A weeklong event celebrating aromantic spectrum characters and expeirences in fanworks of all kinds. Round five running February 19-25, 2024. (Mod: @corelliaxdreaming)
Welcome to Arospec Fanworks Week Round Five! Apologies for the delay; no minute like the last, right? I've moved away from Tumblr due to my own mental health, but I still want ot run my events, so here I am. This year, AFW runs the week of February 19th to 25th. Click here to revisit the guidelines. We're going pretty casual this time with prompts based on the meanings of the colors in the six stripe rainbow pride flag as well as a free day. As usual, daily prompt posts will include additional inspiration for those who want it. Remember you can also choose not to use the prompt. Any aro-focused creation goes!
i was really looking forward to the arospec fanweeks event this year but like... the prompts were late and really vague. i didn't know what to do with them and didn't have the time to think
I do apologize for the lateness, that is 100% on me. I've gone back and forth over the years with vaguer and more specific prompts as well as single or multiple sets, and never really got feedback or a discernable increase or decrease in participation depending on what I went with, so it's really hard to know what people like. Thanks for speaking up.
All right, the long put-off Round Five wrap-up! We had thirteen entires this year from four participants, and here they are:
Day 1 - Life
Cabaret fic by @newwwwusername
Day 2 - Healing
Company fic by @newwwwusername
Day 3 - Sunlight
You Can't Take it With You fic by @newwwwusername
Day 4 - Nature
Midsummer/Jersey fic by @newwwwusername
Wish fic by @corelliaxdreaming
Day 5 - Serenity
Dear Evan Hansen fic by @newwwwusername
Day 6 - Spirit
Frozen fic by @corelliaxdreaming
Sleepy Hollow (musical) fic by @newwwwusername
Day 7 - Free Day
Our Town fic by @newwwwusername
No Prompt
Mario icons by @mrs-luigi-vargas
Apothiromantic heart amigurumi by @corelliaxdreaming
Star Wars moodboard by @corelliaxdreaming
The World Ends With You fic by @theriveroflight
Huge thanks to all of you. Let me know if I missed anything or there are any errors in this post.
Now for the issue of whether there will be a round six. I honestly don't know. Participation was down this year, and though I accept some of that from posting so late on my end, it was discouraging, especially as this has always been a very quiet event to begin with and longtime returning participants...didn't return. I'm also moving away from using Tumblr as a whole. So, as for a 2025 round, I won't say a solid "no" now, but also don't hold your breath. As always, sound off in the comments or send a message if you have thoughts. <3
Title:Â Just Elsa
Fandom/Setting:Â Frozen (Disney)
Characters/Ships:Â Elsa & Honeymaren
Rating:Â G
Words:Â 324
Summary:Â Elsa may have figured out why she isn't attracted to people like most are. Honeymaren disagrees.
Note: For @arospecfanworksweek day six prompt "spirit."
Title:Â A Moment of Relief
Fandom/Setting:Â Wish (Disney)
Characters/Ships:Â Asha (very briefly mentioned Hal/Bazeema)
Rating:Â G
Words:Â 327
Summary:Â Asha, stressed by her friends' sudden increased interest in romance, gets away to the wishing tree for a moment of relief.
Note: For @arospecfanworksweek day four prompt "nature."
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
@arospecfanworksweek free day work featuring: arospec nagi figuring it out, aroace sho refusing to give a fuck, and demiromantic fret having some good tips.
My computer has been acting shitty, and I work Friday-Sunday, so I'm pushing the follow-up post to Monday. Thanks for your patience, and feel free to continue to contribute in the meantime. :)
Arospec Fanworks Week is offically over, but you still have time! We'll leave things open for a few more days for any straggler entries (thought of course you can still post at any time outside of the event week). Expect a wrap-up post on Thursday.
Lowish-effort Aro Mario and Aro Bowser icons for @arospecfanworksweek! They're very simple but I like making them I should do it more often :D
Anyway there's whole lot of rambling about the headcanons under the cut if you're curious, haha. I guess it makes this entry technically match Day 1's prompt but honestly I wasn't intentionally trying to follow said prompts at all, lmao
~~~
OK, so I've headcanoned Mario as aro for a while, now. Part of it is me projecting, of course. But also I think it would be interesting if he was, mainly because of how it would affect his dynamic with Peach. Because, you know, the hero and the princess; the knight and the damsel; he was a boy, she was a girl - at least a lot of the Toads seem to think that it couldnât be any more obvious. But Mario wouldnât think it was obvious. And any suggestions otherwise would just be mostly awkward and off-putting for reasons that are difficult to get across to the romance-minded. He and Peach were already close, as friends. That's all they needed to be, right?
