axaxismlo

hot take: polyamory is a conspiracy backed by Big Dating App, which wants you to have a good experience finding a relationship through them without necessarily losing you as a customer

Bridger: “I like me, and I like gardens, and my friends.”

J.E.D.D Mason: “I apologize, [name], for this mismatch in the radii of our consequentialisms.”

Martin Guildbreaker: “I organized them alphabetically by the ninth word in each document.”

Today in government-funded acronyms:

The ATSDR Partnership to Promote Local Efforts to Reduce Environmental Exposure (APPLETREE)

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godlessace:

I was a little miffed this morning, when PZ (the most widely read blogger on our network) posted a review of Every Heart A Doorway, and said this:

So the main character, Nancy, is ace, and this is a minor metaphor for her true strangeness, which is that she lived in a world of ghosts who disliked the business of the living, so she has learned to retreat into statue-like stillness.

So wait, being ace is a metaphor?  For being strange? Not sure if this is just PZ’s interpretation, or if it’s in there in the book. I certainly don’t remember ace reviewers mentioning it.

I’m also reminded of a comment I once made:

I’m not surprised that allo partners in allo/ace relationships are often weird characters.  Romance stories are often character studies, and you want characters that are worth studying.  What I think is more notable is that the ace character is not equally weird.  It’s a measure of how many weirdness points it costs to be asexual.

So, there are two sides to this.  On the one hand, there are some very weird ace characters, because (it seems) the author wanted to make a very strange character and asexuality was added as another way to make them strange.

On the other hand, ace characters are sometimes less weird than their allo counterparts, because (it seems) the author thought asexuality was weird enough, therefore not much else was needed to make them interesting characters.

Of course, we’re really just imagining the authors’ intentions.  In reality an author might be trying really hard to avoid the two horns of the dilemma, but can only do so much to control how people read it.

I just finished reading Every Heart a Doorway this morning, and as for Nancy’s asexuality being a metaphor, I would say … kind of? She definitely is actually asexual, in the modern internet sense of the word, and we even get assurance that the world-of-ghosts thing doesn’t explain or even correlate with being asexual (much like in Quicksilver, in which the main character is asexual and an alien, and we get an explicit pause to discuss the fact that her fellow aliens aren’t typically asexual). Overall I found her asexuality to be well portrayed. In terms of metaphor, I’d be more inclined to go the other way – the whole concept of the story sort of serves as a metaphor for adolescence, except that that sounds like a pretty bad book and I thought it was pretty good. An bunch of people ages 12 to 19 have had experiences that their parents don’t believe, much less understand; the parents want to get back the kids they thought that they had; they don’t want the people their kids have become, so they send them to the school that is the story’s setting. So for example, Nancy says that her parents want her to wear colors, eat every day, and date boys. In context, I enjoyed seeing two simultaneous interpretations – (1) Nancy has been to a magical Underworld, she learned to love it and hopes to go back, etc. (2) One’s clueless parents wanting one to date boys is a Relatable Ace Experience. (Maybe for people who argued with their parents about clothes and food, the other parts are relatable too – though like, I’m in favor of people eating every day.)

I think what makes all this okay from an ace-representation perspective is that the metaphors / dual interpretations don’t just apply to the ace character. There are two characters who are identical twins, whose parents insisted on considering one of them ‘the smart one’ and one of them ‘the pretty one’; in the world they visit, they switch those roles, in a very dark way. There’s also Kade, whose parents would be happy to see the little girl they thought they were raising, but don’t want the young man who lived in another world. And… well, maybe that’s it, but to be fair, it’s a very short book, and those are most of the main characters.