#theridgebeyond

[ltc-henry-blake]

wrapped ask: 2, 4, 24, 42

2. Let My Love Open the Door by Pete Townshend

4. Easy Lover by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins

24. Squeeze Box by The Who

42. Turn It On Again by Genesis

[acecatholic]

theridgebeyond replied to your post “I'm torn between wanting to use this blog to publicly respond to...”

I always have to think hard about whether or not to post something that sounds too discourse-y because I value hard conversations, but I also want to stay true to my blog’s original intent.

😞 the struggle is reallll 

[acecatholic]

Locust, magnolia

LOCUST: What was your favorite book as a child?I’d have to say either The Little Princess or Harry Potter. Those were my most re-read books and still some of my faves today

MAGNOLIA: Favorite kind of candy?M&Ms!!

Mod Theo

[thephdmedic]

Space ask! Jupiter, Deneb, and Hydra ✨

Thank you for the ask @theridgebeyond!

Do I have any siblings? Yes! I have a sister who is 4 years younger than me

Have you ever been out of your home country? I move around a lot so I’ve lived in the UK, Brunei and Germany and I’ve visited France, Germany, Bali and Singapore :D

Favourite sound? Probably a fire? Because it could either be an open fire at home where it’s raining outside and I’m curled up with a book and my dogs or a bonfire while I’m out with my friends, which are two completely different vibes but I love them both!

[egglife]

Greek ask! Apollo and Hermes :)

Thanks so much for sending an ask!!

Apollo, fav study playlist: it changes depending on mood but lately it’s been these two lo-fi beats playlists on youtube :D 

1. Swing Beats [Jazz Hop / Lo Fi / Chill Mix] 

2. i miss being a child / lofi hiphop mix

(coughs, I also love this one called “1 Hour of Relaxing Rainy Day Animal Crossing Music + Rain Sounds“ because I rlly like animal crossing lol)

Hermes, language u want to learn:

Well, I’d like to be proficient in Mandarin Chinese someday, I currently study/practice it on my own and in school though I’m not that good since I go a while without studying sometimes lol

I’m interested in learning Arabic too; the more languages the better, the list goes on!!

send me greek god/godess asks! 

[acesthetically-pleasing]

1, 4, 5, & 11!

Hey! Thanks for the ask! :) 

1. favourite place in your country?

I love the Baltic Sea and generally any place close is great, the smaller place the better. Additionally, I also love Łódź, which is considered a super ugly city but personally I find it so ugly its beautiful <3

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

Pierogi <3 I have other but they’re top choice, especially the ones with meat. <3

5. favourite song in your native language?

Czesław Niemen - Dzwiny Jest Ten Świat

11. favourite native writer/poet? 

Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer (Have a poem. This is not my favourite of his poems but I like it and it’s the best translation I could find)

the rest of the questions

feel free to send me more asks :) what better way to celebrate the independence day, huh? ;)

[aroworlds]

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:

A lot of aro-ace coding is also autistic coding because allo allistic writers cannot conceive of autistics being anything but aro-ace and aro-aces being anything but autistic. Both identities are seen as lacking empathy and connection to others, and both are subject to the dehumanising assumptions behind this kind of antagonistic coding, where aro-ace coding is used to show an autistic character as inhuman and autism coding is used to show an aro-ace character as inhuman.

Please note that the tendency for combining the coding does not mean that autistic aro-aces have full representation, as I see too many people argue: most of these characters are antagonists who don’t offer full, celebratory, supportive, intentional and beneficial depictions of aro-ace and autistic experiences. Aro-ace autistics are not positively depicted in the broader literary canon; surface aspects of their experiences are used to tell the audience a character is antagonistic. Given that I’m starting to see a few romance novels with autistic characters, by autistics and allistics alike, the idea that autistic aro-aces (and I don’t know of any autistic allo-aro character outside my own work!) are somehow more represented in fiction is raging amatonormativity. Again, coding is not representation and it’s disingenuous to conflate them.

[acecatholic]

Just needed to vent to someone who understands. On FB I came across a post by a good friend about how Christians say they love everyone, hate the LGBTQ+ community, and then claim that they’re the ones being persecuted. It hurts knowing that that’s how people see us, and worse that there are those out there who really are like that. All that can really be done is to understand where my friend’s coming from and love her the way Jesus does, no matter how much I want to retaliate online.

<3