#creativity discussion posts

Since I’m not able to run a proper themed event this year, I thought I’d put together a list of categories and prompts for creative responses to Aromantic Awareness Week. As a media blog, I wanted something that has space for pieces by our wonderful aro-spec creators and aro-spec folks who want to support their favourite creators, discuss their favourite media pieces or share with us their hopes for future aro-spec representation.

Folks who want to participate can @ mention me on their posts (or submit content right to this blog) and I’ll do my best to reblog everything here during the week.

Please note that all prompts are open to original and fancontent responses alike, can be explored through characters both canon and headcanon, and are open to any aro-spec identity or combination of identities involving one or more aro-spec identity. I’m really just offering a little direction for folks who might be wanting to contribute something this week but aren’t sure where to begin.

If your response doesn’t fit any of the suggested options but still merges aro-spec identities and creative media, please don’t let that stop you from letting me know about it. Older and already-posted content is more than welcome, as are new chapters for works you’ve already shared with us. Basically, if you have something you want to share, please let us know about it.

(I’m going to be showing off an aro-themed dollhouse display I’ve been working on, so when I mean anything that’s aro-spec and creative, I do mean anything.)

Apologies for the extreme last-minute nature of this, but I hope folks find this list useful anyway. And I very much look forward to seeing the wide and wondrous creativity of the aro-spec community on display!

Visual Art

Responses can include:

Posting your own aro-spec visual artworks, like paintings or drawings

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec visual artists

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec visual artworks

Creating moodboards around aro-spec themes, identities, experiences or characters

Poetry

Responses can include:

Posting your own poetry or links to poetry collections

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec poets

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec poems and works of poetry

Reviewing your favourite aro-spec works of poetry

Posting YouTube videos of folks reading aro-spec poetry

Plays, Podcasts and Film

Responses can include:

Posting your own scripts for current or future aro-spec TV episodes, plays, podcasts or films

Posting fanfiction concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) in visual/auditory creative media

Posting meta discussions concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) in visual/auditory creative media

Posting moodboards or fanart concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) in visual/auditory creative media

Posting YouTube videos about aromanticism or aro-spec characters

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec-friendly TV shows, TV episodes, plays, podcasts or films

Reviewing your favourite aro-spec-friendly TV shows, TV episodes, plays, podcasts or films

Comics and Manga

Responses can include:

Posting your own comics, be they pages from a larger comic or a short webcomic, concerning aro-spec characters

Posting fanfiction concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) from comics, webcomics or manga

Posting meta discussions concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) in comics, webcomics and manga

Posting moodboards or fanart concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) in comics, webcomics and manga

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec comics, webcomics and manga

Reviewing your favourite aro-spec comics, webcomics and manga

Pride Craft and Merch

Responses can include:

Posting photos of your own pieces of aro-spec pride craft and merch

Listing or linking to pieces of aro-spec pride craft and merch you wish to own

Listing or linking to creators of aro-spec pride craft and merch

Reviewing favourite pieces or creators of aro-spec pride craft and merch

(Note: this can include plush, jewellery, clothing, keychains, accessories, home decor pieces, stationery, stickers, anything.)

Music and Playlists

Responses can include:

Posting your own music relating to aro-spec themes or experiences

Listing or linking to songs or playlists that are aro-spec friendly or concern aro-spec themes or experiences

Listing or linking to songs or albums by aro-spec musicians

Composing playlists that are aro-spec friendly or concern aro-spec themes or experiences

Posting meta discussions and reviews about favourite aro-spec musicians or music

Books and Fiction

Responses can include:

Posting or linking to your own books or stories concerning aro-spec characters and experiences

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec writers

Listing or linking to your favourite aro-spec books, stories and fiction pieces

Reviewing your favourite aro-spec works

Posting fanfiction concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) from books

Posting meta discussions concerning aro-spec characters (or characters headcanoned as aro-spec) from books

How to Participate

Submit a new post to @aroworlds

@ mention @aroworlds in your post

I just want to let you know that I’ve been struggling with family issues, to the point where I had to have my psychologist come around today.

