Aromantic Narratives and Creativity
Lovers’ Day is good trading for a witch who deals in enchantments, ribbons and dyed flowers. For Mara Hill, it’s long been a holiday of tedious assumptions and painful conversations—once best handled by casting petty curses on annoying customers. This year, when a girl asks about love spells, it may be time to instead channel a little Aunt Rosie.
It’s a terrific exercise in redundancy, but some people find the words “no love spells” to be a bewildering subtlety.
Esher Hill left his home and kin a crying wreck of a man, too depressed and dysphoric to care what his people make of him. If he’d had his way, that would have been the end of it.
His sister Mara, the village witch, made sure he didn’t.
Two and a half years later, Esher owns two dogs, a blade, a career and a new body—the shape of masculinity he always felt he should be. A miracle Mara refuses to explain. A miracle the Sojourner’s priests reject and fear. A miracle, say the Grey Mages, that cannot exist without something precious sacrificed in exchange: a soul.
Returning home in search of his sister and the truth isn’t just a matter of enduring stares, whispers, explanations and the condescending pity from those he left behind.
Love holds edges sharper than Esher’s sword, for nobody wins but demons in the sale of souls.
Yes, and that’s what scares him: his erasure writ in the words of love.
Sennkestra on Next Step Cake asked this question for November’s Carnival of Aros, with specific mention of allo-aros in the explanatory post:
What kind of community spaces and resources do you want to see more of, as an aro-spec person?
My wishlist as an allo-aro who must interact with the a-spec and aromantic communities is singular: an a-spec audience. A supportive, responsive audience that recognises the a-spec community’s current tendency to overlook, disregard or paraphrase allo-aro expression, and will make a concerted effort to promote and support the creating of allo-aro content, resources and communities.
That’s it, done. The shortest essay I will ever write.
Not so much.
The problem is that this well-intended question encapsulates the challenge I face as an allo-aro interacting with the aromantic and a-spec communities.
I can answer it as it’s meant. I don’t need to start from scratch; I can rework several old posts into a new essay. This isn’t novel to me, given that this post about allo-aros in the aromantic community is a rework of this post about a-spec community inclusion for allo-aros (which was a rework of an earlier @alloaroworlds post). I can dredge up the answers scattered across two blogs and piece them together anew in the hope my needs will be better acknowledged by asexual a-specs. This is the spirit in which the question is asked and in which most people will and are expected to answer.
How many more times must I repeat myself?
Continue reading “Carnival of Aros: Aro Community Wishlists”
It’s a common allo-aro experience to see well-meaning allies defending us by the use of discussion points that reinforce the erasure and othering they’re meant to counteract. Allies signal-boosting allo-aro works by arguing that they’re also useful for aro-ace understandings of aromanticism, for example, looks like a positive action at first glimpse but continues to contextualise allo-aros in terms of our relationship to asexuality.
How should folks discuss us, then? How should folks discuss the reality that allo-aros are not always regarded as a fundamental part of our shared community or fully supported within it? What words do we use if allo-aros are going to get upset when we’re just trying to be helpful?
So please find a list of discussion points, goals and shapes of activism that are more likely to make us feel that we do have allies willing to acknowledge our experiences and feelings.
Continue reading “How to Ally: Discussing Allo-Aros in the Aro Community”
When Rowan Ross is pressured into placing an aromantic pride mug on his desk, he doesn’t know how to react when his co-workers don’t notice it. Don’t they realise he spent a weekend rehearsing answers for questions unasked? Then again, if nobody knows what aromanticism is, can’t he display a growing collection of pride merch without a repeat of his coming out as trans? Be visible with impunity through their ignorance?
He can endure their thinking him a fan of archery, comic-book superheroes and glittery vampire movies. It’s not like anyone in the office is an archer. (Are they?) But when a patch on his bag results in a massive misconception, correcting it means doing the one thing he most fears: making a scene.
After all, his name isn’t Aro.
