As I change, so my characters.

(Thoughts about sexuality and gender identity, as it relates to two fictional characters and their writer.)

Now that I’m writing Ever Death (the fourth book in the series that starts with Our Bloody Pearl), comparing the protagonists of Our Bloody Pearl and Ever Death is wild.

In Our Bloody Pearl, the main character, Perle, is so stable in their non-binary identity that they never even ask themselves what it means to be non-binary. They just are non-binary. And they’re happy with that. Dejean might be the canon asexual in Our Bloody Pearl, but neither he nor Perle have (seemingly) any libido, nor do they really care about social standards for relationships. 

They know who they are (people who experience no sexual attraction) and what they want (each other, no sex needed.)

In Ever Death, I ended up writing another non-binary, aro/asexual-spectrum protagonist, almost exactly four years after writing Our Bloody Pearl. 

This character has been trying to figure out who they are for years, and they still don’t know. They’ve switched pronouns and labels multiple times. They have, not merely dysphoria, but a kind of dysphoria they recognize to be at least partially caused by social gender norms. They still don’t know if where they’ve landed is entirely accurate to who they are.

They don’t relate to their society’s allosexual norms, but they can’t figure out what that means. They stare at the lips of the person they’re falling in love with and can’t decide whether they want to kiss them, or if they just subconsciously know they should want to. They aren’t even sure if they’re genuinely falling in love or just forging a deeper platonic bond than they have in the past. 

They don’t know who they are or what they want, only that they want to figure it out.

I believe neither of these protagonists are superior to each other; literature needs both of them and I certainly do too. But the transition from writing one, to writing the other, is a marked change in who I am as a person. And I hope someday I’ll be writing a third kind of non-binary, asexual character—one who went through the challenges of doubting and realigning and digging deeper into themselves and came out with the stable, centered self-perception Perle and Dejean seem born to.

(I would be very curious to know if any other writers relate to this..? ^^)