you're not
wanting and not wanting at the same time
a comic for asexual awareness week
bringing this back today for the start of pride month. still overwhelmed by how well this comic went down and with how many people relate. it’s easy to think aro-ace people are all totally accepting of their identities and really proud of who they are. i guess on websites like this you see a lot of people proudly putting their identity in their bio, a flag in their profile picture.
in fact i think a lot of aro-ace people really hate that part of themselves, hide it, and struggle for a long time to ‘accept’ who they are and feel any sense of ‘pride’. that’s the feeling i wanted to capture here. the disappointment, the loneliness, upon realising that you can’t feel what is such a wonderful thing. the embarrassment of not being ‘normal’, of being some random sexuality that nobody irl has heard of, and letting down those around you because you can’t be who they want you to be. how desperately you want to change, how desperately you want to feel. but you just can’t.
i know not all aro-ace people feel like this. i know lots of aro and/or ace people feel able to be in relationships, to feel closeness and have partners in other ways. but i think it’s important to be aware that some aro-ace people do feel like this.
the comments on this comic have mostly been great but a few have been very frustrating. a comment it got a lot was along the lines of ‘aw!! you don’t need to have sex to be in a relationship!’. you completely missed the point, hah. this is not a comic about sex. it’s about a lack of feeling, the lack of something beautiful other people seem to have. another comment that popped up a few times was ‘maybe she’s a lesbian’. well maybe lesbians and aro/ace girls have more in common than people think - maybe they both often struggle to accept that they feel no attraction to men, even though society has conditioned them to do so, sometimes spending years trying to force themselves to like men in that way, when they just can’t.
this comic is called ‘wanting and not wanting at the same time’ because she wants to love. but when it comes down to the reality, she can’t fulfil the requirements of that. she wants to love someone forever, to get married and have children and grow old with her soulmate, but she doesn’t want it with this person. or that person. or anyone she meets or will ever meet. a sort of catch 22, i guess.
hope that makes sense. thanks for listening, and have a lovely pride month ❤️
our founding fathers died so that I could wear thigh-high socks, cute makeup, and go to Walmart. and live.
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ALTYou love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)
Disaster Puppy Content™️
I mean I was fumbling for words to describe Crowley and "disaster" and "puppy" seemed to go so well together.
lets hear it for transgenderism and faggotry. can I get a round of applause for transgenderism and faggotry
You can’t convince me that games like this, hopscotch and skipping rhymes, aren’t some sort of spell. It’s like witchcraft 101 for all the little girls out there
Yao dancers, Lianzhou, Guangdong Province, Southern China:
Deng Yingfa Yao Culture Teacher:
“Our culture is very precious. And for example, the dances and songs we sing don’t have scores, they can only be passed down by word of mouth, to the next generation. It’s important for the young to know them, before these arts are known by others.”
Wow, I didn’t know cultures other than in the Philippines did dances with bamboo poles, that’s awesome!
In the Philippines, there are two main dances involving bamboo poles. One is the singkil, which depicts a story from the Maranao epic poem Darangen. In the story, a princess and her attendants get abducted and a prince goes to save them. The bamboo poles represent the various challenges they had to get through. Here’s an example:
The other one is the Tinikling, which has more rural post Spanish colonization roots, and it’s often staged as a town festival where the dancers attempt increasingly fast and complicated moves to wow the crowd.
I’ve also seen more modern adaptations of Filipino dances, here’s one for the Tinikling - it makes me happy to see our historical dances integrated to present day!
oh thank GOD tumblr did its thing. I saw a reposted uncredited video on tiktok and did some googling only to discover that a lot of cultures have variations on this, and I wanted to learn a lot more! it’s so nice to see the comments here.
There’s also the Cheraw dance from Mizoram, a state in India. I’m not from this part of India and don’t know much about it so hopefully someone else can add on.
This is like our Sword Dancing in Scotland!
reddstardust