I haven’t been okay for many days and I’m still not okay. Today I learnt that the reason Mum doesn’t say anything positive to me about my writing is because she thinks it’s “too gay” and my psychologist phrased this judgement as a good thing I should take on board as important feedback--that, for my own benefit, I should consider being a lot less queer in what I write.

It will be better for my financial benefit, because we live in a world that often doesn’t financially reward queer indie creators.

For my emotional benefit, though? For my sense of worth as a person? How do I find any sense that I deserve to exist as the person I am if I’m editing myself out of my own work? How do I find the courage to have pride in my identities? How do I exist as a real person if I cannot be real in my own creativity?

It’s so hard for LGBTQIA+ people to find pride in who we are. I grew up in a house where my lesbian cousin was The Person We Didn’t Talk About to my Dutch Catholic grandparents. My grandparents died not knowing who I really am because I am something we didn’t speak aloud to them. Those are scars I still carry, this sense that I should not be bold and proud and defiant about who I am, and both the message and the damage it causes all the years after isn’t something the world likes to acknowledge. As aro-specs, in a world where we’re not even seen to exist and our existence is contentious even within spaces that should be safe (like parts of LGBTQIA+ Tumblr) we’re not free from this, even before we consider what amatonormativity says, more directly, about people who live and feel the way we do.

Before now, I’d been feeling positive about being really fucking aro in my writing. I’d been enjoying this process of expressing experiences that I’ve never seen in fiction. Of making myself a little more real, each story at a time, in a world where my existence feels intangible, impossible or undesirable. Of validating my feelings, of doing the radical thing of treating myself as the person I am as though I deserve to be a hero in a story about my identities and experiences, using my words and identity terms.

Privileged people have the privilege of not making their works appear centred on being cis or heterosexual or alloromantically-heteroromantic--in the sense that while their works always centre on these things, that centering isn’t treated as anything but normal. It’s just as obnoxious (depending on how much you like identity centred in a work); the difference is only one of true acceptance. Writing a story about a cishet couple is “normal”; writing a story with a non-binary aromantic character who uses aromantic terminology is “too queer”.

Today, I am being asked to be less of myself in my creativity by two people who think they are being accepting of me in saying this.

Please, please--support your aro-spec creators. Please let them know that they’re loved and appreciated. Please let them know that they’re needed. Please let them know that we’re grateful for the steps they take in making worlds that depict us--both as we are now and as we wish to be in the future. Please let them know that we are grateful for their courage in creating works that depict us even when the world is telling them that they’re only valuable, artistically and financially, when they limit or diminish their aromanticism and/or their queerness. Please let us make sure, as a community, that we can stand together, strong and proud, against an onslaught of messages that demand their erasure and silencing.

Please support your aro-spec creators so they can stand firm in the face of what I heard today and continue to write (or tell or draw or sing or however it is that one creates) the stories we need.

Thanks so much for your best wishes, anon! For me, it comes down to three different factors, although not all autistics will have these in common, many autistics will have a different arrangement of primary senses, and neurodiverse folk who aren’t autistic or neurotypicals may have some or all of them! With this sort of thing, when folks connect to my experiences, I usually consider it an indication that autism may be worth exploring if you haven’t already, but because neurodiversity has so many similar expressions attached to several diagnoses, not to mention the possibility of comorbid or accompanying diagnoses, it doesn’t mean others should be excluded, either.

(I’m wary of making the yes, you’re absolutely autistic because I am pronouncements, because neurodiversity is such a broad and complex field and the only experiences I can speak for, at the end of the day, are my own. In me, they’re attached to this label; in others, they may not be.)

