Aria's Hollow

Finally thought I'd try participating in OC Monday! I'm answering the prompts from this post, if anyone wants to join in as well! If I understood it correctly, there's two ways to participate, and one is making your own blog post answering all the questions for your fellas. That seems easier to start with for the first few rounds I do at least, so here goes! I'll be answering for my OCs Sheva and Wraith for this one.

1. What is [x]'s favourite season? Why?

Sheva's favorite season is summer! There are aspects to every season he appreciates, but he gets cold easily and really likes the feeling of the sun hitting his skin directly, so warmer temperatures are usually nice for him (80s F is pretty cozy for him, though it can still get too hot once it's above 95 F for him). Another big reason he likes the summer is because the daylight lasts longer, and his magic sight dysregulation makes it harder for him to see in the dark (and he's more likely to get headaches faster that are more painful when he has to strain his eyes more too). It's just easier and more pleasant for him to be out and about for long periods during the summer typically.

Wraith's favorite season though is spring! A big part of why is that they really enjoy getting to see all the blooming flowers. They usually find it pretty miserable to absorb much of the world around them (they suffer from pretty severe depression), but all the different flowers around town give a small bit of peace and joy that makes it more bearable to leave their apartment. They mostly are fond of the weather during that time as well - they have a love/hate relationship with rain (clearing the air, feeding the plants, and making nice ambient noise? Terrific. Feeling wet and dealing with paranoia around it somehow managing to drown them? Terrible.), but the clouds and mild temperatures are pleasant for them. (Winter gets a shout out from them though because that's when their jade blooms, and they like the look and feel of snow more than rain. Fall can be pretty, but they struggle the most with summer unless they mainly go out during the evenings.)

2. Does [x] like playing or watching any of the sports popular in their culture? If not, do they prefer sports from another culture, or do they just not like sports?

Sheva doesn't play any popular team sports, because his unpredictable headaches and vision troubles would make either unsafe or just burdensome to his teammates, and he doesn't usually enjoy just watching sports (he still will sometimes though because he likes the social aspect, especially if a friend or acquaintance is participating; he just wishes he could usually see what was happening better). However, he loves to be physically active, and he loves to fence/spar with others in the Order, he likes running and would accept a challenge to race, he loves dance especially, and he could be convinced to play something like tennis where he doesn't have teammates. But he usually isn't competitive about any of it aside from sword-fighting, and it really annoys him when he gets a bad headache while sparring (he knows how to fight through a headache, his job requires it, but most of that training was on how to quickly end a fight once the pain gets bad, not so much how to keep following the competitive rules of a duel). 

Wraith, on the other hand, does not like or care about any sports. They don't like how most physical activity feels (they like how they feel AFTER, but the process bothers them enough that they have a hard time prioritizing it without external encouragement), and they don't care about sports teams since it's just a bunch of strangers doing stuff that they could simply not watch and have more time to do their actual hobbies. (They hate crowds and social events too, so the thought of attending an actual sports event is hell to them.) The only exception is if they know someone well enough to care about them or consider them a friend or close acquaintance, they'll be curious about what that specific person likes or is able to do (when they were friends with Sheva, they demanded evidence that he could in fact do a bunch of cartwheels and dance well lol, and after was like 'huh I guess that is sort of nifty', and they learned a simple dance so they could dance with him on one of his birthdays and didn't mind that, that sort of thing).

3. Where did [x] go to school as a teenager or young adult? Or if fixed schools are not the norm for that age, in their culture, what sort of apprenticeship or secondary education did they receive?

Wraith attended an alternative school as a teenager since they couldn't cope with the crowds and demands of public schooling. It still stressed them out deeply and they hated it with a passion, so they dropped out as soon as they could legally. They refuse to ever go back to school of any kind due to how negative the associations were, and because while they do think they could handle online school now with accommodations, they don't want to deal with all the paperwork involved in acquiring those. It's not worth all the extra drama for them, they prefer their own self directed studies (they have the same amount of medical knowledge as someone who went to medical school, just no official certificate or degree, and they know a lot about magical theory and plant care, and then...very little about anything else except where 1) other fields overlap in some way with their main ones, 2) where someone they knew well told them enough about their own interest for some of it to stick, or 3) the handful of General Knowledge things their parents insisted they memorize).

