As an autistic, loveless aromantic writer who prefers that my feelings of attraction, connection and affection not be contextualised with a word that doesn’t always feel applicable, I thought Aro Week the perfect time to collate those stories written for aromantics like me. This post lists my works with loveless aromantic protagonists and those that don’t presume an aromantic protagonist’s ability to love and/or label their experiences as love.
My other aro works can be found on my fiction page.
What Makes Us Human
Moll of Sirenne needs prompts in their girdle book to navigate casual conversations, struggles to master facial expressions and feels safest weeding the monastery’s vegetable gardens. Following their call to service, however, means offering wanderers in need a priest’s support and guidance. A life free of social expectation to court, wed and befriend does outweigh their fear of causing harm—until forgetting the date of a holiday provokes a guest’s ire and three cutting words: lifeless and loveless.
A priest must expand a guest’s sense of human worth, but what do they do when their own comes under question? Can an autistic, aromantic priest ever expect to serve outside the garden? And what day is it…?
Contains: A middle-aged, agender priest set on defying social norms around love; an alloromantic guest with a journey to undergo in conquering her amatonormativity and ableism; an elderly aromantic priest providing irascible reassurance; and the story of how Moll became Esher’s guiding priest.
More info: Loveless aromantic narrating protagonist.
Those With More
Suki Lewis has always known what she wants–or, more correctly, what she doesn’t want. She also knows that a good woman of Freehome, deserving of her mother’s uncritical love, wants something she can’t fathom or mimic: a stable, lasting romantic relationship.
She can’t safely stay, but leaving means surviving the challenges of priesthood, her mother’s abuse and the belated finding of a name for her differences: allosexual aromanticism.
Those With More collects four stories showing Suki’s lifetime navigation of her belief, family, community and identity.
Contains: The adventures of a sharp-tongued trans, aromantic protagonist navigating other people in exploring allosexual aromanticism, her priesthood and the pressures of amatonormativity, love, emotional abuse and family.
More info: Loveless allo-aro narrating protagonist. Stories focus on the emotional abuse intertwined with/comprising her mothers’ love for her.
Luck of the Ball
A coven of gentlewoman witches seems like the perfect place for Luck Vaunted to hide from hir powerful brother, father and husband. Even better, the upcoming Guildmeet ball offers the new Luck the perfect chance to experiment with genderlessness, magic and sex, if only ze can avoid more sorcery-revealing accidents. Sure, the witches welcome hir with open arms, but after hir twin’s betrayal, how can ze risk trusting anyone but hirself?
When hir brother attends the Guildmeet, a lover expects romantic intimacy and a quest of boots threatens to reveal hir deceit, Luck can no longer outrun hir monsters. Hir only chance of escape: the Westhold coven. But how does ze ask, when ze has lied to them, too?
Some fairy-tale families are formed by blood or marriage. Others are formed by aromantic witches defending each other against respectability, amatonormativity … and the sorcerer potentate’s heir.
Contains: An allo-aro genderless person on the run from hir family; a coven of four aromantic-spectrum witches ignoring all the rules about gender and relationships; and a version of Cinderella that rejects the amatonormativity of Disney’s fairy godmother’s ignoring familial abuse until it prevents the heroine from attending a dance to find a husband.
More info: Loveless allo-aro narrating protagonist. Story in-progress.
Before Crows’ Eyes
Even knows himself: son, baker, non-partnering. He doesn’t want to want sex, marriage or children; he wants the village’s acceptance of a life best lived crafting seed buns and fruit pies. He doesn’t want the local flock of crows as his only companions; he wants human friendships free of pressure and expectation. Most of all, he wants Ma to let go of the idea that a sorcerer’s magic can and must “fix” him.
Desperation leads Even into the forest to seek the only person who can advise him on resisting a sorcerer: the witch Miser Felled, “skilled purveyor of magic and pleasure”. A master of scandal-provoking arts never undertaken before open windows and watching birds. A mysterious figure who has more in common with Even than just an affinity for crows … and offers a more extraordinary solution than he ever thought possible.
Contains: A cis, non-partnering, aro-ace baker who defies convention but craves validation; a trans, non-partnering allo-aro witch who celebrates sexuality but accommodates convention through its rejection; gods observing the human world through the eyes of crows; and proof that all fairy-tale witches are aromantic.
