#aafwc

[lamujerarana]

Asexual Awareness Week Fandom Challenge 2018 → Day Five: A Canonically Ace Character From DC

↳ Roshanna Chatterji, aka Tremor of the Movement

[acesthetically-pleasing]

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby [19/52]

Asexual Awareness Week Fandom Challenge 2017

Sun 22nd, Day 1: Post about canon and headcanoned asexual/spectrum characters in books and comics.

For this occasion 19th aspec drabble of 52 aspec drabbles of 2017. All about Charlie Weasley (and dragons.) [Also on AO3]

"Do kurwy nędzy," grumbled Darek. "Weasley, why the fuck you raised the alarm and I swear you better not answer that it's about the Swed. Because if I stood up the beautiful Lana for another false alarm about the fucking Swed - I will feed you to that dragon myself. Maybe that will make her hatch the eggs faster. Who knows. It will be experiment."

"For a person who dislikes speaking in English you talk a lot, you know?" asked Charlie with an apologetic grin.

"Pierdol się," replied Darek darkly. Charlie still wasn't that good with Polish swearing but he was learning fast and could recognize the various options for the common "go fuck yourself" well enough.

"You see, I'm quite sure I saw a crack."

"Was it on your skull? Because there will be one."

"Darek," Charlie pleaded.

It was just the two of them left. Well, two of them and Katka, the intern from Slovakia who barely spoke English and was not only inexperienced but still full of - generally quite healthy - fear of dragons. It made her unsure at best and unreliable at worst.

They were stuck in Ukraine for over a month now. The giant poster in their small cabin that used to count down the days to the planned hatching was now displaying in disturbingly bright red "-27 days to the hatching!" The charmed tiny drawings of fireworks were getting paler and paler.

Alina left just a few days before, eager to use at least part of her break to spend time with her husband.

Terry and Agata left a week after the hatching was supposed to happen. They were planning their trip for months, to see more of the Europe and finally spend some time alone.

Darek was literally all Charlie had left and that was probably more because Darek could pull girls wherever he was rather than his unshakable commitment.

Sometimes it was hard to be the ace of the group in that sense. To be the only one for whom the dragons really were the priority. Of course, Irina divorced her husband when she could no longer balance the romance with running a dragon reserve, but neither Charlie nor his boss could really expect that kind of commitment out of everyone.

Also, Charlie liked to spread this legend of married-to-dragons scary lady Irina, because he knew she liked that reputation, but he also knew her husband was an abusive dick and dragons were only the final push towards that divorce.

"I understand it's not your thing, but Lena is really, really, very beautiful, you know? And not easy to convince for a date!"

Charlie just kept walking towards the clearing where they kept the biggest Swedish Short-Snout he ever saw, resting on two false eggs and one genuine one. She placed three originally, but one started cracking way too soon and they couldn't save it. The dragon embryo barely formed as they looked at it afterward. It looked big, that's how they got an almost exact planned date of the hatching, but still barely formed. One got some odd spots on the shell and they removed it, worried about the disease. Few spells quickly revealed that something killed that one as well. They replaced both eggs to keep the mother calm and hoped for the last one to be stronger. Sadly, as the time passed, the hope grew stale and only Charlie - with Irina's tentative support - insisted on keeping in with the mother.

"There!" he pointed at the egg, mostly hidden under the huge body of the mother. "Come on, Tina, move a bit, sweetheart."

The dragon eyed Charlie with distaste as he waved at her, urging her to ease up on the egg.

"Kurwa mać," Darek cursed behind him, the crack in the egg now perfectly visible.

Something clicked and they both turned towards Katka who was moving excitedly around the dragon and snapping a picture after picture with a wild maniacal grin.

"Well, this one is tunning up," offered Derek still in slight shock.

Charlie grinned victoriously as Derek owled Lena to cancel their date.