Sheva was homeschooled from ages 4-11 by wealthy parents who hired experienced tutors to give him a more advanced and specific education for someone his age (there was the usual math, literature, history, and a range of basic sciences, but there was also an emphasis on communication/etiquette, public speaking, and politics since his parents were nobles who wanted their son to present well at social events and be able to persuade potential allies to work with them). Once he was kicked out by his parents, however, he was unable to receive any other formal education - his parents had publicly declared him dead and were clear about disowning him, so he couldn't easily use his legal name for anything, and the gang who took him in weren't too concerned about trying to find out how to sneak him into a school, so he just learned combat, necessary social expectations, and a certain amount about gang leadership/management. Once he joined the Order, he did get Wraith to tutor him on magic and some of the basics he had missed out on, but he never took to any other formal studies, so he currently has a rather lopsided skill set where people often have a hard time guessing which stuff he knows and is good at vs which stuff he's clueless on or has been operating with an abstract understanding of for years.

4. Does [x] swim well? At all?

Sheva is a good swimmer! He learned as a kid, and then got a lot better at it once he realized it would help him recover from an injury he had gotten during his gang days. He doesn't go swimming as a hobby very often, but he does it a lot whenever he is especially stressed out or trying to manage an injury or a bout of generalized pain.

Wraith knows how to swim, and is reasonably okay at it, but they never got very good because they didn't really enjoy it. It's purely a practical skill for them that they had to learn, but they won't ever do it if there isn't a specific reason they need to.

5. Describe one of [x]'s dreams or nightmares.

Hmm, this is a tough one since it's making me realize I hadn't thought about what kind of dreams my OCs usually have, like...normally. It's making me want to consider it more though! :O

That said, Sheva and Wraith both canonically struggle with nightmares (and Sheva has night terrors as well) along with other sleep issues (for Wraith it's usually insomnia).

Sheva has a lot of nightmares/night terrors around the various traumatic experiences he has either not unpacked at all or only unpacked minimally - he still has ones about being cut open, poisoned, or abandoned, for example, or strange ones about losing his senses or becoming lost and disoriented. 

Meanwhile Wraith's nightmares probably have more to do with suffocating, drowning, and being trapped or in crowded places and unable to do anything about it.  They have a lot of anxiety and paranoia on top of their own traumas, so they probably get a mix of bad dreams.

I don't think either of them usually have memory-dreams about their trauma, though (Sheva might sometimes, but even then they're distorted from how they actually went). I think they tend to be more abstract or about scenarios that evoke the same feelings as the actual trauma did.

6. What is [x]'s first memory?

I dunno about first, but an early memory for Wraith is going on a walk around town with their parents. Even as a young kid, being touched in public even by their parents could easily lead to sensory overload with everything else going on, so their parents wrapped a short scarf tightly around their wrist and held onto the loose end so they could 'hold their hand' without upsetting them. They appreciated that their parents did this a lot, so they were upset and confused when they noticed the whispers or comments they'd hear from people about their parents not being good and treating their kid 'like a dog' (since the scarf kinda did act as a leash). They just distinctly remember feeling awful that their need to be handled differently made their parents look bad and not enjoying being compared to a dog, and it was the start of them really internalizing that the way they were wasn't socially acceptable and would lead to disapproval a lot of the time. 

For Sheva, I think probably some of his early memories are of being at the banquets or parties his parents would sometimes host and admiring all the different fancy clothes and decorations while also stressing a bit because he knew he'd be in trouble if he did anything embarrassing or that could make his parents 'look bad' (he also knew he could get a lot of praise for speaking well though, so it was very much a high stakes high rewards situation for him). He liked getting to talk to the guests in general since he has high social energy, but wished there would be more kids his age that attended; some did of course, but he felt like he spent a lot of time only ever interacting with adults. 

7. Is their current job what [x] expected to be doing at this point in their life? Are they better or worse off than they expected?

