#I am aro ace so it is wild seeing the aro ace flag on things in such a small fandom | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

archivomeow · 1 month

Text

yelena belova is aroace.

Yelena Belova is canonically aroace.

Lately people dismissing that has been getting on my nerves VERY much, so I’m making this post lol.

First the terminology:

Aromantic — an individual who doesn’t experience romantic attraction.

Asexual — an individual that doesn’t experience sexual attraction.

AroSpec — spectrum that includes different aromantic identities, from aros who don’t feel romantic attraction to those who do under certain circumstances or rarely.

AceSpec — spectrum that includes different asexual identities, from aces who don’t feel sexual attraction to those who do under certain circumstances or rarely.

So first thing i will put here is this;

This in my humble opinion should be enough of a proof, but apparently it is not.

First this part of an interview, the person speaking is a creator/co-creator of Yelena. She says she is most likely to identify as asexual than to follow Nat’s romantic path. Hinting at both aro & ace.

So in the comics Yelena shows no interest dating, as far as i am aware she has no romantic interest in the comics. She is repulsed by sex, she calls herself „nothing” referring to her sexual identity.

As much as many like to say she is a lesbian, she is not, how fucking stupid you sound, honestly. She says it herself, if I said I’m not a lesbian, would you question it? No? Then don’t question her, she says she is not a lesbian, she has no wlw storyline. Drop the fucking lesbian hc.

Some possible foreshadowing in the MCU

1. When she is talking with a widow and a former Ana (show: Hawkeye), there is a line said by the widow accompanying her: „…you and Natasha can be reunited again and live your sex in the city fantasy”.

^ Yelena leaves the room, as soon as the word „sex” is mentioned her face drops, then we have this scene where she’s looking at herself in the mirror.

2. When talking about kids and family (movie: Black Widow) she mentions she wants a dog.

3. When describing „fake story” of her life she made up because her birth certificate was burnt she says Natasha has a husband and talks about her parents, but mentions nothing about her husband or possible spouses or children. (movie: Black Widow)

4. Yelena tends to wear a lot of aro/ace flag colors.

green coat & purple lipstick (green = aro | purple = ace)

yellow & blue colors = aroace flag

Overall Yelena wears a lot of green and white and black together, aromantic flag colors.

^^ can you call that „over the top?” yeah sure… let me remind yall something else:

when enid wore this sweather yall went WILD.

but when Yelena is wearing aroace colors all the time it’s called „reaching”…?

I will continue this with even more, because while you can agree with me and say she is aroace, still there will be people who claim she is aroace, agree, but then this fucking argument comes into place:

„AROS CAN DATE”

„ACES CAN FUCK”

„QPRS EXIST”

Do you see what’s wrong with those sentences? Nothing.

There’s a „but” thoooo…

There is nothing wrong with those, but using those arguments to totally ignore her sexuality ship her and treat her like suddenly she is allo is not it.

Yelena has shown no interest in dating or sex, we can assume she is sex-repulsed as she has shows repulsion to sex and she is to me at least implied to be romance-repulsed.

And we’ve found the problem.

Sex Repulsed Aces are as you can imagine repulsed by sex. Romance Repulsed Aros are repulsed by romance… So how is someone repulsed by said things engaging in said interaction and is not repulsed by them???

I think it’s a great idea to write her into said situations to show she is repulsed and to show it’s okay, because her life, my life, the lives of other uninterested in such thing aro/ace, our lives don’t end here.

Using how some people navigate through their sexuality to justify this is wrong.

You wouldn’t write a lesbian with a man, because bi lesbians exist and she may be a bi lesbian, right?

^ just an fyi, that’s an example, the term bi-lesbian is extremely harmful to both bisexuals and lesbians. check out this for more.

The QPR dilemma is that you don’t understand what a QPR is… it’s not more than friends…it’s not in the middle, it’s out of the regular binary of relationships. Relationships I actually think are QPRs:

Friends with benefits — purely platonic, but you fuck.

Situationship — just friends that do romantic stuff together, unless you call it a romantic relationship, with the other person agreeing on that, it is not one.

QPRs are amazing and beautiful, but it’s not always about fucking and kissing and „acting like a couple” but being a QPR. It can be being friends and living together, not temporary. It can be being friends and co-parenting. It can be many things.

But as I said Yelena is repulsed, why would someone repulsed by sex/romance engage in said thing happily with no doubts, fears, negative feelings just because it’s a qpr, so it’s suddenly fine…?

This is for now all I have to say about this.

As an AroAce, who desires no romantic relationship or a sexual one please please please let us have this representation, for once in our fucking lives.

MORE OF MY POSTS ON YELENA BEING AROACE AND ARO/ACE LINKS LINKED HERE:

answering an anon-ask.

more talk about the comic panel.

harmful aro stereotypes.

shipping aroaces + yelena belova.