Sometimes it was hard to be ace and a dragon tamer. The crowd was often crude, the tight cohabitation prone to romantic and sexual drama. The strain of the job ruined people's personal lives and sometimes it was hard to tear yourself away from the most fascinating creatures in the world to deal with your friend's break up, but Charlie managed. He loved his friends and he loved his job and it was worth it. On nights like this even others had to admit that.

They sat around the dragon for hours, watching the egg slowly hatch. Lena joined them with hot tea and some sandwiches, apparently not as concerned about the lost date as Darek.

Finally, already past midnight, they watched the biggest Swedish Short-Snout hatchling stumble out of the rest of its egg. Tina was brushing the shells off her child, the sticky slime covering its silver-blue scales. It started standing up on the rare legs, falling clumsily, but getting it after several tries, crowding against its mother for warmth.

Katka's camera kept snapping picture after picture, illuminated by the glowing magical lights they set hovering around.

"I'll be damned," Charlie offered in awe and Darek nodded, looking just as shocked.

"It's a fucking hybrid," he whispered.

"She's so beautiful," whispered Lena, tears in her eyes and Charlie didn't bother to question right now how she knew it was a female.

The Swedish Short-Snout/Ukrainian Ironbelly hybrid hiccupped a patch of smoke and Charlie laughed, somewhat hysterically.

"Well, Weasley, what will you name your firstborn?" Darek asked with a lopsided grin. Neither one of them yet managed to be the first at the hatching and therefore had no naming right as of yet.

Charlie grinned, watching the baby dragon blink its red eyes awkwardly.

"Ruby," he said with mock seriousness. "After her godfather."

Lena looked at him oddly as both he and Darek laughed. Hagrid was going to love it.

[embuffalo-blog]

for the asexual awareness week fandom challenge

Day 5 -- A male character you see as aromantic -- Pete Lattimer

[embuffalo-blog]

for the asexual awareness week fandom challenge

Day 4 -- A ship you would like to see as an asexual one -- Mako Mori/Raleigh Becket

[embuffalo-blog]

for the asexual awareness week fandom challenge

Day 2 -- A female character you see as asexual -- Katniss Everdeen

[embuffalo-blog]

for the asexual awareness week fandom challenge

Day 1 -- A male character you see as asexual -- Newt Geiszler

[tartapplesauce]

Asexual Awareness Week October 26th - November 1st

Participate in this challenge in any way you want on Asexual Awareness Week (Oct 26 - Nov 1). Edits, gifs, fanart, fanfiction, fanmixes, just copy-pasting this and listing them out one by one, literally in any way you contribute to the fandom on a day to day basis. 

Day 1: A male character you see as asexual.  Day 2: A female character you see as asexual.  Day 3: A character you see as grey-a or demisexual.  Day 4: A ship you would like to see as an asexual one.  Day 5: A male character you see as aromantic.  Day 6: A female character you see as aromantic.  Day 7: A ship you would like to see as a platonic one. 

Reblog this to spread awareness, please, and tag your edits/whatever as ‘aawfc’. 

That's the cut'n'paste bit out of the way, now for my contribution.  This is going to be long and rambling, so fair warning!

Day 1: A male character you see as asexual.

My nomination for this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

Let me kick off with a quotation from "A Scandal in Bohemia" (annotation mine):

All emotions, and that one [sexual/romantic love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.  He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position.  He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer.  They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions.  But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results.  Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.

  Unfortunately, CBS' Elementary, the modern day American Sherlock version, seems to agree with this.  Not alone did they amalgamate 'Irene Adler' (who in this version had no independent existence of her own, ask me how mad that makes me) with Moriarty, they have Moriarty deliberately manipulate Sherlock via his emotions for exactly this effect - love turns his brain to mush, he is successfully distracted from his investigations into her criminal activities and seemingly she broke his poor widdle heart so badly he had to flee England for the U.S.A.

