I can sympathize with aro and ace people that have grown increasingly tired of the incredibly amatonormative fixation on romance above all other forms of relationships in fandom spaces.
But I can also sympathize with allo queer people that get defensive over queer romantic interpretations (both canon and fanon), especially when we're talking about a medium like anime/manga which does have a pretty major problem of trying to censor and downplay queer romance as purely platonic friendship from executives and fans alike.
I’m not sure why you’re bringing up aro and ace people here, honestly. We’re not the ones that are stealing from your representation.
In the queer fandom community itself, it’s never aro and ace people that get the spotlight. It’s first and foremost romantic/sexual slash ships that get the spotlight, and then maybe het or femslash. Put aside being aspec for a second: friendships are undervalued in general, seen as less important than romance.
This one doesn’t apply to anime as much, but asexuality in modern media isn’t treated nearly as well as queer romance. Outside of the battle shonen/anime space, there are several IPs these days where queer romances are canon, seen and well respected. Most asexual characters, in contrast, aren’t written well. They conform to stereotypes, barely get their asexuality mentioned, and in egregious cases has even been presented as not real/something to be cured.
This is even more true for aromantic characters, by the way. At least asexual characters have bad representation, because aro ones have crumbs. Almost all aspec characters are asexual in some way, aroace mostly and alloace sometimes. Arospec and alloaro characters aren’t seen in the limelight.
To put it simply, aspects get way, way less time in the limelight than allo queer characters, especially in more recent anime.
For the record, I’m not denying that queer romantic relationships get suppressed/erased, both by straight fandom spaces and by greedy editors/companies/executives, especially in areas like the battle shonen space, where two guys can kiss twice and still be seen as just friends. But trust me, they’re not trying to cater to aspecs.
We’re not your enemy here. Your enemy is the heteronormative media landscape that’s going after both of our communities. We should both be making progress together.
I'm bringing up aro and ace people because this post was inspired in part by a very specific Discourse on Twitter regarding The Summer Hikaru Died, where someone was praising it for the relationship between Yoshiki and Hikaru being - in their words - "more than friends, not quite lovers" and then got surprised when the allo queer people that resonated with Yoshiki's story as a gay person having to navigate attraction to another man in a bigoted conservative town didn't like the idea of Yoshikaru not being romantic. Completely unempathetic to why allo queer people would be defensive over seemingly one of the few queer romance rep in the anime and manga industry.
Like, yeah, canonically Yoshikaru is a queerplatonic relationship between Yoshiki and an aroace man that explicitly states the love he feels for Yoshiki is not specifically romantic. But there's basically no consideration for how allo queer people would take "hey you know that queer relationship you like and resonate with that you think represents you? Well actually you're WRONG they're NOT ACTUALLY DATING" after dealing with basically that exact thing from homophobes regarding characters that are either actually confirmed to be dating or have pretty blatant subtext.
I've also seen quite a few aroace people say that any allo queer desire to see queer romance represented is somehow innately amatonormative and regressive.
I agree that aroace people are not the enemy here and that we should be making progress together, but sometimes it feels like some aroace people don't really recognize that's going to mean more queer romance too.
Also, only like, two of the anime/manga that I tagged in the initial post are shonen battle series.
Also, they're not quite canonically a queerplatonic relationship, any more than they're canonically a romantic or platonic relationship. MMR stated that while she understands why someone would view them that way that was not their intention. I was one of the people involved in that twitter discourse and I will still die on the hill that the description truly does not fit Yoshikaru, because as MMR has stated time and time again, they TRANSCEND HUMAN LABELS. QUUERPLATONIC IS STILL A HUMAN LABEL.
