🍊 The Orange By Wendy Cope

As a recent Ace just realizing how much more to the community there is I WANT TO LEARN! I had no idea about any of this happening and with that about anything that happened on the internet in past years. I didn’t know anything about the card suits at all so I’d love to know everything that people knew as common before any of this went down

HOLD UP HOW WAS I NOT AWARE OF THIS

Posts like this are the only reason I’m still on this site

Aspec symbols

Forgive me if someone has made this already, but I thought it would be cool to list the symbols of the ace and aro communities. The ace symbols are generally accepted, but the aromantic symbols are things that I have seen floating around on tumblr. If you have any questions about where these come from I’d be happy to link you to the posts/ sources

This is meant to be a comprehensive collection, so if I forgot anything, please let me know so I can add it!

Asexual symbols

Asexual flag

Black ring on the middle finger of the right hand

Dragons

Cake

Cards (Ace of hearts for alloromantic aces, Ace of spades for aroaces, ace of diamonds for demisexuals,  ace of clubs for grey aces)

Pirates, “Ace pirates aren’t interested in your booty”

Axolotls

Space

Denim Vests

Cryptids

Wolves

Ghosts (Just for Demisexuals)

Aromantic Symbols

Aromantic flag

White ring on the middle finger of the left hand

Griffins

Pizza

Arrows/Archery

Aardvarks

Yellow roses

Ice cream (ice cream sandwiches esp.)

Rats

Nandays and Caiques

Frogs (as of 2020!)

Let me know if I’m missing anything! (thank you to @singeroftalesvoiceofages , @somethingawesomeandironic , and anonymous for your additions) 

shout out to ace and aro kids who are constantly bombarded with the opinion that sex and romantic love are directly connected to living a happy life.

thanks keyboard, when I accidentally typed hest instead of best I totally wanted the hest (norwegian word for horse) emoji

not to repeat myself again but imagine you’re helen pevensie and you send your children away to keep them safe from the war. you send them to the country to keep them alive, keep them children for as long as possible in a war like this.

and then you get them back, and suddenly it feels like you’ve invited war itself into your house. not in the literal sense, arguments now happen quietly and with composure no children should know how to wield. but somehow, whenever you look at them, you think about blood, about death, about enemies felled with weapons too fast for them to notice. it feels like you hugged a man in a trench when you welcomed your children back home.

you feel terrible, but it’s hard for you to be in a room with them all for long. you don’t want to shake war’s hand. war has torn your country apart, war keeps your husband away and in the middle of deadly danger. war should not be sitting in your living room, drinking your tea and eating your food. you’re afraid of war. you don’t want war in your home.

your children should not be the war you wished to keep them safe from.

The Full "I Will Love You." Letter. The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket

Always. Continuously. With increasing apprehension, and decreasing hope.

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in a blurring, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fetuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey. I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of the people who talk too much. I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself and as a pair of white gloves loves to slip delicately into the punchbowl. I will love you as a taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock. I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear daggerproof tunics, and as a daggerproof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguished and until every home is rebuilt form the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love you until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this. I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.

The Cake-Card-Dragon Theory of Asexuality

This is something I’ve been sitting on for almost a year, and I have to accept that it’s never going to express exactly what I want it to express, especially if I don’t share it with other people with other experiences that could expand on it. These are different types of asexuals I’ve seen in the community and different types of characters who frequently get headcanoned as asexual. 

That being said, I can see how this might get oversimplified to “asexuals with feminine/neutral/masculine gender expression” but I want to emphasise it’s not actually about gender expression.

Cakes

Cakes are the asexuals who can be seen enjoying their food, playing with bath bombs, and dressing up in fabulous clothing such as lolita or new romantic. Cakes are likely to joke about “It took me three hours to get into this outfit, I’m not taking it off for anyone!” Cakes may feed into the stereotype that asexuals are prissy or stuck up, or they may get a bit continental with their kisses: a friendly greeting rather than an expression of romance. Sometimes both. They are likely to express passions, but usually towards food or comfortable living. People with a poor understanding of asexuality might say that they are replacing sex with other sensual pleasures, but that’s a very silly thing to say because allosexuals can enjoy food, fashion, and self-care just as much as asexuals.

Fictional Examples of Cakes:

The Eighth Doctor

Aziraphale

Bilbo Baggins

Cards

Cards are the asexuals who come off as intellectual and cold, even if their areas of expertise are far from the usual “intellectual pursuits”. A card is usually ready to verbally smack down people who don’t believe in asexuality with statistics, facts, and explanations of how their debating opponent has a very shaky grasp on biology. However, they may feel extremely frustrated or bored having these conversations over and over again and are rarely shy in expressing that. Cards sometimes, but not always, can present themselves as androgynous to some degree, but are usually neat and tidy in their fashion. They are also likely to be very funny people, often with dry or absurd humour. They are likely to express confusion or dismay over their allosexual friends’ behaviour, either out of genuine confusion or a rhetorical technique to try and get those who feel sexual attraction to examine their own thought processes. A card may find themselves “looking into the camera as if they’re on The Office” whether they’re a real person or not. Cards feed into the stereotype that asexuals are too absorbed by mental concerns to even be aware of their bodies. Fictional characters headcanoned as cards are often also headcanoned as autistic, but one does not necessarily preclude the other, not in fiction or real life. People with a poor understanding of asexuality might say they seem inhuman or mechanical, but cards are some of the first people to point out that a biological process shared by the entire animal kingdom is not a very good gauge of humanity.

Fictional Examples of Cards:

Sherlock Holmes

Spock

Katniss Everdeen

Dragons

Dragons are the asexuals who got really annoyed when they found out what Netflix and Chill meant, because they were ready with the blankets and popcorn. If cakes dress fancy and cards dress sharply, then a dragon dresses for comfort. They often don’t care about their clothing at all, or if they do it’s ironically or simply flying in the face of what many would consider stylish; ie. “Look at my ridiculous hat! Isn’t it the best!” Especially if said ridiculous hat is worn with their most lived-in jeans and a sweatshirt. Dragons are likely to start listing off all their interests and joke that they simply don’t have the time to be interested in sex as well. They might do this four hours into lying on their stomach watching Netflix, but those four hours of Netflix were well-spent. Often, dragons can be perceived as or wonder themselves if they are too attached to their possessions, but this is because they have decided to fill their lives with that which makes them happy, regardless of how that appears. If a dragon wants to sleep with thirty stuffed animals because they’ve been given a new one for every birthday, they aren’t going to let being thirty get in the way of cuddling their stuffed animals. Dragons may feed into the stereotype that asexuals are childish or hyperfocused on frivolous pursuits, but they can be wonderful friends because they’re fun to be around and they are just as likely to hoard a person as an item: if a dragon decides you’re one of their favourite people, they can be the most ride-or-die friend you have. If they’ve fully accepted that their life is fulfilled from interests they’ve chosen themselves, dragons can be some of the happiest people you’ve ever met. Of course, some people may say that they’re also some of the strangest people you’ve ever met, but no one consciously picks normal over happy. People with a poor understanding of asexuality might say dragons never properly grew up, but this is less a problem with the dragons and more a problem with how society expects adults to be boring and miserable.

Fictional Examples of Dragons:

Charlie Weasley

Jughead Jones

The Eleventh Doctor

decay sounds more gentle than rot. when something decays, it is gently taken apart in it's comfortable eternal slumber. when something rots, it's violently taken apart with agony. in this essay i will

Hot wedding idea, the worst man, it’s his duty to try and prevent the wedding at all costs.