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frustrating answer: everything and nothing is normal! no but truly, do not worry about this. LOTS of us revel in fictional romance, lots of us like imagining it but not actually experiencing it. humans in general like imagining/reading about stuff they'd never want to experience! there's a reason horror is such a popular genre, or murder mysteries, or thrillers. which is not to compare romance to those things, but more the example of enjoying the fictionalised version of something/fantasising about it =/= necessarily wanting it. you don't have to find a label that fits this specific thing. if you'd like to, of course you can, but I wouldn't stress about it. I myself love romance stories, and write quite a few myself (i also write Complicated Aro Feelings™ stuff!), and consider myself firmly aro. when you see a thread on here like "romantic songs we dislike" or something similar, that's often an expression of the frustration with how heavily society in general is amatonormative, and view romantic love as something necessary to the human experience. there's nothing wrong with enjoying romantic songs, or films, or stories, and also be aro.

@Holmbo of Billy Bones? i'd have to look through the series to find the specific scene, but i could easily do that! he unfortunately has no aro-specific scene like the ones in the vid, which is why people tend to say he's just ace, but i could send you the specific episode + timestamp of that. i don't think the clip is easily available online anywhere.

Something that helped me a lot was completely accepting that even if my orientation hasn't actually changed, my understanding of it is continually evolving, and I shouldn't beat myself up for finding different labels that fit me better. Another thing that helped me personally was avoiding microlabels (nothing wrong with them! but I found I became briefly too obsessive with labelling every single part of my experience, in a way that was wholly unhelpful for me). This is a personal philosophy, and not something i wish to impose on others, but i see my previous labels as something that was true of me then, of my understanding of myself. So when I understood myself as a girl, that was true, in a way. When i understood myself as pan-ace, that was true. This has also helped me: it's a kind of live and let go view? Or even kind of how Marie Kondo operates: I say thank you to the label, it was useful to me when it was useful to me, but it is no longer now and so I let it go. If that makes sense?

These are not exactly major medias, but they are what I'm very into atm! Billy Bones from Black Sails is heavily coded as aroace. Most people just say asexual, but I think that's the unfortunate link of asexual = no relationship ever. I headcanon Miranda Barlow as alloaro, personally! She's shown as sexually very free, especially as a woman in the 1700s, and she definitely loves the two men in her life (Spoilers for Black Sails: Then there's the Terror (2018). This is purely a headcanon, but I read Harry Goodsir as aro. Sometimes non-SAM, sometimes alloaro. I fully project my own Complicated Aro Feelings™ on him through my fics, hah. The characters in Terror are fun to play around with sexuality and gender wise, but aro!Harry is one i hold onto.

Hello Max, and warmest of welcomes! I definitely know the confusion you describe very well, and I know for a fact a fair few people on here do too. You've been through a lot to discover your orientation and gender. This is on the whole a very chill and nice forum, I hope you'll find a community here! If you have discord, there's also a server that is slightly more active just due to the nature of forums vs social messaging platforms. Welcome again <3

i don't want children, but i quite like them! i'm incredibly, viscerally scared of pregnancy and birth, and i don't want 24/7 care of another human being. but i'm very fond of the children already in my life, and if any of my friends have kids i'm looking forward to being the cool uncle.

? same language! or at least language family? God jul! og godt nyttår :) ETA: nollaig shona daoibh!

Hi, I'm going to put on my Trans Parent Hat for a moment here: DO practice safe binding!! it's SO important for the future of your health. Unsafe binding can lead to breathing problems, back issues, and skin irritation, and other things. Bind no more than eight hours at a time, ideally less, and allow for your chest to rest in between for at least some four hours (ideally more - your sleeping time, for example!) Do not sleep with it on, do not exercise with it. If it hurts, take it off. Try to do stretch exercises before and after binding. There are some great ones online: they're mainly about stretching your ribcage and breathing deeply. I know chest dysphoria is so damaging and limits your state of living, this is very hard. Please do also keep the health of your body in mind. When it comes to sleep, is sports bras an option for you? They allow for more movement, and also flattens your chest a little (it's no binder, i know! but it might help). That + what Arsenic suggested may help you! All my sympathies to you, i know how hard this is. I hope this helps you!

