well, this is nice

Hello! It's been A While since the last rec, hasn't it? This time i'm bringing you a bunch of posts about writing asexuality and ace characters in fiction, hopefully useful to both original and fan writers.

✒ General Fiction Writing

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✒ Writing Sex in Ace Fiction

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Which means "the fics i read this year and put a little start or heart beside their titles in my handwritten list of all the fics i've ever read". Mostly All For The Game and Check, Please! fics, with a few from The Raven Cycle, The Bright Sessions, Harry Potter, Hockey RPF, and Homestuck.

Organized by fandom in chronological order; 64 fics and series total. All stories include content warnings, of which there are a lot.

Also, this is not counting the fics i just skimmed through and put in my Marked For Later list...

🦊 All For The Game

( 38 fricking fics and series )

🥧 Check, Please!

( A respectable 17 titles list )

👑 The Raven Cycle

( Just a couple Ronan/Adam )

💡 The Bright Sessions

( Sorry for the rec )

🏰 Harry Potter

( Couple of fics featuring Draco )

🏒 Hockey RPF

( 3 well-known Tyler/Jamie and thank you very much )

🎱 Homestuck

( A single Striders' fic )

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Is it me or the fics rated as General and Teen+ have way more content warnings that those rated Mature or Explicit?

Also, if you wondered: yes, i am aware of the serious lack of fictional women in my reading tendencies. I'm planning to at least read mostly books with female and nb main characters next year, so here's hoping.

And here's my Rec Masterpost.

I think that when people focus on specific types of physical experiences in books, that they constrain themselves away from noticing a lot of the other ways that books can establish relationships.

Y'know —again, I'm going back to my books, but of course i pay attention to how people read them. I have seen people claim that there is no sign of attraction between Margerit and Barbara in Daughter of Mystery until the very end of the book, when they finally get together. And I'm thinking like: "I can cite you, y'know, in every chapter there is an interaction between them that indicates their growing romantic attraction to each other and their physical response to each other and I know, 'cause i put them in there!" And if you're missing them, then that says to me that you've got this very narrow idea of how people build relationships and how they respond to each other.

And if you've got a character who is on the asexual spectrum in a book, and you are trying to show how they are developing a romantic attraction or how they are enjoying the type of physical relationship they enjoy, and people are attune to only seeing this very narrow spectrum of behaviour as being related to interpersonal relationships, then they're gonna miss that! They're gonna say: "Well no, there was no romance between these characters". Well, how can you say there was no romance? "Because they didn't do X, Y and Z, and X, Y and Z are the only things that count for romance."

And of course then, taking that out of the book and back into social interactions, it says to me that if you belive that X, Y and Z are the only ways to build a romantic relationship, then you've cut me off entirely. You've said that I am not capable of engaging in romantic relationships, 'cause I'm not interested in those things.

— Heather Rose Jones in A Guide To Including Asexuals - Ask An Asexual

I was listening to this episode (part of a whole series on asexuality at The Lesbian Talk Show) while dyeing my hair and luckily i was already finishing, because i had to STOP and SCREAM at my phone: "THIS! This is EXACTLY my problem with half of the criticism to Neil and Andrew's relationship in the All For The Game series!

I've seen numerous folks say that the only romance in the books happens in The King's Men and that it practically took them by surprise, because they didn't see any clue to their growing feelings and attraction in the previous books. And i'm sitting here like "Did we not read the same books? Did you not see them being increasingly drawn to each other, and the way they built their relationship over shared secrets and mutual trust?"

"Did you not see them falling in love, little by little? How attune they were to each other? Did you not see how Neil started to see Andrew not only as a threat or a temporary ally, but as a whole human being that he could lean on, physically and emotionally? The way he started to notice him in every room, how his eyes searched for him every time they shared space?"

"Why can you only see their attraction and love for each other when they're making out and hooking up?"

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Heather also has a related post at her blog called Shall We Dance? Showing Attraction without Overt Erotics.

Hello and happy Asexual Awareness Week 2018, everybody! In honor of AAW, i'm finally posting this meta about the demisexual representation in All For The Game i've been working on since, apparently, november of 2017. Enjoy!

(And yes, this will have spoilers. You have been warned.)

🐾 So, what is this All For The Game thing?

For anyone who doesn't know, the All For The Game series (also known as The Foxhole Court) is a trilogy of self-published books written by Nora Savakic and originally uploaded to Smashwords between 2013 and 2014. The books are a mix of sport college drama meet mafia thriller, and deal with a lot of dark themes, including drugs, self-harm, physical and sexual child abuse, torture and, of course, murder. You can find a detailed list of content warnings for the series in this Tumblr post.

AFTG is also famous for being protagonized by a demisexual guy who ends up in a relationship with a gay teammate, so as many of you can imagine —and also considering that the first book is free and the other two cheap as heck— it became really popular in Tumblr. I'd say that, along with The Raven Cycle and Six of Crows, it has become part of a golden triumvirate of queer trauma YA book series, where you start with one and somehow end up reading all three of them.

Now, the series is not without its problems (the misrepresentation of psychiatric medication being a big one of them) but the way it portrays queerness, trauma, healing, boundaries and found families through Neil's relationship with Andrew and the Foxes makes it a very compelling story. Lots of emotional catharsis going on in this fandom.

Because of all this, its status as one of the few fictional depictions of demisexuality currently out there is very important. Let's explore that.

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If A mostly queer Podcast Rec wasn't a-okay enough for y'all, this week i bring you a totally, 100% asexual spectrum podcast rec list. Starring both discussion podcasts about asexuality and fiction podcasts with main ace characters.

All these podcasts are in english and only the audio dramas have transcripts available so far.

As a warning, the fiction section may contain (slight) spoilers about the ace characters.

🎙️ Discussion

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🎙️ Fiction

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Well would you look at this: This week's rec is not mostly queer, but totally, absolutely, 100% vintage queer. And yes, this one's just as long as A mostly queer Instagram Rec.

Most of these Instagram accounts belong to archives and other cultural institutions and organizations that work on queer history. And most of them are from the USA.

I tried to only include those who post mostly queer stories, not just announcements of their events and exhibitions.

🏳️‍🌈 In English

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🏳️‍🌈 In other languages

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