Romance, too, feels like one of the mechanisms by which a dangerous trans body can be rendered more acceptable to cis folks.
When Rowan Ross is pressured into placing an aromantic pride mug on his desk, he doesn’t know how to react when his co-workers don’t notice it. Don’t they realise he spent a weekend rehearsing answers for questions unasked? Then again, if nobody knows what aromanticism is, can’t he display a growing collection of pride merch without a repeat of his coming out as trans? Be visible with impunity through their ignorance?
He can endure their thinking him a fan of archery, comic-book superheroes and glittery vampire movies. It’s not like anyone in the office is an archer. (Are they?) But when a patch on his bag results in a massive misconception, correcting it means doing the one thing he most fears: making a scene.
After all, his name isn’t Aro.
What is pride merch for if not petty passive-aggression in response to allo folks’ amatonormativity?
Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.
Contains: A world where sexual attraction sans alloromantic attraction takes on fangs and teeth–and a pansexual’s aro liberation means accepting monstrosity.
Your days are depthless silhouettes of human puppetry.
This is a separate list of all my works featuring autistic and aromantic protagonists. My other aromantic works can be found on my fiction page.
It’s also worth noting that my protagonists are like to be various combinations of trans, non-binary, multisexual and otherwise-disabled.
Some of these stories do not focus on the aromantic, and one story, Certain Eldritch Artefacts, is more an example of an aromantic not yet knowing it than an aromantic narrative. (Do the alloromantic usually build a successful romantic relationship with an inappropriate crush by first spending a year travelling around another continent?) The sequel, Love in the House of the Ravens, depicts the beginning of Darius’s finding this out…
What if her love is a dull, flickering, rare thing, so insubstantial it makes better sense to disregard it as meaningful? What if her love is quiet and companionate at best while Keiko loves with fairytale passion, a woman who wants and needs to be wanted?
Pretending to be girlfriends while casing an art gallery with Keiko shouldn’t be a problem, but once Jessie realises things have gotten a little too real in the façade they’re showing to the world, the only thing to do is ask.
Contains: A stand-alone, fluffy, contemporary short story about a greyromantic autistic and the beginnings of a QPR.
Continue reading “Fiction Collection: Aromantic and Autistic”
I’ve seen the beginnings of a trend that conflates aro-ace experiences of aromantic erasure in a-spec spaces with allo-aro experiences of allosexual-and-aromantic erasure.
I am troubled when this notion of we’re all aros together and we all experience aromantic erasure is used to silence allo-aros from talking about our specific experiences. This line of thought seems reasonable because there’s been no real discussion on what allosexual-and-aromantic erasure in a-spec spaces looks like. When you don’t know what allosexual-aromantic erasure is, it’s not so unreasonable to think it similar to aromantic erasure.
When allo-aros experience aromantic erasure in general a-spec spaces, we are simultaneously experiencing allosexual erasure alongside it. (This is because we cannot exist in a-spec spaces by virtue of our allosexuality alone, and aromanticism is not a centred a-spec identity.) This makes our experiences of erasure in a-spec spaces different from those of aro-aces, and we need this difference recognised.
It’s also worth noting that these points are interconnected and similar: a lot of these instances of erasure can’t happen without the concurrent existence of others. I’m listing these to create this sense of exposure and clarification, because even allo-aros don’t know the breadth of our own erasure.
I’ll also say that erasure doesn’t have to be intentional to be erasure. A lot of this doesn’t happen from malice; some of it happens from good intentions and a lot of it happens from the history of aromantic communities and culture evolving from asexual ones. It’s still erasure.
So please find a list of over fifty instances I consider allo-aro erasure, along with a few parenthetical explanations.
(People unfamiliar with terminology used in this post should first read this guide on using a-spec community terms.)
Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.
Contains: A gay aromantic man dealing with the casual amatonormativity of alloromantics who think they accept his aromanticism.
The same old words, the same tedious amatonormativity.
Aro Worlds 