Relating aros to love is like conceptualizing women against men
So we agree that women exist outside of men, right? Saying women can do what men do is still problematic because it assumes we want to be like men, that masculinity is the bar everyone must be striving to achieve. That, as Adrienne Rich points out in her iconic piece on compulsive heterosexuality, a great deal of feminist scholarship still assumes women are innately drawn to men and refuses to examine the institution of heterosexuality. Women and femininity exist in their own right, and don’t always need to be compared against men. Men are not the universal measuring pole that gives something worth.
We’re agreed on that? Yes? Good.
So explain to me why we do the exact same thing with love.
Now, everything I say may not be 100% accurate because I just accepted myself as aro. I’ve learned a lot about myself and this community in the past few months, so if I mis-explain something, please understand it is ignorance rather than purposeful malice/exclusion and kindly correct me (we do basic human respect on this blog).
A (if not, the) main LGBTQIA+ slogan we hear is “love is love.” People justify and sanitize queerness by centering love in the conversation, usually romantic love. This itself probably plays a big role in aromantic erasure when it comes to a majority of queer spaces. People understand love, think of it as this unifying and positive force that brings people together, and assume this feeling is universal and good.
Aromanticism means we innately have a different relationship with the word, “love.” Whether we still experience other forms of love (platonic, familial, love for pizza, etc.) or are loveless, we know the importance of other feelings. A queer experience of romantic attraction naturally shapes our experience with the general idea of love, and what it means to truly experience that. We know there are an abundance of other experiences in this world worth having, and that love isn’t necessarily the only way to care about other people. Love isn’t the only thing to give life meaning, or to make someone whole. Queerness in queer theory means to question to status quo. If love is baked into our amatonormative society, what does “love is love” do to queer this widespread societal ideal? Nothing.
We use love like a weapon, a measuring stick for something or someone’s worth. So to be loveless, if love is what society uses to assign worth and validity, is to be worthless or inhuman. Hence any media representation we manage to scrounge up (or at least be coded as) are either villains, not human, or both. Instead of accepting aromantic existence, instead of being intrigued by lovelessness and allowing curiosity to lead to liberation, society insists on erasing and invalidating aromantics instead.
Well, just as women exist independently outside of men, we can exist outside of love. Love does not measure our worth just as men do not measure a woman’s worth. We can treat people kindly and care about things and be complete, whole human beings without love. This seems to me like a radical flavor of queerness that society as a whole (and some other queers!) aren’t eager to contemplate or try to understand. But whether they understand or not, we are valid and cool as fuck anyways.
Wishing every brave and gorgeous aro a wonderful aromantic awareness week!
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wait. wait. wait. ive been staring at ur latest comic for awhile now and i think i've noticed something about the colors? which are amazing, first of all- just gotta get that out there cuz i adore that soft pink and deep green combo
but i just realized that throughout most of the comic u use both in equal parts it seems. to separate bg + fg and such, to highlight characters/objects, etc.
but then when vash gets back to their room, all the walls are that dark green. and, bit by bit, the pink totally falls off. by the end, it's nothing but constant dark green as vash starts to cry
but then wolfwood slams in and he's backed by that soft pink. and suddenly the comic is nothing BUT pink. soft lines and whites and gentle pink tones EVERYWHERE to just. SO tastefully highlight the little details.
LIKE. WAS THIS INTENTIONAL?! i almost wanna guess that it wasn't since all those green panels w vash crying are all closeups focused on his expression so it makes sense to just put the simple green behind it and all attention on him so the pink just isn't Needed
BUT AT THE SAME TIME THE EFFECT IS SO MASTERFUL THAT I WANNA BELIEVE IT WAS ABSOLUTELY INTENTIONAL
HEHE..... first of all, thank you for looking at my comic so closely, THAT'S LIKE... REALLY SWEET and a huge compliment to hear, thank u thank u
and yes, it was intentional, especially more towards the end!!! in general, the colors are meant to serve as a mood indicator, so a balance of them in a scene would just mean a neutral "okay-ness" and have a functional serve to separate background / foreground / subject matter... deep green signifies introspection or incoming sadness (especially on pg5 when vash cries), and pink signifies wolfwood, which, not an emotion but he is happiness, someone that helps vash lose his doubts in a matter of seconds -- which is why those last few pages are just pink white and lines, and the panels are gone for the majority of it. i wanted to show their unity and togetherness!
while vash still has his issues of just Not saying anything about his loneliness, his feelings are alleviated temporarily with wolfwood's presence and he's just grateful that his paranoia didn't become true, and that wolfwood is genuine, true to his word, when he means he'll be following vash/staying with him. even though it's mission-bound, vash would probably still feel guiltily comforted by that fact.
I'M GLAD IT WAS PARTICULARLY EFFECTIVE IN THIS COMIC because i definitely could've pushed it more... i figured it was a minor thing that not a lot of ppl would care for, but more ppl enjoyed it and noticed the colors than i thought, so i'm glad it worked out!!!
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