#aroblogging

[astriiformes]

Hi in over a decade of reading fic I've never seen stats remotely like this for a fandom. What the fuck (positive) (aro/ace) (so so positive)

[genderqueerpond]

you know what, i. don't think i'm aro anymore

[mtg-player1]

are you having an aromantic day everyone?

[astriiformes]

In general, "character who is in unrequited love with another character who is very aromantic and is just, like, normal about it" is a dynamic that I am obsessed with and nobody ever writes, for reasons that are perhaps obvious but still disappoint me.

[astriiformes]

Honestly one thing that really gets me re: fandom being so terrible about asexual and aromantic characters is that like. It directly affects the media that exists & the ace and aro characters we get to see.

Like yes, it's partially that people who don't or won't understand asexuality and aromanticism are the ones writing bad representation, and in some cases aphobes are just going to be aphobes. But there's also this expectation that if you want to be a fun and cool creator and have your media get popular, you need to make it as appealing to shippers as possible. (Not to mention that these days, many creators have their origins in fandom, leading to further normalization of this kind of thing when they become showrunners/etc). And that causes so many problems, narratively and otherwise, but it also has a horrible impact on aspec representation.

And it fucking sucks. I hate that I know of multiple popular shows where the creator walked back a character being aromantic so that people would "have more fun"--in one showrunner's words, which is also one of the most offensively arophobic things I've ever heard a creator say--and others where characters' canon aromanticism and/or asexuality were minimized in order to appeal more to fandom's wildly aphobic preferences.

People's decision to only care about allo characters (or to ignore the canon sexualities and/or romantic orientations of aspec ones) and make shipping central to fandom has real consequences for the kind of representation we get, and while representation is hardly the be-all-end-all some people make it out to be, as an aro/ace person in fandom, it does still really hurt to see. I hate it so much.

[astriiformes]

Seen a lot of people saying that Rowling's recent anti-asexuality remarks are somehow surprising or unprompted and I would really really encourage people to learn more about the links between TERFism and aphobia. People dismiss bigotry towards asexual and aromantic people as somehow separate or different from other queerphobia when in fact they are all very much linked.

[astriiformes]

In general I think that Hanahaki disease is an irredeemably amatonormative fic trope that needs to go away, like, yesterday and reflects a lot of fandom's worst tendencies. But recently for whatever reason (?) my brain has really latched onto the idea of doing some kind of aromantic, Hanahaki-type curse-as-horror thing and even though I don't have a particularly concrete idea yet, I feel like it has potential.

[astriiformes]

Might actually cry a little bit (in a good way) - the new bill that just passed here in Minnesota granting paid medical leave to people caring for sick family members has such an intentionally expansive definition of "family" that biological and/or legal ties are not actually a prerequisite to qualify for the program. In fact, there's a portion of the bill that specifies anyone designated as family by the incapacitated party can receive the benefits.

Apparently this was done in part to make the policy as inclusive as possible of queer family structures and I am absolutely floored; as someone with a seriously chronically ill queerplatonic partner I worry a lot about my options as a primary caretaker, seeing as the fact that we are not legal partners bars us from so many other benefits, but the fact that this particular one would be inclusive of us (and poly partners, and single queer people with no ties to their biological family but close friends willing to help them out, etc) has given me more hope that may change someday than I think anything ever has.

This is how you do policy that benefits the entire queer community, including poly, ace, and aro folks for whom same-sex marriage has never offered the same legal rights (and plenty of other folks besides, like disabled people or people with terrible biological families -- you don't have to be LGBTQA+ for it to be a seriously important option). This is genuinely incredible. I was excited to see this pass even without knowing it would potentially apply to me, too, but now I'm a total grateful, emotional mess.