Okay. I have an observation, which I am going to try to explain as best I can and hope desperately that it doesn’t set off anything terrible.
Most of the time, when I see ace people worried about misrepresentations of asexuality in media, as long as the character isn’t doing something obviously problematic like vilifying asexuality or trying to fix it, the criticism usually falls into one of two categories:
Alloromantic aces upset with ace characters that are aromantic or assumed to be aromantic, because it reinforces the misconception that asexuals can’t be in a relationship or fall in love
Aromantic aces upset with ace characters that are alloromantic or assumed to be alloromantic, because it reinforces the idea that romantic attraction is still required to be “acceptable” or “normal”
But the interesting thing is, I see both of these comments with pretty much equal frequency. And despite being predicated on basically opposite premises, they are both real problems and valid arguments. I see it come up especially when an asexual character’s romantic orientation is not confirmed - alloromantic aces remind people that the character should not be assumed to be aro, and aromantic aces remind people that the character doesn’t have to be allo. Both perfectly reasonable arguments, in almost perfectly equal numbers.
So the obvious question is, if these are both legitimate concerns, than how can any asexual character possibly be good representation?
I’ll posit an answer: the issue really doesn’t have to do with the asexual characters’ romantic identities at all - the problem is the lack of asexual characters in the first place. If your sample size is small, any addition to that sample size is going to have a much larger effect on the relative proportions. This explains why the reveal of an asexual character can garner such conflicting reactions - people want to feel seen, and unfortunately there are so few ace characters right now that their specific romantic orientation makes far more of a difference to whether people feel seen than it would if there was already a large, diverse body of ace characters in existence.
So coming back around to the question, barring ace characters that are clearly problematic, all ace characters are good representation, because the most important thing right now is to have more of them. More ace characters, more diversity in romantic orientation, personality, background, age, feelings about sex, characters in more genres, more mediums.
And this means that rather than policing every ace character’s romantic identity, we should all be celebrating every asexual character we have, regardless of their romantic orientation.
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