Sheva definitely never expected to be a field agent for a wizard order at any point during his childhood or adolescence, as he both didn't know that was even an option, and had only ever been told that that paranormal communities were scary and bad. Before learning of the orders, he didn't really know how he would ever make money on his own or what he could do; he was still avoiding using his legal name in most places, he had no formal schooling, and was functionally illiterate without significant accommodation. I think as an older teen he did find a way to do some work as a waiter, which he liked on paper and was pretty good at, but it was too thankless of a job and it eventually just made him really depressed. He's very passionate about his current job and can't imagine doing anything else, and he's very well payed, so in many ways he's better off than he ever expected after becoming a wizard. But he also won't let himself acknowledge the ways the career has hurt him or been bad for him, in part because he does genuinely believe it's the only remotely fulfilling place he could ever belong to.

Wraith is also in a place of struggling, but still doing a lot better than they feared they might be doing at this point in their life. Most normal jobs are ones they wouldn't be able to manage or tolerate, and they don't have much schooling or social skills for networking. For a while they weren't sure if they'd ever be able to live independently at all. They like the work they do reasonably well since it involves their interests (even if it's draining having to deal with customers/clients) and are able to keep themself afloat, and they can manage their intense social anxieties a little better now than in the past to at least be able to get themself food when they need to, so they think they're doing pretty well even if there are...also a lot of ways in which they are Not Doing Well At All (more so on the mental health front than job stability, though).

I never played the first Tomodachi Life or even really paid enough attention to it to know what it was other than 'popular game I've never played, seems associated with casual gameplay'. And at that point in time, I didn't really play that many sim-like games anyways (with the exception of web browser dress up games and restaurant management games, but I saw that as separate from console and PC games where I've always been more into fantasy/adventure/sci-fi/horror/rpg type stuff, plus platformers and metroidvanias in general).

But eventually I realized through games like Miitopia and Fashion Dreamer that I actually can really enjoy and get addicted to those kinds of games because...I can make my novel OCs in them! And see funny AU versions of them Move Around and Do Things! The general gameplay was fun too of course, that's why I played so much Animal Crossing: New Horizons for a while even though the OC I used was just one of my Pokemon play characters rather than a story OC. But seeing my story fellas move around was a Very Large part of the appeal.

Enter Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream demo. I finally knew enough about Tomodachi Life as a whole to know it was one of those games I'd get addicted to because I like making my OCs as Miis and seeing them in action. And the demo was out, I was told it was too short and locks you out once you give them clothes, so I was like 'okay, I won't give them clothes'. 

But I didn't realize. The game would bully you into doing this if you made your third Mii. :') 

SO THEY GOT PUT INTO LOCK DOWN HELL ANYWAYS.

AND THEY HAVE BEEN SUFFERING. AND I HAVE BEEN SUFFERING. 

MAERUNE HAS NO ENRICHMENT AT ALL.

SHEVA ONLY HAS AN ELASTIC BAND THAT HE'S USUALLY SCARED OF BUT HAS BEEN HAVING INCREASING LEVELS OF MOOD SWINGS TOWARDS. Which, I do wonder if the mood swings is from the personality sliders or from the chronic isolation. 

WRAITH IS THE ONLY ONE WITH ENRICHMENT. They have maracas and a pop album and they seem to love both. But they need to see the sky again, okay.

So for weeks now I have been sporadically just flopping and going 'WHEN WILL MY MIIS RETURN FROM THE WAR. WHEN CAN I FREE THEM FROM THEIR PRISONS. WHY ARE WE TORTURING THEM WITH SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.'

But now it's finally almost time...we will be free...and I can finally get my guys to do more things and try more foods. xD I need to know their faves. From the demo I found Sheva's top favorite (fried egg, which really TOOK ME OUT) and Maerune's least favorite (nachos, which is also like HOW DO YOU HATE NACHOS lol) but there is still much to learn.

I haven't interacted with the fandom like at all though so while I know from my sibling everyone has been suffering together, I have just been suffering in isolation exactly like my Miis lmao. So I'm very excited for the official release! If I get typing energy during my fixation on it again...I may have to make more posts about my findings. We'll have to see! I'm sure I'll have a blast with it either way though. 
 

Having recently been reconsumed by my old Sherlock Holmes obsession, I have been enjoying rewatching (and in a few cases, watching for the first time) the 1984 television adaptation of the story, typically referred to as 'Granada Holmes'. The third episode of the series, "The Naval Treaty", is a good episode in general. But one curiosity about it is that Holmes spends most of the episode seeming quietly Bothered by something, and it is also this episode that gives us the infamous Rose Speech - right in the middle of a client interview, which is entirely odd behavior for Holmes and seemingly spurred on by...nothing in particular. The episode itself offers no direct answer to these things, so, with my last rewatch, I made a point to keep my analysis goggles on and see if I could come up with a possible solution.

