Sunday Sampler: Disappointment Damsel Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, whatever I feel like talking about, no matter how random or trivial or rambling. They’ll make appearances whenever I feel like it, but it’ll always be a Sunday.

No AI was used in the creation of this blog post. I have been using em-dashes since high school, and I’ll be damned if I let either the plagiarism machine or terminally online witch hunters take them away from me. Also, any art is by either real people or myself (which you will easily spot cuz it’ll look like trash).

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There were two recent announcements of new projects, two things that by all historical evidence & logic should excite me. But instead, I’m not just disinterested, I’m actively off–put from them. I kinda want to talk about why.

First up, there’s this:

Those familiar with me should be able to spot exactly where this is going.

Now, as a concept, a documentary on the history of Cartoon Network and its various eras SHOULD be something that I’d like. But we’re in an era where CN itself is a shambling undead husk kept alive solely to prop up the parasitic late-night block (that begins roughly around suppertime & runs until the start of the workday). Where the guy in charge of the network has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t care about anything that isn’t connected to Adult Swim in some way. And given how much I utterly despise Adult Swim outside of a handful of projects - and I mean DESPISE, from the Reddit bros that run the block to the weird cultishness that pervades its fanbase, especially the Toonami wing - you can probably guess how I feel about him. 

At least I’m not alone in being disappointed by this, as Jeff Harris has similar and more eloquently phrased sentiments to my own regarding this documentary series, and I’ve seen a few people online that also expect this to be awful. One person said it’ll be an episode & a half about CN and then three & a half about how great Adult Swim/Toonami is. They’re probably being generous with that half-episode for CN. There COULD be a good “history of Cartoon Network” series - hell, I’ve been on the record saying that there could be a whole TV show in the vein of those “The Food/Toys That Made America” shows about the history of American animation that would be successful (it would also be a rights clearance nightmare). But for the CN one to be good, that would require people who actually care about animation history, and no one in CN’s corporate suite cares about anything not firmly aimed at the most annoying dudes on the internet.

The other recent announcement is that my other favorite superhero team, the Legion of Super-Heroes, is getting a new title. The last one came out during my decade-long break from comics, and it was just as well, since the main impression seemed to be that it was a tedious run. Bendis was more interested in doing stories about the United Planets & its politics than the team, and while lots of people liked Sook’s art, I found too many of the designs to be so wholly detached from the character they were applied to that I half-wondered if he was cleaning out his old designs. Big buff Matter-Eater Lad with a Hogan mustache? The White Witch wearing weirdly snot-colored armor? I get wanting to give the characters more unique silhouettes (which the LOSH has struggled with at times due to sheer cast volume), but it wound up making them feel less like a teenage club & more like a generic space team. And given how I have been thoroughly driven away from the X-books while simultaneously deciding to return to comics, you’d think I’d be interested.

Please go back & read the opening paragraph of this section if you’re still thinking that.

First, lemme show you the very first picture that I saw of this new title:

Starring Michael J Fox as Not-Appearing-In-This-Issue Lad!

Is it nice that they’re doing a tribute to Michael J Fox & Back to the Future? Yes. Is this the best way to announce that there’s a new Legion title coming out? Well… given how they’re shoved into the background in favor of Superman and not doing anything except posing for a photoshoot, not really.

And that brings me to the actual first issue cover and my next complaint. I DO NOT like this art.

Well… at least Matter-Eater Lad is gonna be there, eating matter as is his wont.

