Carnival of Aces: Fiction

[primeideal]

So, the Carnival of Aces theme is "fiction" this month, which is exciting! But also open-ended.

I'm going to start with this prompt and then ramble. "If you write fiction, how does being on the asexual spectrum or being aware of the asexual spectrum impact your work?" To which the answers are, in reverse order, "less than you'd think" and "compared to what?"

Since I'm not writing much original fiction to speak of, I'll restrict this to my recent fanfiction efforts and long roleplay series (essentially interlinked short stories). I have written a couple stories explicitly about asexual characters, but beyond that, the bulk of my work is gen. My characters' motivations can be summarized by, to name just a few examples, "How do I break the codes of evildoers?" "How do I get back to my own time?" "How do I commentate on sports in the middle of a satirical dictatorship where hardly anyone's literate enough to read a media guide?" "How do I commentate on sports in the midst of a ****ing zombie uprising?"

So, most of these are not romantic or sexual plotlines, except when they are. ("I love you, but how do I tell you I'm a wizard?" "I love you, but there is angst, for I'm only seen as the comic relief and I can never confess the true depth of my love!" "We're on-again, off-again, and...don't mind me, I just have to go adjucate a soccer game.")

Does being aware of asexuality impact my work? Beyond the two explicitly-ace fics, I don't think so, because if I wasn't aware of asexuality I don't see what I'd write any differently.

Does being on the asexual spectrum impact my work? Probably not, because I don't identify as asexual (or anything-else-sexual), in lieu of any epistemological background about how I could figure out what I am. I don't mind this state of affairs, but it just means I tend to write characters who are broadly "like me" and, rather than identifying as asexual, just have it not be an issue. So, there's the neurotypical twenty-four-year-old human man who narrates a 47,000 word fanfic without any romantic or sexual feelings noted on his part. Is this realistic? For me, sure. For someone else, maybe not, and maybe someone who was more confidently sexual would have written that differently. But then, I can't say that being aceish impacts my work because I just don't know who I'd be otherwise.

I guess one way asexuality could impact someone's work would be in terms of "how often are people having sex"? In most of the original sources that I might go on to read or write fanfic of, there's very little on-page sex, which makes sense--since I don't find it that interesting to read about, anything that goes too indepth probably won't have held my attention. So, if I'm writing fic, I probably won't be writing much sex either, as between the original source and my own life there's not much sex to draw from. Moreover, at least in terms of the world around me, I tend not to assume most people are having sex, at least beyond their spouses (of either gender). This might have more to do with my worldview in general than my own orientation, I'm not sure. But if I'm reading someone else's fic, it's jarring to have another author casually go "oh, they were having sex." When my response is "really? them? aren't they a bit young for that?"

Oh, and that's without getting started on romance. Again using other fics as a guide rather than anything I've experienced, apparently it's an Important Thing and a Relationship Milestone to mention that...you love the person you're in love with? Again, this dynamic is just not something I could see myself writing.

The last two paragraphs are the short version of this essay, which introduces another complication. What if one of the characters in question isn't human? For that fic, Luna Lovegood of Harry Potter fame was a decidedly romantic non-human, but perhaps an asexual one--it was easier for me to write her as "not interested in kissing" than to try and wrap my head around what two teenagers in wartime might do. My explicitly asexual fic includes running with someone else's prompt about Tobias from Animorphs, originally a human teenager but now spending most of his time a as a red-tailed hawk, and reimagined as ace (and just as romantic as he is in the books--this is where the "no sex on page" thing shows up). The other one is about Charlie Weasley and Gabrielle Delacour, again from the Potterverse. Charlie is on record as being "not gay, but more interested in dragons than women," which I and many others take as a sign of a cool, well-rounded, (and completely human) ace character. Gabrielle is part-Veela, and the younger sister of Fleur Delacour, who's romantic and presumably sexual (she has several children). I write Gabrielle as unsure whether her lack of interest in romance is just a sign of her orientation or a consequence of her confusing species. By including Charlie as another ace, I'm trying to avoid the stereotype of aces as inhuman, but Gabrielle is actually supposed to represent me in terms of how being on the autism spectrum limits my own epistemology.

In conclusion, this was rambly. But instead of conceptualizing my characters in terms of "ace" and "sexual," it's easier for me to draw a dividing line between "explicitly focused on romance today" and "focused on a much wider variety of things." And the narrator generally tends to fall into the second camp.