hi, i am a newly self discovered aro person! i was in my first and only relationship for several years before i realized that i dont feel romantic attraction the way other people do. i am allosexual and bisexual, as well as romance-favorable. my lack of repulsion and neurodivergence significantly added to my confusion, as someone who truly believed that i existed for love.
im making this blog in hope of connecting with other people like me and creating some more aro positivity on tumblr, as i have noticed the ace and aroace communities are far more active and represented by comparison.
content warnings for those who may be uncomfortable, as i will be posting about sexual desire, physical intimacy with friends, queerplatonic relationships, alterous attraction, and my unique experiences as an aro person. i will post based off my personal comfort and won't take it personally if you don't identify with or like the things i blog. also, no TERFs or purity culture allowed. ever.
The way fandom treats aro/ace characters is bad because it's very telling of how most people view aromanticism and asexuality in real life, because it's evident that they simply do not want to engage with these things or fit them into their worldview. Not because someone writing a smut fic about an ace character is somehow on the same level as them pressuring a real life sex-repulsed asexual person into sex. It's a fictional character being written in a way that contradicts the source material, not a real person having their boundaries violated. No amount of fanfic about them will alter the source material because that is not how fanfiction works.
What fandom aphobia reveals is that most non-aspec people don't want their faves to be aro/ace because they don't find that engaging. They don't want characters they like to be aro/ace not because everyone is sooo obsessed with shipping (shipping is a cornerstone of fandom culture and it's not going anywhere, you have to get over that), but because they just don't want to expand their worldview to fit aro/ace people into it. They don't want to learn about what aspec experiences are actually like, they don't want to see aspec stories, they just want us to be as ignorable as possible.
This can be discussed without shitting on romance/sex-favorable people and implying that the only good aro/ace representation is 100% repulsed and anything else is erasure. We do actually need representation of different types of aspec people and it isn't just The Mean Allos saying "aros can still date and aces can still have sex" to justify their fanfic
i like when characters have weird inexplicable intimate bonds but i don't understand romantic or sexual attraction so it's just weird bullshit instead #myweirdbullshit #ilovemyweirdbullshit #secretthirdthing
ladies, gents, and everyone in between or outside of those parameters, we are back again for 2026, this time kickin' off the announcement a little bit sooner. after last years outstanding support and excitement for this event, we've decided to run it again! the planning is just about all the same as last year too, no big surprises about it.
and, as always, a little bit about your host. hi! we're Mito/Rev, our pronouns are ve/1t, and technically we're the same guy running it as last year but with a sprinkling of turns out theres more than one of us. we're collectively aromantic with some variance in how the lot of us experience our non-ace aro'ness.
schedule
prompt submission: May 1st to May 10th
prompt voting: May 11th to May 17th
prompts posted: May 18th (probably won't have fancy formatting)
downtime to pre-create: May 18th to May 31st
posting week: June 1st to 7th
guidelines
1: anyone can participate! whether you're non-ace aro, aroace, alloace, or alloallo, you can participate! just keep the works focused on aromanticism without the asexuality, yeah?
2: please tag your works properly! nsfw and dead dove creations are allowed and welcomed, but it'd be nice if ya tagged 'em
3: don’t worry about posting “late”! i’ll be scrolling around for things posted late through all of June, aim for posting during the week but it’s okay if ya don’t. however, if you do post late please tag the blog* to ensure we see it!
4: any fandoms** and any “ships” are allowed! this is a multifandom event, and, truthfully, the more the merrier and all that jazz!
5: most importantly, have fun with it!
aaaaaaaand, yep, that brings this post to a close!
all in all, we continue to hope that this event brings the non-ace aro community a little closer together, raises awareness of non-ace aro experiences in fandom, and most importantly, that everyone has fun with this event
arrow assets made by @aroworlds
if anyone has any questions about the event, the askbox is open as always
-Mito/Rev
*last year there were issues with posts not showing up in the tag, so if you desperately want your post to be reblogged here we would suggest just tagging us to make sure we see it
**the one stipulation to this is works by jk rowling and neil gaiman, we cant stop you from making them, but we wont be reblogging them
what I mean: "sexual intercourse" is as much a social construct as "romantic courtship," and you discover this very quickly as a queer person if you try to talk to able bodied straight cis people who literally think the only thing that counts as Actual Sex is penis-in-vagina penetration, like they call oral "foreplay" it's so dire. various people have a lot of vested interest in cleanly defining "sex" vs "not sex" for a whole slew of reasons (ex. censorship dodging and enforcing, conferring the social clout of virginity and prowess, finding and closing loopholes about premarital sex, deciding what relationships "count" as serious partnerships, ligating what is general assault vs sexual assault vs Something That's Definitely Probably Fine And Not Sexual At All, Actually, etc.), and it's really not something you can just fall back on as obvious common sense that people are dumb for questioning.
for me being bi has contributed a huge amount to noticing all the ways in which romance and friendship run together and i think in general people would benefit from recognizing that romance and friendship are socially constructed categories used to describe a vast, nebulous, and often overlapping range of feelings
Every Relationship is actually a specific, unique thing. We invented Shorthands, such as Friend or Husband, to help describe recurring motifs in Relationships. But. The labels are simplifications. They will always fail to adequately contain the entirety of the Relationship.
due to popular demand (21 people agreeing I should let it consume me) I'm adding a bunch of pages about aromantic stuff to my neocities (to those who arent familiar, thats a website) and if popular demand strikes again I shall give yall the link. once it's at least semi decent and somewhat done