First off, let’s start with the overall designs. While I appreciate that the artist has kept the traditional color palettes for the characters so they’re more easily identifiable (which is already a step above Sook), the designs themselves are… oof. Most of the guys have some variation of that godawful “broccoli hair” style that, aesthetics aside, will instantly date this like Grell’s 70s coiffures date his run. The outfits themselves are weird; there’s no reason for Saturn Girl to have a random loincloth or for the pops of random added colors to Triplicate Girl & Cosmic Boy’s outfits that are more distracting than interesting. I’m not sure who the dude in the mid-ground is supposed to be (my best guesses are either Mekt Ranzz or Element Lad), but I am very distracted by how he appears to be *shudder* mogging. I know they’re supposed to be teenagers, but why do the guys all look like different stripes of the twink rainbow? Why does Matter-Eater Lad look like he’s sporting the short haircut that Post-Zero Hour Triad had? Why is there an electro-bike doing an Akira slide randomly in the corner, and if Garth is in the foreground, who is driving that? Why is that bike the only dynamic action on the cover? Why is Robin there? Why does it appear that Mano, the Persuader, and the Dominators were thrown into a blender for the villains, and why does their leader have angel wings? These aren’t questions borne of intrigue (except maybe the Robin one); they’re questions borne of tilting my head at the picture like a confused dog and going “... buy WHY?”

Dramatic recreation of my reaction.

Also, I don’t wanna hear anyone ever rag on the Five Years Later jacket designs again. Between this book giving either this or a mis-matched cape to the team members and the newly announced Titans book having their cast wearing similar short & puffy jackets, those suckers are making a comeback, which I’m guessing is spurred by something on TikTok. Speaking of, both Legion cover images look less like a superteam going into action and more like influencers posing for the camera. Having characters looking at the viewer as though they’re looking at the photographer or looking in completely different directions instead of at a shared threat or goal doesn’t work for me. In the first cover, they aren’t looking at the guys in the foreground, they’re just posing and looking past them, so it’s not just that one. It all feels very “how do you do fellow kids”, like it’s desperately trying to appeal to either actual teenagers or the chunk of the market that tries to be down with them at all costs. And lemme tell you, from experience, they aren’t BUYING those comics. You KNOW where they’re getting them. So they aren’t gonna be giving you money.

Part of me wants this title to be good. The writer is a workhorse guy who has stated that he is using the Post Zero Hour Legion as his inspiration, and as someone who got into the Legion via that era, seeing them get some actual love even by proxy is overdue. The plot is similar to other eras I liked, in that the Legion are a social/rebellion movement fighting against a corrupt ruling force. But I just CAN’T with this art. It feels like it wants The Kids online to love it and make it go viral cuz it’s so omg hashtag relatable. Remember the last title that tried to do that? Remember how it involved a meet-cute in the middle of a school shooting? Remember how it ended with the lead character trying to hug it out with a murderous super-dictator? Remember how the creator threw a fit when The Kids pointed out how corny & try-hard it all was? I REALLY don’t wanna see that happen with the Legion.

You know how to make the Legion appeal to a new audience? Tell good stories with them. That’s what hooked teenaged me with the Post Zero Hour iteration. That’s why so many younger readers go to the scan sites, because the good stories that hook them are out of print. It’s not cuz they’re about characters rocking the latest styles available on TikTok Shop while sucking their cheeks in to make their cheekbones look bad. 

Honestly, both of these feel like a reminder that for every old favorite thing that I get to revisit & enjoy with new entries, there are two that are getting just the absolute worst treatment. For every Walpurgisnacht Rising that makes me psyched to see where things go next while returning to familiar fictional grounds, there are at least two things that make me want to retreat into nostalgia. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the majority of the latter are from comics or animation. Something about the modern internet scene around those two mediums is especially odious right now. From fanbases trying to tear down every single animated “pilot” in a particularly weird variation on the “crabs in a bucket” effect to comics pros not only catering only to whatever is requested by their social media venue of choice but also acting as UNprofessional as humanly possible to better seal those parasocial bonds, those mediums are in a dire place. And both have made it impossible to just say “this isn’t good” or “I don’t like this” without it being twisted into a moral judgment or ideological argument, so you learn to just disengage.

Maybe it’s better to just let my own memories of these things be. To remember the Cartoon Network that made gentle jokes about niche programs for their bumpers, taught a little bit of animation history with Toonheads, and didn’t have a kudzu-esque overnight block run by a particularly odious gaggle of fratboys. To remember the Legion being a particularly unique superteam that tries its hardest to be timeless while letting its characters grow & change like people should. To just… enjoy these things instead of being reminded that I no longer can.