23 notes · View notes

carlyraejepsans · 2 years

Note

What do you headcanon everyone's sexuality to be?

honestly I'm very um. whatever about sexuality headcanons. I don't think monsters in undertale see gender and sexuality as we categorize them in real life, so things are a lot more flexible. that being said, i do have Some Thoughts:

alphys is bi. like just bi, she's the only one i have a straightforward headcanon for. she even has the lil pride flag stickers on her water bottle n shit.

i like the idea that asgore and toriel are so old that they still view sexuality as something you Do rather than something you Are, like people used to do back then. i mean asgore obviously loved rudy at some point in his life and toriel has some wild stories from her youth that she'll play coy about, but neither of them would describe themselves as queer. just because that's not how they think of sexuality As A Concept.

i... don't see sans as the kind of guy with a label ? i think when you get down to it, he would technically fit the definition of demi, but he'd zone out halfway through the kind of conversation that leads to that conclusion so he just shrugs it off when you ask him and makes a bad joke to change the subject. also it varies, i like ace sans and i like bi sans too, but straight sans still feels more accurate to me than him being into dudes lmao. he does joke about kissing the homies goodnight tho ("WAIT A SECOND... YOU NEVER KISS ME GOODNIGHT. AM I NOT PART OF THE HOMIES??" "i never kiss anyone bro, we don't have lips" "OH! THAT'S RIGHT!!! ...CAN I STILL BE A HOMIE??" "sure man, knock yourself out")

okay okay i know how it sounds, but y'know that action movie dynamic where the machomen hero duo fights together side by side and spends all the film having very high homoerotic tension with one another except they both have wives and play it off as a bromance because if it was truly gay they would alienate over half of their fanbase? PAPYRUS AND UNDYNE ARE LIKE THAT, BUT PLAYED COMPLETELY UNIRONICALLY. it is completely 100% platonic, they're both HUGE homos in opposite directions and it has no bearing whatsoever on their individual sexualities. it's just the kind of spontaneous homoeroticism that spawns from beating the same guy up every day for enough days in a row. but yeah they're both gay as hell. (also undyne feels like the "10 years ago i married my best friend. my girlfriend isn't too happy about it but me and papyrus were drunk and we thought we could get away with tax fraud" kinda gal).

oh and papyrus doesn't do romance at all. full stop. aro!papyrus my beloved

mettaton had his gender identity crisis already and when he finally worked it out and saw the sexuality crisis in the distance he just decided he wasn't gonna deal with any more of that bullshit

frisk is a baby. they grow up to be very bi and very flirty, tho. which surprises no-one.

#answered asks #undertale #hope this suffices! i know you said every character but I don't feel like doing deltarune too #hhhhh all the fun gang is gender and kinda in love with each other. because queer kids be like that #sans #papyrus #toriel #asgore #undyne #alphys #mettaton #hcs

289 notes · View notes

pageofheartdj · 9 months

Note

Hi! Autistic aroace anon from before! I saw your post abt ace Donnie and aro Leo (which btw, I LOVE how their colors are basically their flags? But in Leo’s case it’s his green tone)

And I totally agree!! Donnie seems to have somewhat interest in romance, like the innuendo at the Bearnardo “why I always like the cute and mean ones” and with Atomic Lass. But a teen flirty normal level (thank god, I also agree with you at the “pls they dont care yet, its hormones. Pls focus family and friends), than to actually have smth not rlly, and the arosexual part? I may be projecting a lil here. But he always seemed more interested in the flirt part than anything else.

With Leo, he liked to flirt, but more to charm the person to gain their favor than actually flirt, like in Donnie’s case. He always seemed averse, but not against it, just “yuck”. I felt that was also a normal teen reaction like “I don’t wanna get strings attached” but with smth more, a “yeah, rlly not for me” thing. I can totally see him being gray/demi aro (again projecting? I’m gray/demi aroace), since with some stuff he seems fine but with others, more exaggerated or “honeyed” ones, he gets uncomfortable. But I could understand if ppl put him on sex-repulsed full Aro in the spectrum.

It’s totally wild and funny to me how the fandom is rlly 8/80. The dynamics of both of them being switched in the fandom to fit the box idea that they created for these two is wild to me. “Oh, Donnie’s autistic and 10% of the time, specially in stressful situations, he doesn’t want to be touched? And also a genius nerd? Nah, he’s a goofy goober which the idea of relationships is totally alien and foreign to him, he totally runs from it and has 0 experience of it”. “Oh, Leo’s has narcissistic tendencies and flirted to gain favors before in specific and numbered occasions? He’s totally a flirt, believing everyone wants to date him and he’s a heartbreaker, he totally loves that attention, not uncomfortable at all”

So yeah, sorry for my lil rant, but I rlly do feel whatchu said in that post a whole lot!!

Speaking of colors, he is blue and wore that orange uniform in Air Turtles so yaknow XD

The thing is, the turtles are teens, PLUS they lived an isolated way of life. They had NO way of acting on their interests no matter if they had or didn't have any.

And also. Attraction and relationships are not connected whatsoever! They can. But they don't have to! So the allo person might not want any relationships and aspec person can want and be in one. The relationship status says NOTHING of their identity xD

And moving on to Donnie. He has crushes on fictional character and makes sense, again, no people around. But he also used this his type on Strawberry who are very real and in the moment and is very cute and is very mean to him xD Donnie has a type with real girls too. What he wants to do with this attraction and if he has any sexual attraction is unknown and obviously, it's a kid's cartoon and romance is basically a non-existant part of it(thank god xD). And anyone can hc almost any queer and not queer identity on him, because all of them can and will work xD

Same with Leo, we have some canon moments with him, but it can work for so many queer identities. He is aro as a very direct conclusion. He is grey or demi and his repulsiveness tones down if he falls for someone, etc xD He can also be just a teen who is not into romance but now it extra disgusts him. Anything can work and as long as we are not forcing our hcs on others, it's all good xD

I also hc Donnie a quick developer, he had his plastron developed first, he instalearned his mystics. He could get into the whole romance territory earlier than Leo too xD Leo might not be that enthusiastic the way Donnie is, but still!

