#r0bit rambles

Everything seems to revolve around romantic/sexual relationships. Oh, you wanna go out with your friends in a safe queer-friendly environment? The gay bar is the only third space you’ve got, where the potential of being hit on is not only normalized, but expected. People will openly discuss their sex lives with people they barely know and act like it’s normal. Marriage, dating, and getting laid are expected of every adult, and if you express no desire to achieve any of that, then you’re antisocial or traumatized and either way need therapy or to just “get over it.” If you’re asexual and in a relationship with someone who isn’t, it’s somehow always on you to push your comfort zones to please your partner, rather than on your partner to accommodate you. Hell, many people still believe that aro/ace people don’t belong in queer spaces. There are no aro/ace-friendly queer adult spaces, and if you have the audacity to advocate for a sex-free queer space, then you’re a conservative puritan who must be anti-sex and hate everybody, and people will tell you to just attend family-friendly pride events because somehow sex and adulthood cannot be mutually exclusive. The message of sexual/romantic liberation is only reserved for those who wish to engage in it, and anyone who wishes to be liberated from it are excluded and looked down upon. The concept of somebody being sex/romance repulsed and wanting to interact with their community without it being present, while also still respecting allos and advocating for the protection of their right to their own sexual expression, is seemingly an incomprehensible concept for most allo queer folks.

I can’t even rely on fiction to escape it because essentially every book, film, TV show, etc. incorporates romance/sex, even when it’s not at all plot relevant or necessary. Hell, at this point the entire fantasy genre of literature is just romantacy. Even in the rare instances where the main character is ace, sex is still brought up and discussed by other characters. Fandom spaces will straight up ignore any aro/ace rep that exists because “it’s fiction, it doesn’t matter,” but if somebody took a canonically gay character and made them straight you know everyone would riot. Aro/aceness in fandoms is treated like an obstacle to circumvent or an optional characteristic, which then makes you feel like your own identity is something others can disregard if they feel like it irl. I’ve seen so much porn of canonically sex-repulsed ace characters that it makes me wonder if people do it out of spite at this point, which is a concerning thought.

And this is why I have such an aversion to romance and sex: I cannot escape it and expressing any ounce of discomfort risks me being ostracized from queer spaces. EVERYTHING is about sex and romance and any implication that not everything NEEDS to be causes such insane backlash that it feels almost comical. So I do my best to avoid it — as much of it as I can. I’m adverse to it because it’s forced on me and I refuse to tolerate that. But then I’ll never know how much of that aversion is part of my natural programming vs defensiveness. Maybe I would want romantic companionship with somebody who respects the way I’m wired. Maybe, someday, I would be willing to make love if it’s on my terms. But I’ll never know that because any moment of ‘what if-ing’ just feels like allonormativity winning, and I hate that notion stronger than whatever desire I have to understand my programming. I’ll never be able to understand my own identity because society will always interfere, and I’ll never truly know if any feeling I experience is genuine or just compulsory allosexuality.

not shaming at all I just genuinely want to know

(I welcome a rant if you need to^^)

I could write an entire essay on my grievances about that movie, but the tl;dr of it is that ‘I, Robot’ is one of my all-time favourite books and the movie is just .. a terrible interpretation (if you can even call it that).

The plot of the film isn’t even possible within Asimov’s robot universe. It takes a book that explores the nuances about the possibilities of advanced robotic technology and how it would affect humanity and greater society and turns it into a boring, generic action movie with the ‘technowogy scawy and bad’ cliché. One of the biggest points from ‘I, Robot’ (of my interpretation) is that it is the fault of humans for replacing themselves with technology, not the robots. Humanity literally engineers themself into obsoleteness in the book, whereas the film just comes up with some evil central AI entity that doesn’t even exist in the book and points the blame at technology rather than the corporations prioritizing it over people.

The film also massacres my favourite literary character, Dr. Susan Calvin, who in the book is a stoic scientist who dedicates her life to the study of robopsychology and juggling the tension between tech corporations and humanity. She’s arguably the main character of ‘I, Robot’ since the whole story is connected through the wraparound plot of her being interviewed about the timeline of robotics. In the movie, they just made her some hot chick in a leather jacket that needs to be saved. While Asimov was no woke revolutionary, I do love how Dr. Calvin is a serious, competent woman whose character does not revolve around romance and the fact that she’s arguably the most important person in the whole story. The film absolutely butchered her and I find it unforgivable.

It’s also just a trash movie. It bears absolutely no resemblance to the book except for, like, three character names and the title. The director could’ve just changed the names and picked a different title and it would’ve been its own film with some small nods to Asimov’s robot universe (as dozens of scifi films already do). The movie takes one of the most influential pieces of science fiction (Asimov literally came up with the concept of robotics when he wrote the first short story from that book, ‘Liar,’ and a huge amount of robot media references the Three Laws of Robotics), shits all over everything that made it good and unique, and had the audacity to slap ‘I, Robot’ on top and essentially overwrite the general public’s association with that title. Most people I’ve talked to had absolutely no idea that ‘I, Robot’ the book exists until I mentioned it.

Also, the robot designs are the ugliest fucking robots I have ever seen in my life and I want to smack whoever approved those as the final designs with a baseball bat. They’re somehow even uglier than the irl Tesla androids and looking at them fills me with a primal, white-hot, blinding rage.

I will get one someday, I just don’t have one yet. But I will, and when I do, it’ll be My Motorcycle™.