It’s International Asexuality Day and I wanted to talk a little bit about asexuality and Wayfarer.
I admit I am a little nervous posting this. Some of you know this already, but for those who don’t, I am an ace writer. When I came out a decade ago, the vocabulary to describe my experiences barely existed. I spent years questioning who I was because I didn’t know the words for it and neither did anyone around me.
Prior to meeting my partner, dating was a nightmare. I had one really bad year in university where my friend group couldn’t understand why I had never dated and spent 8 months peer pressuring me into dating a handful of different people, all because they couldn’t believe I was in my early 20s and had never had a relationship and had never had sex. When I was cast in a play and had romantic scenes between myself and another one of the leads, there was a rush to get someone to kiss me so my first kiss wouldn’t be a stage kiss. Later in the rehearsal process, a student director–frustrated with a bad rehearsal–told me that I shouldn’t have been cast because I couldn’t play a character involved in romance if I had never been in a relationship.
In my professional writing life, I have met resistance to the idea that asexual characters can have romance as an integral part of their character arc. During my graduate playwriting program, I conceptualized a romantic comedy with an asexual main character. This pitch was shot down by my supervisor who–while not harbouring any ill intent, just misconceptions–could not fathom a romantic comedy with an asexual character. It just didn’t “work” for him. Romance is so often integrally linked with sex (both in media and outside) that to have one without the other seemed to rip away a foundational element of the genre I wanted to write. The very idea of romantic and sexual attraction being two separate things was a foreign notion. If I wanted to pursue the rom-com concept, I would have to drop the asexual identity of my lead.
I ended up writing about queer 18th century lady pirates instead, but I still really wanted to work on this ace rom-com. A few years later, I applied to a new playwrights development program to develop a similar concept. This program was funded by a queer theatre in a major Canadian city. I thought that, given that the board were openly LGBTQ+, they would be more open to the idea of an asexual romantic lead. To be fair, I didn’t write the best submission (the pitch and writing samples were rushed), but again, one of the reasons it wasn’t accepted was because the people reviewing my work couldn’t imagine “asexual” and “romantic” existing at the same time.
Wayfarer is the first professional project where I have been able to include asexual characters without question. That is undeniably important to me as a writer. Asexuality covers a diverse spectrum of experiences and while I may not be able to cover every single one of them, my hope is that its ace main characters provide representation that people like me have been missing in mainstream media and offers an avenue of understanding and compassion for folks who aren’t ace.
Alexia is one of Wayfarer’s main romanceable characters. She is biromantic asexual. Many of her experiences in navigating the desire for a romantic relationship without sex are based on my own and are an integral part of her romance arc. She is the original ace character I had planned for this game and through her I am finally able to write the ace romance I have wanted to for a very long time.
Ren is another one of Wayfarer’s main romanceable characters. He didn’t originally start as an ace-spectrum character, but the more I wrote about him, the more he struck me as being demisexual (demisexuality refers to people who only feel sexual attraction to someone when they have an established emotional bond with that person). He has had one relationship prior to the start of the game, one that ended poorly. His romance arc is the slow burn of the game; it takes the longest to initiate as he needs time to build trust and connection with the MC. Like Alexia, he is also biromantic.
Felix is a main character, but he is not a romanceable by the MC. Like Alexia, he has been ace from the very beginning of conceptualization. Asexuality is not a key part of his character arc, but it does impact some of his relationships. When I created Felix, I was thinking about some of my friends who are ace men and the pressure they have felt to live up to the societal expectation that they must be sexually dominant and experienced because they are men. Felix doesn’t care about sex. He is not interested. He is also demiromantic (he doesn’t develop romantic feelings without a strong emotional bond).
There are other ace characters (as well as aromantic characters) in Wayfarer aside from these three. This is an explicitly queer story that takes place in an explicitly queer world, and its ace characters are a fundamental part of that queerness.
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