The case itself doesn't have anything about it that would obviously agitate our titular detective (there are other episodes where that's the case, and it's a lot more out in the open) - it's just a mystery revolving around how some government papers got stolen in an unusual way and trying to find where they could have gone. But there are two other points in the episode that I believe to be the culprit of The Moods:

• This episode has Holmes mention twice Watson's medical practice as something that might prevent him from wanting to join him (Holmes) on cases. The first time is openly testy ("Oh, if your cases are more interesting than mine >:/"), while the second time is during a more quiet, melancholy moment. Watson had noticed Holmes being Bothered as well, and asked him if was alright. Holmes initially shrugged it off, but then  made some comment about wanting Watson to come with him the next day to investigate if it won't keep him from his 'legitimate work'. There's some carry-over or call-back to the testy tone from earlier, but the actual mood has a lot less bite and is followed by a more earnest request.
• The client in this episode is specifically an old friend of Watson's (not sure when they became friends though lol since Watson says he bullied the guy at school, but they only seem to hold affection for each other at present)

Now, one of the interesting things about Granada Canon, is that despite mostly trying to be as faithful to the original stories as possible, they chose to entirely write out Watson marrying, and significantly rearranged the order of the cases. The result of this is that in many of the stories where Watson, in the books, is visiting or returning from time spent with his wife, instead sees him coming back from working at his medical practice or simply a vacation. I could be wrong, but in the books I don't think Watson having a practice ever overlapped with him living with Holmes, so in Granada we get to see a little bit of what that dynamic looks like.

And in this episode, I think we see that it is a matter of some tension and insecurity, at least on Holmes' part. And I think it's because, for Holmes, the cases are his career, his passion. His professional title is Consulting Detective. And also notably, it's a job he invented, not one general society tends to understand or take seriously until they see how he works and how well he does get results. Watson, on the other hand, is a practicing medical doctor - a traditionally respected position and something that frankly should be a full time job. He never takes on any kind of title in relation to the work he does with Holmes, even though he works nearly every case with him. Holmes refers to Watson sometimes as his biographer since Watson always writes up their cases, but I can't recall at present anyways a time where Watson referred to himself as such (the closest you get is that Holmes always introduces Watson as a 'colleague', which Watson does call himself once as well, which is fairly ambiguous).

And while Holmes obviously cares about the work a lot on its own merit, he makes it clear many times in the show that having Watson accompany him makes a significant difference to him, and he clearly prefers it. This is only episode 3 of the series, but in episode 1 we had him insisting Watson join him for the case and telling his client adamantly that he'd work with both of them or neither of them, and in the second episode, we see Holmes low-key mentoring Watson in the craft of deduction; and now we see him being incredibly moody at the fact that Watson has another profession. So, I think he fears that Watson sees the cases as just a fun hobby, and isn't nearly as passionate about them (or about working together) as he is, since functionally there's not a 'reason' for him to work on the cases other than just Wanting To.

This case's client being an old friend of Watson's I think sort of passively exacerbates this insecurity. For a decent chunk of the time they know each other, Holmes considers Watson his only friend. And while Watson doesn't seem to have many close friends either, he nevertheless is the more social of the two and does have old contacts he's still fond of, and I think for Holmes it was just another reminder that Watson could, from his perspective, easily have a normal, respectable life without him at all. And for all that Holmes carries himself with great confidence, there often seems to be an underlying anxiety when it comes to his requests that Watson accompany him, so I think he worries Watson will lose interest in him eventually and want a more 'normal' life (which, there's even more evidence of that in the books, but I think in the show it's definitely still there).

In general, I feel like there's a lot to say about how Holmes and Watson sort of juggle the merging of their professional and personal lives together in Granada especially, but that would probably turn into a whole other essay. xD Case in point, though, I believe that was at the root of Holmes' moodiness this episode. And it would explain why it stays so understated unlike other times things bother him; there really wasn't anything actionable he could about it, it was just this persistent anxiety/melancholy. Because in the episode, Watson is working the case with him, he is being attentive, and Holmes doesn't have any real personal issues with Watson's other friend. So, Holmes keeps it mostly to himself, as much as I would have loved a more direct follow up on it at some point.

