Yasmine: Just be yourself.
Ava: “Just be myself”? I have one day to win Beatrice over. How long did it take before you guys started liking me?
Camila: A couple of weeks.
Mary: A few months.
Lilith: The jury’s still out.
Ava: “Be myself” What kind of garbage advice is that?
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It’s ace week again and I want to start by saying I appreciate the constant and consistent rise of overt queer representation in media. I really, really do. This post is not about that, but I did want to start by recognizing that we are definitely seeing a positive trend of queer rep and I’m not begrudging anyone that.
On the other hand.
Why is it that Sex Education, a show lauded for its depictions of teenage sexualities of all kinds, only openly discusses asexuality in one Very Special Episode?
Why is it that Brooklyn Nine Nine, a show respected for its diversity, only mentioned asexuality once and it was clearly meant as an insult?
Why is it that Faking It, a show inclusive of many teen sexualities and groundbreaking in its inclusion of a main intersex character, only references asexuality in a single throwaway line meant as a “we’ve collected them all” joke?
Why is it that Heatstopper, a show that gently yet explicitly includes all sorts of different identities in its main teen characters, doesn’t have a single reference to asexuality? And if Isaac or Tori were meant to be included as ace rep, why weren't they identified as such the way the rest of the characters were?
Why is it that Jughead, a character known in the entire run of comics going back to 1941 as having two defining characteristics: a disintrest in girls/dating and an obsession with food and who was made explicitly asexual in a 2016 run, was not made asexual in Riverdale when the opportunity presented itself?
Why is it that when fandom was presented with Good Omens they chose to call it “not queer enough” when the option to see Aziraphale and Crowley as ace or aro was very obviously there?
Why is it that I’ve seen BoJack Horseman, a show that has earned every Emmy it has won, praised as groundbreaking for having main reoccurring character Todd Chavez’s asexuality be a part of several different storylines only ever from asexual sources?
I know why. Do you?
Happy Asexual Awareness Week.
Edit: I did address this in a reblog but since a lot of recent people seem to be finding this through the tags and this is happening with enough frequency I will add it here.
To all the helpful people in the notes telling me that a) Alice Oseman is aroace or b) that there are plans for explicit ace representation in season 2 of Heartstopper or c) that there are other publications within the Heartstopper universe that examines aspec characters...thank you. I know. That is actually most of the reason Heartstopper made it onto this list.
Because what that means is, a creator that *has* explicit aspec rep in other works, *has* explicit aspec rep in the main work that is the subject of the adaptation, and *is* aspec themselves made the choice to relegate explicit aspec rep to a second season that had not yet been secured at the time of writing season 1.
Setting aside that I know fuckall about what the adaptation/creative process was like or what TPTB were like during said process, from my perspective that fucking sucked. A lot.
Happy Asexual Awareness Week.
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