The Moment I Realized I was Gray Ace

It’s Genndy Tartakovsky’s birthday on the day I’m writing this. So much of his work has been part of the fabric of my past, present, and certainly future. I named my first dog Dexter. I wrote some articles before that open up on how I find Primal to be crucial to art as a whole. I have yet to share how the cult favorite Sym-Bionic Titan would serve as the piece to ultimately break me through into accepting my sexuality.

Where this all began was the friendship I’m very thankful to have as well as getting to help out early on with the upcoming queer horror documentary of Sam Wineman. A little after he talked to an intimate group about how most everyone he’s worked with on this is queer, I didn’t add anything to that because I have a long history of mentally checking out whenever anything related to sex would come up in conversations. I once again found myself doing that here and would later be told by Sam one-on-one, “No one can tell you what your sexual identity is.” I would say it’s very obvious, but truthfully I never once before thought this applied to me.

To wrap my head around what I would say I am in this regard, I had to look back on what sex exactly meant to me. After the hour-long walk/metro ride, I thought I knew what to type into Google by the time I got back home that same night. The show I was binging at this time was Sym-Bionic Titan, and the next episode I was on was the I Am Octus episode.

The episode opens up with the three main characters (Lance, IIana, and Octus) talking about what a piece of art at a museum means to them. IIana says she thinks the piece makes her feel “warm and hopeful.” Lance added that he sees “desolence, devastation, and endless war.” In Between these two, the cybernetic Octus states how many colors are in the painting. When Lance and IIana ask questions about what he feels seeing it, he scans the painting then adds on how many tries the artist took before the final piece.

I always found a sort of relatability whenever I would see humanoid robots in media (Daft Punk, Buckethead, etc), so if I’m given an episode of a show that focuses on a robot character’s unreliability to the people around him, I am inclined to segway my attention from my google searches of asexuality to the tv. Octus seeing things objectively would later add as a growing tension in this episode that would eventually become an annoyance and sort of anger towards his lifeform friends he was built to protect. “My robot scanner isn’t detecting anything. I GUESS  it’s beyond my robot capacity-”.

As this episode went on, I was finding an unusual amount of relatability with this robot in particular. Especially when (in prior episodes) Octus would get a girlfriend that he clearly likes but has next to no close encounters with. As dialed in as I was into the episode, I went on to narrow down search results like “types of asexuality.”

Literally, RIGHT when my eyes fell on the type of queer I am, the episode closed on Octus saying, “I may not see the painting the way they do, but I see it my own way. I’m not a robot, and I’m not human. I am something different.” I got fucking goosebumps at that moment and thought, “Yup! That settles that”.

So how this relates to sci-fi and horror is that specific flavors of these two genres (the queer horror community and an animation king who I long admired) helped make me comfortable in my own skin. I wish I got to tell this story to Genndy when I met him before watching Sym Bionic, but I instead used that time to ask him “IS THE CAVEMAN FROM OLD FLAME THE CAVEMAN FROM PRIMAL??”. I would later on not feel like a complete dumb ass for laying an egg that hard because sometime later Adult Swim would air THIS AD. I like to think I annoyed into existence.

Until we next meet, happy belated birthmas Genndy!