Although Mikey doesn't seem to mind and Raph is a big supporter as a comparison xD

And yeeeeeeah I am not a fan(although I can VERY much understand) of latching on this one trait, no matter if it's a rare one or not, and making it the whole personality. Donnie is autistic and very rarely is not 100% excited for a touch? He is touch repulsed autistic. He has canon romantic interests? Nah he is aroace. (Which I LOVE aroace hcs. But I've noticed that in fandoms aroace hcs 99% mean NO romance and NO sex NEVER, even though aspec has SO much variation). With Leo he has these few sad moments and BOOM he is a 100% 24/7 sad boy that was born depressed and all that. Despite the fact that he is very joyful and very confident and very cocky most of the time. YES he copes with jokes, this doesn't mean ALL his jokes are just cover ups. Donnie's copes with collecting data, doesn't mean he doesn't do it on regular just cause he likes it. HECK both of them tend to cope with the thing they like, so they would feel better. Donnie likes data collecting so he copes with it. Leo likes joking so he copes with it.

I love your rants🤝

#rottmnt #rottmnt donnie #rottmnt leo #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #rise leo #rise donnie

4 notes · View notes

poetandwolf · 11 months

Text

The Demon’s Lab

🌊 Welcome to the island~ here’s my intro~ 🌊

🐺 Greetings, hello, hi! I am Tala! You also may have heard of me as Grunge. This is my personal blog for my relationship with my spirit husband. Commonly known as Alhazad/Alhazred. INFJ, Scorpio. I am somewhat a furry- I draw myself as wolf sometimes, and other times as a cat. Al has a cat form too.

🌌 I am over 35, I kind of given up on changing my age on every social media because at this point it doesn't even matter. Don't let that fool you though. "act my age" what the fuck does that even mean, act my age. The ocean is old as fuck and will still kick your ass. If this bothers you feel free to block me.

🎸 I draw and paint. My hobbies also include hiking, working on my house, gardening, landscaping, spending time with my family, cooking, reading, crochet, guitar and bass, and writing. I do take commissions - so if you’d like me to draw or paint you f/o. Look at my commissions :}.

💫 Alhazad is one of the main antagonists of Wild ARMs. He's also the infamous Alhazred. We've been together since 1999, and yeah. It's been a while. I couldn't be happier. I am somewhat active on other parts of the internet talking about him. He occasionally goes by the name "Aubrey" in other areas.

🏳️‍🌈I feel like I fit the age old trope of 'glbt+ person finds out they're gay and leaves het relationship' only it was an allo relationship/s and... I'm on the aro/ace spectrum lol. If you're still salty about it after all these years you're kind of dangerously sounding like one of 'those' kinds of homophos/terfs :)

° 　. ● . ★ ° . *　　　° * 　.　 :　　:●. 　 *° :●. 　 * .　 * 　.　　 ˚ *.　　 *　　 * ⋆ 　 . · 　　 ⋆ ˚ ˚ 　　 ✦⋆ · 　 *⋆ ✧　　 · 　 ✧　✵　　. 　★ ° . *　　　°　.　°☆° 　. ● . ★ ° . *★ ° . *　　　°　.　°☆★ ° . * *☆°. ☆. * ● ¸ . 　　　★ 　° :●. 　

❌ DNI ❌

❌ if you're here to start shit about my husband. Or be a passive aggressive coward who has nothing better to do with your time. I'm a good dog. But if you start shit with me you will regret the day you crawled out of your mother’s womb.

❌ It should go without saying; MAPS, pedos, zoos, Nazis, TERFS, and any other sort. Nope. :| If you're a HP fan and still support Robert you can go get fucked.

❌I'm also mildly scarred/due to trauma and it's hard to see DBZ (the saiyans), FF9, or PPG. I’m not saying *your* versions of said characters are bad, it’s just ahahaha.

☢️Metal health check; ADHD/ASD - dx’d, in the early 90s. iirc. Retested and diagnosed with ADHD in 2022. Currently seeking treatment for it. Medication has been like night and day for me. So, fellow Autistics and ADHD’s. Welcome. I am negativing them both and it’s been a TIME. There are sighs of OSDD/DID. I have tried talking again and again with therapists making 100% Al is not apart of that; while when channeling him the symptoms are similar; he doesn’t fit the criteria.

☢️ I am a real adult. I may talk about adult things here. If you are not comfortable with that, do not follow me. I am not your dad. I can not monitor your internet interactions. Block/flag/whatever you do if that kind of thing makes you uncomfortable. I know the whole “minors do not follow” is not as enforceable as it SHOULD be and you kids are gonna do whatever you want- fuck the police. This is my first and only warning. If you see something you don't like here it is not my responsibility. I typically tag "nsfw" and that's about it. (if I remember, ADHD and all, you're lucky if I remember to pay my bills lmao.)