It sucks to “just enjoy things” quietly, like so many people say to do, since shared enjoyment of something IS a major social connector. So I keep looking, hoping that these things will improve. And I keep being disappointed. So as usual, I just wanna vent.

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There’s nothing like a look back at niche internet history to pique my interest, and this one was a particularly hilarious example of a niche internet historical event. Remember when a gaming hub site tried to determine the ultimate iconic gaming character and wound up choosing… an L-shaped Tetris block?

I personally would have voted for the "long vertical line" cuz of its combo creation potential.

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Lightning-squared round! Because those lightning beasts of Korbal have been busy lately.

• I never liked RWBY, even after trying to like it. But I’ll be the first to say it was probably the ancestor of the current indie animation boom online. So it makes sense that Viz is giving them a new season to ride that tide. I won’t be watching it, but it’s still a make-sense revival.

• Dynamite isn’t gonna do more Jonny Quest comics, are they? Sigh… of course…

• If you’re gonna do a modern “spin” on I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, make sure that the audience you’re doing it for can handle downer endings. Cuz right now, we’re seeing what happens when you do one for an audience that absolutely cannot.

• Nick Knacks got to the first of the original Nicktoons, which is Doug, and I am legitimately shocked that Pop Arena didn’t harp on the creator being a born-again Christian. Probably cuz it’s a work he actually liked, so he was willing to let it slide.

• That Legion cover does bring up a good question - why hasn’t there been an official crossover between Back To The Future & the Legion yet? That kind of nostalgia crossover is catnip to the direct market.

• Now feels like a good time to recommend Teenagers from The Future, an excellent series of essays on different eras, characters, & audiences surrounding the Legion. Make sure it’s the 2011 edition, since that has more entries and some revisions/additions to existing ones that were absent in the original publication.

• I don’t want to spoil Exedra Quest part 1 chapter 1 for anyone who hasn’t played it yet, but they absolutely NEED to make that variation of Sayaka playable at some point. I’d be shocked if they didn’t, seeing as how she has her own model & all, but you never know.

• Uma update: I finally got a completed Career to break into A rank for the first time… and it’s swimsuit variant Golshi. Because OF COURSE it’s her.

• Kinda weird that both of my subscription crochet boxes are at points where both have me doing the same kind of ornamental stitch. That definitely wasn’t planned.

• We’re a month & a half away from Walpurgishnacht Rising coming out, I have zero idea how I’ll be able to see it at all (let alone get a hard copy to own that isn’t charging the usual cartoonish Aniplex prices), but I am already obsessed with Selema Terez. I just like highly-themed magical girls.

 

Gee, I wonder why...

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So, that’s another “sampler” that wasn’t that much of a variety pack. But I needed to say a few things, share a few things, and know that one-off posts like my very personal post about losing my ace resonance with another old favorite series get ignored, so another Sampler it is!

As usual, I leave you with a cat photo:

He loves to lay right there, behind the fan, every night. I have zero clue WHY.

Hope to see you next time.

One last June post: The Unicorn of Spacetime

Okay, I have one more aroace rant for this month in me. And it’s gonna be a personal one, even moreso than the earlier ones. AND it’s also gonna reference something that has become inextricably linked with the absolute nadir of fandom (AKA Tumblr) since it was revived. So hunker down, folks.

Even though I didn’t realize that I was some flavor of asexual until my 30s, mostly due to lack of reference points in my formative years, there were always hints there that wouldn’t make sense until viewed in hindsight. The biggest clue that I was aroace in particular was that I had zero interest in 90% of romances in media. I never got into the various 90s Spelling teen dramas or series that overlapped with that genre (such as Buffy) because I would inevitably get bored with all of the dating & sex shenanigans that fueled those shows. The roots of the great shipping infestation in fandom were just starting online, where you could still sort of discuss other topics related to whatever work you were a fan of besides who you wanna see kissing (or more, usually), but that feeling was fading fast. But because it was expected that I’d HAVE to like something romantic/sexy/both, I kept trying to fake it.

