Alex | Female | she/her | 25yr |
A disappearing and reappearing artist. I love plenty of things and I draw and post my art on here too. ლ(ಠ益ಠლ I normally don't tag my posts.
This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!
was gonna leave my comment in the tags but tbh i’m silent enough about this as it is.
seeing stuff like this is so upsetting because these terms were well known and widespread in the ace community but because of exclusionists many people stopped using terms like this because they felt uncomfortable and unsafe.
i loved these terms when i was in highschool, i loved the feeling of community, but i lost that because i didn’t feel comfortable openly and proudly calling myself asexual.
they’ve hurt so many people and damaged our community badly and i will never forgive them for that. we deserve to use our own terminology and feel safe within our community.
sometimes i notice i haven’t seen “grace” (grey-ace) in a while and consequently wonder if i made it up.
I remember ppl - even other ace ppl - saying the card suit thing was “cringey” and “straight ppl aren’t gonna take us seriously” (sounds familiar?) So i guess the community wound up abandoning it. We were also having severe issues at the time with aces being stereotyped as “childish/immature” for associating things like cake, dragons, and space with asexuality, plus in general as most aces just don’t “get” allosexual things in media and irl. We were starting to be viewed as ignorant, virginal, childish, losers, etc. I haven’t seen an ace-cake thing in a good while now.
This was the infancy of exclusionary influence on us. I didn’t realize it did more damage than just closeting us. Whole symbols and terms have been lost. Community has been lost.
I remember three-four years ago I got myself into the ace community on Insta, and I came across these terms. People in these circles would talk about cake, space, dragons, and the black ring on the middle finger. Then, a year or two later, ace content fizzled out (I thought it was Insta’s algorithm figuring out that I knew all this and didn’t bring me the old stuff) and young aces had no idea what any of these were - including the black ring. Finding out young aces had no idea what the black ring meant nearly snapped my heart in two - I proudly wore the black ring, I drew characters with it, and it was my quiet way of communicating to others what my sexuality was. I was baffled at the lack of knowledge - and it turns out that exclusionists got their hands into our community and snuffed us out.
Anyways, we need to bring this back. I thought the card suite thing was cool, it taught people the different ways people can experience attraction, I loved making jokes about preferring cake, I loved wearing the black ring and talking about it with my fellow queer people at my highschool QSA club.
I’m sorry, people don’t know about the cake or ring anymore? I remember being welcomed with spams of cake gifs, photos, and MS Paint drawings. I also distinctly remember that the block solo ring in the midle was meant as reference to the Ace of Spades (black, solo, middle of card). Only thing I didn’t know was that other aces could represent a more refined nuance. Let’s see if we can get this all rolling again.
Welcome to anyone who is interested in helping with the culture revival.
remember back in the day spending hours trying to get the perfect theme for ur blog having it reflect ur whole identity. nowadays its like. i havent looked at my blog on desktop in 4 years and neither has anyone else
[PA intercom voice] din djarin there is going to be a little girl on jakku in need of a father. i REPEAT there going to be a little girl on jakku in need of a father
important to know this was the first draft of the main drawing:
an important thing that i feel like a lot of people don’t know when getting commissions is that. when an artist asks for visual refs of an oc, it doesn’t have to be polished art or anything it can literally be something like this
wait really?
Yep! Even if it’s just a quick concept doodle, anything that communicates what you’re after is helpful. We can work with you to get the details right once we have a mockup going, but anything you can do to give us a starting point is a big help.
It’s funny out of context but I am so fucking sad over this
He can’t feel the blanket he’s holding or the cold and he’s too big for his bed and he can’t fall asleep but he’s trying to do all those things anyway because he’s 10 years old and he’s just had his entire life and childhood ripped away from him in every way possible and all he can do is hold onto the tiniest pieces of normalcy because that is literally all he has left