The AU Guy

Before I started writing in earnest, I did not understand how much writing was going to eat into my fic reading time. We joke about having too many tabs open, but I have a different problem: the amount of tabs I have open on new fics is way smaller than it used to be. My ao3 wrapped would be a sad affair. Unless I’ve subscribed to an author or come across something on my dash, I basically don’t see it

Which has really driven home for me how much fandom cannot just be creators. You have to have people who want to read fic and meta discussions and joke posts. You have to have people who want to look at art and gifs. It has to be mutual.

Community thrives on flow. You have to have that movement of people sharing things with each other for a community to exist

🐉 Meet the Contributors!

Arsanders | @arsanders

ASEXUALITY AND AROMANTICISM IS A SPECTRUM!!

An asexual person can want sex

An asexual person can be repulsed by sex

An asexual person can fall between

An aromantic person can want a romantic relationship

An aromantic person can hate the idea

An aromantic person can fall in between

There seems to be a weird phenomenon in fandom where people give their aro/ace headcannon to an unimportant side character or the one person that they don’t have a ship for. Every other character is shipped with another person and there is just one single person in their story and that is the aspec character.

And that is shitty for a few reasons.

You cannot only make the “boring” or ”undesirable” people aro/ace. It feels incredibly weird. Those are typically the characters that get sidelined in fics as well. There are outgoing aspec people. With friends and in some cases they are in relationships as well. They aren’t all shy introverted people or science geeks with no desire for a social life. But you don’t see that in fandom.

The other problem is that it seems like you cannot imagine an allo person being single. Choosing to stay single. Like the only way someone could be happy like that is if they were “incapable” of love and had to settle for what you perceive to be a lesser form of happiness.

You also often see the aroace label, but rarely aroallo or alloace headcannons anywhere. The aroace label just gets used as a “this character doesn’t date and is therefore unimportant” box.