I never got why my friends would have crushes on the fictional characters that they liked the most, especially the ones from anime; at least with a live actor from a live action show, I “got it” on some level, but the animated ones struck me as especially alien, doubly so when they’d find an ink & paint person more attractive than someone flesh & blood. Or that said attractiveness was the characters’ sole measure of worth, not talent of a performer or being a compelling character. I got so desperate to try to understand WHY others liked romances (and make myself like them) that I took a whole college course on romance novels. My main takeaways from that class were twofold: one, that genre was “slop” before slop was a thing, and two, if your book wasn’t good enough to sell as a mystery/caper/historical piece/literally any other genre, just toss in a couple sassy conversations & a few sex scenes, and it’ll be picked up by a romance publisher in a heartbeat*. It was exhausting playing along with this omnipresent thing that I just didn’t comprehend.

But it was also around this time that I discovered reruns of the original Doctor Who on a third-string PBS station**.

Man, that original show was a breath of fresh air. The Doctor was the first character that I really “clicked” with on some level that I still didn’t fully understand at that time. He was definitely heroic & principled, even if he wasn’t always nice; he was a character designed more around being distinctive & appealing on a personality level than casting the hunky-wunkiest guy in his vague 20s/early 30s that they could find. He was an alien who hung around with & helped humans not because he had no other option but because his world kinda sucked. He had a constantly rotating stable of companions who he treated like friends or students, and the only hint of a romance would come from either a companion deciding to leave to pursue one or from whoever they were helping in that storyline. And even then, those instances were pretty rare. The show was cheesy, was rich in that uniquely claustrophobic & dusty British TV aesthetic, and had often-goofy effects that managed to become legitimate threats thanks to strong writing & performances. But best of all, it wasn’t designed around that very annoying 90s/00s idea of “sex appeal”, and the main action of any given storyline wasn’t getting derailed for patience-testing romantic tension. There was nothing else like it, and even 15-20 years after its then cancellation, it felt like a breath of fresh air. It was a unicorn.

When the show came back in 2005, they turned that unicorn into yet another horse. CGI effects, slick production, the Doctor being one in a string of conventionally attractive guys with a “last of my kind” backstory, and a focus more on the companion less as a partner & more as both the “real” hero of the stories AND as the ultimate soulmate love interest… it was like the revival was designed to surgically remove everything that had made the original show so refreshing. The clever writing of the original, one that could easily show The Doctor as ultimately heroic while still willing to make what seem like cruel choices (such as the fate of the Silver Nemesis) was replaced by the kind of “monster of the day, with slow building thread to be picked up for the finale, along with smatterings of romance” plotting that I never liked in other genre works of the time. I tried in that first season & a half, I really did, but between the “Rose can do anything” writing & the heavy emphasis on her being The Doctor’s purest truest love, along with other cliche choices***, I just could not get on board. And it just kept getting worse as the show went on, especially with the embarrassingly hornt-up spinoff Torchwood… and then came Tumblr.

Now, I would be lying if I didn’t say Tumblr had some good points. I would never have discovered that I was ace if it hadn’t been for someone sharing a comic about the subject, reading that, and having that “OH” moment when you can finally put a word to something you’ve felt for ages. But personally, the place has been more of a cesspool than a gazing pond. And when the revival of Doctor Who hit Tumblr, it did so at the perfect time for it to become a site-wide obsession:

• First, the latest incarnation of The Doctor was a guy who met the Tumblr standards for being a heart throb;

• Second, the show was taken over the same guy who was the lead writer for Sherlock, which was already beloved there; and

• Third, the series had come out of its “super companion saves the day using hints she gave herself via time travel & that were (admittedly cleverly) seeded through the past seasons, then had a tragic parting with her one true love” finale that made people kinda wild.

If my timeline is off, I… honestly, I don’t care. Point is, this was the era of Superwholock on Tumblr, of everyone being a little hot for David Tennant, and of downright worship of Steven Moffat. This was also the era when Tumblr collectively discovered that you can be the worst kind of bastard to ace people online and no one will care.