Allosexual was coined as a term* (alongside a couple of others, i only remember zedsexual right now which i think is cute - Z being on the other end of the alphabet from A) because a lot of allos were uncomfortable being referred to as "sexual". Not to mention that "sexual" and "romantic" already have connotations in speech: if i tell someone "my friend Ali is (a) romantic," they're gonna assume Ali is very romance inclined, maybe they romanticise certain aspects of life. If people outside of the community aren't familiar with a term, the definition of allo is extremely easy to explain. If they're gonna know about aspec identities i think it's important they know that term too. Not to beat this drum again haha but it's the same with the word cis! *i'm unfortunately not familiar with the aro history on this, i was not out to myself as aro at the time. "arosex" made me giggle for some reason, sounds a bit like a sex position? haha

@nonmerci but the thing is exactly that allosexuéll is not english. if we had had a similar issue in norwegian, that alloseksuell meant queer, we would have found a different word and thought aloosexual is english. personally i do not see the problem, and it seems like the one thing someone has found to complain about after the fact, just to complain. i agree with you: it's up to them if they have an issue with it. i don't know if any Quebec French speakers have spoken against allosexual in english lately, but back when it first came up as an issue it was firmly non-Quebec speakers who kept regurgitating it as an argument. idk, maybe i'm burned out by how much this smacks of the aphobic arguments of 2012-ish, when every argument against allosexual - or indeed, anything aspec people tried to do for their own community - was so supremely bad faith.

@Apex that is partly the argument on AVEN. which is like. so does cis. "straight" lumps trans and cis together. that's the nature of it. for that matter, so does "sexual" or "non-ace/non-aro/non-aspec". it's a frustrating conversation.

wow that was an infuriating thread to read!! bit thank you to the aroallos who stepped in there, could feel my blood boiling reading some of it lmao. it's really incredible how saturated AVEN is with allos. i don't want them to start gatekeeping, of course, that would be ridiculous and create infinitely more problems, but the entitlement of some of them in an explicitly ace space is mind boggling. not to mention the arophobia from some of the alloaces :^) clown hours. i'd just like to say again that most people i've met, most LGBTQ people that i've met, who haven't heard of the allo term before? has had NO issue with it, once i've explained it to them. those that do usually have an issue with cis too. i see the "allosexuéll" (sp?) argument was regurgitated too. that's so tired - false friends exist. we will never find a word that works in every single language - besides which, each language have their own terms for queer/LGBTQ people and community. our word for queer is skeiv, which means skewed or bent. as someone mentioned, femme is a common slang within lesbian/wlw circles, and that's literally a French word. sorry - i know most people here knows this. i'm just so tired of an argument that's been happening since the big aphobia days of 2011-2014.

I was confused by the resistance of using allo on AVEN too, and asked about it in a profile post. i'll be honest, after talking to a few who answered, i haven't been back on - I got frustrated by the conversation because I thought this was a conversation long behind us, and i recognised that i was in a bad headspace for that kind of convo, and since i've just been scared about checking my notifs in case i started a fight ? here's what i gathered though: this distaste of the label seems to be 1) mainly on AVEN, and 2) mainly by non-aspec people (either asexual or aromantic). i've been more "active" in ace spaces on tumblr, and i've never seen the same distaste for the label there, neither from aces nor allos (allo-allos, that is). people i know and people i follow who are not aspec, but do know the term, happily use allo for themselves when the term is relevant to use (in the same way cis people who don't object to the label cis are!). i've been on the periphery of an asexual group where i live, which is not English speaking, and they happily use allo - as do the allos who know the term. this is anecdotal, of course, but to me it seems like this is very limited to AVEN, and personally I find that so strange. all of the arguments i saw (from allos!) had the same rhetoric as the arguments against "cis". it lumps too many categories together and implies a privilege where there is none, was one i saw - which i've seen against cis too, and frankly "sexual" does the same thing. there's a disconnect there: the recognition that there needs to be a way to talk about non-ace people, and whatever we choose (sexual, allo, non-ace, zedsexual, whatever) will lump them together, but a resistance to an actual label.

i do have spotify, but it's not a good support for smaller artists like alto said! so i always try to link their bandcamp, and buy music directly from them.

i'm getting back into listening to albums as a whole! i used to as a teen, when i bought CDs, but fell out of the habit once spotify and similar came around. i'm also buying CDs again, or at least the digital albums of artists i want to support. Right now the album I keep replaying is The Unmaster by Dizraeli (especially I Freak Out and Rising Son) I also keep listening to Hark by Gentle Mystics on loop