But anyway what I'm trying to say is a major appeal of this headcanon for me is the likeâŠinherent defiantness of it. Standing in step with so many normally romance-coded things and doing them platonically despite what everyone wants or expects. And then also me projecting, like I said before đ. Wrote a couple of fics about it even, if you wanna read them~ đ
As for aro!Bowser, though, it's only something I've vaguely been thinking about recently. 'Cause I read a whole bunch of Bowuigi fic last year, and in almost all of those they gotta wave away/retcon/reconcile Bowser's attraction to/kidnapping of Peach, right? So one way I've seen of doing that is something to the effect of Bowser kidnapping Peach because Junior needs a mom. Which is such an interesting rationale to give him, haha. But to be fair its usually not by itself; there's usually a sense of 'well, Peach is very kind and beautiful, so marriage is definitely the way to go on this (or so I thought'. But sometimes it isn't and that's very funny to me. The things shippers do to pull their stories off are something to behold sometimes đ€
But still! It got me thinking. What if Bowser's crush on Peach was completely manufactured? Unknowingly, of course; in the sense that Peach is very kind and beautiful and powerful and the monarch of a nearby kingdom in his age range so that's how these thinks are supposed to go, yeah? He wasnât totally sure; becoming King didnât really leave any room to know otherwise, with how much work there was to be done every day. At least Kamek had seemed to think so, though, talking about alliances and heirs and a bunch of other things Bowser hadn't been really listening to. Though Kamek was hardly wrong about anything important, would it kill him to be a lot less boring about it?
But even still, Bowser's proud and headstrong and stubborn, so when the marriage-alliance with Peach doesnât work out then he decides to make it work out. And then the kidnappings start. And then continue. Because "it'll totally work this time, this plan is perfect!".
Like trying to jam a square peg into a round box over and over with no clue that there's anything wrong. Or maybe an inkling of a clue that we've decided to ignore because, you know, "I'll kidnap Peach for good, this time, you'll see!"
Also I remember seeing discussion somewhere about how Bowser could be interpreted as someone with abandonment issues, which could play into this too; people will stay if you keep them by force, after all, whether by kidnapping, marriage, or both.
So yeah. Not the greatest outlook on things, obviously.
Regardless, I think that in this universe where Mario and Bowser are both aromantic they both get on track to consciously realizing it post-Super Mario Odyssey.
Mario because as he and Peach are flying home Peach obviously wants to know why he snap-proposed to her like that. To which Mario has to sheepishly explain how his inner competitiveness had flared up when Bowser had tried to propose to her again. To which Peach sighs because yeah, of course it was that. And then Mario gets around to asking if Peach is okay, to which Peach describes the nightmare of a past while she'd had because of this wedding business, to which the conversation pivots to weddings in general, and then romance in general.
And Mario contributes to the conversation as best he can, but⊠he knows from watching Luigi's romance-related ups and downs over the years that the way he himself thought about the concept wasnâtâŠcorrect.
But Peach won't stand for Mario thinking that there was something wrong with him; it takes an overnight stint or three in the castle library (to Toadsworth's chagrin) before she finally finds an answer for him. So she invites him to the castle for tea, and for a vocabulary lesson that'll change his life.
Meanwhile Bowser sits on the moon,. Reflecting on his utter defeat that must have been more crushing than he'd thought for him to not even remember how he got out of that cave, thinking about how even aside from Mario being on his tail the entire time this whole wedding planning business was more of a stress-filled ordeal than he'd initially thought it would be, considering the fact that the post-wedding future that he'd figured he'd figure out as it came had stubbornly remained an amorphous blob of ambiguity instead of snapping into place during those final hours, despite the Broodals' assurances to the contrary. He'd indulge in a rare bout of self-reflection, maybe, about these inconsistencies.
And then he would shrug, get up, and make his way home. Because while he wasnât particularly sure about marrying Peach anymore, he knew he would still be kidnapping her. Because of the engaging process of making and executing perfectly laid plans, because of the adrenaline rush of a good fight, because of the future bonding experiences with his kids, because the rest of his minions needed something to do, ha.
Because of the fact that he was Bowser, King of the Koopas, and he's absolutely not the sort of person to just give up, even if his core motivations have shifted slightly! And just as Mario would always show up to ruin his plans and take Peach back home Bowser would just make new plans, and he was going to successfully pull a kidnapping off and beat Mario once and for all, he just knew it!