It's excusable for Watson, who in this story is in love, engaged to be married, deliriously happy and longing to fix his best mate up with a nice girl so he'll be as happy, to make this mistake.  It's less excusable for a show that could go the route of casting Watson as a woman, and a Chinese-American woman at that, which has (to date) avoided the stock TV show dynamic of having male and female co-leads evince UST with hints that this is leading to a romantic relationship; which could introduce characters who are POC and not just 'background extras'; which could re-imagine Ms Hudson as a trans woman; which could relocate Sherlock lock, stock and barrel from London to New York, but which could apparently neither countenance nor imagine a character who is not currently, nor ever has been, sexually active.

They even gave Mycroft a fiancée because (a) it enabled them to show the rift between the brothers by having Sherlock behaving shittily by sleeping with her - yes, he was trying to prove to Mycroft that she wasn't really in love with him, but come on and (b) hey, the Holmes brothers may be weird, but they're not abnormal, you know!  They had girlfriends!

Because apparently you can be an ex-junkie, privileged brat, eccentric genius with social fluency problems pain in the arse, but you can't be celibate/a virgin past the age of fourteen or so because that's just weird. It's like what The Simpsons said about TV ugly - you can be TV weird, not weird-weird.

Disappointed in you there, Elementary.

It's the invisibility of asexuality, the notion that not being sexually active or interested in sex stems from repression or abuse or shyness or some such, or that you're in the closet about your true sexuality (back in the Bad Old Days of the heyday of 50s Freudian dominance of psychiatry, I'm sure plenty of women who were asexual were diagnosed as frigid, and plenty of men who were asexual were recommended for a bracing stint in the Army or some other profession that would boost their masculinity, because if you didn't like girls, that was a worrying hint of possible effeminacy and/or homosexuality).

BBC modern-day Sherlock was a tiny bit better (though it is horrendously problematic about women, race - the "Blind Banker" episode is frankly unbelievable in its treatment of the Chinese characters - and queerbaiting) because at least it mentioned the notion of Holmes simply not being interested (the unaired pilot episode was perhaps the best at this, with a more relaxed, less aloof Sherlock than the official pilot and series in the restaurant scene who was off-handedly and casually honest about this to John, who thought it a bit unusual but accepted it without making a big deal of it - it was introduced in the context of the canonical habit of Holmes' fasting while on a case, so it was clearly meant as all part of his character, not picking out the element of his sexuality and highlighting it).

Of course, then the show went into virgin-shaming and queerbaiting and all the rest of it (of course they went the 'Irene Adler is sexually/romantically fascinated by Sherlock' route, of course they did, even when they made her a lesbian (or bisexual) professional domme), so that chance was lost.

If the 'joke' in BBC Sherlock about "Ah, that's the reason I've never seen you in here before with a girlfriend - you like boys instead! Here, I'll get a candle, it's more romantic" isn't funny because why should "No, I'm/we're not gay" be funny?, then it's just as tiresome and just as unfunny when it's "If you're here with someone who is obviously closer to you than a mere work colleague, it must be a romance whether it's gay or straight coupledom".

If you question "Why should the default assumption be 'this character is straight', 'this character is white'" then all I put for your consideration is this: why should the default assumption be 'this character, by showing regard or affection, is demonstrating sexual interest'?  Please note: I'm not knocking slash here, or anyone whose headcanon sees Holmes and Watson as a gay partnership who had to be closeted or extremely discreet in their times.  I'm standing up for the "consider 'not interested at all' as just as valid as "'of course they're straight' 'consider maybe at least one of them is bi or gay'".

So yes - Sherlock (and Mycroft) Holmes are my choices for canonically asexual characters in works of popular culture.

Is Sherlock aromantic?  I don't know and I wouldn't bet on it one way or the other.  He needn't be; asexual and aromantic are not tied together; you can be aro/ace, ace (or on the spectrum), or aro (or on the spectrum).

