#aroblogging

I'm not even opposed to being included in the former category, to be clear -- by society's standards, as an aro/ace person in a queerplatonic marriage, I am one of those weird perverted queers. But I would like if the other weird perverted queers actually acted like I belonged in their spaces, and not just when it's, like, a funny comeback.

Like, I actually do think the -repulsed/-averse labels still apply to me in some ways, but I also think that they sort of flatten the fact that there are a million different ways sex and romance can crop up in your life, because of how omnipresent it is in society. And some people really are uncomfortable with all of them, and that's so fair! But it does feel a little strange to me to have been in that situation previously, and to suddenly be like. Well. Sometimes it's fine actually. But only sometimes, or under specific circumstances.

I think I've been dwelling on this some because we're going to be moving imminently for my PhD and a lot of people I've met in my program so far do know I have a wife, but NOT that I'm aromantic or asexual (yet, at least, not yet -- I'm sure it'll come up). And it's sort of weird to be like huh. I used to struggle with calling Scribe my partner because I was stressed about the assumptions people were going to make, not understanding we have something queerplatonic specifically. Whereas now I'm more just glad people know she's important to me and that I have an easy shorthand for that and am okay with the explaining of the particulars coming later, if that makes sense? Like, I do still want to explain. I'm very aro anc that's very important to me, and also I want to expand people's idea of what might be going on within a committed relationship. But I'm no longer quite as paralyzed about someone misinterpreting things -- that's on them, not on me!

In any case. I'm so glad I'm aro/ace but also so glad I have someone to get through scary life stuff with, and I'm never going to stop being grateful that she loves being in an explicitly (queer)platonic marriage as much as I do. But man. There's just so many nuances to all this and sometimes it really does hit me that every ace and/or aro person's relationship to sex and romance is pretty unique, and I wish we talked about that more in ways that built solidarity instead of like. Creating one million different microlabels to switch between whenever or if your relationship with them shifts.

Like yes, it's partially that people who don't or won't understand asexuality and aromanticism are the ones writing bad representation, and in some cases aphobes are just going to be aphobes. But there's also this expectation that if you want to be a fun and cool creator and have your media get popular, you need to make it as appealing to shippers as possible. (Not to mention that these days, many creators have their origins in fandom, leading to further normalization of this kind of thing when they become showrunners/etc). And that causes so many problems, narratively and otherwise, but it also has a horrible impact on aspec representation.

And it fucking sucks. I hate that I know of multiple popular shows where the creator walked back a character being aromantic so that people would "have more fun"--in one showrunner's words, which is also one of the most offensively arophobic things I've ever heard a creator say--and others where characters' canon aromanticism and/or asexuality were minimized in order to appeal more to fandom's wildly aphobic preferences.

There's always, inevitably backlash when characters are confirmed as ace or aro, often in the form of people who are upset about them being the "wrong" kind of queer or insinuating that aspec rep doesn't "count" as queer representation in the same way as other identities. So there's something really significant about reveals that position the character in question as sharing something important with other queer people. In The Masquerades of Spring, it's Nightingale affirming Gussie and Lucy's gay relationship in the same breath as he admits he doesn't really understand "physical love" himself. I am also reminded of another one of my favorite ace character reveals, from the podcast ars PARADOXICA, where Dr. Sally Grissom reassures a lesbian character (in the 1950s) that the secret of her identity is safe with her, as another queer woman. Both these moments not only reveal Sally and Nightingale to be aspec, but they position them as queer, with ties to other queer people and who feel something of a sense of queer community.