(The Rose Speech, placement wise then, I think was that since the interview with the client had mostly come to a close, there wasn't any other immediate distraction, and so in his more emotional mood, he fixated on the rose and philosophy. There's probably more analysis to be drawn from the exact content of his speech in the context of the episode, but that also would be a whole other essay. xD Maybe a little bit of a reach, but it's sort of neat also though that he'd specifically go to a flower while feeling insecure about his friendship with Watson, since Granada Canon especially emphasizes that Holmes generally dislikes nature/the countryside while Watson is a fan. In the book as well Watson specifically mentions the little aside being odd since Holmes normally never showed interest in 'natural things'.)

This month's carnival of aros theme is 'Friendship'. I've had a lot of thoughts on the subject, in life and more recently in specific, so I'm going to answer a few of the prompts and possibly go off on some side-tangents.

The first prompt asks about how we define friendship - what does the word bring to mind, and if it differs from other people's definitions. For myself, I've always found the word 'friend' both very simple and very vague. Because it honestly covers a huge range of relationship styles, degrees of closeness, and personal investment. In certain regards, 'friend' can be used to imply only the most basic requirements for functional, semi-regular interactions: someone you reasonably like/treat well and are more familiar with than a stranger or distant acquaintance. 'Casual' friends are friends who usually only meet these requirements, and maybe the addition of occasionally interacting with them in a non-work setting. In this sense, it becomes rude to say someone you see semi-often and don't hate 'isn't your friend'. Amiable classmates and co-workers are also often called 'friends' by default, even if you aren't especially close.

This has sometimes been awkward for me, because I don't instinctively consider casual friends...'friends'. I'll refer to them as such because that's polite and less clunky sounding than always saying 'my acquaintance' or something, but inwardly there's always a feeling of doubt on if I actually want to commit to 'being friends' with them. Because the word 'friend' also applies to a range of closer friendships, which are generally lumped together under categories like 'close friend' or 'Real friend', and its those kinds of relationships I roughly think of first when I consider the term 'friend'. But even that's imperfect, because again - the sheer variety encompassed there. Is that person one you like mostly from familiarity and a few shared activities? Is that person someone you'd feel comfortable discussing your personal life or vulnerabilities with at all, and if so, to what extent? How much effort would you put into helping them with things or making time to spend with them? Regardless of how you answer these questions, there's a pretty high chance that relationship would be considered a 'Real' friendship as long as it was slightly closer or longer lasting than the minimalistic 'casual' friendship.

Commonly in the aro community, 'friendship' can mean any of these things too, but more often can refer to a deeper non-romantic relationship. I've only recently begun to realize how much I might actually fall into the category of 'placing higher expectations on close friends than most of society', but it's true that even 'best' friends, the closest 'normal' form of friendship, have a certain limit to the amount of commitment that's considered acceptable. Originally, the term queerplatonic was specifically about queering the standard for platonic relationships - and while there's been a lot of recent debate over what 'platonic' really means or covers, based on some of the conversations I saw during QPR's original framing, it seemed to be used somewhat interchangeably with 'friendship' at the time.

I won't get into the details here, but as conversations around QPRs (and squishes) changed, it did seem that was a lot more talk of what 'platonic feelings' felt like, what 'queerplatonic' feelings felt like, and so forth. This was actually pretty confusing to me, because it re-framed something I didn't even realize could be framed differently: friendship wasn't defined  as much now by structure - what activities are done together, what levels of emotional effort and commitment are involved - but by the specific nature of the 'feelings' involved. Before I had kind of just figured there was 'romantic Feelings', which I lacked, and then there was just....Non-Romantic Feelings/Relationships. I never thought of 'friendship' as having a unique 'feeling' to it, per say. I just thought of it as feeling at least somewhat positively about someone, feeling familiar with them, and Not Having Romantic Feelings for them. And this has been a considerable source of confusion for me, since while I wholeheartedly agree that a relationship is whatever the people involved Decide it is regardless of what it 'looks' like, it sometimes feels like I don't having much of a framework beyond social etiquette and vague, oversimplified terms to guide my own interpersonal relationships.

