#finally some discourse

the way you say it it seems nora made andrew have sex with roland. if we phrase it this way then she made drake have sex with him too. she did not have to do that. she also made nathan burn neil with a hot iron. did she need to do that? probably not, neil has been through enough. why don’t we revoke her rights for that instead?   

i really don’t know what to say to you. the way i see it andrew was a teen who, despite everything he’s been through, was exploring his sexuality. for that purpose he chose roland who was older then him - well teens do stupid thing like that sometimes. if we weren’t allowed to write about those stupid things ya as a genre wouldn’t exist. roland wasn’t able to respect andrew’s boundaries, yes, but it sounds like a roland problem to me, not a nora problem. just as there are teens who will pursue older people sexually despite it being a stupid and dangerous idea, there will be older people who will disregard those teens’ boundaries. are we not allowed to depict it in fiction? or did nora have to explicitly state at some point how problematic andrew and roland’s fuck buddies situation was? like have neil return to him in that scene at eden’s and be like roland you’re an old creep you should be ashamed of yourself? 

i would argue that it isn’t the author’s responsibility to put a disclaimer before every problematic thing they depict, it is rather the reader’s responsibility to reflect upon those things and understand why they’re unacceptable behaviors that should be condemned. it’s very good that you know that roland shouldn’t have accepted andrew’s advances. but for those who don’t - it’s not nora’s job to spoon-feed it to them. aftg is neither middle grade nor ya and nora’s isn’t your baby sitter.

that being said i guess the underlying problem here is not that nora shouldn’t have put some things in her books but that some readers who can’t recognize that those things aren’t condoned or who just get upset by those things or get triggered by them - those readers shouldn’t read aftg. how do we warn them? trigger warnings would be a good first step. idk if there are any in the books themselves but they should also be on a visible place on goodreads. another good step would be stop misrepresenting aftg on tumblr in such a way that people think it’s a wacky gay sports romance only to be disillusioned after reading it. but in the end, we are responsible for what media we consume. nora didn’t make anybody read anything as far as i know. 

so yesterday i got those two upset asks bcs i may have worded what i said in a way insulting to sex-repulsed people but it got me thinking and i formed an opinion on the matter

so firstly, allosexuality is a spectrum just like asexuality. people who feel attraction and/or like sex are different and sex has different meaning to each of them. so naturally there are people who can live without it just fine and if their partner happens to be sex-repulsed they’d have no problem dispensing with sex. but there are also people for whom sex is an integral part of their lives. and if they fall in love with a sex-repulsed person who can’t have sex with them, it’s logical that they’d consider an arrangement where they could still have sex with other people. it’s not cheating if their partner agrees to it and it doesn’t mean that they don’t love their partner enough. bcs sex ≠ love. you can have sex with people you don’t love and not have it with people you love. expecting your partner to give up things they like to do in order to be with you and to prove their love is kinda entitled in my opinion. however, if it’s really important to you that they don’t do those things - like i imagine it’s very important to most people that their partners don’t have sex with other people - then it means that you’re not compatible. it doesn’t mean that they don’t love you, it means that they don’t satisfy your personal criteria of how you should be loved. it’s a tragic situation but nobody’s at fault here and nobody’s obligated to sacrifice things.

secondly, there are different kinds of sex-repulsed people as well. some will want their partners to be only with them, but the others will be okay with such kind of arrangement as i described above. it’s fortunate if the allo person is ready to give up sex, but they shouldn’t be expected to be the only partner to make compromises. maybe there’s a scenario where these people can meet halfway.

and in regards to andreil “neil doesn’t want to have sex” au, i agree that andrew is certainly the type of person who would give up sex to be with neil and the fact that i didn’t consider this possibility is probably what made those anons upset. but i skipped it and went straight to the “arrangement scenario” not bcs i wanted to insult andrew’s character or something but bcs i also believe that neil is the type of person who wouldn’t make andrew give up anything. i think neil would be completely okay with andrew hooking up with other people now and again if andrew wanted to. i don’t think that neil would be jealous (bcs after everything they overcame it seems kinda a minor issue) and i don’t think that neil would believe that andrew doesn’t love him enough.