First off, I loved your ask post about erasure, Scrooge, and representation. Anon, if you’re reading this, you’re a legend. Second, I haven’t read A Christmas Carol in a while, and I was curious how Scrooge is coded. In what ways do you see him as aro-ace? Thanks bunches!
First, I’m going to @ mention @thatmrgold, because I think they’re also a fan of Scrooge, additional to the original asking anon (or at least I’ve seen a reblog on one of my posts that suggests this–many apologies if I’m mistaken). I have read A Christmas Carol several times, but it’s many years ago now–my most recent engagement with the story is The Muppet Christmas Carol adaptation, seen last year! For this reason, I encourage anyone more familiar with the source material to expand upon my answer. I don’t have the detailed familiarity with the canon to answer save in broader strokes.
The main points where I think thatEbenezer Scrooge can be coded or seen as coded involve a previous failed romance (it’s depicted that he comes to love money more than hisfiancée, for which she leaves him), his long-running single-man-in-the-world status (he lives on his own, no partner, which is meant to indicate his hatefulness) and his isolation/disconnection from the world around him (demonstrated in a lack of compassion for his tenants, a refusal to allow his workers their Christmas, etc).
I’m going to explain why these points are effective coding, because written in a paragraph like that, they don’t seem like much. Thing is, they don’t have to be!
I’ll stress that much of this ties into long-running antagonistic aro-ace (and often autistic*) coding shared with other characters. A lot of a-spec coding is less about certain qualities suggesting a character’s being a-spec and more about those qualities being part of a broader literary canon of similarly-viewed characters. In other words, characters where people read those qualities together as having associations with a-spec identities, not because those character qualities are always inherently associated with being aro-ace or a-spec. In this sense, Scrooge is a-spec coded because Sherlock Holmes is a-spec coded and Clariel is specifically aro-ace and early The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper is aro-ace coded, and all these characters have commonalities in how they see the world, how they connect to the world and, most particularly, how the rest of the world views them. Viewed in isolation, Scrooge isn’t necessarily aro-ace-coded. Viewed in a social and historical context of other characters interpreted as aro-ace, on the other hand, he is.
I’m going to use The Big Bang Theory to explain my point, because I think Sheldon Cooper is the most recognizable character, and despite not liking the source material, I’m quite familiar with it. The Big Bang Theory doesn’t properly describe early-seasons Sheldon as aro-ace; it compares him to aliens, to plants and the scientific understanding of asexual reproduction. I think it does once or twice use “asexual” but it’s never in the current understanding of “lacking sexual attraction” and more like “a being without sex”. He’s constantly dehumanised for the aro-ace qualities the show won’t name. He talks, though, in ways that clearly demonstrate a lack of sexual and romantic attraction, and because of amatonormativity, they later give him a slow-growing romantic relationship as part of character “progression”. (Which is handled so disrespectfully and antagonistically, but that’s another post.) When people first hear the words aro-ace, they’ll commonly think of early-seasons Sheldon, because that’s the undercurrent of his character compared to characters like Scrooge or Sherlock. Even people who’ve never heard words like asexual or aromantic have an idea of what they think it is on first listen, because they’ve been exposed to so much unlabelled coding: in a world lacking intentional and meaningful representation to properly educate audiences on lived experiences, coding instead forms the basis of understanding.
(And it’s unexplored amatonormativity and aro/ace antagonism, of course, for why negative character traits are so often a-spec coding.)
This is why we end up with a character being aro-ace coded for things like not having a relationship and not connecting with people. These things do not inherently mean anything about the aro-ace experience, but they’re part of a social context where qualities indicate identities. Only the people who have a true need to understand–either as allies working with us or because they’re a-spec–go to a-spec communities to learn the diversity of experiences associated with our words, to look beyond the clumsy outline of coding.
(In fact, they have no concept of coding as distinct from representation.)
Additionally, especially because we a-specs are raised in a world where we are not seen or understood, we ourselves often come to relate to those qualities, however negative the coding and context, too. Not having a relationship says nothing about one’s lack of attraction, but many a-specs struggle to have a successful relationship, are pressured into ones we don’t want or are non-amorous. In a world where so few characters are depicted as long-term single in late adulthood, we’ll take that character for our own. Not connecting with society–well, I suspect the majority of aro-specs respect the need for Christians to celebrate their cultural and religious holidays, but when being a-spec is always a wall between us and the rest of the world, we feel and relate to that distance, that disconnect. When Christmas means people pestering us about our relationship status or lack of attraction, don’t we feel a bit like saying “Bah, humbug”? A romance failed by not loving someone else enough–not loving enough has been or will be levelled at many aro-specs, and I know that I’ve felt that because of my lack of romantic attraction, I must have loved something else over the “proper” romantic love for another person. It fits close enough to the amatonormativity we experience.
(There’s a reason why LGBTQIA+ and queer people so commonly relate to antagonistic characters, as their experiences of disconnection and alienation are as close as many of us get to our lived experiences. Only recently has there been, for some identities, anything close to representation, including representation that positively explores our alienation, enough that we might first see ourselves in anything other than antagonist characters.)
Lack of mainstream/broadly recognised representation, too, drives us to forge more intense connections with flimsier points of similarity than would be reasonable for a white, abled heterosexual cis woman connecting with white, abled, female cishet characters. She can be choosy about personality and character type in the characters she deems to be like her; we have the unconscious-but-constant knowledge that there’s few others like us and connect, in relief, just to have someone vaguely like us in the story, even if they’re clearly an antagonist.
On their own, these things are flimsy pieces of connection, but in a social context of coding and lack of representation, they become so much larger.
Does this make sense? A lot of what I see as aro-ace in Scrooge is less about descriptions of lack of attraction as it is broader brush-stroke images that correspond to lived experience or negative coding. Folks more familiar with the source material may be able to offer you more detailed examples, but for me it’s about the type of character Scrooge is in the social context of similar characters seen a particular way by a-specs and allosexual-and-alloromantic folks alike.
* Explanation of why I mention autistic coding under the cut for those who’d rather ignore the tangential murmuring: