robot-as-metaphor-for-outsiderness" that sci-fi is really good at.
Laying out all these patterns makes it feel like this is an objective assessment of how different authors write these characters and how they fall into three particular categories, but it's not necessarily. Not really. It's in some ways an artifact of the characters I had on my mind and wanted to talk about, because the other character I was considering putting as the type specimen for Tier 2 was Katniss Everdeen.
Which of course breaks the pattern. Katniss was also not written to be intentionally a-spec, but she's female, her main relationships are with her regular human sister and best friend, and she's the center of the second most famous love triangle in YA literature. (She is still from sci-fi, though.) And she comes off as intensely aro due to her general attitude of assuming any expression of romantic interest is either a bizarre out-of-pocket non-sequitur or part of an elaborate mind game to perform Romance for the voyeuristic thrill of the crowd who she needs to keep appeasing to stay alive. So like, the "uninentional a-spec" character isn't just a "straight men writing straight men with an 'unmarked' sexuality who fail with their girlfriends because that's #relateable" thing.
But then this wraps back around to what you said: the heightened and unreal settings of sci-fi allow for scenarios that push characters - and readers - to consider the normal and the abnormal, the expected relationships and the unexpected ways to consider and choose them. And I do think sci-fi is a very productive setting for taking a closer look at what we mean when we think about romantic and sexual and relationship normativity!
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