aro_gant_aro | Is a rose by any other name just as aromantic? (Reply)

This piece was written for the Carnival of Aros topic: Language.

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Is a rose by any other name just as aromantic?

Approx. reading time: 5 mins
Word count: 900 words

As an avid reader, alleged writer, and wannabe editor, language fascinates me. I'm very particular about word choice and I'll often mentally edit work as I read. Far too often I find myself thinking phrasing is messy or underwhelming. Forget that the author thought this was the perfect description, I know better haha. That is essentially why I love editing, helping an author communicate exactly as they imagine is a beautiful thing. Which is why I want to discuss the use of the word "aromantic" in fiction and Common Bonds: a Speculative Aromantic Anthology is going to help me.

When it comes to representation in text there are three options:

Word of God - the author says a character is X identity outside of the text
On the page - the author writes a character being X identity in the text without naming said identity
Word Used - the author uses the label of X identity in the text

What I want to talk about here is personal preference. My favourite method is On the page. I've discussed this previously in my review of Loveless. Essentially my dislike of Word Used is I feel like it's rarely done well tonally. And while I could write to meet my own lofty standards, I'm too big a fan of conversation. "I'm polyamorous" vs "my partners" and "I'm aroallo" vs "I only do sex, you'll find no romance here". Which is a little ridiculous when my aversion is to reading a few specific words among thousands, y'know?

So my question: when you write an aromantic character do you say, in text, that they are aromantic and why?

Let's take the most stereotypical path of an author. You write a fictional novel and you aim to get as many readers as possible. Forget about the publisher's control over what you write and how queerphobic your society is. This is an ideal opportunity to promote aromantic rep - and you’re writing an aro character either way - do you explicitly use the term aromantic?

Common Bonds is chock full of aro characters written by aro people. I was really curious before I started reading what kinds of people I'd meet. It didn't occur to me to ask how they would write these characters until I was four stories in. It was in that fourth story that read the word aromantic for the first time. Here I was reading a book dedicated to aromanticism and the word hesitates to show up? Not including the label comes with a safety net in an aro anthology. There is a guarantee that your audience will know on the front cover. I was curious, knowing this, how many of these authors in this aromantic anthology would choose to use the word anyway.

Of the 15 stories the representation is as follows:

4 stories use Word of God
6 stories use On the page
5 stories use Word Used

Excluding the cover, the foreword and the thanks at the end - this book uses the word aromantic or aro, in text, around 8 times*. Thoughts?

It is by far more than most stories that's for sure. I don’t fault the authors for their choices in any way. In this anthology they don’t have to worry about the moral question of not including a term that could change someone's life. I find it really interesting how evenly distributed the types of representation are. Less so when you consider only 1 in 3 authors chose to use the term.

There's no real way of knowing why these authors chose to write as they did. I wonder how much of this choice is based on genre. The vast majority of these stories are fantasy. There's a few urban fantasy, a couple of sci-fi, and one superhero story. Based on my totally legitimate research (source: I’ve read a lot of queer books), fantasy stories rarely use modern terms, such as identity terms. This is supposedly due to tone. Of the 8 fantasy stories in this anthology only 1 of them used the word aromantic. Urban fantasy stories are the complete opposite, they are our modern world turned fantastical. Of the 5 urban fantasy stories, a whopping 4 used the word aromantic. Adhering to a genre is a big deal in writing. Big enough to tell you whether to say aromantic or not?

I'd love to hear more about author preferences when it comes to this. Do you think using labels stops suspending disbelief? Is education, representation, and the aro agenda more important than our fragile author egos? What variables do you weigh when making this decision? Or is there no decision to be made at all?

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Some interesting things:

One instance of On the page representation in the Fantasy genre uses the word ‘aromatic’ in the name of an object (spoilers) and implies its use is a play on aromantic. This means that this story could have, in text, been Word Used story, but the characters themselves chose not to use the word during this time
Of the 10 stories that named or implied an aromantic identity, only about half named or implied other orientations. Within the anthology there is about an equal amount of confirmed (on the page or word used) aromantic asexuals and aromantic allosexuals.
No stories used any identities terms beyond aromantic, the asexual spectrum or allosexual despite there being On the page representation for many different orientations
No stories used any identities terms beyond aromantic, the asexual spectrum or allosexual despite there being On the page representation for many different orientations
*I didn't count the exact amount of times aromantic or aro was used in text because it didn't occur to me to until the book had already returned to the library rip so this number is from memory
If you ask your local library to buy Common Bonds then you'll be putting the word aromantic out into the world for countless people to learn and therefore karmically you can write however you want right? ;)