Our Ace Community

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together, we are The Ace Couple, and as we see yet another Pride Month come and go, these same conversations over and over, year to year— how do we actually find community? What does queer joy look like? What does ace joy look like? The online ace community doesn’t feel like a community. All of these conversations. Exactly the same one we have every single year.

Courtney: And this year, as part of my ongoing effort to not be an online person, I decided to ignore all of the online Pride conversations, discourse, in favor of solely focusing on my personal communities, doing work in my local community in terms of mutual aid, education, and that was quite frankly a much better Pride experience than I’ve had in past years where I was paying attention to the broadly online queer community, the broadly online ace community. And in the past couple of weeks when we have done some lighter episodes, like just talking about some of our funny ace moments, we’ve gotten a lot of listener feedback that people are really enjoying hearing something nice and light and fun and enjoyable because of all of the horrors of the earth right now, which certainly cannot be ignored.

Courtney: But that did get me thinking that we haven’t spoken at length about this bright, shiny, beautiful nugget of ace joy that we had with our own personal community a little over a year ago. And so I think we’re going to share a little bit about that story today in the hopes that it can bring a little joy. Perhaps it can inspire those who are seeking community to maybe think outside of the box in terms of trying to find your own.

Royce: So how do you want to get into this? Because the caveat here is that this is a group of people that we do largely interface with online. We at least met them online and have had an ongoing sanctioned TTRPG time for nearing 4 years now.

Courtney: Yes, so although this isn’t an in-person community, this is a personal community. It’s not just people talking at each other back and forth online, right, by online I don’t mean social media, I do mean—

Royce: Virtual.

Courtney: Virtual. Yeah, well, it’s no secret, we’ve talked about it before, that we have an ongoing all-ace D&D group that has, at the time this is going to be released, hit its 4-year anniversary. And one of the things I hear over and over again from folks who don’t have a local or personal queer community or ace community is that the online ace community doesn’t feel like a community. And I wanna put a great big pin in that because this concept itself is one I have thought about tremendously, I’ve spoken with dozens of people over multiple years about my thoughts on this, and I’ve been developing these thoughts, so this in itself can and will be an entire episode about what is a community.

Courtney: But the CliffsNotes is, in a lot of ways, when people say the online ace community, they just mean if you are an ace person talking about ace things online, on social media, whether that be Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, perhaps Discord even, Facebook, all the usual suspects. And that can be a way to start your journey of finding a personal community. But if you don’t find a way to develop personal relationships with people who have shared interests past just having the same queer identity, then if seeking community is something you’re trying to do, that is when you’ll start running into this really common feeling that a lot of aces have of trying to find community and feeling like they just can’t get there, even if they see a lot of ace content or discourse come across their feeds.

Royce: And I think a big part of that is that the large social media sites are not intended to create communities. They shuffle content together, so you’re not- In an actual community, you have some manner of control over who is in and who is out and what dialogue you’re seeing. And like, it’s, it’s scoped, it’s protected in some way. The social media sites are these broad algorithms that are not designed for that.

Courtney: Yeah, my thesis of upcoming “What Is Community” episode is that communities that flourish cannot be hierarchical in nature. And social media by design is hierarchical. So can you meet people online on similar footing and find a way to take that relationship outside of social media for it to flourish? Absolutely. And outside doesn’t even necessarily have to mean you are in person. It doesn’t have to even necessarily mean, you know, we have each other’s phone numbers, we call each other every day. Uh, people can and do develop relationships in DMs, for example, just finding that actual one-to-one conversation and not just doing this one-to-many form of communication that social media has by and large turned into.

Courtney: But I, I could go on for hours about this, so we won’t right now. We’re just gonna talk about our little group. So we did actually meet all of these people online. We’re in all kinds of different time zones, none of us live near each other. But of our players, the first time I ever spoke to one was actually for our inaugural Disabled Ace Day, so that was founding a Disabled Ace Day event during Ace Week, found some common ground pertaining to the intersections of disability and asexuality, and our frustrations that those intersectional conversations were not getting the proper respect that they deserved. That was Mik, who has been on our podcast before. Mik is also a streamer on Twitch. So even though I hadn’t been on Twitch in many, many years, I did start watching some of their streams, popping into chat a little bit. And when we were just, you know, brand new on Twitter, not knowing many other online aces— I did actually know some in-person aces. Obviously, you, I live with, but I was so naive to the ways of Twitter-type social media that I was like, I’m just gonna follow any and all aces I find, and it’s just gonna be a big ace love fest. And for the most part, that was not true. But I did start by just following a ton of aces, which at the time, the, the searching on the website, if you search the word like asexual or ace or aces, it would show you profiles of basically everyone who had those words in their bio, so that was kind of how I started. If you had those words in your username or your bio, I was just gonna follow you.

