This was a comment I left on this wonderful post by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
glorious_spoon - I wanted it on my own blog for safekeeping, and also because I have more thoughts on what I said, and I want to come back to it at some point. I said:
glorious_spoon - I wanted it on my own blog for safekeeping, and also because I have more thoughts on what I said, and I want to come back to it at some point. I said:This is so interesting to me as an aromantic person, because I write, well, almost exclusively shipfic. And even before I realised I was aromantic, I knew I just wasn't a very romantic person. The gestures don't really...mean anything to me. They don't translate to love, they're just there.
You just articulated 90% of my problem with fluffy shipfic: the thing with fluff in fandom is that they do Romance. They get each other flowers, or cake, or they go to the carnival together.
And for some people that's empowering and all power to them, really, but when I need fluff I need it to be about the way that character interacts with the world.
Fluff needs to be an autistic character's partner giving them a sensory experience they crave but rarely allow themselves. Fluff needs to an anxious character getting a much-needed hug and an evening in the company of friends where they can melt into their partner's shadow but still participate when they feel up to it. Fluff is about what makes somebody feel at ease in their own skin, and it's not always a big romantic gesture.
In fact, looking back at most things I've shipped over the years, it seems to me that I always pick characters for whom Big Romantic Gestures are useless.
I do I write 'I love you'; sometimes it's in the context of either friends or a relationship drifting apart. But I also write it between couples, because it does mean something. I think about couples saying they love each other the same way I think about telling my cats or my friends that I love them - I say it when they do something extremely silly, or hopelessly cute, or when they make a terrible decision and I am filled with warm fondness for this complete idiot whom I have chosen to love, and so I tell them I love them. It feels more authentic to me like that, anyway, that my characters say 'I love you' when one of them is yelling at the TV screen, or when they manage to write an entire paper in one night and they're sleepy and cranky the next morning - because I know that that's when I would say and that's when I would want to hear it. And most shipfic is just my aro ass delegating romantic love to those who can do it.
