Asa Clematis and Wisteria Shien, from the Clem and Wist series by Hiyodori
Asa Clematis is a talented healer, but not the medical kind. She's a mage healer, and a damn talented one at that. But in a country where healers are commodified to serve mages, that's not necessarily a good thing.
Lucky for her she meets Wisteria Shien, a very special mage. She's the second incarnation of the Kraken, a legendary mage with unlimited power. But this also makes Wisteria's magic the most difficult to treat, a task Clematis takes willingly when they befriend each other and eventually grow to something more.
Alas, a forced betrayal sees Clematis imprisoned for treason, and when we meet her in the first book, The Lowest Healer and the Highest Mage, she's seven years into a life sentence.
Imagine her surprise then, when the Kraken- the woman who betrayed her- shows up one day, her legendary powers all gone. With the promise of parole dangled, Clematis takes the challenge to get her magic back, but can she forego the seven years of anger that have been building since the day the Kraken betrayed her...
I highly recommend this sapphic enemies to lovers urban fantasy, check it out on Amazon!
“You wouldn’t be misleading me, or making promises you didn’t intend to make. But you are beautiful, and I like you very much.” She leaned a little closer; an inch, a breath. “Let me kiss you, Simran.”
the thing about aromantic-coding used as an obstacle to overcome in romances is like. of course these are actual normal and legit experiences that have nothing to do with aromanticism - many people have issues with commitment and romance because of fear or trauma or insecurity or repression.
(side note: I recommend reading this post by @lavendersbook missed opportunities in aro representation or the accidental aromantics for some more coherent thoughts than mine adjacent to this)
but when you have a book where one character's main journey is about them figuring out their demisexuality and relationship with sex/attraction, and then the other main character has an excessive amounts of moments of them expressing distaste for romance, being uncomfortable when people give them romantic gestures or want to be in a relationship with them, are happy with non-romantic sexual relationships, express the fact that they're not interested in romance and constantly have those boundaries pushed.......only for them to I guess eventually have those boundaries pushed over the edge and admit to whatever fear or trauma is stopping them from being in a relationship then they get together and it's fine they're in love happy ending
it's just a bit weird imo, in an ace book, to not even BRING UP the concept of could they be aromantic? Because even if they aren't arospec, being introduced to a mindset that says ‘it’s okay and normal to not be interested in or prioritise romance’ could help them feel better about the way they are and probably allow them to face their Issues naturally instead of being forced into overcoming it. Unlearning amatonormativity benefits everyone.
(and yes blah blah the point of stories is to be messy and unhealthy sometimes and not everyone has knowledge of the intricacies of every queer identity but I personally think if your narrative falls apart by a character knowing about aromanticism you need a better narrative)
like in Kiss Me, Maybe, the love interest has this fear of commitment because of her past relationship ending badly and the greyace MC does ask her if she could be aro, and she's like no, I feel attraction and desire for romance, I just don't trust myself not to mess up again (something along those lines). The book isn't perfect but like, it was so easy to at least attempt to bring it up. (and sometimes, when it comes to aro & ace identities, we need Telling as well as Showing. because the aspec things we 'see' are different for everyone)
Whereas That's What She Said ultimately villainising the aro-coded character for her fear of committment due to her parents' divorce or whatever while the rest of the book is about her friend's demisexuality.... and This Feast of a Life (which I really did like overall, it just unfortunately also does this) where one MC has a dislike/fear of relationships because her mum died and she's afraid of getting close to someone and losing them again.....in both cases there was such an opportunity for exploring an arospec character? or at least them questioning about it? and the trauma/issues could have been explored as the things they are rather than a reason to cause a conflict? In TFoaL especially there was so much opportunity for exploring the complexities of differing needs between an alloace and aroallo in a relationship - like that was explored I'd say, it just feels off when it abruptly ends with the aro-coded character being like yeah i was repressing things we're in love everything is Normal
(as an aside note, cynthia so's other book (which I loved!!!) has a SC who 'never felt romantic towards ex, there must be something wrong with me' and I was sure it was going to balance that with the questioning ace SC subplot and have her be questioning aro but. never brought up. so I was thinking about that when I started TFoaL knowing it was aspec in some way)
it's just kinda. I'm not mad I'm just disappointed. there was opportunity for exploring things in more interesting and complex ways and it's unfortunate that, instead, books keep going in this direction. idk. end thoughts
Any time someone asks “Hey, does anyone have any good aromantic representation that they can recommend?”, the responses are always like:
Alloromantic asexual character
Headcanon
Asexual character who doesn’t use the separate attraction model (because the writers didn’t do enough research to know what that is) but who is vaguely implied to not like romance
Character confirmed as aroace via twitter post
Headcanon
Side character in a heavily romance centric story
Headcanon
Aroace character who is actually pretty decent representation but who is also from some incredibly obscure webcomic or podcast or something, so you end up becoming incredibly fixated on a piece of media that no one will talk with you about :(
Character from a book written for teenagers (but which closeted teenagers can’t access without the risk of outing themselves to their parent(s)/guardian(s), because it’s very obvious from the cover and summary alone that it’s an LGBTQ+ book)
Headcanon
And of course, there’s never a single alloaro or non-SAM aro on the list.