Royce: And that was right at podcast creation time, basically.

Courtney: Yes. And one of those accounts was Aces Playing at Attraction, Shakey— Shakey— Sharky and Satan, also both podcast Interview alumni.

Royce: They still have the honor of being our longest 2 episodes.

Courtney: Such an honor. Such an honor it is. And so finding these extra shared interests is really, really important because now all of a sudden I have a Twitter account that I don’t know how to use and I don’t like being on it. But now when I log in, I see just a bunch of random ace people talking about whatever’s on their mind, whether or not it’s ace-related.

Courtney: And one day Sharky and Satan happened to be playing Undertale, and that is one of our favorite games. It had definitely been a couple of years since we played it. Based on the stream announcement post, it sounds like they were gonna have a bad time. And we wanted to watch. So we popped into the stream and started chatting in there. And they had a bad time, but we had a good one.

Courtney: And as we got to know all three of these people a little better through additional conversations outside of the original platforms we had met them on— I believe Mik was a guest streamer on someone’s D&D campaign on Twitch at one point, and we had already had a former D&D group fall apart catastrophically, in large part due to the acephobia of our friend and DM at the time. So we had a big, like, D&D-shaped hole in our lives. And we were interested in starting another campaign. But this was also during a period of time where I was not leaving the house at all. Neither of us were. Uh, the pandemic was no joke, is still no joke. And so we were really lamenting, how are we going to find this again? How are we going to meet new people if we can’t leave the house?

Courtney: So that’s when I hatched the idea, oh, if Mik plays D&D, maybe we can play D&D with them. So over the course of several more months of chatting, getting to know everyone a little better, throwing this out as an idea and an option, we got all three of them on board to start playing a virtual campaign with a weekly schedule, and we recruited a mysterious 4th member who we shall not perceive. And we started our first campaign four years ago on July 4th, because fuck fireworks and fuck this country, D&D is better with all ace D&D group.

Royce: Yeah, July 4th, 2022 was our first proper session. We had had a session zero before that to get backstory figured out and set expectations. This was the first time we had tried to run a full campaign from a book. We had had some D&D experience on homebrew one-shots, all with the same 5th edition rule set, but this was a bigger undertaking. It was Out of the Abyss. That is a pretty large scope adventure.

Courtney: Which, if any of you D&D nerds out there are interested in actually hearing about what happened in our campaign, it was amazing. It was such a fun time. They made such incredible decisions. We had a blast DMing it, and we would be willing to share some of those things. I don’t want to put it in this podcast also because some of you might not want Out of the Abyss spoilers. Some of you might not care and are only here to talk about the social and community aspect of it. So let us know if you’re interested, and maybe that’ll be an option in the future. But we kept a very, very consistent schedule throughout the run of this campaign almost every single week. There were only a few one-offs now and then where someone had something going on. And we very often still made the commitment to meet even if one or two of us were out. So we would sometimes intersperse a little one-shot separate from our campaign here or there, or we just get together to chat.

Royce: Or do some kind of light party game. I think the biggest hurdle in getting a TTRPG group set up is to protect the time slots that you’re supposed to meet up.

Courtney: Which, that’s not only true of, like, TTRPG groups, but that’s just true of community in a broader scope. It is showing up and being intentional about it. Yet another thing that social media is not good at because they want you to be very absent-minded about it a lot of time by design. So when we were nearing our 3rd year of playing, they are getting really close to finishing the campaign, and we decided what better way to celebrate this campaign and give it a send-off and give it a memorable finale, but to actually, for the first time, get everyone together face to face.

Courtney: So we did have to sort of put a brief hiatus on the campaign when they did basically everything except the finale, the big final encounter, to get everything coordinated and get everyone’s schedules aligned. But we made it work so that really close to the 3-year anniversary, we were able to get everybody to come in from all of their miscellaneous places to stay here in our home to do the finale session right at our dining room table where we record these podcasts. As a matter of fact, that’s where we’re sitting right now.

Courtney: And listeners, I cannot tell you how much that week meant to me. We did have a little bit of a hurdle figuring out how to take our all-virtual campaign into the physical world. I had fun because I have started painting minis. I had started only a few months before we started planning this little trip, but I was determined to get everybody actual minis to have on the board, so I sent everyone a link to HeroForge so they could basically create their own minis, and then we printed them out here at our house and I painted them, but we’ve been playing on Roll20 this whole time. That’s where all of our maps had been. So a lot of figuring out the map situation, uh, sort of fell to you.

Royce: Yeah, and I don’t know that I would do it the same this time. We tried to take a TV, put it on the table, get the sort of Roll20 battle map that we were using for the finale onto it at the proper scale to support minis so we could do a mix of tokens for smaller enemies and minis for more important things. But the story we were trying to tell with the finale was too large of a scope. Like, the physical map was too large for that to be suited very well.

