#aro coded

• The mc maomao is so aro/ace coded

spoilers below the cut

TW: Brief discussion of queerphobia

I can't emphasize enough how hurtful it was to grow up with Little Women as my favorite book (it was also my first book, at age 5) and Jo March as my favorite character; reading her explicitly rejecting a romantic proposal and finally thinking "this is a possibility, I don't have to say yes just because they're my friend" and then watching a lot of people saying that she's selfish, immature, and ungrateful because of that. It is very hard to separate the comments toward Jo to the ones I know I could get if I express her same feelings. They make me feel unaccepted, hurt and as if there was something wrong with me (which for many years made me feel very alienated). Even more, hearing people I know criticize her that way make me feel unsafe to ever consider coming out to them.

Yes, she's "just a book character" but this is why representation is important. We know the "healthy" side of having LGBTQIA+ representation: to feel seen, to see our experiences talked about on a story, to have characters we can use to explain our orientation/identity/attraction to other people. But queer representation also shows us how some people would react to us: denial, repulsion, invalidation. It shows that some would explore virtually any other possibility before accepting that someone is not straight/cisgender; it shows the other side of the coin, the one in which some identities "are ok" but others aren't.

I've had to read and watch tons of Little Women's analysis where it is talked that Jo was confused, or even "playing hard to get". I've gotten tired of explaining how it is possible that Louisa May Alcott was basically forced to give her a love interest because of the expectations of publishers (and the own public, but mostly publishers so it would "sell well"), and that Jo was supposed to stay single on the original plan. I've talked about the own Louisa's life and how she never married, and how the 2019 Gretta Gerwing's version attempts to redeem this part of the story showing "what was expected of female writers (Jo and Louisa respectively)

Canon (Aro)Aces 163/?: Esperanza ‘Spooner’ Cruz (Lisseth Chavez) in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow 6x5 The Satanist's Apprentice (2021) 1/ 14