Dodecahedron314

Me: "Oh, look, <singer I like> has a new album!" Album: *entire first half is about singer kicking himself for staying in the "friendzone"* Me: "...really? Why? Just why? And also WHY???"

Yes. The most pointless half-arsed romantic sub-subplot I've ever seen. They literally interacted TWICE. There was absolutely no reason for that to be a thing, ever. Plot relevance? Nope. Character development? Nope. Something that anybody would have ever shipped before it actually happened? Nope. Introduction of a vaguely important character? Nope. Any relevance whatsoever to pre-existing canon? To the best of my (admittedly limited) knowledge, nope. That leaves exactly ZERO compelling and valid reasons for that to be included at all. Sorry, I get very ranty about Marvel movies in general in this respect.

Correction: Marvel had been decent about it...and then Age of Ultron and Civil War happened. (I will never stop being salty about what happened in Age of Ultron.)

Agender polyhedron reporting for duty. Not attracted to anybody, but whenever someone's attracted to me, it gives me pretty bad dysphoria, because I don't pass and so I know the person is expecting assigned gender roles out of me in a romantic context, which is just not OK on any level in existence.

In general, as a romance-repulsed aro, shipping is just all the nope. I would be a lot more active in a lot of fandoms of it wasn't for how shippy they all are. I do occasionally ship characters queerplatonically, or even in a best-friends-but-not-queerplatonic way, but even that's kind of rare--I tend to focus a lot more on the actual plot and universe of something than which characters could be in some sort of relationship. Real life shipping? That's a thing people do? NOPE NOPE NOPE.

I very much relate to this. As far as I'm concerned, I might as well be a Boltzmann Brain.

For some ungodly reason, my dorm has a subscription to Cosmopolitan, and the new issue came in yesterday. As is the custom, someone immediately picked it up and started reading it aloud in the common room, and there was a quiz on attitudes toward romance, which we all took collectively. The questions were all about how you would react to romantic situations like a couple PDAing in Starbucks or a celebrity couple breaking up, with three multiple-choice options to where one was negative, one was slightly positive, and one was extremely positive. Because the negative ones were often worded in the most amusing way, everyone picked the negative ones as a joke. At the end of the quiz, the conclusion was that we all hated romance and needed to "do some self-searching to find our happiness", because, you know, we'll never find a man like that. Then I just said loudly, "I've already found my happiness, and that's being a romance-repulsed aro!", because I don't know about the rest of the room, but that was certainly how I interpreted the description given at the end of the quiz...everyone else was joking about picking the negative options, but I certainly wasn't!

I always thought it was pretty clear that I've always been one of the most flagrantly aro people in existence, but I guess it wasn't as obvious to my parents somehow, because when I came out to my mom it took several rounds of explanation for her to get that yes, there's a difference between aro and ace, and yes, I'm both...and then used it as ammunition with respect to my dad shortly after they split up in an argument that he wasn't even remotely part of. Then there was my dad, who kept on bringing up the inevitability of me getting a boyfriend whenever we would have a conversation about the future, until I finally came out to him on accident the last time he asked about it. (To his credit, after he'd asked me about boys and I'd flippantly said "No, that's not a thing for me" like I always do since I'm so used to being extremely out with my friends and then proceeded to quietly panic because I'd never planned on coming out to him, he just calmly said "What about girls?", which was more progressive than I'd been expecting from somebody who still occasionally uses "gay" in the same sense a 12-year-old boy uses it, and when I said no to that, he just kind of verbally shrugged and said "eh, as long as you're happy." I'm hoping that'll be the last I hear of it from him...it probably won't be, but I can hope.)

Civil War spouiler: (sorry for the typo, my phone is being annoying and I can't edit this for some reason because the mobile site hates me)

If you're all right with "kid movies" (although really the only things that make this a kid movie are the facts that it's from Pixar and the protagonist is 14; the storyline isn't juvenile at all and it deals with some really deep issues in a really touching way), I highly recommend Big Hero 6. I just saw it this week with my ace club, and it was picked specifically because all of the movies we were considering had NO romance whatsoever. Not one couple, not one kissing scene, not even one subtle indication of a crush. I think that's one of the first movies I've seen in literally years that I can say that about. And another one I just remembered: the made-for-TV two-part screen adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel Hogfather. At this point, it's my family's traditional Christmas movie, so it's not exactly seasonally relevant right now, but definitely one to keep in mind.