☢️ Before any judgments here, that I might be some loser living in my parent’s basement. ...lol. No. I’m a real adult doing well on my own with a whole ass house, job, and car and all that neat stuff. You can be ficto and be independent, free, and happy. It took a tonne of work to get this far. And it was worth every penny. And if you're in that stage where your working on getting where I am now; it's worth it you can do it. I believe in you! I can also help suggest various organizations that can help you get your first house :>

☢️I am not.. ‘hip with the kids’. I do not know all the terms and I also can not monitor or be up to date what is.. ‘bad’ within fandom. I also kind of don’t care, lol. Like I don't. The world is on fire and *gestures at the general state of America* we have more important things to worry about. If someone I reblog or someone who follows me did something you don’t like or don’t agree with it is not my responsibility to keep track of others actions.

#villian f/o #self promo #f/o promo #intro #fictoromantic

1 note · View note

aro-comics · 3 years

Text

Fashion Analysis (Part 5: Aromanticism & Fashion?)

[Note: This post is a part of a series analyzing self-expression, fashion, aromanticism, and how they interact with other parts of identity. For full context please read the whole thing!]

Aromanticism and Fashion?

Now that we have gone through LGBTQ+ History with fashion, and the importance of self expression - I think we’re in a good place with all this context to discuss how aromanticism and fashion can intersect. (and again, as a disclaimer, all of this is purely speculative!).

Personally, I think there may be a few philosophies on how Aromanticism and Fashion may interact. You can look at it a few different ways, either considering the influence amatonormativity may have on our methods of dress, but also the context in which Aromantic communities are forming (online).

On the influence of Amatonormativity

Up until this point I’ve been side-stepping the consideration of amatonormativity – but it does impact self-expression, I think, and it’s worth discussing it’s relation to aromanticism.

I had a discussion with one of my aroace friends about the idea of wanting to avoid “attention” in the romantic and/or sexual sense growing up. There is an inherent tie-in with wanting to appear desirable (as shown in the beginning of the comic, and also reinforced through many pieces of popular media), with romantic outcomes. In both of our experiences, I believe it made the idea of being seen as conforming to beauty norms an uncomfortable activity.

And looking back to lesbian fashion history too, we can see this subversion of heteronormative expectation is tied into a lot of their community’s means of dress. Which leads me to wonder - will we also see this with an emerging Aromantic sense of fashion? How could this impact clothing choice, and general expression as it relates to an amatonormative society?

I want to note that personally, outside of professional contexts, I like to dress femininely in a subversive and “alternative” way. I LOVE the idea of being hyperfeminine as a performance, being a living, breathing, work of art, while simultaneously creating an aesthetic that would not consider “attractive” in an amatonormative context. And another aroace friend has confirmed feeling this way with me too! She mentioned she likes to dress in a way that will make women go “wow, we love this outfit” but at the same time cause *conservative straight old men* go “what are you wearing” (to paraphrase our conversation).

I think some good examples of this from my personal experience would be the following:

1. I love aggressive, graphic liner - generally makeup is thought of as something that feminizes the face, something that softens. But I also like to use it to create the angles and shapes that adorn my face, something abstract for the sake of being beautiful. Like mentioned before, I don’t want to appear romantically attractive to anyone, and I think that for me, at least, this is a part of using femininity to subvert these expectations.

2. I love ethereal-looking, avant-garde sheer dresses, not in the sense that they could be romanticized, but in the way they again make me feel detached from the idea of beauty for the sake of appealing to anyone else. Instead, for me it feels like beauty as a wild, untameable form of nature and being.

But … maybe I should mention the unconventional tastes are partially tied to the fact I spend a lot of time in creative spaces because of my degree, and overall I am exposed to more diverse ranges of self-expression to begin with! Either way, though, I am curious what other aros have to say, so feel free to let me know your experiences with this. I’d love to provide an update with thoughts from other aros!

Forming Community Online and its Possible Impacts

The online nature of the development of Aro Culture leads me to wonder if this medium of interaction will influence the development of our fashion, much like how it influences the development of fashion overall. For example, with tiktok, the app is often credited for its major influence on modern fashion trends (and leading to the emergence of microtrends).

Most visual designs are being affected by the way social media algorithms work too. The “allegria style” created by facebook, otherwise known as the “flat gangly limbed drawing style beloved by tech companies”, has exploded in popularity. Regardless of how one might feel about the widespread adoption of this style of illustration, it’s clear that it has significant advantages that have led to its popularity, one of which is its ability to be “consumed” or visually understood at high speed due to its graphic nature and simple design. Basically, when people look at things on their phones, and they’re scrolling quickly, they’re more likely to understand what they see and interact with what they see if it’s easy to visually “read”. And I truly believe that this is influencing most forms of design, including fashion (which subsequently, will influence aro fashion). If you’d like to learn more about this subject, sources 14, 15, and 16 provide more insight into how social media algorithms have influenced design and visual culture at large.

