/u/myownasexualfantasy on Finding out I'm asexual through Fanfiction...
Oh, I love fanfic too! I'm not sex-repulsed at all, so I read plenty of explicit stuff (I identify as an aegosexual ace), and reading different relationship dynamics and even stuff like kink has helped me figure out a lot about feelings, and relationships, and what romantic or sexual attraction might feel like and what kinds of relationships I might want in real life.
I generally feel kind of weird about real-people fic, but I was looking through the "asexual character" tag on AO3 and I found this fic called Bloom (BTS) that was actually really relatable to my experience with asexuality. It starts with the main character realizing that his friends are all hooking up with people, and him having been aware that they were all sexual, in theory, but not actually realizing it, and oh boy, I have had that revelation multiple times in college. It's not like I want to be allosexual, or that I feel "broken" or anything, it's just this kind of weird sinking feeling where you realize that you're missing out on something and it's like they're leaving you behind.
What made the fic so powerful for me was the revelation that the main character has:
"And it’s as though a door has opened into a new world, but not the world he expected — he’d been so terrified of his hyungs leaving him behind that he’d forgotten, somehow, that he could move forward himself, and ask them to come with him."
Like, I don't know why this concept was so mind-blowing to me, but the idea that you don't have to fixate on how everyone else is doing something that you're not part of, and that you can instead strengthen your friendships by communicating openly about how you feel, or initiating things like cuddling, completely changed how I think about intimacy. When it comes down to it, close intimate friendships can be almost indistinguishable from romance if there's no sex involved. And that gave me a lot of hope for the kind of relationship I want at some point in the future, because I'd never really thought something like that was possible.
November 20, 2020 at 11:51PM
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