A Week in Asexual Characters – Adèle

Aesthetic by me! I’m learning 😀

You might have noticed that so far, I’ve talked a lot about non-spectrum rep. I do have Larryn who is gray-ace, but since this is not canon within the text yet, I kept it for a later day. I did start out writing asexual characters that experienced no attraction, as this is closer to me, and still a wide array of experiences. But. Ace-spec folks deserve heroes too, and it’d be ridiculous to have such a large number of ace characters that didn’t include them. It wasn’t entirely conscious at the time (that is, back in February 2016), but I also deeply needed to explore aroness and spectrum IDs. I had identified as ace for a year at that point, and I was slowly starting to acknowledge that I just might be aro too, just very differently than what my aceness is.

 

So, in comes Adèle Duclos, policewoman extraordinaire, tall and French and biromantic and demisexual. I wanted a character who was aware of the shape of her aceness but didn’t wait on the attraction to engage in potential romantic relationships. Adèle is the kind of person who knows what she wants, and it felt right for her to go ahead according to her romantic impulses, with or without sexual attraction. I always spend some time thinking about the way my characters approach and consider relationships (even allo ones, though I think … that the time I spend there is very characteristic of being ace and aro? I don’t know, it feels like allos all agree (or talk like they do) on this relationship process being “attraction happened so I went in for both” but maybe that’s just me).

 

Anyway. With Adèle it was even more important than usual to think of this, because the very initial drive for Baker Thief was her relationship with Claude. This novel is built with the structures of a fantasy romance novel (except it’s aro as all heck, and has a central QPP), and knowing exactly how these characters relate to the idea of being in a pair was important. So… biromantic, willing and ready. When Adèle’s romantic crush appears, she does wonder if sexual attraction will follow, but it’s essentially not what would make her decide between yes and no for a relationship. It would just change the shape of it, and one of the nice parts of Baker Thief is how all the shapes are presented as equally valid.
The other nice thing about Adèle is that she defies some more common ace stereotypes. We’re often the nerd of the story, small and shy and anxious. Adèle is none of those things. She’s well muscled, she’s confident, she’s impulsive. She’ll take space rather than shrink on herself, and that’s not something we often see when it comes to ace rep. The one other I can think of is, in fact, another demi woman (Rivka from the Mangoverse). So she works against the way people will usually think of physical characters as necessarily sexual, which isn’t something I feel we’ve examined a lot as a community yet. 

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