I think another factor to consider here is the effect of seeing the whole world at once - having the influence of all different media, visuals, and pop culture at the same time has created a very unique environment for development. As one example, the wider aspec communities have developed with the existence of our flags (which are purple and green centered for ace and aro respectively). This would be knowledge that wouldn’t be so easily spread through the whole community in a pre-internet era, and I personally (THIS IS ONLY MY THEORY) feel this is part of the reason there is a far stronger connection to these colours within aspec culture. It’s something that unifies us and was one of our first introductions to the community (since most of us probably looked up the definition of aromantic, or asexual, online), and I think for this reason these colours hold special significance and are present in a lot of of our means of self expression and communication with other members of our community.

Obviously, the formation of symbols and ways of self-identification will occur anyway (many symbols exist for other members of the LGBTQ+ community too), but I do think being online has a particular influence on the ways community symbols are communicated, and create a different context in where these cultural symbols take shape.

[Note from Author: For Part 6, click here!]

#NotAComic #Fashion #FashionAnalysis

37 notes · View notes

aromagni · 4 years

Text

Change Through the Aro Renaissance (Carnival of Aros, September 2020)

I have both witnessed and participated in many changes of the aro community. I remember being a baby aroace in 2015 and mostly lurking as I followed many aro and ace blogs. Back then, it seemed the aro community was mostly the aroace community, more linked to ace, not yet having developed its own identity. I remember trying to find more ways to engage in the aro community and stumbling upon aroplane, which was an aro forum before arocalypse, but I think it was inactive and I’d looked for forums during the absence between the two. After lurking and solidifying my confidence in my identity, I’d kinda drifted away from actively participating in the community at all for a little while, so I’m not particularly aware what happened in between; I’m vaguely aware the arocalypse forums were created in 2016, but it seems in my absence from the community in 2016-2017, much of what had been there had become lost, presumably decimated by the tolls of exclusionary discourse.

In 2018, I was in college where I could be more outwardly queer, and I started seeking out community more. On one hand, engaging with college queer organization made me want to bring more visibility to ace and aro things, especially aro….during this time, I met many alloro aces who I couldn’t relate to, which started pushing me towards centering my aro identity more. I remember wanting aro-spec awareness week recognized at my college and in trying to do so, realized the arospecawarenessweek tumblr had become inactive, for they had not updated the date that year. I started following more aro tumblr blogs and joined the forums and then joined an aro discord server that spring, and that was when I started to truly engage in the aro community.

It was exhilarating interacting with other aros, both on discord and then how we carried that over to tumblr. I fondly remember the coining of arogender and subsequently developing the flag for it. We all followed and reblogged from eachother and it made it energizing to engage in the community because we could feel confident that the effort we put forth to create things would not be wasted, because our content was shared amongst ourselves in our tiny community. Many of us blogging starting then had not really participated in the aro community before; many of us were my age, late high school to early college student aged, treading into actively participating in community for the first time, and thus our knowledge of our history and our terminology was distorted by time and viewed by the remaining crumb trails on the internet.

This was the time when our community was reborn, reborn from the ashes of the discourse and created into something new, a more independent aro community brighter than we’d ever been before: This was the aro renaissance. In fact, “aro renaissance” is part of the blog title we used when we made aromantic-official in May 2018. I’d had the idea because I noticed most of the older modded aro blogs of old had become dormant, and it would be good to have some sort of group ensuring the continuation of events like Aro-spec awareness week and maintaining resources like a glossary. At the time, we were thinking small in the context of a tumblr blog, but it was a start.

I remember around December 2018, many flags were made. There was the blue-orange aroace flag and shortly after I made an aroace flag of my own, and then an a-spec flag, and then there were other a-spec flags too I think; we were wanting to differentiate between a-spec, an umbrella term encompassing both aro-spec and ace-spec, from aroace, a specific identity indicating being both aro and ace at the same time...though there’s still some confusion between the two in terms of flag usage still. Shortly after, there was also an aro allo flag made, and the allosexual aro community grew as a more distinct established component of the aro community; no longer was the aro community solely an aroace community, we had become an independent aro community.

In late January 2019 I’d went to the Creating Change conference, where there was the first ever aro & ace hospitality suite and I interacted with other a-spec activists, including people from the fairly newly named TAAAP (The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project). It was refreshing seeing the advancement of aro activism as more than just a subset of ace, and interesting to see the development of activism out in more the “real” world rather than just on my corner of the internet. I remember then hearing how they were planning to host the first carnival of aros (inspired by the longer-running carnival of aces), and since then it has been nice having carnival of aros to foster discussion of many aro topics.

I remember that first carnival of aros coinciding with a lot of clashing between the aro and ace communities, sparked even more by the specific topic of the month relating aro and ace communities. I think we, the aro community, were frustrated at being ignored. The ace community had continued to grow and gain recognition and visibility, while claiming to represent us as well but in a way that was more a misrepresentation, depicting aro as a subset of ace, thus further erasing the reality of our experiences. We were frustrated and bitter, often justifiably so; even I as an aroace was frustrated with the ace communities treatment of aros at that point, and I know many aro allos were even more upset. I think we were also still less sure footed, with our community still establishing-itself, so as a result were more defensive and scrambling for anything we could claim as our own, often misguided by the often incomplete or misinformed scraps of posts around different words and such. (In hindsight I think there were some inaccuracies in my first carnival of aros post that february, but it was an accurate look at what we were frustrated and upset about at the time).