The first is that I have almost no ability to visualise images inside my head (aphantasia). I have more of an abstract knowledge of what things are--for example, I can tell you that Mum has wavy blond hair and crinkles around her eyes and she looks now like Oma (my grandmother) did in my early childhood, but I have no corresponding image of what she (or Oma!) looks like inside my head. I don’t have any visual sense without looking at her right in front of me. I don’t see a red apple in my head; I sort of think that it will have a brown stalk at the top and green shading around the stalk and the apple curves in at the bottom. The best I get as a mental picture is a red, circular blob, and for non-simple objects or scenes, not even that much. When I think of my room, for example, I list the things within it and their details rather than imagine them.

(I also have prosopagnosia, difficulty recognising faces, and while I can make eye-contact if I feel safe, I’d much rather not. It feels … it feels uncomfortable and rude and painful all at once in ways I struggle to describe. This makes fictional descriptions of people difficult for me, because I tend to interpret mood based on movement, word choice and tone of voice, not facial expressions or arrangement of facial features. As for distinguishing features, like size of nose or lips? I just don’t notice these at all.)

For this reason, when I attempt to write a scene, I have no picture of said scene in my head. None. I’m building it instead from an abstract knowledge of small details and how I think they might fit together, and while reference pictures can help, I’m rarely able to put it together the way allistic critique partners have asked of me. I’ll note that I know a few allistics with aphantasia, including one of the people who frustrated me most about wanting more description, so other people don’t seem to find it so much of a problem.

The second is that, like many autistics, I have more of a small detail sensibility–in other words, I see small details before I see the whole scene together, if I do at all. For me, a busy street scene is footsteps clattering on the pavement, the smell of petrol and perfume, music blaring from shop doorways, the screech of breaks as a car stops, the reflection on the wet asphalt as the lights change. It’s not the larger structure of the street and shops or the amount of people and cars occupying the street. The whole is suggested, for me, by the way the pieces of the small fit together.

Many allistics have read my work telling me to “describe more”, and I’m baffled, because I described the smell of the smoke and the rust of the metal and how the lift-cage creaked! How much more description do they want? Do I have to describe the shape of each flake of rust or something? I suspect it has to do with their passing over the smaller details I’ve provided in search of a missing big-picture description, while I’m just adding more and more smaller details to paint the scene, not realising that there’s anything missing–and to this day, I have no idea how to provide what they want. I don’t experience the world that way.

The third is that the world I experience is shaped more by touch, sound, taste, movement and smell than sight, more than is normal for most abled allistics. I’m better at non-visual small details than I am visual small-details. In a world where film and television have changed so much about what is expected from prose, especially genre/non-literary prose, this means my work isn’t as accessible as expected–it lacks that easily-visualised sensibility. I tend to describe how people move over depicting colour, for example, as this is something I’m more sensitive to as a stimmer. The feel of a cloth is something more natural to me to describe than its pattern.

All those things together means that my work describes things that aren’t expected to be described while leaving a lot that is expected to be described undescribed, and so far no writing teacher or crit partner has been able to explain precisely what they mean by describe more. It’s obvious to them; it’s a mystery to me. In the last couple of years, I’ve been slowly working on trying to build my descriptions and setting in ways that feel real and meaningful to me–to write how I think is natural as an autistic. There’s a lot of rules of prose to work through to try and find whatever my authentic autistic voice is underneath, though, and I’m nowhere near finished in this process.

So it’s important to me that someone else understands that my goal isn’t to make my work fit allistic expectations of description. It’s to try and better use tools of description to paint the world as I know it, so allistics can peer in and see how things look like to me–even if that image is focusing on the feel and smell of a soft wool blanket against a blurry, vague background. So I suppose my challenge is one of learning how to better convey that these gaps in my description are not a mistake but are instead the nature of my worldview–to give them a more easily-perceived sense of intentionality. I am absolutely not yet there, but I’ll keep trying.

I hope that gives you some idea, anon, from where I’m coming, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this is the combination of autism and writing for me. Just as there’s so many different shapes of autism, there’s so many different shapes of how autism interacts with writing, too.

I am somewhat biased in that I’ve written an aro character who means “all love” when he says he doesn’t love (and this is explored further and more explicitly in his future stories) so, as someone who has a complicated relationship to love myself, bring them on.

