Hello again aros of tumblr!
I want to thank all that have participated or left feedback of any kind for this lil project. So far we've gotten 61 responses!
I think it's overdue to address some concerns:
1. Eyestrain
I had a feeling the flag was eyestrain-y and should have listened to my gut; sorry to any photosensitive folks! I updated the original post and the form so they should now be safe to see.
2. Copycat flag
I've gotten some feedback encouraging us to not have the flags match as it would create further confusion between asexuality and aromanticism. I get it; we don't want more aro invisibility under the ace label and flag…
Now, I know I am biased as an aroace, but I've always wanted the two flags to match for ease of stacking them together. But I ALSO think would help create mutual recognition (i.e. people would see the two flags and recognize the aro flag as what it is even if they only knew the ace flag, so like… increasing visibility).
Some people agree and some do not. You are free to use the original flag; this is more for me than it is for others hehe. It's entirely self-indulgent (although the form shows me a significant number of people would enjoy this flag). I'd also like to remind you all that the lesbian and gay mlm flags also match (and that to me is just fun)!
In particular, one entry in the form said it's inappropriate for me as a white person to copy the work of a Black woman and pass it as my own. I would like to specify that I "copied" the flag on purpose. The whole point was to align myself with Ashabi's intersectionality addition! I'm not claiming it as my own idea, it's literally spelled out that the flag WAS inspired by Ashabi's ace flag. /nm
I also want to stress: it's deliberate for me to have only changed 1 stripe. It's because we're all neurodivergent and we Don't Like Change. /lh Changing one stripe and one stripe only is something I'm purposefully prioritizing.
Another thing that spoke to me was the people who encouraged this project to be independent from the new proposed ace flag. Seeing as it has… the same issue I'm trying to address here but worse lol (I'm talking about the meaning of the pink stripe).
Plus, of course, everyone who said we should just assign a new meaning to the white stripe instead of changing the flag.
On account of these various pieces of feedback, I have a couple more ideas to put forth:
1. Not changing the flag. Just updating the meaning as I said before. This is always an option. I'll be sharing the results of the survey when I feel like we've gotten enough responses, and we can decide together (maybe through a tumblr poll?) what we want it to mean. I don't think the OG flag creator would mind if we all do it together!
I'd love it if we did both actually as I, to everyone's surprise probably, am not too inclined to use the new ace flag, so not having to change the aro flag to match would be good. Yeah I know what the hell am I even doing here—
2. I don't quite remember where exactly I'd seen this first, but at least one person suggested using a blue stripe to contrast with the yellow of Ashabi's ace flag. This way, this proposed alternative aro flag would take a bit of a life of its own (even though the concept is derivative lol). Also relevant: it was brought to my attention that adding yellow makes it look a lot like the aroallo flag.
So here's a couple drafts for a proposed aro flag with a blue stripe instead of yellow:
In the first flag, I tweaked the light green stripe to blend in better between the darker green and the blue. I did not change the top green stripe's specific color for a reason: it wouldn't match the shade used in flags for other aro-spec identities otherwise.
(Don't tell anyone, but that's also a reason I'm doing this project: if we change the aro flag too, we, conceptually, won't need to change any of the ace-spec flags because they'd just follow the same pattern of only using the top/bottom colour…)
In the second flag, I kept the same greens as the OG flag but edited the gray stripe to be a bit more blueish (it looked like shit without this tweak). I tried my best not to make it look too much like the mesi-aro flag, but I might have failed.
I am slightly impartial to the second one because I like me a warmer green. But what do you think? Does it look too much like the mesi aro flag? Is it a problem?
Of course, if you think the shades could be better, I'd love to see how you make them. Post them and tag me if you want! /gen
(I must admit that I'm a little bit nervous with the amount of attention this has gotten (might not seem much to the average poster, but it is for me trust me). Please be patient with me if I make mistakes! Point them out and I'm ready to fix it.)