Okay, I don't know if this is actually a hot take or not, but I wanted to say this:
To me, often the stories that have no (overt) romance--but still clearly have love--are the most meaningful. Like, you can have Sam and Frodo fucking in your fanfic or your headcanons if you really want to, but isn't it beautiful that they didn't need romance to still love each other? To be willing to sacrifice so much for each other, and persevere through such hardship together? Isn't it meaningful to anyone that the kind of love--familial, platonic, friendship--was what sustained the heroes of a story through their trials when that kind of love is so often made a distant second to romantic, sexual love? Can't the love between friends, between chosen familial bonds, be enough? Must we reduce everything to just. Shipping. What if they were just friends? What if a story could still celebrate humanity and the power of love and still be aromantic and asexual? What if there were a platonic explanation for this, and it was the good old Power of Friendship?
Maybe I'm just in my aroace bitter feelings again, but it does get kind of alienating when all a fandom seems to want to talk about when engaging with their Story of Choice is what they think about the hypothetical sex.
This isn't about any particular fandom, despite my using LotR as the example, but I will say I firmly believe all Tolkien's characters are aroace, and any canonical relationships are qprs and any children sprung fully formed from the earth. The same goes for Terry Pratchett's characters. You can pry this from my cold, dead hands.