#aceingrace

which is just flat out aromisia and belittling as hell. Especially when the flag is meant to represent multiculturalism and intersectionality. The stripe is literally pink for love. A western symbol. But then if you're aro and don't like being represented by the color of love, it's only because you have a western mindset?????? That is just blatant hypocracy.

and the creator has specifically said she *doesn't* give permission for people to change the shades of the colors unless the whole entire thing is getting changed at once, so you can't edit it to make it more accesible, cuz the "final" version right now is eyeburning almost on par with the usual intersex flag.

i don't feel like making an instagram account just to bring up the innaccessability, and other people have already brought up the aromisia, and I don't know how substack works.

Apparently there were tons and tons of surveys and polls about this. If that's true, how is the final version *this* eyeburning, and this belittling and erasing of aro aces?

I also just don't understand the purpose of attempting to reject the AVEN original ace flag, (for valid reasons. Why the hell does the white stripe officially stand for allies???) but then clearly just doing that again with two extra colors.

sigh

Once again. to the Queer community in general and especially those who make pride flags:

Please remember that disabled people exist. You should pretty much never be using full saturation, and if you want your flag to be accessible, you need to talk to lots of disabled people with photosensitivity to make sure it's not going to cause us migraines or seizures.

There's a reason the disability pride flag was almost immediately changed to be less saturated, and it's because the original *was causing seizures*

I'm just very bitter that aroaces always seem to get the short end of the stick whether it's in the ace or aro communities.

And no one ever wants to remember that disabled people also exist in these communities, and deserve to not be caused pain by trying to interact with the symbol that's supposed to represent us.

Editing to add the next day: There is no reason for any of this to be set in stone. This flag has already been changed from its original pastel form to this. It can change again. Nothing is stopping it from doing so if it's meant to actually be inclusive and intersectional and able to be something the whole entire asexual community can use.

(You can skip to the paragraphs below the empty gap if you don't have time or the energy to read it all.)

I apologize for the long absence. I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of interactions I've been receiving. I have good, or bad, news (depending on the individual and the diverse feedback you all have left):

Unfortunately, Ashabi, the creator of the Uni Ace Flag that prompted me to start this blog and project to update the aro flag, has made it clear that they're not interested in learning about loveless folks and how her flag is discriminatory towards them.

Actually loveless people have commented and messaged her, expressing the realness of their exclusion and hurt, but they just. Didn't care. Didn't address it.

What cemented this distrust I have in them now is that, in one of her latest posts, she shows how totally and utterly she's misunderstood what our issue with the pink stripe is. They think it's about "amatonormativity and romantic love". We've been telling her in no unclear terms that it's about *Love in General*, about loveless people, about how problematic it is that so many loving aces try to justify their humanity on their ability to "still love, like Normal People!!". But I guess she's just too alloro and loving to get it.

I was hoping she wasn't one of those, but their silence (and not silence, i.e. what they said in that post I mentioned) is speaking very loudly about what she believes matters and is worth being acknowledged in their flag and what needs to, essentially, be tone-policed.

I do not appreciate how she's been brushing off any and all criticism (the one that's not actually just cruel flames towards her person at least) by telling, for example, other neurodivergent people that they "just need to get over their fear of change", or not listening to other POC when they tell her she's not actually consulted with them at all. It's cruel and dismissive. It's not "inclusive" at all.

Also, so much for them allegedly having researched for 3 years in advance for this. They didn't even originally include aromantic experiences on that flag. And they thought they fixed it by now including "all forms of love: self love, Romantic, Platonic, QPR, Aromantic". The hell is "Aromantic" as a type of love??

Anyway, I was giving her patience and the benefit of the doubt, but following that post, I'm done associating with her and their redesign. These are all my issues with them, finally out.

That said!

We still have that issue with the white stripe in the OG aro flag. Just as a refresher: it currently represents "the platonic stripe" which of course isn't very inclusive of aplatonic aros. We still need to change it.

Therefore, I announce that I personally don't intend to update the look of the aro flag anymore.

If you all are still on board, I encourage us to keep the aro flag as it is, but update the meanings of the stripe or of the stripes.

This also solves youse's concerns with my yellow-striped redesing looking too much like the aroallo flag, and then the blue-striped redesign I followed it with looking like the non-SAM aro flag instead, lol.

And also!! While we're at it, what do you think about taking the opportunity to update the meaning of the OG ace flag's stripes as well?

When I have the spoons (and once I get an idea of whether or not we want to expand this to the OG ace flag as well), I'll create a new form so we can decide what meanings to assign to each stripe together, just like before. Open questions.

I apologize for wasting the time of everyone who's already responded on the first form, but I'll still take those answers into consideration even though I'll need to take some creative liberties with interpretation given the extra stripe.

AND I'll also take advantage of my hopefully decent enough language skills to provide the form (and associated post explaining what I'm doing) in a few other widely-spread languages beside English as well. Because I'm just a white person and I'm sure if Ashabi, a Black person, was lacking insight about what other POC needed, I'm really not equipped to go in it alone without consulting.

Was thinking of Spanish and French, which would cover most of Spanish-speaking central and southern America and French-speaking Africa, Portuguese for the same areas which I can't speak but can read enough to understand with the help of a translator (I'm Italian just for context), and Mandarin for China and some of SEA but I'm rusty and it will require a lot of spoons and grace from all you Mandarin speakers.

An asexual flag stimboard with various suitable stims!

I've returned to CSP after many months, and ended up making Pride art by coincidence(I had this drafted for a while, but the timing for when I completed this is quite perfect)!

These are my OCs Amy & Rivera; the background is inspired by Ashabi a.k.a., AceInGrace's asexual flag design.

Happy Pride Month to Ashabi, to the Black asexuals, Black aromantics, Black aroaces and all those that fall within that spectrum

Some extras below

five-striped version of aceingrace's asexual flag it mixes the pink and purple stripes into one stripe. the orange-yellow hue is created by finding the hue between the purple stripe and its inverse color.

i want to iterate that this is not an attempt to replace or fix aceingrace's flag. consider this a spinoff of it.

i also wanted to try making an aromantic flag inspired by it:

allosexual , alloromantic , allorose flags

So for the first slide, this isn’t really true considering the Black aces forum on AVEN is dead because nonblack aces kept going there and asking black aces questions on some magical all knowing negro nonsense. Which made the black aces abandon the forum that was supposed to be for them.

Again, they’re lying through their teeth. AVEN quite literally got into their own feelings about Ashabi even mentioning changing the meaning of the white stripe which is what led to all this drama. AVEN could’ve at least took Ashabi’s suggestion and made a poll on their forums and the other organizations they work with to see if the Ace community wanted to change the meaning of the stripe. But no, that didn’t happen because they got defensive over it(as explained in this article: https://aceingrace.substack.com/p/its-international-asexuality-day )

For the third slide, this is the leaked message they’re talking about:

Yet again, they’re lying. We can all clearly see that the message in response to mic says, “Thanks. Still keep it off our forums, as long as you can”

As long as you can does not imply it’s temporary. That implies a long term if not permanent intent to not have the survey there. The screenshot also says it’s the final final revision of the survey. The whole response goes beyond poor wording.