I remember also that February more was done to celebrate ASAW than had been in years previous, though it was still small. I also remember some divisiveness between the aroace and aro allo sides of the aro community, which caused an unfortunate binary which subsequently emphasized the need for terminology of aros who were neither asexual nor allosexual, thus many discussions about “non-SAM” aros, and other words for that concept. I think that continued well into that summer.

Speaking of that summer, in June 2019 AUREA was launched! This one wasn’t started by me, but naturally I ended up pulled into doing more aro activism stuff. AUREA (Aromantic-spectrum Union for Recognition, Education, and Advocacy) has wonderful resources including a comprehensive glossary with links (both original and archived) to sources and some flags, and also has various research and lists of other aro-inclusive orgs, including local ones. We also publish multiple articles a month, including a “What’s Going On” article at the start of each month covering what’s going on in the aro community, and then other articles about various topics. AUREA is everything I’d wanted when originally making the aromantic-official blog, but is so much more than I thought to hope for. We collaborated with other activists and made ASAW 2020 even bigger than before, and we also launched an aro census, and just so many different cool projects. It’s so cool having a good comprehensive centralized aro resource like AUREA and just having a specifically aro activism organization focusing on aro issues specifically, not just having aro included under aro & ace groups. I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do and what we continue to do.

I feel like in the last year since AUREA has been formed, the aro community feels a lot more solidified and stable, like we’ve finally concretely established ourselves as an independent entity to be recognized. And even though we’re more solidified, we’re still growing and creating and innovating, there’s still this wonderful energy and motivation which we continue to grow with. Some other things have happened this year, in April 2020 we had to kinda scramble to keep the arocalypse forums going, and now I’m a mod there too because I don’t seem to know how to not be involved in things, especially because I vehemently care about seeing them continued. (Why is it always spring? 3 springs in a row I’ve gotten involved in big ongoing aro projects like that). Then June 2020, TAAAP pride chats started and have continued every month, which is a really cool opportunity for people from the a-spec community, both ace and aro, to gather to discuss various topics, and also to interact with various a-spec activists.

It’s been really fascinating watching and helping to aro community grow over the past few years, and I feel like I’ve grown with it. Through my activism, I’ve learned a lot about what I am good at and how I can work well in a team, which has helped me gain a lot of confidence about things where in-person experiences had made me lose confidence. It’s also kinda wild when I think about the scale of it all; the aro, and also ace, communities are really fairly small, such that it’s not hard to end up doing this activism on a national or international scale. I never really set out to be an activist, I just wanted to get involved and cared about improving things and have lots of ideas, so I kept doing things, and now I look at what I’ve done and realize that huh this is activism, I am an activist, and probably a rather prominent aro activist at that. It’s weird especially compared to how extremely ineffective I feel I’ve been at doing any sort of activism at my college, to then think of what I’ve managed to help accomplish on an international scale online. I feel inspired by the changes, the growth of the aro community, and I look forward to helping it grow even more.

#carnival of aros #aromantic #actually aromantic #aurea #aro community #aro activism #my post #magni’s thoughts #long post #not particularly organized/is kinda word vomit but many thoughts and is done so

13 notes · View notes

faranae · 4 years

Note

If you don’t mind me asking but how can the word queer be used as a positive thing to say about the LGBT community, As every time I hear it it has been used in the negative way.

First thing’s first: I’m very sorry that’s been your experience Nonny. I don’t mind you asking at all, but it’s just not an easy question to answer.

Here’s the thing: I’m not an educator. I’m just one queer dude trying to fight for the right to identify myself as I see fit without being tackled to the floor and accused of being a “cis white neurotypical homophobe” for it. (I do wish I were exaggerating, but my inbox has been hella wild this week and I can assure you I am maybe one of those things, possibly two but I am honestly just not ready to dive into the technicalities of what qualifies as cis right now.)

As for your question: I can give my own take on things, but I’m the first to admit it will be biased.

Story time! Long post incoming:

I hail from a tiny village in Ontario, Canada, where I was raised by my grandparents.

Where I grew up in the early-mid 90′s and beyond, queer was used as a slur just as much if not less frequently than gay, lesbian, dyke, butch, twink, and any number of currently acceptable(?) LGBTQ+ terminology. Consider this my point of argument, I suppose: A good portion of the stigma is absolutely based in locale/environment. In my personal history, they were all bad. Especially since baby Fara was raised in the Roman Catholic school system.

Then came the opportunity to leave: I was accepted into a specialized arts program at a high school in the city. I moved away, and nosy neighbours and an unshakeable reputation were traded in for public transportation and being lost in the crowd. It was the best thing to happen to my baby gay life.

Ninth grade was a wild awakening. I’d already known for years that I wasn’t exactly “normal”, but the sudden exposure to all of these divergent teenagers was really something. I was quickly adopted into this massive group of queer peers, and there was a lot of education in that short year as I learned about myself and others through them.

