Being a Gray-Aro Asexual Shipper, and a Gray-Aro Asexual Huge Fan of Certain Actors, etc.

This is a submission for the January 2021 Carnival of Aros, hosted by CharCharChar on the theme of “Stories”. The Call for Submissions was here. Note, I’m the blogger who used to go by the name luvtheheaven. This is my new blog under my new username, VioletEmeraldx. This is the first of my submissions, but I intend to submit one or maybe two more tonight.

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It’s just hard for me to even know where to begin, as I have so many thoughts on the broad idea of “stories”, and so many can at least somewhat be tied back to aromanticism. But also none of my thoughts are super specifically focused on aromanticism either. I really wanted to participate in this carnival this month though, I like the theme, and I wanted to see what I can do.

I am heavily immersed in fandom spaces, especially vidding ones, and to a lesser degree podficcing ones, and to an even lesser degree than that I am a fan of fanfiction and meta analysis of fandoms as well, and for all 4 types of fandom stuff I love both consuming and creating the fanworks. I entered fandom spaces somewhere between age 14 and age 16 depending on how you measure it, and I’m 31 now, so this has been roughly half my life. This has been 14.5 to 16.5 years worth of time paying overly close attention to characters I get attached to and feeling deep emotions over the storylines in fiction, especially in television and a few select book series. I didn’t know I was asexual until 7.5 years ago, and didn’t realize it was an option until around 9.5 years ago. And I didn’t know I was aromantic until even more recently than that, although I guess I started questioning if I might be aro in the back of my mind around 7.5 years ago as well.

There were a lot of years of a teenage and young adult me entering fandom spaces and feeling obsessed with works of fiction when I didn’t have the concepts I needed to have about my orientations. When I didn’t know it was possible to be interested in partnering with multiple genders when my only desire for partnership was in a completely non-sexual and non-romantic way, and so I didn’t know I was queer on a few different axes – I was pan, and I was ace, and I was aro.

Two years ago, in January 2019, when I was asked how could I be aro and a shipper by my grandmother, I explained that it’s often like rooting for two people to be happy much like going to a wedding. My grandma understood me saying that people aren’t happy for the couple getting married because they are attracted to them. Generally, people are simply happy for them. So I think this is where I come from with all this with at least a high percentage of my ships? But I wasn’t entirely sure. As an aro-spec ace who was confused about if I experience crushes at all or very often but who certainly is a shipper, it’s hard to explain why I feel the way I do, especially without understanding exactly why others feel the way they do and where my feelings diverge.