Courtney: It was a real big map.

Royce: It was kind of clunky, but it was still fun.

Courtney: They were real big enemies.

Royce: It was still fun. That is just a challenging thing to do in D&D in general.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: I think.

Courtney: Yes. But the actual finale was so much fun and getting sort of— obviously we’re all together here to play this game and play this finale, but that happened on one day and we had, you know, the rest of the week to explore other interests. And that was just so great to get to engage with our players, not only in person, but with their other interests that don’t always overlap with D&D. We’ve got a player, for instance, who really enjoys making cocktails and made an entire cocktail menu for us themed around all of the demon lords we encountered in this campaign, which was so cool and wonderful and great.

Courtney: And we actually got some of our in-person local community to help with this because we had, for example, in this campaign is Jublex, the demon lord of slimes and oozes and things. So of course they thought, well, this should probably be a Jell-O shot. But most standard recipes for Jell-O shots are not vegan to work for us. But we have a very good friend and neighbor who had already previously figured out a vegan Jell-O shot recipe for us for a totally unrelated event and was able to help them make this new Jell-O shot based on their original recipe.

Courtney: We had a player who brought the Final Fantasy TTRPG. I feel like we’ve offhandedly mentioned the Final Fantasy TTRPG, but I don’t remember when or why it would have come up.

Royce: We mentioned the Final Fantasy XIV TTRPG recently because we had a commenter who was surprised to learn that it existed. I don’t remember the context either.

Courtney: But yeah, so on one of the days we had who is normally one of our players actually GM for us a totally different game and do a one-shot. And that was just so incredibly joyful, uh, because we’d been— we, we had our suspicions, uh, this would be a fabulous GM, but we had not, uh, been able to confirm it yet. So that was wonderful to see that all of our suspicions were in fact true. And of course, while we’re here in Kansas City, gotta do all of the Kansas City things. So we recommended our favorite barbecue place because it has a solid option for us that is not meat. And sometimes we ordered takeout to eat at home. We did eat out a couple of times. Uh, we did quite a bit of cooking for everyone as well while they were here.

Royce: Yeah, there was some jazz. There were a couple places we went around town, not too many.

Courtney: Oh, jazz, of course! I mean, that is quintessential Kansas City, first of all, but we have a player who’s incredibly interested in jazz, so we took them to the Mutual Musicians Foundation, which is in the historic 18th and Vine district, which is the oldest continually operating jazz venue in the world. They are only open extremely late at night.

Royce: Oh yeah, because this place is what it is, they also have a special license to sell alcohol at odd hours that other places are not allowed to do.

Courtney: Yeah, there is a Missouri law, because they open like after midnight and go until 6 AM, only on Fridays and Saturdays, and you can hear just incredible jazz music. And there’s always an opportunity, if you’re a jazz musician yourself, to bring your own instrument, and there’s always an opportunity to jam with the band. Like, incredibly cool stuff. But Missouri, yeah, fully passed a provision specifically for this place and this place only to serve alcohol until 6 AM.

Courtney: There was a time we were floating the possibility of renting a karaoke room, but we had varying levels of excitement and reservation about that. And I’m actually really pleased with the alternative we came up with because this is maybe one of my favorite nights ever. This entire day was just so phenomenal. But one of our players has started learning guitar. I have a guitar which I have not played in years. And I was never very good in the first place because my hands are tiny and my fingers are hypermobile. But I broke the guitar out, and right here in the parlor of our house, we were mostly all sitting on the floor. We have furniture in that room, but we were mostly all on the floor. And we played music, we took turns singing, um, we had some of our special Demon Lord cocktails flowing. Incredibly, incredibly important week in my life.

Courtney: And of course, had to have cake! Not only for all of our aces, but for the celebratory culmination of this 3-year-long campaign. So I ordered a great big cake from my favorite local vegan bakery, and I told them to put Out of the Abyss on it, and then I gave them like all the flavor options and everything, and for decorating notes, I just told them to make it look evil. And that was interesting to see what they came up with. It was a little too pretty to be evil, but it was a pretty cake. It was like purple letters Out of the Abyss on top, and they just did like black roses all around the perimeter of this great big huge round cake. And so we just had that like ready in a box on our kitchen table all week so anyone could just help themself when they wanted some cake. And it was a very big, dense cake, so it lasted us a while.

Courtney: And just in the span of that week, with everyone here staying with us, finishing this large campaign that we’d put so much time into and effort— our time slot for playing was, you know, roughly four hours. Every week. And depending on what was going on, it wasn’t uncommon that we would just be catching up for half an hour or an hour before we’d even start playing. So it wasn’t always a solid four hours of playing, but that was sort of our dedicated time block. But even outside of that, I mean, just you and I, Royce, as the DMs, like we had extra prep time, extra thinking and planning to do with it. So it was a lot of dedicated hours and it was just so satisfying to see that come to such a wonderful conclusion.