Lots of us had to close DMs, cuz people would happily fill them with anonymous insults, threats, & GIFs of gore or hardcore porn. The battle cries of “the A stands for Ally” and “don’t use (insert term and/or symbol here), it’s stealing from people with autism/REAL queer people” were constant. Even mentioning canon examples of ace characters in media would result in comments that… well, at best you’d get “omg, no one CARES about YOU PEOPLE”, a sentiment that would get you rightfully punched when applied to anyone else. I got to witness more than one artist I followed go on her journey of identity discovery and come out of it genuinely declaring, “I used to identify as ace but realized I’m not, ergo no one else can possibly be ace”. And their television creative hero Moffat gave them the bludgeon of declaring us “too boring” to ever be worth anyone else’s time, in fiction or in life. It was a horrible time, and once it was no longer confined to Tumblr, it would metastasize into the much more direct, organized, & vile harassment on other platforms we got in 2018-2019****.

So imagine just how much FUN it was to be someone who had once loved Doctor Who, who realized belatedly that part of why you loved it was because the lead character was VERY ace-coded along with its many other unique creative qualities… and the dominant discussions around it were being led by the same people who celebrated just how generic it had become and who would while away a boring study hall by sending suicide bait GIFs to strangers online solely cuz said strangers were ace. You had a work that showed that someone like you could be the great hero driven by principle & wits, the subject of interesting stories without them being built around their dating woes, that could have friends that rotated in & out of their life but always regarded them fondly… and it was snatched away to great celebration by people who, at BEST, think all you could possibly be is “boring” and removed everything that made this work unique except for intellectual property names. When even my father, a conservative man of relatively simple tastes, declared the revival series to be “dumbed down” with its inclusion of constant “companion equals love interest or tease thereof” subplots, you know that it’s been a FALL. 

He still watched it, though. And because of that, he kept me updated on it. He’d show me scenes I’d like, notably Tom Baker’s cameo (which was like seeing a favorite teacher again) & the animated episode, and keep me updated with his always-positive impressions of the newest incarnations. He even showed me a pattern for the striped scarf that Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor wore at one point, since he knew I’d probably like to try making it. So I was never completely unaware of what the show was doing. But I couldn’t really articulate to anyone in everyday offline life why I had drifted away from Doctor Who, and thanks to the Tumblr Exodus & fandom weirdos’ penchant for term searching, I couldn’t vent about it online.

It didn’t help that Doctor Who became yet another Culture War battleground+, when any criticism would be characterized as somehow fueled by hatred towards Jodie Whitaker or Ncuti Gatwa; that people existed who DID hate them just for being who they are didn’t help, so now all criticism had to be hammered into the warring sides’ respective boxes. But little by little, possibly because of Disney money being involved & them being an acceptable target for hate from both divisions of the Culture War, people felt safer commenting on dropoffs in quality. Even after the failed attempt to “bring back the hits” with the double regeneration and casting Rose’s actress as the would-be-impending new Doctor, one that to the fandom’s credit the majority saw through as creatively bankrupt, I still didn’t feel comfortable expressing my own thoughts on why I was disappointed.

It wasn’t until I watched this video during my 2025 Ace Week preparations that I finally heard from another ace person who shared my thoughts. For so long, even other aces would be okay with the constant love subplots, even if they were the most obnoxiously hetero things ever, but now I FINALLY heard from someone in the same boat. Who liked what the show had been because it was free from cliche romances that dragged down the main plot. Who saw The Doctor as a noble ace hero with new layers added & revealed with every incarnation. Who gave up on the revival because the writers were so obsessed with romance that it became obnoxious. Someone else who remembered when that horse used to be a unicorn.

As I’m writing this, it’s been recently announced that there will be no 2026 Doctor Who Christmas special and that the series is on an indefinite hiatus. More than a few people are citing the “bring back the hits” decisions made with last year’s special, but I’m seeing something that I didn’t expect to see. People are talking about the original series again. Lots of comparisons are being made between the Seventh Doctor declaring that the adventures will most definitely continue versus RTD’s favorite laughing wordlessly as a failed “wham” moment. One made people excited for what could have been (which you could argue was seen with spinoff media), while the other was met with confusion at best & eye-rolling dismissal at worst. There IS potential in the idea++, but given that it’s being handled by the same guy who treated the last character she played as the “real” lead (in a way akin to my complaints about Jessie here), it’s just gonna be more of what was already done. The main response from people who enjoyed the revival appears to be disappointment at what it’s become and wondering if its abrupt ending is a mercy kill.

