The Friendzone in Fandom
My ex-girlfriend-as-of-a-minute-ago sits beside me at the Oakleigh bus-stop in her purple flannel and deep blue Tardis leggings. The bluest blue to ever blue. I sit next to her, legs folded up onto the bench. I’m chewing at my thumbnail, right at the corner, where it hurts. It’s cold, I’m underdressed and uncomfortable. But I don’t want to tell her that. I came all the way up here to make this easier on her, not harder.
I’ve read on Google it’s better to break up in person.
‘We can still be friends.’ I say again, the I like you mumbled somewhere in the painful crease between thumb and nail. I mean it. My ex-girlfriend-as-of-a-minute-ago is gorgeous, smart, driven and has the same weird intersecting taste in Lano and Woodley and Starkid musicals as I do. We’d lay side by side on my bed at our laptops for hours, scrolling through Tumblr, sharing memes and listening to the A Very Potter Musical soundtrack. She’s literally great in every way.
‘I’d like it if we can be friends.’ I go on. We had a plan today, well... two separate plans. Her; to meet up and go shopping and maybe I’d stay over. Me; to break up with her face to face, near her home so she wouldn’t have to travel far. Somewhere familiar so she’d feel a bit surer footed.
‘We can still go shopping if you want.’ I say. I really do like you, I think. Again, a plea. ‘I’d like it if we could stay friends.’
She gets up.
We do go shopping, browsing without buying and stopping for coffee (her) and tea (me). It’s grey and windy, sometime in October, so we sit inside. I tell her it’s shit weather for Tardis leggings and she kinda-laughs. While we’re sharing a caramel slice, my words get similarly crumbly.
‘I know it’s cliché,’ I say to her. ‘But it really isn’t you, y’know. Promise. It’s all m—’
‘I know,’ she cuts me off without looking up. Then chews her words in her mouth as though she’s deciding whether she likes the taste. ‘I just, I want more.’
I’m twenty and after four months, my first romantic relationship becomes my last.
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One of the things I felt that could bind my ex and I as ongoing friends was our mutual love, participation and understanding of fandom.
If you don’t know what fandom is, fandom is basically the name given to a group of fans, different from normal or unaffectionately ‘casual’ fans by our acts of curation and creation inspired by whatever it is we’re fans of. Usually fandoms coalesce on social media, the most popular platforms for this being Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and Discord, though you can find pockets and whole congregations of fandom in all crevices of the internet. I mostly hang around Tumblr and the publishing and curation platform AO3 (Archive of Our Own), where I have been reading and writing fanfiction since I was eleven years old.
I’ve always been someone who has extreme feelings about popular culture. If I like something, I probably love it, and if I love it, I drown myself in it like an XXL hoodie, the things I love are an important part of who I am.
Fanfiction for me has been and continues to be a way for me to express my love and frustration for the media I consume, analyse the characters who grab my attention, and showcase the relationships that I wish had received greater attention. I’ve been writing fanfiction for so long now that it isn’t just a thing I do, it’s part of how I see myself. It’s part of how I want to be seen by others.
More than anything, fandom has been a way for me to learn the language of my own identity.
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There’s a lot of love in fandom.
Culturally we’re conditioned to think about love a lot. It comes in all different varieties, after all. I’m certainly not against romance, even if sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to see just how much media is romance-focused: movies, shows, books, annoying YouTube Ads, and fanfiction. Love is certainly in the air (and the water, and the fire, and the earth).
While the majority of people’s understanding of fanfiction is primarily sex what seems to go hand in hand in fandom is a great deal of romance as well. Shipping: the fannish act of wanting and/or supporting two (or more) people in a romantic relationship. The majority of fanfiction is comprised of shipping, shipping wars, novel length meta-dissections of what a glance between two fictional characters really means for their on-the-surface platonic relationship.
It was 2014 when I first saw the word aromantic. In a fanfic about one of my favourite pairings called Found Naked in his Azaleas. At first there was confusion, the things I had experienced in media and socially within my culture told me that romantic love was the only love that carried any weight; that everyone felt and strove and desired a romantic partner in their life; that, to be a complete person, you needed to have another half; that you couldn’t have intimacy without romance.
Then there was a profound point of recognition, the cliché light bulb glow, the softly breathed ‘oh.’
My lesbianism, encompassing my genderfluidity and aromanticism, has always been relative to what the people around me have been exposed to. I’ve been told over the years that lesbian and genderfluid sure, these are terms recognisable, but aromantic—that’s something you have to Google. Something that comes with side eyes and comments like ‘well, one day,’ ‘never say never,’ ‘you just haven’t met the right person,’ ‘wait… you mean you don’t like sex?’
Firstly, to that last point; aromantic and asexual: entirely different things.
Secondly, although I found the language to express my aromanticism through fanfiction, the existence of aromanticism in fandom--a hyperreal environment fixated on romance and romantic relationships--is far from the norm.
The reality is aromantic people can oftentimes feel excluded from fandom spaces.
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This exclusion is hardly surprising considering the messages in the media we often form our fandoms from. One of the largest fandoms Doctor Who, with over 55,000 fanfics on AO3 (one of many fanfiction archives) in the episode “The Husbands of River Song,” has River tell the audience that the Doctor is beyond being able to fall in love with her and in “The Family of Blood” character John Smith wonders at the humanity of the Doctor as ‘falling in love never occurred to him.’