More info: Protagonist doesn’t specify love as a quality in his dealings with others.
Bones of Green and Hearts of Gold
Constance, princess of Blackvale, knows the duty of a summer-hearted heir: wed the prince, birth the child, symbolise her people’s prosperity and fecundity. Love, joyously and passionately, a man even she believes handsome and kind. But what if her heart can’t cast summer’s warmth? What if she feels solely the profane desires of skin and flesh? What if Blackvale’s crops wither and rot unripened because their future queen can’t—and won’t—bow to the nonsensical-seeming rule of seasons?
She knows only one way to avoid catastrophe, falsehood and marriage: surrendering herself to the Forest Witch. Not even for his daughter will the king risk angering the feared but necessary master of briars, protector of forests and abductor of women.
Constance expects a lifetime’s bondage to a dangerous witch, freeing her cousin to inherit Blackvale’s throne. The witch has other ideas…
Contains: A multisexual allo-aro princess who, in the name of duty, wants the witch to lock her away in a tower; and a trixensexual allo-aro witch who sees hope and possibility in the princess seeking hir protection.
More info: Protagonist doesn’t equate her experiences of sexual attraction with love and expresses her belief that she is unable to love.
Witch
The forest road promises you the chance of a world beyond marriage’s expectation … but the witch waiting by the roadside offers up queerer, stranger proofs of validity.
Contains: An allo-aro who discovers a magical shortcut on the road to freedom from their village’s traditions of sex negativity and amatonormativity.
More info: Protagonist doesn’t specify love as a quality in their dealings with others.
Antagonist
Cai likes women, casual sex and an absence of long-term relationships … which wouldn’t be a problem if said women didn’t see this as proof of his becoming the enemy.
Contains: A trans, heterosexual aro who realises that his story’s self-designated heroes leave him one role to play.
More info: Protagonist refers to a prior, failed attempt to love; he doesn’t equate his experiences of sexual attraction with love.
The Girl and Her Unicorn
Ponder Sheafed can’t stop asking questions. Ze isn’t the girl others presume hir to be. Ze won’t become a wife or let a wedding’s absence stopper hir lust. Ze isn’t good, so maintaining hir kinsfolk’s high regard demands a complicated dance of stealth, secrecy and untruth. Ponder does, however, own some ability in deception … so when tragedy befalls hir family, how does ze explain that–despite all appearance to the contrary–ze can’t trade hir life’s service for a unicorn’s magic?
Only virtuous maidens may enter the forest to seek a creature as pure as a unicorn. Returning home empty-handed avoids provoking Father’s rage by confessing unacceptable truths, so what options has ze other than embarking upon a farcical quest for hir family’s salvation … and dreading the failure to come? No unicorn can ever grace an unrepentant liar!
Ponder isn’t good. But neither, ze discovers, is the unicorn.
Contains: A genderless, non-partnering allo-aro who speaks lies to live hir truth in a village that prizes a girl’s goodness above all else … and a unicorn whose duty to humans has been wildly misrepresented.
More info: Protagonist feels strongly connected to hir family and friends, but does not label this feeling as love.
Pillar
When fog creeps and moon fades, the desperate seek out gods few dare name … but even gods struggle to witness the cruel consequences of their people’s amatonormativity.
Contains: A allo-aro woman who doesn’t choose marriage and children … and a society that expects she use her time in service to those who did.
More info: Protagonist feels strongly connected and obligated to hir family, but does not label this feeling as love.
When Quiver Meets Quill
Alida Quill is just fine spending hir holidays alone with a book if it means freedom from hir family’s continued expectation to court and wed. When hir co-worker Ede sets hir up with a friend and won’t take no for an answer, Alida plots an extravagant, public refusal scene to show everyone once and for all that ze will not date. Ever.
Ze doesn’t expect to meet Antonius Quiver, a man with his own abrupt, startling declarations on the subject of romance.
It isn’t courting if he schemes with hir to pay back Ede … is it?
Contains: One autistic, aromantic organiser extraordinaire armed with coloured ink; one autistic, aromantic officer a little too prone to interrupting; and an allistic friend in want of better ways to go about introductions.
