Not Tropeworthy: Asexuality

It's not unusual for irl aces to be mistaken for gay... no idea how often that happens in fiction, though.

I'm aware of that. I mainly had fiction in mind when I said that.

I mean there are many indexes that include tropes that are only sometimes used in that context.

They probably just included it because of the irl thing.

I think Romantic Asexual and Villainous Aromantic Asexual are the only actual ace tropes we have, and I’m not sure what others we can add at the moment. There probably are some, but…augh. The identity is just in a very strange place right now in fiction.

Edited by Eiryu on Nov 30th 2021 at 2:23:49 PM

The thing is, while being Ace is obviously a completely valid and existing identity, it's also the lack of a thing. So it's hard to portray it in fiction, since in fiction it's hard to portray that something isn't a thing.

I mean, honestly, as an ace person, I find it very much is the presence of something and not a mere lack, but that is well beyond the bounds of this TRS discussion.

For now, we should disambig and create new ace-related tropes as they come up which can be discussed in the Making up for Lost LGBT tropes. We don’t have to make new tropes to fix this one right now.

Yeah, exactly. Making tropes about asexuality/aromanticism is hard because the literal definition is the lack of sexual/romantic attraction, and it's hard to trope the lack of something without grasping at straws (like that Ambiguously Asexual trope that got cut).

Edit: ah dammit, 'd. I agree with too though, we don't have to worry about finding more ace tropes right now. Do we have enough consensus to disambig, or should we wait a day or two?

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Nov 30th 2021 at 3:32:00 PM

Hey, sorry if I offended you there, didn't mean to. My point is just that it's hard to portray something like Asexuality since there's not many ways you can show a character is Ace.

I think we need to wait, even if it's just to hit the 3 day thing.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 30th 2021 at 3:33:39 PM

I pretty much live and breathe this discussion as an ace writer, so trust me, I know. I just don’t see how the discussion of creating new ace tropes is relevant to this particular discussion.

Let’s just disambig it and worry about the rest later.

(Obviously we have to wait, but just pointing out this discussion has sort of derailed)

Edited by Eiryu on Nov 30th 2021 at 2:37:00 PM

TBF, I wasn't online for about an hour and didn't really know that's what the discussion was about. I was mostly chiming in because I thought it was relevant to the disambig discussion.

Well if I recall, we did have a similar discussion in the TRS thread for Transgender, but yeah, s'not important right now.

I’m late to the party.

I think disambiguation is the best option... for now.

Neglected to mention this before, but I think the Asexuality In Media index sounds like a good idea.

Disambig.

I think there's just generally way more bi and trans rep than ace rep in media, so there are more tropes visible there (albeit not always positive ones). And speaking as an ace spectrum person myself, the fact it is the lack of something does make it harder to trope ambiguity because technically any character who doesn't have sex could be read as asexual. It's a very personal kind of identity and thus hard to recognize in characters unless it's outright named and/or thoroughly explored.

If we make the media index, I'd say we could have a lower threshold than the other media indexes by allowing any media that has a named explicit aro or ace character, just because the rep seems even lower than other kinds of queer rep.

I agree with requiring in-work acknowledgement from works on the index.

How exactly is Asexuality not a trope, besides being similar to Bi The Way and Transgender? And if Asexuality is "just a thing that happens", why isn't Romantic Asexual? I feel like we'd be losing something by deleting/disambiguating it. Would people be arguing for a cut if it was titled No Interest In Romance?

A few things:

• Being Ace isn't the same thing as lacking an interest in romance- that's Aromanticism, not Asexuality. Hence why Romantic Asexual is a thing.
• What exactly do you feel we'll be losing that we didn't lose when we cut Bi The Way and Transgender? What's the difference to you?

No Interest In Romance or No Interest In Sex would more broadly cover the character's role in the narrative, while Asexuality is about a character having a specific identity, without any regard to things like stereotypes or narrative purpose.

That is a bit of an issue I see when it comes to getting rid of this trope, not saying it shouldn't be done, but it isn't as easy as getting rid of Bi The Way and Transgender because there isn't many subtropes to split this into because asexuality in media is so rare both because LGBT representation in general not common and it is hard to potray.

Yeah, I feel like we'd lose more from cutting Asexuality than Transgender and Bi The Way because we don't have as many tropes to migrate examples to. We could probably move some to Chaste Hero, but there'd still be a lot of examples with context lost.

The crowner currently going on for Queer Media has an option for creating an LGBT representation index- if that succeeds, it will hopefully fill the need to document when a work represents asexuality, bisexuality, being trans, etc. without creating tropes that are just 'this character is ace' or the like.

And that sucks, but if they're context for something that isn't actually a trope... Callous as it may sound, I'm OK with it. Details can be moved to character bios or the like if possible, and if there's any patterns unearthed in cleaning there's no reason we couldn't make a new draft. But keeping it up solely because there's not enough tropes to move the examples to sounds like we'd be prioritizing quantity over quality- the amount of examples over the amount of tropeworthy examples.

I actually think the situation is very similar as it was with Bi The Way — the main reason people wanted to keep it was because it was a "nice" trope that wasn't, like, Depraved Bisexual, but that still meant that like 80% of the examples were "character is bi" with nowhere more specific to put them.

Simply put, "character is ace", which is what much of the usage is, just isn't a trope.

For potential trope babies, I could maybe see "fictional species reproduces asexually" for the alien species in the wick check, and "asexuality angst" where a character feels "broken" because they don't feel sexual attraction.

Edited by Synchronicity on Nov 30th 2021 at 2:46:12 PM