I know it's not the point of the post, but other than saying I feel this so bad, I actually have recommendations that are at least *close* to the kind of rep we're looking for here. And since it's Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week, allow me to take this opportunity to share them:
Common Bonds - a speculative aromantic anthology
A collection of short fantasy-themed stories centered on aromantic characters and non-romantic bonds. The title mentions aromantic (although it's in the smaller subtitle so only a more meticulous parent would notice), and it is pretty obscure media, but I seriously suggest it if you're starving for good representation (it's not even expensive at all imo!). Most of the characters are aroace, but there's at least one aroallo, I haven't finished reading it so there might be more—
Hallo, Aro - Aro Worlds
Another collection of very short stories centered around aroallo characters. The other great thing about this one is that IT'S FREE. Also very niche, obviously.
Aro Worlds also has other collections like "When Quiver Meets Quill" (includes all types of aros including stories that don't mention sexual attraction at all, which I'd interpret as non-sam aro coded), "Bones of Green and Hearts of Gold" (same), "Spirits Most Singular" (non-partnering aros), and lots of other things, but I haven't read any of these ones. They're also all available to download for free, as they are collections of public works written by the community.
Koisenu Futari
A J-drama starring two aroace characters. From what I've seen it's decently popular! I've posted about it before and got more engagement than I'd expected. There also exists a subreddit for it, sooo.
Honourable mention: there's also some aroace rep in this other fantasy-themed collection called Being Ace, but it is obviously focused on aces first. It's a really good read so far, though.
I hope this encourages someone to pick up these pieces of media!
i have these scapegracers character cards that i have been working on for forever but I just can't figure out getting the final look how I want it to, lol. here's a preview tho!! hopefully I'll finish them sometime this year
Review: Metal From Heaven by August Clarke
Rating: 5/5
I received an ARC of this title through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
Marney Honeycutt works in the Yann I Chauncey Ichorite Factory but when their sister leads a workers' strike that turns into a massacre, they are suddenly all alone. Touched in the head by the metal they worked from birth, Marney has to get out of the city. They fall in with a gang of thieves who whisk them away to a mansion high in the hills by the sea. But Marney will come back. Because they are going to kill Chauncey and they're going to marry his daughter to do it.
August Clarke has done it again. I was captivated from the very first page by Clarke's signature dizzying, dazzling prose. I was utterly immersed in this rich world that blends fantasy and science fiction absolutely perfectly. I loved the different cultures, I especially loved the way Clarke emulated butch/femme lesbian culture, I loved that trans-ness was just part of the world and Marney never had to fight to be who they were.
The queerness really was my favourite part. It was so nice to finally read a book about a trans stone butch that feels like the trans stone butches I know. Marney felt and talked and behaved like so many of my friends do and that representation is so sorely needed. I have a list of friends a mile long to recommend this book because I know they ache to see themselves and their lives represented in media. I'm very grateful that August Clarke is able to do that with their books.
And the prose! Clarke has such a specific way of writing that just latches into your brain and doesn't let go. It flows so beautifully but has a staccato edge that I can't get enough of. I especially enjoyed how Clarke intermittently used second person to elevate how Marney was telling the story and the reason why they were doing that became so satisfying as the story went on. It was utterly brilliant.
If you are looking for a truly unique speculative fiction story that centres queerness and working class people in a story of revenge, I implore you to pick up Metal From Heaven and allow yourself to be swept away in this enthralling book. It's an absolute masterpiece.
do you have any like good books/literature/media you recommend for learning more about the butch community? ik there’s a deep history and wanna learn more about it before ik for sure that’s how i identify.
like. a lot of stuff i see on tumblr is butch/femme and like chivalry and all that which i vibe with but also. idk. i’m very much more androgynous for androgynous so some of that stuff doesn’t really hit home if if that makes sense. sorry for rambling so much.
I highly recommend this butch and masc sapphics database made by @lavendersbook. Filter by "butch" or "butch4butch" for best results.
But for the obvious rec, read Leslie Feinberg. Zie made Stone Butch Blues available for free online prior to hir passing: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/ There's also Drag King Dreams and Transgender Warriors.
For some personal recs, read Wherever Is Your Heart by Anita Kelly. It's a novella about two older butches and it's really sweet and a little spicy. Super cute.
Girl Mans Up by ME Girard is about a tomboy teenager. (Butch/femme though) Affirming to imagine a masculine adolesence if you never had one, or if you did.
Hijab Butch Blues is another good one, a memoir.
Gideon the Ninth for a popular with lesbian tumblr book that I personally couldn't parse. (I think it's because the audiobook was 20 hours long and narrated by a British woman who I couldn't understand, lmao.)