Courtney: But just on the personal level, having everyone here, having all of that time with them, exploring all of these different interests together, there are so many moments that every time I think of them, if it just randomly pops into my head, I smile. I’m frequently thinking about how wonderful that entire time was. And there were so many little funny moments that we can still joke about with our group together, things that, you know, I’m gonna keep amongst us because it’s, it’s personal and private and meaningful to us. And I can never convey exactly, um, what that means to you as outsiders just listening in on this, but the end of that campaign did not spell the end of this group. We are still playing together. Due to a variety of life and schedule changes, we had to take a little time before we started a new dedicated campaign, so we were bouncing around from like other one-shots for a while.

Courtney: But it’s really cool. We started not too long ago Wilds Beyond the Witchlight, and the way that is sort of integrated with some of the backstories from the characters in Out of the Abyss. We’re sort of making this a sister campaign. It’s new characters. It’s not the same characters. But we’re saying that these two stories took place more or less simultaneously. So there’s going to be a little bit of lore mixed in between the two. So that’s been really exciting for us as DMs to think about, but we also came up with a new solution for the times where, uh, one of us might have to be out because we have another obligation. Because previously it was like, okay, who’s gonna DM a one-shot? Who has the time and capacity to do this right now? But you came up with a great new solution, and I’m excited to see how that turns out.

Royce: Yeah, we haven’t ventured too far outside of the 5th edition D&D ruleset just because it’s very familiar, and it’s nice once you get so familiar with a particular style of game that playing the game is pretty easy, and then you can just focus on the roleplaying and the storytelling. But I did finally get into Blades in the Dark after hearing some good comments on it. It’s something that’s been on my radar for a few years, but again, learning a new ruleset is daunting, so I had never looked at it. I hadn’t looked at it until recently, but we should be starting that up soon, and that I hope will serve as a good B-plot for whenever someone is out from our standard sessions.

Courtney: It wouldn’t really be a B-plot, it would be a Plan B. But this is a very different universe than the Feywilds. So do let us know if anyone is interested in hearing a little more about the campaign. If not, we can keep that as a fond memory and a hell of a story for ourselves. But I know there’s a lot of D&D people out there, and it is because I know that a lot of you are out there that I have the perfect marketplace vendor to share with you today.

Courtney: The Evil Nay, where you can find apparel, accessories, comics, and art at the intersection of the TTRPG community and queer culture. Now this shop I’ve been a huge fan of for a year now, before even becoming one of our Marketplace vendors. Our aforementioned good friend who helped with the, uh, Jell-O shots actually happened to find this creator’s booth at a Pride that wasn’t even our own local Pride, and ended up not only buying things for himself, but buying us gifts, because look at this, how great are these designs.

Courtney: We have a whole slew of like d20s in the color of different pride flags. And so the one we got gifted is a d20 with the ace pride colors that says seduction resistant. And for himself, he got a d20. And mind you, this is also a player of mine for our in-person Curse of Strahd campaign that I am DMing. So this is a good friend that we introduced to D&D. And he got this rainbow-colored d20 that just says slay.

Courtney: And these are so, so good. So this was before I even knew that this creator was AeroAce. I am getting gifted items from their shop and just absolutely falling in love with them. And so here are some ones I don’t have. But when I started looking at this shop, these all had me giggling. There is an aero-colored die that says disengage. There is a bear flag that says wild shape. It’s so good. The non-binary flag says multiclass, and the trans flag d20 says reroll. I am completely obsessed.

Courtney: And there’s a lot of other just like really good queer nerd merch, even if TTRPGs aren’t your thing. There are a lot of really cool like Pokémon designs. There are a lot of more general designs that just say like, oh, well, here, I guess there’s even an Owl House. We’ve done an episode on The Owl House. Lots of other nerdy fandoms. We’ve got some Spirited Away, we’ve got some Mario. And again, this is clothes, stickers, tote bags, keychains, even books. There is a full-color 68-page comic here. The artwork is obviously beautiful. I haven’t read it myself, but now that I see it, I might have to.

Courtney: I even got an extra one of these seduction-resistant stickers to give as a gift to another D&D ace that we know who does happen to be a local friend of ours who ran an ace-themed one-shot for us last Pride Month, as well as a couple other aces we managed to recruit. And that was also, again, wonderful, joyous in-person community, loved it so much. Had to gift one of these stickers because it is just far too good. So links, as always, to find the Evil Nay are going to be in the description box if you’re listening on YouTube or the show notes on our website. And as always, thank you all so much for being here. And we will talk to you all next time.