We were the group of kids that took up a good third of the cafeteria every free period, playing Magic: the Gathering and euchre and singing songs and laughing amongst each other. We were the theater kids, the artsies, the techs, and the nerds. We outnumbered the jocks and other social stereotypes by a decent margin. A quick social media check on my part shows most of those kids identify as LGBT, queer, or otherwise allies in their adult lives.

Those kids taught me that queer was a weapon for us as much as it was for “them”. Someone on the bus calls you gay? Turn on your heel and plant an innocent kiss on your best friend’s cheek. Don’t be vulgar, but absolutely fight for what you believe in. Some were… Considerably more aggressive in their acts of expression. Queer was ours. It was what we made it. What that old lady on the bus said with disgust, we held over our heads with pride.

A lot went wrong after 9th grade. My mother pulled me from the arts program and as such I was sent to a brand new school elsewhere in the city. What happened there made it very clear that experiences are not universal. Where I’d previously had a massive group of support and strength, I found myself forced back into the closet for my own safety.

Not only was “queer” a negative expression once again, it was violent.

Within a week of reluctantly admitting to a counselor at this new school that I wasn’t straight, I was very publicly pulled from PhysEd and assigned an isolated changing room for the rest of the semester. Only a few days later and my new peers suspected I was “one of the gays”, all without me saying a single thing in public about it.

Make no mistake: I was a shy, quiet kid for the most part. I tried to be brave and embrace the change as I’d learned from my peer group at the first school. I made the mistake of wearing a pride pin to school after that; my quiet little rebellion against what they’d started to say about me. I held my chin up through the glares where I could, and shot coy smiles at those who used those words against me like they were supposed to mean something unforgivable. I even called a few girls pretty out of spite. (They were actually quite pretty, but also very ugly on the inside.)

My “cocky” and “unapologetic” refusal to be insulted was met with a group of girls beating the everloving shit out of me while I waited for the bus after school that day. All because I was “queer”. I didn’t go back.

A lot’s happened since then: I dropped out of high school and got my GED as soon as I was legally able. I found my tribe again after that, and reconnected with a good chunk of the original crowd. I discovered there was a word and culture based around my take on how relationships should be (polyamorous). I got married. Had a kid. Bought a binder. Did a lot of living and made a lot of mistakes. Still am.

I hunted for literal years trying to find one word, one flag, one identity that fit me. What I wanted. Where I belonged. I was especially sore about it whenever Pride Month rolled around:

(From the end of pride month in 2018)

Most terms that seemed to fit always had some exceptions or exclusions that turned me off or disqualified me from using them by saying I straight-up wasn’t welcome. It was only in the past couple years that I finally said “fuck it” and settled on “Queer”, an identity I’d had since ninth grade but always wrote off as “too vague”. I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t vague, it was intentionally inclusive of anyone who wanted to use it.

And that, that’s the important distinction there I suppose. Are there those who don’t want to use queer or find it makes them uncomfortable? Absolutely, and that should be respected. We all have different experiences; different origins that paint our perspective of what is and is not acceptable. To some queer is power or comfort, it’s rebellion, it’s a fist in the air screaming that we exist and aren’t going anywhere. To others, it just digs at old wounds. To another group, they read that it was a bad word online and dug their heels in.

The problem lies in that only one side of this argument seems to be respecting those distinctions. If one does or doesn’t want the Q in LGBTQ to apply to them, that’s their choice. You don’t see gay dudes up in arms saying “There shouldn’t be an L in LGBTQ since I’m not a Lesbian and I don’t appreciate people implying I am.” Or you shouldn’t see that, anyway. And yet we see that very thing happening with the Q.

Members of our community are being pitted against each other by people who have no business instigating such fights. The same rhetoric and strategies are being used to shove queer out of the spectrum as are being used to exclude aro/ace and bi folk, and trans to a point as well.

The culture itself is being twisted. People aren’t looking into why and how queer has come back into the spotlight as a “slur”, when we’ve been peacefully using it ourselves and reclaiming it since the late 80′s. Hell, we were “queer” before we were ever “gay,” with that use of the word originating in the 1800′s (gay popped up as an alternative to homosexual in the early to mid 1900s).

In 2005, when same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide here, we threw parties and held each other and cried at how far our queer butts had come.

In 2020, I look at the next generation on social media and see them screaming that my identity is now an unforgivable and homophobic slur.

I hope you can understand where I’m a little skeptical and even bitter here.

We’re going backwards, and it hurts.

So yeah. Queer is seen differently by many people based on our experiences and exposures. Unfortunately that paints it in very different lights in different corners of the community.

I am queer. At no point will I ever apply that label to another person who doesn’t want it to be. In my experience anyone who implies that “the queers are trying to force you to be queer too” is either very ignorant, very misinformed, or malicious in their intent.

It’s no different than the “foreigners are going to take our jobs”, “gays will corrupt our children”, or “foreign religions will take away our freedoms” arguments. They are started and spread with malicious intent, and latched on to by those who don’t yet know any better. It’s why civil discussion is so, so very important.

Thank you for asking so politely, Nonny. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do much more than give some personal anecdotes, but the use of the word queer is something that isn’t entirely black and white for anyone nowadays. I can’t just pull a bunch of citations out of my butt and say “this is why it’s a good thing”, because it really is subjective you know?