Watson may have made increasingly half-hearted attempts over the years to recommend possible romantic interests to Holmes, particularly from amongst their clients ("Don't you think Miss So-and-So is admirable, Holmes? Sosmart and cool-headed and pretty as well!") but he gives up on them and accepts his friend for what he is.

When Holmes says that 'the fair sex' is Watson's department, he is acknowledging his own limitations.  He may often rebuke Watson for being a hopeless romantic who always sees the best in people, particularly women, but he also takes his advice on a topic where Watson knows more from actual experience than Holmes does.

From "The Adventure of the Second Stain":

 She looked back at us from the door, and I had a last impression of that beautiful haunted face, the startled eyes, and the drawn mouth.  Then she was gone. 

“Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department,” said Holmes, with a smile, when the dwindling frou-frou of skirts had ended in the slam of the front door.  “What was the fair lady’s game?  What did she really want?” 

“Surely her own statement is clear and her anxiety very natural.” 

“Hum!  Think of her appearance, Watson — her manner, her suppressed excitement, her restlessness, her tenacity in asking questions.  Remember that she comes of a caste who do not lightly show emotion.”

Is Sherlock a cold, unfeeling, ratiocination machine?  No, he's not - and that's another myth around asexuality, and in the wider context of how society views sex and romance: that if you're not in love, have never fallen in love (or at least lust), you are completely emotionless, robotic, even inhuman.  

Asexuals can feel love for family, friends, pets, country, nature, favourite TV or book characters, flavours of ice cream and everything else 'normal' people feel.

Watson, after years of partnership, learned better - that Holmes was not a cold, reasoning machine:

From "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs":

In an instant he had whisked out a revolver from his breast and had fired two shots.  I felt a sudden hot sear as if a red-hot iron had been pressed to my thigh.  There was a crash as Holmes's pistol came down on the man's head.  I had a vision of him sprawling upon the floor with blood running down his face while Holmes rummaged him for weapons.  Then my friend's wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair.

"You're not hurt, Watson?  For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!"

It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.  The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking.  For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.  All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

But we knew - or should have known it - already.  Younger Holmes mentions two good friends in his youth, Victor Trevor and Reginald Musgrave.  Watson tells us that though he speaks disparagingly of women, nevertheless he treats women clients with courtesy and even chivalry.  He has the Baker Street Irregulars, who are obviously more to him than just a gang of street rats he uses as informants.  Mrs Hudson, despite all his shortcomings as a tenant, never evicts him and is taken into his confidence at the most crucial times ("The Adventure of the Empty House").

And quite frankly, if we're going to go the route of "love turns your brain to mush" that Elementary needed as a plot point, I'm all for the side of cold-blooded reason.  I'm asexual (on the side of the scale moving towards greysexual, I think) and definitely aromantic, and I work in a job which involves provide social services to the public (I don't want to say more than that because confidentiality issues).  And I do see a lot of people messing up their lives (from my point of view) for the sake of 'love' (which quite often evaporates and goes 'poof' and leaves the consequences behind).  From that point of view, I am with Holmes: why on earth can't you use your head?  Why can't you see the problems here?  What is so over-riding about this particular emotion that it makes you act in a foolish manner?  It is, from this side, an intrusion, a distracting factor.

But that's why Holmes has Watson - to represent to him the good of romantic love, to explain it to him why people do those silly things, and to show that no, your brain need not turn to mush when you're in love.

To sum up: Sherlock Holmes, asexual.  Not in love with Irene Adler or Watson (though he does love Watson, and that love of philia is every bit as valid as eros).  Irene Adler, not in love with Sherlock Holmes, happily married to Godfrey Norton.  Professor Moriarty, not in love with anyone except perhaps himself (and asteroids, definitely asteroids).

Thank you, Granada, for giving us canon Holmes and canon Adler.  I just wish modern versions could show that there are all kinds of love beyond simply romantic/sexual being in love.

And as long as I can type at a keyboard, my bitter, wizened little heart will continue to maintain: Sherlock Holmes, asexual.  No romances here.