Another recent one I forgot about: my university has a thing where you can go and be a guinea pig for psychological studies and get paid, so I did a bunch of those last week. One of them involved a question-and-answer thing where I was the one getting asked the questions, and one of the preset questions to be asked was "what would your ideal romantic partner be like?" Needless to say, I gave the experimenter a piece of my mind as politely as possible. And added it to the "other comments" section of the experiment feedback form. And nagged the experimenter about it a little more. And ranted about it to a friend who had also taken the same study--and, apparently, had had to keep from cracking up when she was asked that question because of the mental image of my probable reaction. So yeah. I was just ever so slightly salty about that.

My assignment for freshman English when we read R&J was to participate in a Facebook group (well, fake educational Facebook, but you get the point) where we were all given characters to portray and interact with everyone like we were that character. I got Prince Escalus, which was fitting, because he's just sitting around there pointing out how ridiculous the entire thing is while everyone else is running around killing each other and making fools out of themselves. Of course, the online interactions that were supposed to at least be vaguely plausible with respect to how the characters act in the play wound up with all the popular kids launching a rebellion against me, led by Benvolio or Mercutio (I don't remember which), who was being represented by this guy who was just generally an aggravating person in the way that 9th graders often are, so that was that.

The perfect anecdote to describe my thoughts on the matter happened just today: As I was leaving my dorm with a bunch of friends on the way to dinner, there was a little kid running around on the quad with no immediately obvious adult presence (a moment later we saw two women standing off to the side, so don't worry, the kid was fine and not actually abandoned or anything). One of my friends said jokingly, "Oh, no. Is this is an abandoned kid? Is <our dorm> going to have to raise this kid now?" I responded, "No, don't worry, I know a volcano we can sacrifice it to." (Note: worry not, no small children were sacrificed in the making of this post. And yes, that was an exaggeration, I don't actually dislike small children enough to sacrifice one to a volcano. Almost, but not quite, because basic human morality.) I blame that specific joke on the fact that in high school, as part of their psychology class, one of my friends conditioned their little siblings to start chanting "Sacrifice! Sacrifice!" whenever they held one up over their head. This same friend also once made the Tumblr post "Reblog to support sacrificing my significant other to a volcano", which got an amusingly high number of notes. I had interesting friends in high school.

Occasionally a turn of phrase comes into my mind and some part of me goes "hey, I could totally turn that into a pickup line", and every so often I wonder what it would be like to write characters who flirt with each other, mostly because I'm a sucker for witty repartee and terrible puns. Because that's what flirting is, right?...right? Also, super awkward intrusive thoughts. Definitely not attraction, because there's no actual feeling attached to them, but just occasionally the thought of "technically it would probably be physically possible to kiss this person right now", which is just weird in the extreme because no way does that even remotely make sense as a thing that would ever happen involving me. More just kind of recognizing that the possibility exists on some level, and getting super weirded out by it.

The first Avengers movie, from what I can remember? Definitely not the second one, though. I am forever salty about the second one. Out of the Star Trek movies, I don't remember much romance in Search For Spock (III), The Voyage Home (IV), The Final Frontier (V), or First Contact (VIII). (Can't speak to Nemesis (X) or the newer ones because I haven't seen them.) Also, both Labyrinth and Real Genius (all right, so there's one kiss scene in the latter, but it's totally irrelevant to the plot and completely skippable, and they don't even act like they're in a relationship anyway). I might remember more later.

"What's your type?" "I use the backspace key a lot. Which, incidentally, is what I will use on YOU if you continue to ask me such questions."

Me, sophomore year of high school, after both of my friends had recently come out as lesbian: "Well, I guess this makes me the token straight friend, then." Me. Straight. HA! BAHAHAHAHA!!!! Oh, young Dodec, you sweet summer child.

Perks of getting better at a language: Now you can finally start to understand all those songs in your target language that you downloaded when you first started studying it. Drawbacks of getting better at a language: You now understand some of said songs just enough to realize that they're actually love songs.

I was going to add mine...and then I just wound up serial-smashing the like button on every single post in this thread I agreed with (in no particular order: Katniss, Kaylee, Rey (if they try to make her and Finn a thing, I swear I will riot), Annie (I'm incredibly happy to find out other people here read Gunnerkrigg Court!), Natasha Romanoff, Light and L, etc.). I'd also like to throw in basically the entire cast of Todd Allison and the Petunia Violet (and in addition, Elijah and Meredith are in the most QP of relationships and no one can tell me otherwise), as well as Janice and Maureen from Welcome to Night Vale (I also strongly headcanon Carlos as demiromantic demisexual) and Dr. Hilbert and Captain Lovelace from Wolf 359.

I can definitely relate--I don't always ship, but when I do, it's always queerplatonically. Especially since it's very satisfying to find characters that work really well together on a strictly platonic basis as opposed to just having to kind of squint and avoid the romance implied in some relationships.