and what if the character wasn't directly rejected but at every turn they were made to experience situations that made them feel completely irrefutably unwanted. what then

Being an aroace disabled person is so fun because whenever the possibility of (aro)ace disabled characters is raised, the disabled community is always like, "umm, that's a negative stereotype because you're just saying disabled people aren't full adults, capable of consent with ~normal~ desires and that we're unloveable, why are our characters always asexual?"

Like, a) the vast majority of disabled characters aren't ace, lmao, b) they're just fully accepting all the negative stereotypes and beliefs about asexuals being broken, unfulfilled or not fully/properly developed and the idea that being in rose (romantic/sexual) relationships is a necessary part of being fully humanised and c) centering allo disabled feelings of annoyance over these negative stereotypes about asexuals being applied to them, about asexuality being used to dehumanise them, without recognising that the group most hurt by the dehumanised asexual disabled character is asexual disabled people. They fully accept us being misrepresented, they're just annoyed they're hurt too. Good representation for ace disabled people is an important part of the pushback against this trope, but they'll never accept that because they just hate any association with us. Why must a disabled character be allosexual to be good representation?

"We'd accept it if it was good." The fact you say all that aphobic shit when it isn't is proof enough you have a problem. It is in fact a basic part of the bigot playbook to criticise any poorly executed minority character's existence and then defend themselves by saying they wouldn't say all that bigoted shit if they were a good character.

But a lot of you can't even acknowledge aces are a minority, despite the fact you say all this shit, despite the fact aces have the same rate of conversion therapy as gay people, despite the fact that asexuality is still a diagnosis in the DSM and ICD. We have 101 problems even getting you to recognise that aphobia exists, let alone that you contribute to it.

seeing people throw fits about queerbaiting when their fave is canonically queer they’re just not in the ship that the fandom wanted is fucking wild to me like damn i did not know not being in a relationship (or not being in a specific relationship even bc half the examples off the top of my head ARE in canonical same-gender relationships) revoked your queer card. sad!!

honestly it's hard to meet other aspec people irl but in my experience they are there it's just that they don't know it's safe to talk about or they don't know it about themselves yet. there are many advantages to loudly and obnoxiously talking about being aspec all the time but certainly not least is the ability to ace more sexualities and aro more romanticisms than you ever thought was possible

i guess what i'm saying is that if you can't find them precooked then homemade is fine. no prime directive make everyone more aspec now

There are just so many characters that should've been women.

I was aroace during the great "aros / aces are just privilegied evil men trying to infiltrate the queer community and abuse women" discourse, and now I'm a trans man during the great "trans men are just privilegied evil men trying to infiltrate the trans community and abuse women" discourse.

Well that's just great

As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.

fun fact: if a fictional character is given too many poorly written romantic subplots that ultimately dont go anywhere, the aromantic community is legally allowed to claim the character as one of their own

Today's aesthetic: fictional characters whose whole deal is an allegory for the struggles faced by a real group that they're actually part of.

It probably says something about this blog's followership that half the people in the notes' first thought was Madeline Celeste and not, like, a gay X-Man.

Media: Here's an aroace character! We didn't use the word aroace because it didn't exist when our media was made but we did explicitly say this character has never been attracted to anyone and does not possess any emotional feelings attached to sex or relationships.

Fans: Well actually since they didn't use the word aroace (which didn't exist when the media was made) this means that their lack of attraction is somehow not innate and can be fixed by meeting the right person (please ignore how this perfectly mirrors homophobic "you're not gay you're just struggling with same sex attraction and you'll meet the right one someday" rhetoric) and that right person is (looks for closest friendship this character has) is someone of the same gender so this character is gay and if you disagree you're homophobic.

I'm actually so surprised this post is still getting notes months later and hasn't gotten me any hate yet. Anyway this post was about them.

One bad thing about tumblr search showing reblogs with comments nowadays is I can't privately complain by reblogging my own post because now it will show up in search results.

Might just have to do the Twitter Method and write out my complaints in a draft and then post a screenshot of it.