#personal babble

Hi. 👋 I’m aware that my handle is a mouthful, so feel free to use “Achro” [ak-ruh]. The name stems from my love of cephalopods 🐙 (and their astounding color-changing abilities) and the fact that, despite efforts to introduce colors, I am most comfortable wearing (and drawing in) black and white.

This blog is where I post Wenclair short fics (in the format of Incorrect Quotes) almost daily since 6/14/24. I like to imagine that they’re funny, and I hope you think so too.

‼️Warning‼️ The rest of this is long and exceedingly personal, so please feel free to find better ways to enjoy your time. Like reading a fanfic and leaving the author a comment.

What the heck are you?

I’m AMAB, born in the 80’s. I’ve come to identify as demimale, but that’s me settling until I have the mental energy and capacity to focus on myself again. I still experience periodic bouts of gender dysphoria and in general feel like my masculinity is something I wish I could shed.

My exact age is not explicitly stated because I am afraid of age discrimination. Growing up as a minority (Asian) with androgynous/effeminate features in a conservative town meant I’ve already experienced discrimination.

For an entire year of high school, I was “harmlessly” terrorized every day when walking home from the bus stop. Just a car full of boys from my suburb making a game of not hitting the minority kid with their car door as they sped by.

The rev of an engine. Boy laughter closing in at speed. Adrenaline. Fear. And the slam of the car door shutting moments before impact. Sometimes with a few beats to spare. Sometimes with nearly none.

Cue resigned relief.

I have been called by slurs. I’ve had gum in my hair, my shoes pissed on, my family mailbox filled with shaving foam and my front door both stink and smoke bombed. In middle school, I was even stoned after getting off the bus to walk home, but I’m not sure if that was racism at the time. The perpetrator did grow up to be a raging bigot, so maybe?

It wasn’t too bad. Just a small scar on the back of my head. I tried to crawl home immediately after and made it down the sidewalk and halfway across the road into a cul-de-sac before a friend returned with an adult. I like to imagine the reactions of the kids waiting for the bus the next morning. Head wounds bleed, so I had inadvertently left a red trail the entire way.

The stain lasted a week. California sun baked it in.

It improved after high school, except for a brief period in college in the South. The worst of that wasn’t directed specifically at me. A Chinese exchange student was shot in the back of the head at around 11pm, in a safe part of town, while on a pay phone calling his parents. It was a hate crime, but the news glossed over that.

So, yeah. Discrimination sucks. I’ve been called slurs for race and people’s assumptions about both my sexuality and gender. I’ve been terrorized, injured, degraded, touched, and made to feel very afraid. And you know what? I’m a lucky one! I wasn’t AFAB, even if I feel I should’ve been.

There. That’s why I fear age discrimination. It’s not hard to figure out my age, but I wasn’t about to welcome discrimination. Before starting this blog, I already saw unfair treatment of 30+ year old authors and fans. I was the target of two online predators in my teens, so I can certainly relate to why people are protective.

So after a year of posting with no complaints outside of a handful of trolls, I thought that maybe, just maybe, people didn’t care about my age. That the fandom focused on the non-canon ship of a young queer couple—from a show with themes of learned acceptance and fighting bigotry, based on a character originally played by an actress very close to my age—appreciated my brain rot for what I intended it to be:

Short snippets to help people laugh because omgwtf, things are SO not funny in the world right now.

To my delighted relief (and which kind people have been reminding me of), I am largely successful. The discrimination still does hurt for more reasons than I’ve explained here, but that’s okay. I’ve gotten through it before, and this time, there’s people out there who are nice enough to offer support. 👋😌

Uh. That’s it? What about—

Oh. Shoot. The stuff I haven’t covered. Um. I’m demisexual, lately bordering on asexual. I’ve been happily married for 12 years now to a historically RAGING LESBIAN who made an exception for androgynous little me (and possibly toxic werewolf biker dudes, judging from her reading list 🫢).

Our friends remark that we’re an odd match. Before age sank its teeth, she was aggressively sexual, while I wasn’t. At kink parties she’s the enthusiastic participant, while I’m the chatty pretty ace-ish person in the corner, cracking silly comments and killing boners. At a party themed 70’s Porn Industry Awards, my wife won “Causes Most Fear Boners” while I ended up with “2nd Best Asian”. 😑

We shouldn’t work, but we do, and that’s largely because our humor and silliness mesh. Yay me!

My household includes at least 1 Achromatophore, 1 awesome wife, 2 roommates (married), 2 dogs, 1 turtle, several frogs, 1 large constrictor, numerous assorted fish, sea anemones, and assorted marine and land arthropods. There were also 2 cats, but they’ve passed on.

Cool. So… Wenclair?

I love the fanon! I enjoyed Wednesday the show, but outside of Ortega’s performance and the aesthetic styling, I wasn’t too impressed. What doomed me to my fate was when, after finishing the final episode at the end of 2022, I asked my wife the fateful question.

Me: Do you think anyone else felt the chemistry between Wednesday and Enid?

Her: Prolly.

So I checked AO3 the same night, sorted by kudos, and have been reading Wenclair fanfics ever since. And to be honest, I’m more of a fan of the Wenclair fanon than I am the show. The hundreds upon hundreds of fics have helped me to process so many different things that I had been ignoring.

It gave me the opportunity to experience what life could have been like were I born differently, through characters I found familiar and comforting, and set largely in the same timeframe as when I was at my most miserable. It’s been a safe place for me, and I’m thankful for it.

Fast forward a year. I started leaving comments. An author befriended me. They encouraged me to write. And… so I did. Every day. Twice a day. Sometimes more. I had never written for others to read, so it was all scary at first, but now? Now it’s amazing.

I’ve been writing because it makes me happy. It reminds me that I can still be creative even after the pain in my hands made me largely give up sculpting and drawing. It helps me to cope when things get difficult. It helps me to share my joy when things are better.

This absurd blog has allowed me, an exhausted dork and often reclusive hermit (fuck you Pandemic), to slowly begin making connections again, and to share my brand of inanity with others who enjoy the same fandom.

Kind makes me feel a bit sad that only now in her older age has she ever tried to get to know me or care about me hah ha

We even lived with my american grandparents for quite a long time as kids because our family was struggling. I only really got to know my maternal grandfather and have 2 really good convos with him right before he died.

Today before checking out, my grandmother went red in the face as I was recounting a story from being in Norway and she told me, like it's a surprise, that I'm really funny and she had no idea.

And, after cutting out some choice images and covering others I'm post it notes lol, I showed her a sketchbook of mine and she was amazed like. She didn't even know I liked to draw.

I'm an adult. I've lived in the same state as her for a long ass time. Now, she suddenly cares.