Besides, this is my blog, not my old Comms class in college. Nobody’s convincing me to write a full APA-compliant essay on the subject unless they’re paying or professionally grading me on it.

#Queer #Trigger warning #long post #story time #AskFara #Anonymous #fara rants

37 notes · View notes

mysterioustrickster · 2 years

Text

I posted 18,198 times in 2021

25 posts created (0%)

18173 posts reblogged (100%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 726.9 posts.

I added 119 tags in 2021

#mee too thanks - 52 posts

#pair - 37 posts

#nsfw? - 6 posts

#jerma - 4 posts

#actuallyautistic - 4 posts

#california - 4 posts

#allistics shut up challenge - 3 posts

#yeah - 3 posts

#holy shit - 3 posts

#lmao - 3 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#you don't care too much what people think of you so long as you live up to your own ideals. still you want to be recognized for your achieve

My Top Posts in 2021

I’ll start this off by saying that I’m absolutely thrilled that ace flags are being included much more often in various pride flag art posts. As a person who was figuring out that they were ace on this website in 2015, and was actually pretty traumatized by what went on in 2016, it’s really incredible to realize that this site, and most of the online community as well, has moved past that period of ace-phobia.

That being said, I’ve noticed a trend of the ace flag being included and the aro flag not. I’d really like to emphasize, to whomever sees this ramble, that the aromantic community is not actually the same as the ace community. There is overlap, as there is for all orientations. However, aromantic is not a subset of asexual. They exist in parallel; many of their struggles are shared, but they are not just “the same thing” and they do not use the same flag. Aphobia as a whole includes the erasure of aro identities, the erasure of allosexual aro people, and the suggestion that being aromantic is less significant or important than being asexual. Even as I am typing this post, “aromantic” is marked as misspelled, and “asexual” is not.

All of this is just to say, I think they deserve the same thought as asexuals do. Aphobia on this site does not end until they are thought of as an equal and parallel orientation to all other sexual orientations in the queer community. Basically: if you include an ace flag in your post, you should also consider including an aro flag.

27 notes • Posted 2021-06-27 18:17:37 GMT

there’s a post going around making fun of people using/asking for tone indicators and it pisses me off. like, consider that if a large number of the notes on the post include slurs directed at autistic people, you’re not actually in the right. allistics shut up challenge

29 notes • Posted 2021-01-22 22:59:31 GMT

49 notes • Posted 2021-09-24 23:32:38 GMT

today was wild huh

110 notes • Posted 2021-01-05 08:04:24 GMT

kinda frustrated that so many people have such a black-and-white view on the representation in Luca. Like, no, the director did not intend for it to be gay coded, as far as we know. He based it on his own childhood friendship and it’s good to respect that. It’s also good to show close masculine friendship that can be intimate and touchy - I think people looking at it and saying it’s automatically romantic is somewhat amatonormative.

However, it’s also important to see that it functions really well as a coming out allegory. There’s a lot of space for people to see themselves in it - it could absolutely be taken to be gay-coded. Overall, I see the same problems in fan reactions as were present for Good Omens - it’s left open, so people think that means that it must be one way or the other, and they take hard stances and get upset towards the other direction. I wish people would understand it as it is - open ended - and let it be that. you can have it how you like it, and other people can think differently.

722 notes • Posted 2021-06-20 05:47:54 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

0 notes

shadowsofwho · 6 years

Note

30, 28, 19, and 6!

30. How do you feel about snails?I really like snails! I think they’re super cute. I like their pretty little houses. I used to pick up snails that I found on the way home from school and keep them as pets in the flower pots, making sure there was enough food and water. At the end of summer my mum would make me take them to my grandparents’ house (which has a yard) so they could survive the cooler temperatures there. I don’t actually have a clue what snails do when it gets cold but releasing them into the wild was always a big deal for me.

28. What is the coolest name that you would never name a real human child?I don’t think I have a specific name for this but I really enjoy names in Tolkien’s Elvish languages (both ones that exist and making up my own) and I think some of them are so beautiful but I would never make a child go through having to explain to their peers why they’re called Hwinnieth or something.

19. What is a strange red flag you have when pursuing a relationship?If you ever see me pursuing any kind of romantic relationship of my own free will, that will be your red flag. I am so very aro ace. I tried having a boyfriend despite not being attracted to him (mainly because he was really into me and I felt bad about it and I needed the validation at this point and curiosity) and the one good thing that came out of it was the realisation that it’s a horrible fit for me. And that’s that. Sorry I can’t be more specific.Oh and also, don’t date or befriend someone that doesn’t want you to meet/hang out with any of their friends. I’ve never seen this not be a bad sign.

6. What role do you take on when you have to do a group project? (for example: leader, delegator, slacker, etc.)I used to be the person to do most of what I deemed important in my own, then delegate the things I’m bad at or didn’t want to do. Nowadays I’m usually less invested so I pick a task I can do by myself and stick with it. Also, I usually do the translating and/or editing when required. So my group members will do most of the research and “content creation” and then I take everything, correct errors, and make it sound nice, look pretty and be formatted the same way. It takes out most of the stress projects usually cause me.

On a side note: I haven’t used the mobile app to answer an ask in literal years and wtf is up with the editing options? I can’t even tag this or use rich text formatting?

0 notes