I am so tired of seeing “love” billed as the ultimate indicator of a “good” character while “inability to love” is the ultimate indicator of “evil”–despite the fact that some of the most difficult things I have endured came about from someone else’s love. If relatives bullied me and friends-who-wanted-to-be-boyfriends stalked me despite and because of their ability to love, why should an inability to love mean anything when love just as often motivates cruelty? In my opinion, there is nothing inherently misrepresentative of aro-specs in a character’s inability to love–just the social tangle of ableism and aromisia and amatonormativity from other people in unquestioned assumptions that ability to love makes a protagonist. Why should it?

I talk more about autism-coding than aromisia in the following, but a lot of negative/stereotypical autism-coding is applied to aro-specs (or characters coded as aromantic) because Western society in its unquestioned ableism deems autistics as a handy pre-existing representation of “heartless” and “inhuman”. I’ve also got a second ask on a similar subject that talks about idealised representation in writing a single character versus writing multiple characters of that identity, anon, so please consider this the first half of my response as opposed to the entirety. Everything I say in response to the second ask will be relevant to you as well.

Anon, I told you this was going to be long, but … well, it’s long!

The problem is that amatonormativity is a wall I keep hurling myself against, as an aro and as an aro creative, and there isn’t much conversational space where I am permitted to go all out in talking about it. I fear discussing this with too much vehemence, to go beyond the hand-holding 101 conversations about being aro, in case I alienate the alloromantic folks who do support me. Alloromantic people aren’t interested in conversations that undermine their sense of the world, and aro-spec spaces are small; both things together result in silence.

Because of this, I think it’s reasonable that this is something hard to grasp, for aro-spec and alloromantic folks alike: the educative conversations are hard to find or don’t exist. When you add to the fact that for the last two years a-spec people have been fighting targeted hate, that our conversations have fallen back to claws-out defence or the shield of validation, how the hell are we supposed to understand our own experiences, especially something as-yet-unquestioned as the practical impact of amatonormativity?

I hope you don’t mind, but because this is so long, I’m going to concentrate on amatonormativity in media and its impact on me as a creative.

In terms of fictional media, I think amatonormativity shows itself most obviously in the concept of a happy ending–that two people in a romantic relationship is by far the most common variant. No, not all stories end witha romantic happy ending, but so many do, even if it’s only a romantically-happy-for-now ending. Think Disney films; think action films shoving in an unnecessary romantic side-plot because the hero gets the girl once the explosions are over; think every story where the guy got the girl for reasons we the audience are expected to accept without question.

Likewise, a film with a tragic or unhappy ending is often shown by a protagonist not falling in romantic love or the dissolution of a romantic relationship. While there are other forms of indicating tragedy, the lack of a romantic paring for a character expected to be in one is common. There’s a reason Romeo and Juliet has long been framed as a tragic romance even though the tragedy, I’d argue, lies more in the impact of feuding families on the next generation, not the death of two young people in a “star-crossed” romance.

Even genres that aren’t romantic in the sense that romance isn’t the focus of the plot will still include sexual and romantic tension between characters: many of the crime and thriller novels I’ve read, supposedly less romantic because they target a cishet male audience, devote a great many pages to depicting romantic relationships nonetheless. The majority of YA novels depict the development of romantic relationships (which is why I kept reading middle-grade books even when I was too old for them) and even low-romance adult fiction still has the protagonists having had or desiring a romantic relationship at some point. So many literary works deal with the breakdown of romantic relationships, affairs, being single, unrequited love, or the way dangerous or alien environments, or the tyranny of distance, places stresses on romantic partnerships. These often won’t have purely happy endings–often tragic or complicated–because they’re Literary, but they’re just as obsessed with romantic love as any romance novel. In constantly going on about romance’s failure without ever making the point that someone can be happy and self-fulfilled without it, literary works are as amatonormative as anything else.

