#you could argue the love potion scene goes against my argument that she doesnt want a normal romance because She Tries To Get One That Way

[iztopher]

the "if you ask me, te'ijal and galahad are both aromantic" post

happy pride to ME (and to @snowsheba who encouraged me to write this >:3c)

one of my favorite and most foundational headcanons is that both te'ijal and galahad are somewhere on the aromantic spectrum. (fwiw i like aroace galahad and very squiggly aro bi te'ijal)

and i could put each of those thoughts in separate posts, but frankly there's gonna be so much overlap - because their relationship with each other is such a big part of it - it makes more sense to put it together

warning: this post is SO LONG (1039 words under the cut) i'm so sorry i have so many thoughts on this topic. also, aveyond 3 and aveyond 4 spoilers!

i'm gonna start loosely with galahad because that headcanon came first, in 2013. my best friend came into my ask box like "arospec galahad who conceptualizes this fairytale ideal of romance and does not fit into At All" and they were SO RIGHT

galahad is such a rigid person. he internalizes rules about how the world works and refuses to adjust his perspective ever, at all. it makes so much sense for amato/heteronormativity to be one of those, for him to decide his feelings aren't actually decided by how he feels but how other people in his situation would feel, how he thinks he should feel.

(this also, not going to lie, ties into my headcanon that he's autistic, because in my experience as an autistic person you tend to not really understand how a lot of social constructs (which romance definitely is!) work and try to reference other people for them)

which is to say: arguably the most aromantic thing galahad does in canon, to me, is switching on a dime and suddenly acting like he's in love with te'ijal the moment they're human. it has Never read as genuine to me, even when i was like, 11 years old playing the game for the first time. i've always read that as him thinking "okay, I'm human, I'm married, my wife is human, clearly this adds up to me being in love with her. it has to, because that's how the world works"

and it's not, and I love that! 1) because there's a lot of potential to dig into for how it impacts their relationship and both of them individually, and 2) because I'm so used to the trope of romance being the Proof that someone is human and complete and I love the idea of someone operating under that logic and it explodes in their face

on the flip side, te'ijal's response to that being disinterest and disappointment says a lot about her, too, and while part is she's a vampire and perceives relationships differently, i like to read into that as her being aro, too. it's a fairly common aro experience to be "crushing" on someone and then they return your feelings and suddenly you lose interest or become actively uncomfortable with the whole ordeal

not to mention te'ijal canonically, blatantly misunderstands romance. in the promotional interviews for aveyond 3, te'ijal recounts how she tricked galahad into marrying her and tops it off with "it's a romantic story, don't you think?". she thinks of insults as flirting, and when she is genuinely flirted with, it goes over her head and/or she doesn't acknowledge it.

shopkeepers flirt with her fairly often and she makes no more to recognize it

galahad calls her "my love" and all she can think about is that it isn't "spawn of evil"

the one exception to this is john, who asks her to kiss him, and she responds "you don't value your life, do you, uplander?" genuinely i cannot tell if this is her expressing disinterest or trying to flirt back. who knows with te'ijal.

but by any means her relationship with, well, relationships, is clearly her own. it's very easy to take that a step forward and decide that part of what makes it so unique is that she doesn't experience the feelings a lot of other people do that makes them easier to sort or interpret.

i would also go ahead and argue that marrying someone who hates you, partly because you think the fact that he hates you is endearing, works very well for an aro read on te'ijal. te'ijal is canonically not interested in a conventional romantic relationship! if she was, she would not have picked galahad!

te'ijal wants "romance" and a "relationship", but with a misunderstanding on what those actually entail, and without any of the usual connotations of either of those things.

...and while i'm reading too deeply into canon, i'm going to swing back to point out that galahad never gives indication of wanting a genuine relationship, either. galahad complains all the time about how much te'ijal ruined his life, in all the different ways, and he deserves to, she did, but he treats the wedding as one step in the middle of many and never points out that she, theoretically, stopped him from pursuing any other relationships. that is not on the list of things that galahad minds about being married to te'ijal.

this is skewing long and also kind of negative, so i want to wrap up on a more positive note, which is why these two mean a lot to me as reading as aro, which is:

i would argue that ultimately, te'ijal and galahad's relationship does not seem canonically romantic, especially after aveyond 4. i mean, arguably their healthiest, most "that's actually kind of sweet" moment is when galahad breaks up with her. but even before that, their relationship never had anything that firmly set it as romantic. the things that normally would - being married, te'ijal calling galahad's behavior "flirting" - was clearly not, or at least more complicated, in context. which isn't to say it can't be, but like - we don't know. canon definitely doesn't seem interested in giving a long term answer to that question.

the only people who know exactly what is going on between te'ijal and galahad are, well, te'ijal and galahad. and that idea of "my relationship is my own and my partner's and nobody else's to quantify or understand" resonates so strongly with me as an aromantic person and makes this relationship, despite being chaotic always and awful frequently, probably the one i relate to most personally out of all of fiction. i mean, where else am i gonna find a guy calling a woman he isn't in love with and isn't even technically legally married to his wife every time he talks to her?

i just really, really love te'ijal and galahad each with their own relationships to relationships that somehow helps them stumble into something that works for the both of them by throwing any idea of convention out the window and just kind of trying to make it through eternity together in the way that makes sense to them.

#aveyond #te'ijal ravenfoot #galahad teomes #te'ijalahad #additional notes going in the tags lol #you could argue the love potion scene goes against my argument that she doesnt want a normal romance because She Tries To Get One That Way #but i dont think it counts because that is kinda a weird contradictory blurb in the face of Everything Else abt how she navigates this #WOULD YOU BELIEVE ME I SOMEHOW HAVE MORE TO SAY ON THIS SUBJECT