More info: Protagonist doesn’t specify love as a quality in hir dealings with others.
Monstrous
You submit, obediently, to their chains and collars … until you start to wonder what it is about your beast’s nature that requires the loving to demand such restrictions.
Contains: A world where sexual attraction sans alloromantic attraction takes on fangs and teeth–and a pansexual’s aro liberation means accepting monstrosity.
More info: Protagonist doesn’t equate their experiences of sexual attraction with love.
Loveless
When Paide ein Iteme says the words “I don’t love”, he doesn’t just refer to romantic relationships.
Contains: A disabled, pansexual, aromantic cis man discussing the reasons why the phrase “I don’t love” encompasses his platonic and familial relationships.
More info: Loveless allo-aro narrating protagonist. This story takes place after the second Eagle Court story A Prince of the Dead. It may help new readers to know that the narrator (Paide) is a revenant, ensorcelled by the necromancer he fought in the first story, Their Courts of Crows. The first two stories do not show him identifying as loveless.
The Lies Lovers Tell
For a hundred years, I am bound to a witch’s servitude. I’m not free to be in love. Will you accept this?
Thorn Bloodvine passes hir days trapped in a tower. Well, ze does if “trapped” encompasses “climbing out the window and down the beanstalk whenever the whim takes hir”. Magical wards and a wall of brambles surround hir prison, but neither prevents hir from tending hir garden … or the local youths from raiding hir strawberries. A fearsome witch does dwell within said tower, but hir magic is best suited to creating oversized vegetables. Quirks aside, Thorn laid hir truth at hir lover’s feet before they took to bed: ze cannot become Fortitude’s partner.
But when Fortitude speaks one simple word, Thorn’s carefully-ordered world falls apart. For it isn’t just a fairy story that prevents hir from becoming a woman’s happily-ever-after.
Contains: A non-binary, allo-aro autistic with a knack for growing strawberries; an aro-ace witch who dons an ill-fitting costume for the sake of her friend; neuroatypical ponderings on love and lovelessness; and a Rapunzel riff that sits uneasily with its lack of happily-ever-after.
More info: Loveless allo-aro narrating protagonist discussing love with an aro-ace who doesn’t identify as loveless.
Content Info
Header links take you to information pages with blurb and further links. Brief content advisories are included inside each book or at the beginning of each post.
Being a loveless aromantic does not by default require an absence of attraction (in its many shapes), connection or intimacy. Some loveless folks don’t experience attraction; others may not perceive their feelings as a form of love or wish it contextualised as love by others. As I am a loveless allo-aro, many stories feature allosexual aromantic protagonists who don’t consider their sexual attraction as equivalent to love. Many characters are non-partnering, as I am, but this should never be treated as a prerequisite to lovelessness in general and loveless aromanticism in specific. Likewise, some stories depict characters expressing the desire to make friends and possess (accepting) family.
Most protagonists are various combinations of trans, non-binary/genderless, multisexual, disabled and autistic. My experiences of disability and neurodiversity are central to my identity as loveless.
Few stories are free of love mentions, particularly in regard to amatonormativity, aro antagonism, family and the expectation that everyone feels and performs love (in ways acceptable to alloromantic neurotypicals).
In several stories, due to a lack of setting-appropriate language (amatonormativity and sex negativity in fiction and real-life) “lover” is used as a polite term for “unmarried sexual partner”, not to express sexual love. Some stories, again as a reflection of fictional and real-life amatonormativity and aro antagonism (where the shape of love best valued is romantic love), have secondary characters or even the protagonist conflate “love” with “romance”.
Before Crows’ Eyes, What Makes Us Human and When Quiver Meets Quill do not have narrating protagonists who identify as allosexual. Loveless aro-aces may find more representation in my post collecting loveless aro poetry.
K. A. Cook is an abrosexual, aromantic, agender autistic who experiences chronic pain and mental illness. Ze writes creative non-fiction, personal essays and fiction about the above on the philosophy that if the universe is going to make life interesting, ze may as well make interesting art. You can find hir blogging at Aro Worlds and running the Tumblr accounts @aroworlds and @alloaroworlds.
Aro Worlds 