Romantic love and relationships don’t have to be successful: we just have to show a character desiring these or struggling with these, just so the audience knows that the protagonist is human. Characters who are shown as disdaining romance, or being uninterested in it, are usually antagonistic characters who are beyond redemption, are aliens or robots, or are coded as robotic–characters who are literally inhuman or portrayed as such. There’s a reason that The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper becomes a kinder, more “normal”, less-autistic-coded man the more he falls in romantic love with Amy, despite being introduced as extremely aroace-coded, and it’s called amatonormativity.

This is the point in the post where we aro-specs are giving the world that long, pained stare, and for good reason.

Romantic love as a marker of human worth is the most succinct way I can describe the impact of amatonormativity. It’s not a flawless summary, but so often romance is treated as a universal concept, relevant to all, because Western society uses the possession of or desire for romantic love as an indicator of a person’s humanity. Romantic love makes us human, and so romantic love is everywhere, unquestioned and unassailable.

Elements of a more expanded sense of amatonormativity include:

- The idea that romantic attraction, love and relationships are universal to the human experience (predominantly a relationship encompassing, exclusively, one perisex heterosexual-and-heteromantic cis man and one perisex heterosexual-and-heteromanticcis woman).

- The idea that romantic love is the primary form of love and all other forms, once one gains a certain level of socially-acceptable maturity or adulthood, are naturally secondary.

- The idea that romantic love and relationships are relatable to and attainable by all, and any failure to relate to it or attain it is a personal or moral failing.

- The idea that people who do not experience, attain or desire a romantic partnership are, after a certain age, childish or childlike, immature, robotic, alien, inhuman.

- The idea that sex (especially non-heterosexual or non-vanilla sex) is only acceptable, for a person of high moral character, when it comes paired with romantic love. (Characters who have sex without romantic love are often coded as grasping, hateful, calculating, predatory.)

- The idea that the attainment of romantic love and relationships is a marker of character development, growth, adulthood or redemption.

- The idea that because romantic love and relationships are universal, to not depict them in media is to render one’s work childish or uninteresting. (Every aro-spec creator of narrative media knows the impact of this one.)

- The idea that the lack of romantic love or relationships, or the desire for these, is an indicator of a person of low moral character.

- The unquestioned idea that romance sells, accompanied with the assumption that the inclusion of romance in a work (or the story-arc of a protagonist) is a necessary part of making that work (or character) appealing to all audiences.

- No comprehension that romantic attraction can be felt and experienced in a diversity of ways and strengths, particularly with regards to fluctuation, intensity and circumstance.

- Very little comprehension of the difference between romantic attraction and romantic behaviours.

- An assumption that there is a certain set of behaviours that are only or best experienced with romantic attraction. (Engaging in these behaviours without romantic attraction is also often coded as predatory.)

Our next aro-spec creator is Shell, already known to the aro-spec community as @arosnowflake and the author of the awesome short story Seducing Trouble!

Shell is an autistic, ADHD, non-binary aro-ace person who writes short stories, original fiction, fanfiction and essays. You can find eir fanworks on AO3 under the username spitecentral, writing for the Voltron: Legendary Defender, Fullmetal Alchemist, DC Universe, Batman and Batgirl fandoms, and we’ll hope ey posts more pieces from eir original Coffeeshop Project!

With us Shell talks about how ey writes romance as an aro-ace, depicting relationships in fiction, the impact of amatonormativity on creativity and eir alienation from current aro-spec community conversations. Eir words bound with enthusiasm on authentic creativity and the growth of the aro-spec community, so please let’s give em all our love, encouragement, gratitude, kudos and follows for taking the time to explore what it is to be aromantic and creative.

Can you share with us your story in being aro-spec?

I never thought I was anything other than straight, although I did start noticing that I was different from other people when I was as young as twelve (for example, I remember being asked to pick the handsomest guy in a boy band, but to me, they all looked the same). However, I simply put this down to my autism, and since I was already desensitized to differences with peers, I pretty much ignored it. That is, until I repeatedly saw the word ‘asexual’ used online, and I began to wonder what it was, so I googled it. After reading the first paragraph on the Wikipedia page, I basically slammed my computer shut and did my very best to convince myself that no, I was overreacting, and also straight; after all, I was already autistic and ADHD, so any more diversity would be implausible.