For TV/movies, check out Roberta Colindrez, Lena Waithe, Tig Notaro, Sara Ramirez, and Vico Ortiz and the things they've starred in.
I need everyone to get into the lowest healer and the highest mage. it's a self published lesbian fantasy/romance series on Amazon by Hiyodori and I know it's not for everyone but if its your thing it's like yuri catnip. it's madoka and the locked tomb rolled into one butch4butch series.
asa clematis is the most arrogant little shit ever and a great protagonist. she's in prison for treason but her ex who is very clearly still in love with her is the most powerful being in the world. clematis literally invented a new branch of healing. the government hates her. she physically cannot stop making annoying remarks to others. she's butch. she does the wildest shit. it's great
What bordered on being intolerable was the sense that I no longer knew where Wist ended and I began. The sense that I had started consuming her. Or that she had started eating into me. Or both at the same time. It made me want to finish the job. It made me want to pack her away safely inside me. No embrace could ever seem tight enough after you felt someone starting to meld with the very fabric of your secret self.
I need everyone to get into the lowest healer and the highest mage. it's a self published lesbian fantasy/romance series on Amazon by Hiyodori and I know it's not for everyone but if its your thing it's like yuri catnip. it's madoka and the locked tomb rolled into one butch4butch series.
asa clematis is the most arrogant little shit ever and a great protagonist. she's in prison for treason but her ex who is very clearly still in love with her is the most powerful being in the world. clematis literally invented a new branch of healing. the government hates her. she physically cannot stop making annoying remarks to others. she's butch. she does the wildest shit. it's great
We're excited to highlight Talia Bhatt, author of the current club read Dulhaniyaa. Read on to hear how her identity and experiences informed her writing, and how queer love is a jailbreak.
“Desi trans lesbian” feels, sometimes, like an ephemeral identity.
I am situated nowhere transhistorically and barely transculturally, having to borrow the language, social trappings, and forms of identification of the nation(s) that colonized and impoverished mine to even express my embodiment and positionality coherently. In a world where Afsaneh Najmabadi can pose the question “Is any one of you a lesbian?” to a room full of Iranian transsexual women and get blank stares, as she relates in Professing Selves, or where Deepa Mehta notes in her groundbreaking lesbian romance Fire that Hindi lacks even a word to express the concept of a woman loving another intimately, romantically, carnally, I am unmoored and unfixed, an anomaly because I dare to imagine my transsexuality independent from men.
“Woman are for men”, assumes every culture with harsh patriarchal contradictions—which does not entirely exclude the West—and trans women doubly so, since the abhorrence of non-heterosexual modes of living and social organization leads many from cultures like mine to presume that a woman would only transition to be with a man. A profound loneliness dogs my very existence, alerting me to the wispy shadows of a shrouded past that barely had a record of women like me prior to the midpoint of the 20th Century, only whispers and rumors and sensationalist gossip scrawled in academic journal by Esther Newton, alluding to the idea of a “man” that, having availed of hormones and surgical interventions, now sleeps with lesbians—the scandal.
No ancestors that are mine to claim.
Dulhaniyaa is not a particularly melancholy book, though a certain pensiveness pervades the opening chapters. There a story within the story written in subtext, in allusions and word choices and snippets of dialogue, that Esha and Billu and Dolly and others are aware of: my homeland, my motherland, my culture and my nation and my state—it is not a place for queer women. It is certainly, emphatically, not a place for a trans woman who fancies herself still attracted to other women, or even indelibly non-binary in a way. Women like us have no names, no pasts, and almost certainly no futures within the narrow confines of the constructed and stifling heterosexual hegemony.
A reviewer was kind enough to sum up Dulhaniyaa for me better than I ever could, stating triumphantly that “Queer love is a jailbreak.” It’s a quote that has stuck with me both for how simply it states a core theme that I certainly labored to convey without necessarily consciously meaning to, as well as for how profoundly vast and unencompassable the prison I find myself in is. My shackles are Time and Language itself, my cell the land I was born in, my wardens its people. I am a refugee in a sense that many, many queer and especially trans people tend to be, evicted and disowned and erased from hearth and homeland.
I wrote Dulhaniyaa because someone broke me out of that cell. She saw the woman I was as well as the woman I could be, and helped me bridge the gap between the two. She is now my wife.
Queer love is a jailbreak. Get your pickaxes ready.
wow chain gang all-stars really just ends like that. i knew it was going to happen but it's the abruptness and the lack of follow up or closure that really gets me. the thing you knew would happen happens and then it's over and you're left with it so the feeling has to just sit there and fester. many of adjei-brenyahs short stories from friday black ended in a similar fashion so i don't know why id expect differently, because really what else is there to say. i feel hollow and angry and mournful and something else i don't have a word for. 10/10 amazing book instant favorite. i need to stare at a wall for 5 hours.