Regardless, this all means that yes, my own definition of friendship often does differ from others, though I also wish there were either a lot more words for different kinds of friendships, or that it was considered the norm to have 'where do we want to take this relationship/what to we want out of it' conversations more casually and not just with potential romantic partners. I usually define friendship somewhere on the more best friend territory side of 'close friend', but also use the term for people I'm especially familiar with but have slightly more 'muted' feelings for. I've also taken to referring to a lot of friendships that might look romantic-coded or qpr-coded as 'Epic Friendships', because they're deeper or more 'grand scale' than people usually think of even best friends as being, while not necessarily being 'coupled' formally.

This relates pretty directly to another one of the prompts, asking about how one's aromanticism affects the kind of things one wants out of a friendship, the kinds of things they'd like to do together. For myself, I do tend to have slightly muted emotions for periods of time in general, so while I may occasionally have 'friendship feelings' for people I like, I can't easily base a close or epic friendship off of having those All The Time. So instead I do think of the kind of structural things I want, and I do think my lack of romantic attraction and romance repulsion helped shape those ideas. Sharing hobbies and interests is important to me in a friendship, along with sharing core philosophical/moral beliefs. That by itself, along with some feeling of familiarity and basic communication compatibility, is enough for me to consider someone 'a friend' (not a casual friend, or co-worker friend, but A Friend). To really reach Close Friend levels though, I would want to do /lots/ of activities with the person - fun projects, watching shows/playing games together, going out to places together if/when possible, having long conversations. I'd also have to feel like I could talk to them about my struggles and experiences openly, which is honestly the hardest criteria for me to meet with people. This would also increase the feelings of loyalty/commitment I feel for a friendship. Epic Friendship, though, would be like...we SUPPORT each other. Emotionally, financially, however we can. We actually feel excited to spend time with each other, at least a decent bit of the time. And there's definitely effort made to keep up little routines and make time for each other. Most people would reserve that sort of thing for a romantic relationship, or a qpr (and, by the old definition at least, Epic Friendship is an iteration of qpr, on paper), for my aro and probably gray-platonic self, I would just think of that as deep friendship. (That said, there's definitely lots of grey areas between these 'stages' of friendship too)

To wrap up, I just want to briefly touch on some of the less-directly-related-to-my-above-rambling prompts. xD One was if the aro community has specific ideas on friendship - and I'd yes, yes absolutely; dissecting, celebrating, discussing friendship in various ways is a Big part of the community. There are aros who don't seek friendships or have complicated feelings about the term/concept for various reasons, which given the prevalence of friendship as a concept in society and the many ideas conflated with it is a whole conversation on its own. And many other aros feel that friendship means more to them to your average alloromantic, and discuss the way society devalues friendship and non-romantic relationships as a whole. I've always been very interested in these conversations, and am excited to see the kind of changes and developments our communities increasing activism brings about.

Finally, the prompts asked about group friendship, or friendship as community. Naturally, as more people get involved in a group or community, the less 'lose-knit' the 'whole' becomes, but the feeling of community and resources increases. With smaller groups, there's also definitely unique dynamic on is expected of everyone when they're all together compared to what various individual relationships within the group expect of each other. I do think community friendship should be valued more - people who have more finances and resources should share with those who have less just as a matter of course. But currently, even within close groups, while often there grows in-jokes, familiarity, and expectations, it's not been my experiences or my observation in others that friend groups are expected to take care of each other very much. Some amount of emotional support it offered/expected, but it does seem to have a built-in limit. Group Epic Friendship (Found Family?), while somewhat popular in fiction, doesn't seem to have a lot of real-life respect (or at least, people don't generally seem to be looking to start that kind of thing as far as I'm aware).

So there are some of my disjointed musings on friendship! A vague word with a lot of different definitions, but still a phenomenally important concept in all its variety for a lot of people, especially many aromantics. And this ambiguity, while not always a bad thing, is absolutely worth dissecting and analyzing for those of us who want more clear-cut frameworks for navigating interpersonal relationships.

Hi all! I am hosting this month's Carnival of Aros. The carnival is a monthly blogging event in which participants create content based around aromanticism and the chosen theme for the month.

