#tmfly

So I, your dear blog author, am a sort of fucky romance-triggered lithosexual. What that means? Well Belial up there just spelled it out for you. It’s been a pain in the ass, at first just thinking you hadn’t “found the one” as relationship after relationship shattered upon the shoals of our own dying sexuality. An endless chorus of “why are you growing cold, Barbie? Why don’t you want to fuck anymore?” and of intense and toxic love affairs with either people who were infatuated with others (best boyfriend in uni was already dated/broken up with the guy he’d eventually get back together with and marry and was essentially using me as a rebound and it was SO fucking good all the trappings and actions of a good deep relationship but I could feel him thinking of someone else as he fucked me) or couldn’t even view me as fully human (my narcissistic and abusive ex-wife).

And, like, in the last couple years as I’ve started to interact with a-spec folk and learn enough to describe the pattern of my attractions, to trace their rise and fall, to name them, to see that there are roads where I can potentially have fulfilling relationships that don’t shatter on the shoals of my lithosexuality or grind me to despair under abuse and neglect (heyyy allo-aros. <3), I’ve started looking to see if there are any characters like me in any literature out there.

The first one I found was Bloom Into You. That classic “starter” yuri throws two a-spec identities at you unnamed. It’s a love affair between Yuu, a demisexual, and Touko Nanami, a lithosexual. It gave me a lot of hope when I read it, because it seemed to promise that you could work it out. But it also kind of hurt, because the story treats Touko’s lithosexuality as a sort of mental illness, a thing to be treated, overcome. An obstacle to be conquered rather than a part of her that needs to be embraced and worked with.

Then, as I was discussing things with a lesbian friend who had no idea what lithosexuality was, she clued me in to a one-shot manga by my favorite yuri author TMFLY: An Undesireable Relationship. This story’s unnamed lovers, a Brunette and a Blonde, are in a relationship that is leaning hard in abuse/neglect kink with Brunette a/n-ing Blonde. The twist comes at the end, as Blonde eats out Brunette and she goes “ugh I love you” and Blonde stops in a frame that just captures outright the emotional moment when the Litho flips everything off.

It’s, like, the mood that I’ve felt over and over and over again. Like, I’ve dated an average of 3 people a year from when I started dating at 11 till now. Maybe half of them got serious. And all but a few (which all crushed me under abuse and neglect and were really baaad) ended a couple weeks or months after THAT moment. The moment that everything just turned off. At first you don’t even notice it. You feel them love you and you bask in being loved. But it doesn’t take many relationships to realize that the warm breeze of their affection has blown out the flame of your lust. And as much as people talk about wanting love more than sex, when all that remains is something toeing the line between the romantic and the altereous, when the sexual is gone, they call you cold. They call you uncaring. And when it’s done it’s a relief to not have to put on the performance of wanting them anymore. But it’s also terrifying to see that coming. And that panel just catches it.

And that’s the two.

Except I’ve been re-reading Angel Sanctuary for the first time since high school. For the first time since I was 15. The last time I read this I still just assumed that people had soulmates and that I hadn’t found mine. That I was just experiencing the normal fading of lust that my elders warned about when they talked about building relationships on love

In my re-read, the second Belial appeared I went “OH! I remember this asshole. I loved this asshole so much.”

This explicitly transfeminine, lithosexual asshole. Not just lithosexual, but with the same sort of weird cross-over between romance and sexuality that I have.

It’s funny because as far as I know the word “lithosexual” didn’t come about until 2013. I last read this in 2003. It was written in the late 1990s (1996 for this volume? I can’t be bothered to look it up.)

So I unexpectedly see representation of lithosexuality in a work from my childhood, before the term was coined. In an explicitly transfeminine character. Sure, she’s villainous, and her lithosexuality is painted as something abnormal, but it isn’t a illness to be cured like in Bloom Into You, or a plot twist to invert the abuse kink scenario and show there is an ACTUAL abusive relationship underpinning it with a reverse power dynamic like in An Undesirable Relationship.

Belial is just abnormal and honest to her desires. She serves, fucks with, and pursues her love, knowing, ACCEPTING, that if she wins her battle she loses.

Tsumetai Yakedo o Oshiete yo | by tmfly Yazawa Nico’s Birthday release 3/4! Happy birthday, Nico Yazawa, may the Nico love be aplenty in the following years too. Once you’re done reading this one, go read So do you wanna go out, or?