Past me was so naive.

Anyway, I came to terms with being asexual at sixteen, and openly started identifying with it without adding ‘I think’ when I was seventeen. When I learned about the SAM, I initially dismissed the idea of being aro because I had a couple of crushes when I was a kid. However, after learning more about aromanticism and after some conversations with aromantic people, I decided to adopt the label since it really fit me. I mean, I was like nine when I had those crushes, and I don’t feel like they counted. I’m fairly sure now that I was just having them because it seemed like the Thing To Do, and, even then, all of my fantasies involved a more platonic ‘best friends forever but with shared pets’ lifestyle than a romantic thing. So while I may or may not have had crushes before, I don’t think I ever will again, and I don’t want to either, so I’ve adopted the aromantic label. I know it sounds weird, but oh well!

Can you share with us the story behind your creativity?

I don’t remember exactly why or when I began to write. I know it happened when I was around twelve, but that’s kind of it? It’s not really a spectacular story. As for how I began to create the things I do now, that’s slightly more interesting. Really, everything centers around one thing: spite. No one writes autistic characters, and no one writes stories with no romantic plotlines, so I guess I’ll have to do it myself! That’s my literal thought process behind my writing at any given moment, honestly. Even when I’m not writing about autism or other marginalized identities, I write obscure and sometimes absurdist fantasy with magic types or settings that I haven’t seen used before, because I find writing that fascinating, or because I’m annoyed that no one else has used that particular idea. I’m fairly sure that was the reason I began writing originally, too: I had stories I wanted to read, and no one was writing them, so I guess I’ll have to do it.

gloriousmonsters replied to your post “Ah thank you K.A! Forgot to mention I'm autistic too, so I think I do...”

it's so cool to see other autistics talking about learning stuff about themselves from things they write?? I haven't run into it before and always felt kind of weird that most of my self-knowledge has come from looking at stories and characters (esp one specific one) and going 'oh dang I didn't know that about myself.'                                                                                like that one character in particular I wrote as trans before i realized i was trans, had an ED before i realized I struggled with one, was autistic before i knew I was autistic, etc etc etc. it’s gotten to the point where when my sibling asks me something about myself I’ll sometimes joke ‘let’s see what 'name of character’ says’                            

Forgive us for the side conversation, fabulous followers! I’m tagging anything like this as #off topic, so if you’d rather blacklist this tag in favour of aro-spec awesomeness, by all means do so.

I don’t see it discussed either--maybe because there’s not a lot in the way of blogs focusing on autistic creativity, which leads to these sorts of conversations and revelations? There’s a lot more conversations on autistic experiences and identity, but not so much on particularly autistic creativity and narrative. I’ve never seen anyone else voice this before now, but it feels so birthed from my inability to easily identify what I feel outside my writing it can’t not be an autistic experience.

(Side note: I was excited to see another autistic, trans, aro-spec creator in the artist profiles! We exist! *flaps hands*)

Everything significant about my life, experiences and identity was written into my works before I knew they applied to me. Autistic characters. Characters with sensory processing disorder. (I thought I was basing my story on the experiences of a friend, and it took me several months to realise I was describing me.) Trans, pansexual, aro, aro-ace, non-binary characters. Characters with mental illnesses. Some of it was more of a case of me writing out an experience and then recognising that happened to me and this is how I feel about it, even though I’d identified it as something else at the time; a lot of it was prophetic, part of my brain knowing things before the rest of my brain.

I think that my brain is pretty decent at subconscious analysis, but the bridge between said analysis and conscious awareness doesn’t exist--it can’t communicate this knowledge (especially not in real-time) to the part of my brain that recognises what it is I know. So a lot of my creativity in narrative is me talking to myself, a process of forming that bridge. It’s just that because it’s indirect communication, until I finally realised what was happening, it was so easy to miss. Now I’m aware of it, I pay more attention to it (although I’m still surprised by emotional revelations) and acknowledge it as a method of understanding who I am.