This month's theme is: Langauge

Terminology is so often a topic of much discussion and debate in the aro community, as we create and critique new terms all the time, and deeply analyze and critique pre-existing terms just as regularly. The aromantic community was also built largely online - and there's no denying English is the dominant language spoken on the Internet. So I wanted to give everyone an opportunity to share their thoughts on language in the aromantic community, whether that's from a non-English perspective or generally about our relationship with terminology (or both!).

Here are some prompts to offer inspiration, though of course if the general theme inspires you to take a totally different direction, then absolutely feel free to follow that muse instead:

• How do you approach discussing things like attraction, orientation, and so forth?
• Are there any new terms you've found especially helpful, or conversely, which concepts do you think are lacking proper terminology?
• How do you feel about how the aro community at large handles discussions on terminology?
• What's your relationship with how new terminology is created, shared, and discussed?
• Are there any terms or phrases or concepts in your native language that you find more useful than the English terms, or are there any concepts you'd like to see explored more thoroughly in your native language?

These are just a few ideas to work with; again, any method or approach to the theme is welcome. Language and communication is a huge part of culture and interpersonal relationships, and aromanticism intersects directly with both of those things. 

To participate, leave a link to the content you created (a blog post, video, photograph, etc.) by October 3, 2021. I plan to post the round up of links October 4. My blog is set up to take anonymous comments, so no worries if you don't have a dreamwidth account! Happy September everyone, and I look forward to seeing everyone's contributions!

A lot has happened since I last updated! I'll start with nanowrimo, since that was a notable event like usual for me. I wrote about 35,000 words total, so not the full 50k, but I did succeed in writing every day that month, so I'm proud of sustaining my writing habit during that time. Especially since that kind of....died afterwards xD. My life was rather taken over by roleplaying, especially that of Masks, a superhero based rp game. I have written much supplementary material for it, and still vaguely intend to write quite a bit more.

I also completed my 2020 reading goal of 24 books! I read the first five volumes of Fruits Basket to complete it on time. I kind of like the series so far, and generally intend to get back to it this year, but it's not a super high priority or anything. I don't love the series, but it wasn't unpleasant to read either. I kicked of this year's reading goal (also of 24 books) with starting the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson, which I'm really enjoying a lot so far. As of this post's creation, I have read The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance all the way, and have begun reading Oathbringer.  I plan to read through to the end of Rhythms of War before moving on to other books or book series.

I have also finally seen The Mandalorian! I may write a proper review on the first two seasons, but basically I've liked it! It fits right in with the Star Wars verse, and has a fantastic cast of characters. I'm also rewatching The Clone Wars in preparation for viewing the seventh season finally, and that's been a lot of fun. I am watching Wandavision weekly as well, so you can (probably?) expect a season one review for that once it's finished as well.

Also! I am finally, slowly getting back to working on my non-rp original projects! I just wrote a little more for my fantasy utopia/mystery story outline for the first time in ages, so that's been really good. Maybe I'll even poke around some of my other original projects soon, but for now I'm seeing how far I'll go with this one.

And that...is where I am now! xD Oh, and I totally failed to do the Snowflake Challenge on time this year so please expect to see posts for it exceptionally late.

I recently read Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire for the Ace Readathon that was hosted on Twitter during October. It is the first in a series, which I knew going in, so I didn't expect every single thing to be perfectly resolved. It was a relatively short book about a group of teens who all wish they could go back to the fantasy worlds they went to as kids trying to solve a murder in their new school/home. Overall, I had somewhat mixed feelings on the book, as I enjoyed certain elements quite a bit, but also clearly had the wrong expectations of the kind of book it was going to be, because I kept trying to figure out what was supposed to be the Central aspect of the book and seeing how everything was supposed to fit together thematically, which definitely made feeling invested more challenging.

Our main character, Nancy, went to an Underworld where servants of the court had to stay still as statues, and she and the prince (?) had some kind of relationship that Nancy thought was romance I guess. The diversity of the fantasy worlds the different kids went to was pretty interesting, but it actually wasn't explored much or focused on. Which leads me to one of my first critiques of the books - everyone seemed to have some kind of stockholm like need to return to their fantasy worlds, even though almost all of them sounded like terrible places to live, ones where any story actually set in that world would be about criticizing it in some way. And that's just...never questioned. Up until the end, that's what the characters want, and I felt weird about the implication I was supposed to be rooting for them somehow in this endeavor.