I sympathize. Y’all definitely seemed to love that horse. I just wish your horse hadn’t been what was left after my unicorn was mangled beyond recognition. Either way, we’re both gonna miss it.

And now I’ve reached the hardest part of any given piece, figuring out how to wrap this up nicely. So I’ll put this tangentially related thought out there. There’s a tendency to read a lot of shounen manga heroes as being some level of ace. This ranges from examples where I can see it (Luffy), examples where it’s against canon but still kinda fits (Goku), and examples that I just don’t know (the lead guy in Dr. Stone). As far as “unofficial” representation goes, it’s probably the best we’ll get that doesn’t fall into “heartless & unemotional, not even human” stereotypes. But when I was younger & I had no words for myself besides “weird”, I had The Doctor: a man who’d save the galaxy constantly but could also make the hard decisions, who estranged himself from his homeworld because Earth was just kinda better, who had a large network of friends & colleagues that would always welcome him & be welcomed by him in turn. He might not have had that shounen power scaling, but he was just as much an aroace hero as any of my examples. I just hope that it’s finally safe to articulate that after all this time.

But just in case it’s not…

No idea who made this, since it clearly was swiped by whoever I swiped it from in turn.

Because this is a compulsion with me, here we go with the footnotes:

*= One glance at what’s considered the “good stuff” on BookTok & similar circles makes the stuff I read look like James freaking Joyce. And those didn’t have covers that look like Heartstoppers fanart on their badly written smut delivery systems, either.

**= The PBS situation in my area is… weird. The main one airs “marquee” British dramas, staple shows like Nova & Frontline, PBS children’s shows, and a bizarrely large amount of “reverse Alzheimer's with this simple pamphlet” glorified infomercials (usually during pledge drives, depressingly enough). The secondary one focused on New Jersey issues and was more likely to rerun British & classic comedies, ranging from Red Dwarf or Last of the Summer Wine to SCTV. The third-string one isn’t really considered a PBS affiliate anymore and has become a modern public access channel, but back in the day, it got the stuff deemed “too niche” for the other two. Hence, airing OG Doctor Who at 2am & 6pm on Sundays.

***= I wanted to mention how much RTD in particular LOVED to fall back on “evil fatty fat-fat fat person” in his run but couldn’t fit it into the main piece. But yeah, he had that uniquely British hatred towards anyone with the slightest bit of pudge that you’ve also seen in other works (it’s especially bad in Harry Potter).

****= It feels like even the “ace community” people want to forget this era ever happened, and as someone who was basically shoved violently back into the closet because of it, I really REALLY resent that. Respecting people who were hurt and acknowledging who did it & when it happened is infinitely more important than kowtowing to the perpetrators in the name of “community unity” or some shit.

+= One day I’ll get an essay or Sampler out there on how frustrating it is that literally every single piece of niche/”nerd” media becomes this weird battleground, and how the absolute worst are the ones whose tactic does more to silence criticism of mass media in the name of perceived progressivism (including one particular example who was uniquely bad about it), but not yet.

++= Seriously, “huh, I just regenerated into a duplicate of my ex” is an idea with both dramatic & comedic potential, but let’s be honest, RTD would never be able to realize it.

Some timely OC pixel art

As much as I have a… complicated relationship with Pride Month and with the ace community as a whole, I still have a bunch of a-spec characters in my works. And I still like to do terrible pixel art. And I had a rare bit of relax time this weekend.

So I decided to give my most aroace OC, Olly/Knitwit*, a makeover themed around the two color schemes associated with aroaces. Besides alternate hair styling, I also did these without her glasses so that the birthmark over her right eye is visible.

The color use is probably kinda subtle, but (a) Olly has a bit of a history with aphobia in her backstory, so she’d probably choose something not as attention-getting to be safe, and (b) gotta keep in mind that June equals summer equals gross hot weather.

