Today on the site I’m delighted to give a peek into Being Aro, the brand-new YA anthology edited by Madeline Dyer and Rosiee Thor containing stories featuring aromantic rep across a variety of genres! Here’s the gist:
Explore expansive aromantic love and connection in stories across genres
These twelve stories showcase aromantic people breaking generational curses, finding acceptance, and protecting the vulnerable while highlighting the infinite ways people find connection and love without romance.
A high school matchmaker learns a lesson about love. A rebellious spaceship pilot defies his culture’s compulsory coupling. A boy magically transforms banned romance novels into living dragons. A teen immune to romance, and the zombie virus, fights to survive the apocalypse. Being Aro is full of stories throughout real and imagined worlds that cross genres and disrupt the status quo.
And here’s some insight into some of the stories, given by the authors themselves!
“Kimberly Ma Meets her Match” by Ann Zhao
“Kimberly Ma Meets Her Match” is a story I’d had in my mind in some form for quite a while before Rosiee and Madeline approached me about Being Aro. I saw a video on my feed some time ago where a guy was reminiscing about the time he messed up his high school matchmaking fundraiser, and I wondered what could’ve happened if his motivation was something more than just joking around. What if two people did the same thing and got a 100% match with each other? Or—and this is what I ended up going with—what if someone did it in a frustrated protest of the way we center romance in our lives? Eventually, this became Grace and Kimberly’s story! Fun fact: This story was my first time writing about someone discovering their aroace identity; Dear Wendy features two characters who are already openly aroace at the start of the book.
“The Binding” by Soumi Roy
“The Binding” grew out of my experience as a grayromantic person—someone who exists in the in-between, where attraction isn’t absent, but it doesn’t follow the rules the world expects. Growing up in India, I was taught—explicitly and implicitly—that marriage and children are the ultimate achievements for a woman. No matter what else you accomplish, that question lingers: “Why aren’t you married yet?” I’ve pursued a PhD, built a life across continents, and still found that expectation waiting for me back home—brought up in every phone call with my parents that often end in arguments, echoed by relatives, acquaintances, and even well-meaning strangers. Over time, that pressure begins to feel less like a choice and more like a script I’m expected to follow.
In “The Binding,” I wanted to take that script to its most extreme—where love isn’t just expected, but enforced, ritualized, and punished if absent. It’s much like the pressure in most arranged marriages across South Asia where a woman must learn to love a stranger. Gauri’s journey reflects my own resistance to that narrative—the problem isn’t the person who doesn’t “fit,” but the system that insists they must. One of my favorite lines in the story is when the Collector tells her, “You are not broken.” That reframing—of absence as possibility rather than lack—captures what being grayromantic means to me. This story is, in many ways, about reclaiming that space, and recognizing that there are many valid ways to exist, to connect, and to belong.
“Preservation” by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
I like stories about uncertain power. I enjoy reading about people clawing their way up to it, sacrificing their relationships or morals or even themselves, and I enjoy reading about people losing or giving it up to gain something truly meaningful. I gobble up eat-the-rich stories whether they’re deep or not. “Preservation” was inspired partly by Saltburn (the infuriating and entertaining Cattons) and partly by a conversation I had with a labmate driving up to Washington for fieldwork (conservation, radical environmentalism). The story follows a disowned aristocrat-turned-activist determined to save an endangered species on her homeworld, no matter the cost. Along the way, she makes formidable enemies, but her fair share of friends, too. Though I’d say I write almost exclusively platonic love stories, “Preservation” is my first piece of short fiction where the main characters are explicitly aromantic. I had a great time exploring the relationships in it, especially that with our protagonist’s unexpected partner in crime.
“Flying Solo” by Claudie Arseneault
The first seed of “Flying Solo” was planted almost a decade ago, as I played with the idea of an aromantic Narcissus. How could I resist? Here was a mythical figure whose spurning of others’ advances had been spun into a tale of caution, a lesson not to be selfish, heartless, cold—the parallels were too obvious to ignore. There’s a long path between the original Greek myth and the teenage pilot at the heart of my story, one that passes through Pacific Rim‘s drift compatibility and Knights of Sidonia‘s haunting and hunting space horrors, to inevitably land on the one theme I cannot stay away from: the transformative power of friendship, and how true connections form away from the heavy expectations of compulsory romance.
“Do You See Me” by Isa Fiel
Yoli, an aromantic young woman, is haunted by a vengeful ghost of her family’s past, who is destined to kill her on her birthday or leave her cursed for the rest of her life. Yoli’s determination to break free from what she’s told is her inevitable fate speaks to the hope I wanted to convey: the hope of ending harmful cycles and upturning arbitrary expectations that are so often thrust upon us. There’s much to say about the complexities of generational trauma—of hurt borne alone and pains without words to describe them and the well-meaning but aching step forward for a better life—about the danger of self-imposed isolation, and the reality of how easy it is to fear that we might never be enough. That we’ll never measure up because we’ve been told that we’re missing something that everyone else seems to have. It traps us in cycles until we internalize the belief that our fates are inevitable. That there is nothing we can do beyond following the script.
I wrote “Do You See Me?” with the me-of-then in mind. The me who, at that age, felt unsure of herself, who felt out of place between two cultures, who found it so hard to visualize a future that would accept them. So, writing Yoli having the courage to not only choose to break past that fear, having her come to understand the pain of the past and choosing to approach it with strength and compassion, allowing her to admit when she is wrong and learn, deciding to lean on her friends for support to pursue her own future… it’s hopeful. In a world where silent suffering is a virtue and empathy is considered a failing, I continue to hope that we can shape our futures for ourselves, because we are all enough. Individually and together.
And yes of course, Yoli and the gang did eat the menudo afterward.