But that was really more of a b plot, or really just background context. The core of the story was the murder mystery. On its own, I did think it was a well done murder mystery. The clues were gruesome but interesting, and I didn't guess the culprit until it was revealed. And the writing style was pretty vivid and easy to follow, so that was good too. But I didn't really see the point of the mystery when there was all this character building potential in the background - and if the mystery was going to be the focus, why have these character building scenes scattered about in the first place? They didn't actually lead anywhere, and had no impact on the mystery.

So, while I did enjoy the book, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had understood its purpose from the beginning a lot better. Because as it, I'm still not entirely sure what the purpose was. The excerpt of the second book only made that more confusing - it seems to be a prequel about two characters who pretty much left the entire main setting at the end of book one. That said, it also looked interesting, so I may yet read it anyways. And I'd definitely be curious to read more of the author's work to see what some of her other stories are like.

So I've been rather absent here of late! I've been a bit scattered and exhausted for a while now, but I still want to try and keep up on here at least periodically. SO! What I've been up to:

- Playing Guild Wars 2! I vaguely recall the first game from childhood, so when my friends wanted to try out the sequel, I was interested. I of course had to make my first character a Necromancer, and came up with a very short Sylvari woman named Visthira. She has joined the Durmand Priory and specializes in blood magic and soul reaping, with a side of death magic. I'm still annoyed that the game gave the player character a canon personality/voice, as it kind of discourages roleplaying, but even so I try to see Vis as herself - if nothing else, I'm happy with the vibes I'm getting from her! I would be happier if the light armor would let me have pants though, or a longer, more robe like skirt. Perhaps once I can do more with Outfits the problem will be solved lol. She is also a jeweler and tailor! But because I took so long to get to crafting, it has been hard to progress in it much. xD The areas with the right level of crafting material is FAR too low for my character level (and none of these salvage items are giving me JUTE SCRAPS), and I usually prioritize character leveling and plot following. But eventually I want to go back and catch up with my trades!

- Role-playing Masks! And spending far too much time writing supplementary material for my player character, who I almost never get to actually play since I've been DM-ing for a long time. I wrote (and even partially revised!) nearly 10,000 words for her backstory, and now I don't know what to do with myself since my hyperfixation is not useful xD

- Taking some Gale courses on writing screenplays, writing for magazines, and getting into online writing markets! These have been rather low-stress compared to past courses, and the screenwriting class in particular has given some of the most useful plotting advice I've seen a class give so far.

- I'm low-key participating in the Ace Readathon over on Twitter! I recently started reading Every Heart a Doorway, which has been interesting so far. If I finish it in time I'm going to read Beneath the Citadel next, so we'll see how it goes!

- Working on my story outline for the project I hope to post on Tapas. This is the second draft of the outline, since I want it to be as polished as possible before I start drafting (since Tapas is serialized). It has been very difficult to focus on because I want to do prose writing more. xD But I'll keep trying!

A Carnival of Aros is a monthly blogging event in which a host (in this case, yours truly) comes up with an aromanticism based theme, allowing aromantics to write to the prompt however they see fit. Last month's theme was Open Questions for Aromantic Research, if you want to check that out! To submit your post for this month, write your response on your blog of choice, and then post the link here in a comment by the end of September 30 (my blog is set up to take anonymous comments, so no worries if you aren't on dreamwidth!). Late responses will be taken through October 2.

This month's theme is 'Change'. Our community is a young one, and as such it's constantly growing and changing. Also because of this, we don't have as much history yet as other communities. So I thought I'd give everyone a chance to both reflect on the progress we've made so far, and look to the future and consider what we might be able to do now to see the changes we want happen.

Here's some prompts to get you started, but feel free to ignore them if you want to answer a different way:

• What are some of the greatest changes you've seen in the community so far? How do you feel about them?
• What's a positive change you want to see for the aromantic community in the future?
• What's a negative change you could see happening that you want to avoid?
• What experiences have you had in the community that changed your own outlook on things, aromanticism or otherwise?
• How did discovering your aromanticism change things for you?
• What influence does your aromanticism have on other parts of your life - gender, identity, work, religion, etc.?
• What is something you believe we as a community could start doing immediately to work towards certain kinds of change?