The last seven posts don’t quite cover all the ace rep I have written, and certainly not all I have in mind. I wanted to present a few more characters I have that will eventually make it into my stories, or that will have their rep made canon later down the line. I’m sure by the time I get around to all that, there will be even more!
1. Larryn and Gray-Aceness
Larryn is one of those characters I haven’t talked about much yet, at least in term of aceness and sexuality. It’s just… there’s already a lot going on in his storylines, and none of it presented an easy opportunity. I decided if it fit better in the last of the trilogy, then I could roll with that. It does always bother me that it takes that long to make it canon, but less so knowing that I have other ace rep around.
So I have just released City of Betrayal, meaning I can finally look more closely at how this happens exploration happens in City of Exile. Larryn is the kind of gray-ace who experiences very rare attraction, often fleeting sensations that are gone before he can really put a name on it. But when it comes? It comes strong. Like… everything else Larryn does, really. No half measures with him! So this has happened to him once before, around preteen age, and it was very confusing and he hated it. When it strikes again, he’s more mature (I mean, *cough* Larryn has a strange way of being mature but y’know) and better able to handle it. Still not in a good place, and it still comes as an unsettling surprise.
And I very much chose this framing on purpose, because I often see acespec narratives where the advent of attraction is welcomed and exciting. That’s more Adèle’s case, too. The thing is, my experience with specness (as an arospec) is that it can be disturbing too. I feel like we don’t talk about this enough. Attraction descending on spectrum people isn’t the messiah—it isn’t systematically celebrated, and it also doesn’t suddenly makes us allo. So that’s where I’m going with Larryn! Really looking forward to it.
2. Yuri and autochorisexualism
Hey, so none of you really know Yuri yet, but he’s my secret favourite side character from Baker Thief. Yuri is a trans man part of Adèle’s new team—the mostly silent, benevolent sarcastic type. I’m preparing a spinoff series of small mysteries novella within the universe, and he would be the hero of those. Yuri is aromantic and autochorissexual. He lives home happily with a bunch of cool lizards and snakes as well as his wide collection of novels. I haven’t settled on the details of storylines yet (I have a very good grasp on the ID, partly from my own experience of it and would love to find… actual good rep for it), but this is still such a big hole in the ace rep out there, and I know it for sure affected how long it took me to ID as ace. So. This is also coming eventually.
3. Jessana and aces building a family
Jessana is probably not appearing in a story for quite some time, but she might be one of my most personal ace characters. Her story changed quite a bit through the time, and I’m not still certain of how I want this to go, but Jessana is… what happens when you’re an ace who really wants to have babies but struggles with the whole making them part. She is not strictly sex repulsed, but that stuff just doesn’t work for her. I have some trends of Ace and Family stories with Larryn, but Larryn is definitely building his by Adopting All the Children. With Jessana I am looking at a completely different approach, and I’m not sure how much my feels will handle this. These are not topics we often see addressed in ace fiction, because so much of it is YA and while Jessana is fairly young for them (she will be around 19-21, got to settle on a timeline for other things to decide), I really want dig at this. It certainly has been on my mind for longer than I knew what asexuality was so…
That covers most of the incoming and existing ace rep I have. There will be others among the Baker Thief crew, although at this point I am conceptualizing them as aro narratives and deciding if ace (and how that shapes the story) after, because Baker Thief is and will always be an aromantic series. With, you know, a lot of ace rep too.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the series!