"and what if I said Hawkeye pierce" to the old man asexual post - eye-opening. what is the asexual hawkeye headcanon? can you say more?
dfhjklfdgfkdhgfjgshfjg LISTEN I ALWAYS LOVE ASEXUALISING THE SEEMINGLY VERY ALLOSEXUAL
ok so i feel like aromantic Hawkeye isn't much of a reach, he either goes for doomed romance, or runs away (and there's his whole Dynamique with Margaret), so I often think about how like. Romance is societally Encoded and so there are times when Hawkeye thinks he oughta romance because it's The Right Thing To Do when you like someone (Margaret also needs to unlearn this, see after they have sex One Time and she's like "ok we're dating now" and it completely ruins things for them until they sort out between them that they absolutely should not be dating!!! and from that point on they become p much steadily best friends)
so the asexual leap (which i will absolutely acknowledge is a leap but take it with me!) is actually very similar: it's Societally Encoded
Hawkeye is... kinda kinky. and lonely. and wants companionship. and he's charming and he likes to be liked, and he's insecure. AND i don't think he minds sex, per se. it's what's on offer, people like him for it, he gets stuff out of his mind, etc. it like. does the job, yknow? it's no big deal... but as the show goes on he clearly pursues it less and less because it doesn't do the job anymore (Alan Alda called it an empty pursuit even.... not for ace reasons ofc, but continue on this leap!) and it's not actually what he ever Really needed
NOW FLASH FORWARD WITH ME to the mystical time post-canon and i can imagine Hawkeye just. not looking for sex anymore. he's still lonely. he still wants companionship. in my ideal world Hawkeye and Margaret continue being friends post-canon because they get each other extremely well and can build a relationship not predicated on romance which would make it easier for both of them to get by in a world that demands certain performances (in a sadder world they don't see each other that often and Hawkeye is still kinda lonely... but then I think he'll always find like-minded people, see further below in this)
but what about the sex?
well there's a couple of versions of this also, one of which is my "Hawkeye is looking for kink, not sex, but sex and kink are also socially linked even though they don't have to be and i imagine him more interested in the kink side and the sex is (like i said before) also there. or not." what sort of kink is dealer's choice, but the show does give hints of what one can play with! (personally a hefty side of classic D/s, potentially some pain if he's not a wimp about it, and just for my sake a little lingerie crossdressing... which quickly goes to Gender if one wants, but doesn't have to)
the other one is ditch the kinky side (it could just be talk after all) and Hawkeye very comfortably simply never has sex again. or a romantic relationship. and it's not even really something he thinks about because he's fully A Weirdo now so people don't try it with him the way they used to in his 20s (and he's done his time in the uh... trenches. as it were)
maybe he does some charitable work down the line helping people with PTSD, maybe he finds his way to anti-war protesting, maybe he develops an interest in helping patients who are HIV+ in the 80s (he'd be in his 60s or so then?) so he's already got a foot in that world. maybe he gets some friends generally who know him as the guy who's a confirmed bachelor and everyone sort of assumes he's an elderly gay man (because ace and gay lives follow similar trajectories often, esp before the 21st century)
the only real question here is whether he discovers anything in relation to this kind of identity-forming. a lot of early ace (which covered aro) Stuff was often not very widespread. yes it's been around as a word for over 100 years and there's Kinsey's "X" and the asexual manifesto, but would Hawkeye know about any of that, reasonably?
or would he just be like "shrugs, used to do that sort of thing to get through some of my time overseas when I was drafted, then I just kinda stopped." would people see it as a symptom of trauma? would they just honorably include him in queer spaces because he's "basically one of them" in the way he is (camp mannerisms, demeanour, political views, outsider-status, and he's everyone's friend)
much to mull on in the details but. in terms of the sex itself. the core element of it is "does he really want that or is it a societally ingrained stand-in for what he actually wants that he gradually lets go of (including in the show itself), entirely relinquishing it when he gets home..."
