Actually, I have more thoughts on this and want to expand on them.
Iāve been seeing a lot of people lately, particularly in younger-skewing fandoms, getting very up-in-arms about fics using both the ā&ā tag and the ā/ā tag for character relationships. Specifically, Iāve been seeing criticism about how this āforces romance into platonic spacesā and forces people who just want to see platonic content to interact with romantic content, and vise-versa (I see the first one way more).
I will first acknowledge that, yes, sometimes these things are just straight-up tagged incorrectly. Sometimes people write something which is clearly not meant to be platonic in the slightest and tag it ā&.ā Mis-tags happen, unfortunately, though they very often come from a place of misunderstanding (never underestimate the power of dropping a polite comment suggesting a tag change).
I will also say that the use of both of those tags in conjunction already has a history of being used to indicate a āfriends to loversā situation, or some other set up in which a close platonic relationship morphs into something more romantic over the course of the story. Both tags are true in the narrative, and so both tags are relevant.
But I also want to point out and chat about this third option - sometimes, itās tagged as both because it can, genuinely, be either. The situation can be read either way. The narrative itself is ambiguous. And this isnāt a bad thing. This is not some gotcha! against people who want gen content. This ambiguity is oftentimes a feature, not a bug, and itās very odd to me that people have stopped seeing it as such.
Sometimes, when Iām writing two characters in a situation, I donāt even really know if the interaction is platonic or romantic. I know it is intense, and mostly positive, and has a lot of weight between the two characters feeling it. But is it truly romantic? Shrug! Search me, who knows. Could this be because I am very aspec myself and have a pretty non-standard conception of the romantic-platonic continuum? Yeah, probably! But thatās what I mean -
Thereās this wonderful, squishy, fluid place between platonic and romantic relationships. Itās complicated, itās non-precise, itās incredibly queer. That ambiguous nature, that not-quite-this-not-quite-that, that fluidity between supposed binary points, is what queerness is about. This insistence that something must be one thing or the other, a situation must be read as only romantic or platonic, sounds a lot like the kind of thinking that says you can only be one gender or the other. You can only like men or women. Itās a binary, babes, and enforcing binaries isnāt good. Whatās romantic to one person is not necessarily romantic to another person. What one aro person considers romantic is going to be different from another aro person. Is holding hands inherently romantic? Is kissing? Cuddling? How far can cuddling go before it starts being romantic? What if someone disagrees with you?
And, listen, I love the uptick in gen content that a lot of fandoms are getting. Sign me the fuck up for some gen h/c, thatās most of what I write, I think this is a fantastic way that fandom is expanding. But an insistence that those two things must always be kept separate - that something must only be ā&ā or ā/ā, and to tag both is an attack against platonic/gen content - erases that ambiguity. It feeds into a binary that which is both toxic and built off of fake binary norms.
This is all to say - sometimes, the relationship is undefined and squishy, and that isnāt hurting anyone, and should both be celebrated tagged as such.