It’s an ongoing theme of the show that the Doctor is too alien to understand love (or at least the people around him believe that), discussions that assume that romantic attraction is an inherent part of human experience, so removing that from a character makes them alien, makes the Doctor different from ‘the rest of us.’
Through adaptation and fandom, even characters who are canonically aromantic in their source material have been twisted to fit the shipping mould so popular in fandom. Jughead Jones from Riverdale (11,000 fanfic on AO3) and Raphael Santiago from Shadowhunters (27,000 fanfics on AO3) were both purposefully erased of their aromanticism (and asexuality, but not being asexual myself I won’t speak above the voices of asexual people regarding representation).
Jughead, originally from the Archie comics, was intentionally asexual and subtexually also aromantic (being outwardly romance repulsed) and while his actor Cole Sprouse in Riverdale the show was all for the idea of keeping to canon, the show writers didn't agree pairing him with the character Betty.
Raphael is a minor character in both the Shadowhunter TV series and the original Shadowhunter Chronicles written by Cassandra Clare, who confirmed on Twitter that Raphael was canonically (in a rather JK Rowling-esque move, but still canon) aromantic and asexual. And while in the show Raphael confirms his asexuality telling Isabelle he doesn’t like sex, his aromanticism is all but dismissed.
Ships sink in fandom once someone is aromantic, unless fans are okay with queerplatonic relationships and most aren’t. For much of society, for most of fandom, if you take the romance out of a relationship, that relationship loses its meaning, its interest.
There’s a general criticism with fandom that aromantic people like myself have and it’s how aromantic characters, voices, and stories are often silenced. Non-romantic relationships are co-opted almost violently, discounted, and ultimately seen as less than any sort of romantic counter.
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Somehow friendship has become a purgatory, a prison for a person whose romantic interest isn’t reciprocated. Or a consolation prize, the kind of relationship that can be put to the side when something more comes along.
Friendship has almost become this sort of… zone.
Modern mythology asserts that the 90s sitcom Friends popularised the term “Friendzone,” when Joey warns Ross that he’s taking too long to let his romantic feelings be known to their mutual friend Rachel. Ross and Rachel of course are famous as one of TV’s most notable ‘will-they-won’t-they’ couples, both a trope and a couple dynamic fandom thrives on.
The once goofy typically 90s joke between two friends became a near-to toxic term, succinctly blasting some of society’s most dangerous ideas about women, sex, consent, and friendship around. Amazing really, as the Friendzone doesn’t really have much to do with friendship at all.
In the same way more and more criticism of the term has arisen in recent years, more and more support for and space within fandom for aromantic fans and aromantic creations has started to occur. As an example in 2014 I read the first fanfic featuring an aromantic character, now in the same fandom (the Supernatural fandom) there are 164 fics tagged with aromantic/aromanticism. A mere drop in the ocean to the 216,886 fanfics on AO3 for the whole Supernatural fandom, but more fic tagged with aromantic/aromanticism than any other fandom on the platform.
Recent TV hit Good Omens (16,435 fics on Ao3 since releasing in June this year) has seen a massive groundswell for aromantic fic and aromantic interpretations in fandom spaces. The original author and current showrunner Neil Gaiman specifically noting aromanticism in a tweet discussing the queer fandom interpretations of the show’s main characters: “I wouldn't exclude the ideas that they are ace, or aromantic, or trans. They are an angel and a demon, not as make humans, per the book. Occult/Ethereal beings don't have sexes/genders, something we tried to reflect in the casting. Whatever Crowley and Aziraphale are, it's a love story.”
Whatever kind of love that may be or how it may take shape is refreshingly (in an era of J K Rowling’s Twitter account) left to the eye of the beholder.
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I should say that I am someone who does have fandom ships. The hows and whys of my relationship with shipping have a lot to do with me just enjoying certain character dynamics and desiring to see more scenes with specific characters together in either a platonic or romantic context. One form of relationship is not more than the other. I've enjoyed fanfiction long before I realized that aromanticism was a thing, or before I realized that I was myself aromantic, and I still enjoy it.
There are a wide variety of aro experiences, and there are many aro fans who enjoy reading shippy and/or romance-focused fanworks.
As an aromantic fan and creator, deconstructing romantic expectations and perceptions of “love” as well as elevating and equalizing how non-romantic relationships are valued in comparison to romantic relationships is an integral part of my work but also an integral part of learning about myself. Amplifying expressions of aromantic identity is a critical element in altering relationship expectations and critiquing how the structure of romance may constrict our lives and relationships.
In a culture that tells us that friendship is a consolation prize, reclaiming the value and importance of platonic relationships – and celebrating these relationships in fiction, does a lot of work for creating inclusivity and acceptance of aromantic people in fandom and life.
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‘More?’ I ask, too-milky tea sliding around my mouth and down my throat.
My ex-as-of-a-few-hours-ago, nods. ‘I want Ten and Rose, Jack and Ianto, Amy and Rory I want, like,’ she sighs, cards thin piano-playing fingers through her hair, ‘You get it?’
‘Yeah.’ I say. I don’t.
We finish our drinks in silence.