Despite my… ambivalence with the aroace flag colors, I like this one a little better. Maybe it’s because the dark blue lends itself to denim, thus making it look less like a costume & more like casual clothes. But man, did making this confirm my distaste for the yellow used in it, because finding the shading variants of it was eye-searing. The flag-patterned elements might be more obvious, but they’re also easily removable in case Olly decides being vocal would be more of an issue than it should be. And she totally made those socks & the armlet herself.

Probably as pointless to share this as it is any of my writing, but I generally like the way that they turned out. I’m probably the only one, though. And even if I did share some of the one-offs, I’ve learned that people won’t read anything that isn’t something they already recognize or something that lends itself to shipping. But whatever. Happy Pride.

*Still rolling with this name till I find a better one. Suggestions welcome.

Brief Mandatory June Vent

Because there are just some mistakes that I fail to learn from no matter how many times I should have by now, I always feels like saying something about my ace-ness during June. Not on social media anymore; I'm not THAT hopeless, and the energy of 2018-2020 Twitter has been coming back big time. But I gotta vent about something, and since I'm 90% closeted about being aroace in real life & between therapists again (thanks, new insurance), it's going here.

I ran into a great video on the absolutely dire state of ace rep in media from an aroace perspective from another aroace person who has many of the same complaints that I do: that the rep is half-assed & off-screen or limited to the same story in teen dramas and that even the best rep (like Todd) is still romantically oriented & aroace visibility is limited to characters who fit the "cold-hearted user/emotionally stunted nerd" mold. They also addressed recent examples in terminally online fandoms where these handlings have resulted in fandom kids (who have been reaching staggering new lows in their absence of human functionality lately) being even more aphobic than they already usually lean towards being. And what's in the comments?

Orientated aces doing this:

Truly one of the greatest & most useful quotes from the internet.

I'm not joking.

Kiddo, I assure you, they're not calling you a fraud cuz you're not aroace. They're calling you a fraud because they think that way about EVERYONE under the A-umbrella. Also, your omission of the T from the acronym in today's environment is... telling.

I just... I get SO tired of this bullshit. When your own micro community keeps trying to make sure that you're not welcomed & seen as a problem to be fixed or excised, of course the macro community will be doing the same. And then everyone else. Y'all don't even bother with the traditional "ur valid BUT" blowoff to aroaces anymore; you just tell us to shut up & stop existing so things can somehow be easier for you.

I feel obligated to show my aroace-ness in some little way during June, but it's never out of "ace joy". It's more like pure, unadulterated, destined-never-to-be-mitigated aroace SPITE.

Art/eternal mood by sirompp on Tumblr

Anyway, I hope everyone has a decent Pride except for exclusionist aphobes & pick-mes like asumi_channn961. I hope their Pride involves illnesses that make colonoscopy prep seem enjoyable by comparison.

(Also, the same sentiment applies to the respondents to the video linked who are trying to portray ace visibility as "ableist" because people slap the same "you're an unemotional/childishly nerdy weirdo who can't be trusted" stereotypes on autistic people.)

Sunday Sampler: Black Hearts and Pink Blossoms Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, whatever I feel like talking about, no matter how random or trivial or rambling. They’ll make appearances whenever I feel like it, but it’ll always be a Sunday.

No AI was used in the creation of this blog post. I have been using em-dashes since high school, and I’ll be damned if I let either the plagiarism machine or terminally online witch hunters take them away from me. Also, any art is by either real people or myself (which you will easily spot cuz it’ll look like trash).

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Owen Hart would have been 60 this year.

Wait, let me rephrase that: Owen Hart SHOULD have been 60 this year.

Sunday Sampler: Accidentally Themed Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, whatever I feel like talking about, no matter how random or trivial or rambling. They’ll make appearances whenever I feel like it, but it’ll always be a Sunday.

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Sunday Sampler: Clip Show Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Man, having a job that actually involves doing engaging work and being around other people really keeps you from getting too absorbed in your own thoughts. That's definitely a benefit, even if it comes with the downside of commuting on a known hell road twice a day. But there is another downside, and it's this - it doesn't let me get so bored & isolated that I start to think of topics for this blog.