On this land shall darkness prevail

Hey, I finished drawing the rest of The Pool Scene ™!

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”

When I told my grandmother’s friend group about aromanticism most of them didn’t understand, they were polite and asked a lot of questions, some didn’t really believe it bc well, people in their 70s are rarely that open minded; but there was this one lady that looked pensive and when the others quieted down she asked me if the name for it had existed long, and when I said no she told me about her best friend:

A 74 year old woman who had married young, back when my country was in a fascist dictatorship and women couldn’t have/make their own money, so their only hope was marriage. They lived together years, and I’m not sure if they had children, but as soon as it was legal for her to divorce she did, and, living in a small town, she faced her neighbours’ questions and judgement: Was he a bad husband? Did he cheat or treat her badly? Was it the other way around? He wasn’t “man enough”? And many less nice things.

Her answer to all of them was that her now ex husband was a wonderful man, and that they’d remain friends as they’d always been, because on her side that’s all there could be, because she didn’t find it in herself to love, not him nor any man or woman, but still cared deeply for him as she did for all her friends.

She now lives happily in retirement, traveling around the country with her friends, ex husband included, and also has a cat.

When the lady told me this she sounded doubtful at first, afraid she was appropiating but when I told her that the experience sounded like those on our community she looked so happy, and kindly asked me to write down the terms and what they mean on a paper so she could show her friend when she went back home, tell her that she wasn’t alone that there were more people who had united and have a name and are fighting to be recognised.

That day I realised something: That there are more of us than we know about, that in this age of information many of the older generation were still estranged from the net and among them there are aromantic people too. And that for those people who have probably felt other and wrong most of their lives, the knowledge of the label and community, the confirmed existence of others like them that feel it’s important enough to recognise that feeling or lack thereof, can be just as healing, reassuring and important as it was for us, the newer generation who stumbled upon the term on the internet when we were teens.

The internet is great, of course, but if we want to find the older aros de have to look for them, because they most surely haven’t found themselves in that label yet either. And to do so we must share our terms and experiences and shout to the world that we exist outside the screens, that we are real. I know it can be risky or even dangerous but if we wish to find them, and hopefully make them a bit happier, it’s all we can do.

But like, thematically it’s also just fundamentally super fucking gay in a way I’m still trying to articulate.

Part of it is in the religious oppression narrative. And it’s in the found family vibe. It’s in Catra trying to assure Shadow Weaver that it’s “just a phase” when Adora first defects from the horde. It’s in the princesses forming a literal rainbow when they work together at the end of season one. It’s Bow “coming out” as a rebel fighter to his two dads.

It’s in Adora’s narrative of being told her whole life to deny her own needs and desires, like that part in season five when Shadow Weaver is trying to convince her that Catra is a distraction? And that Catra will always be a dangerous and corrupting influence on her? But then her vision of Mara tells her that she deserves to have love. 

It’s in Adora initially being mislead to believe Mara was a monster when she was actually a freedom fighter who refused to submit to her predestined path.

And it’s in Catra’s angry repressed… everything. On a subtextual level everything about Catra’s narrative reads like an angry abused gay teenager whose disconnect with her own feelings has turned both self destructive and outwardly destructive. And then in season 5 when she’s brainwashed/converted by horde prime and tells Adora she’s finally at peace and free from feeling anything about her. Like. THE SUBTEXT.

And then also the way Adora/Catra are paralleled to Spinerella/Netossa in season 5. And Spinerella’s line, when she’s first revealed to be possessed, that’s something like “it’s a pity we can’t be together in the light of horde prime”. Which like, obviously refers to the fact that no individual relationships of any kind get to exist, period, under his rule because nobody gets to be an individual. But, again, the subtext. The layer of meaning there that wouldn’t exist if they were a straight couple.

But then the thing that saves the ENTIRE UNIVERSE is Adora and Catra finally accepting their love for each other (and turning into a LITERAL RAINBOW when they kiss).

And just the whole emphasis on supposed imperfections and impurities being people’s greatest strengths. It’s just.