An agave lounge with a six-course small bites menu paired with cocktails should debut later this month in Wicker Park. Botánero is from chef and partner Yanitzin “Yani” Sanchez and partner Richard Vallejo. It’s replacing Caspian, a casual Mediterranean restaurant at 1413 N. Ashland Avenue, according to a news release.
Botánero’s special tasting menu will be offered on Wednesdays, kicking off on October 23. There will be two seatings daily and reservations will be taken via Tock. Besides the tasting menu look for tamales, quesadillas, and tlayudas made with tortillas derived from heirloom corn from Mexico.
Typically served at bars with drinks, botanas are small plates, kind of a Mexican counterpart to Spanish tapas. Ownership hopes the taco de negro asada with prime beef ribeye, queso asadero, mojo negro, onion-cilantro gremolata, and roasted marrow bone becomes a signature.
Weekend brunch should include a bottomless option for unlimited house margaritas, micheladas, mimosas, and spritzers.
Chef Yani and Vallejo are frequent collaborators. They teamed on Taquizo, a casual taqueria that opened in 2022 and has since closed in Wicker Park. Taquizo was a reboot of Las Palmas. There are also two shuttered suburban Mexican spots: Mercado Cocina in suburban Glenview and Cine in Hinsdale.
Sanchez’s credits also include Sabor Saveur in Wicker Park. That space would become Takito, and she continued as a consultant for the burgeoning group that expanded into West Loop and Lincoln Park.
While not the sole focus of Botánero, Mexican tasting menus are still a rarity in Chicago, with Topolobampo and Tzuco in River North being the most prominent. In recent years, taco-tasting menus at places like Cariño and Taqueria Chingon have soared.
Botánero, 1413 W. Ashland Avenue, planned for an October opening; Wednesday tasting menu launches on October 23, brunch launches on November 9.
In the urban-suburban trajectory, restaurants typically start in the city before making their way to smaller towns around it. Opening in early September, Petit Pomeroy reverse engineers that story as the smaller sibling to Winnetka’s Pomeroy, which opened in September 2021 on the North Shore.
“Pomeroy is the highest-grossing restaurant we have in Ballyhoo,” says Ryan O’Donnell, Ballyhoo founder and CEO. “The suburbs have been very good to us.”
Above Ballyhoo’s Gemini Grill, which opened earlier this year at upscale residences One Chicago in River North, Petit Pomeroy is one of four restaurants Ballyhoo Hospitality (Coda di Volpe, Old Pueblo Cantina, DeNucci’s, and Gemini among others) will be opening in the next seven months. The other three will be in suburban Highland Park and Glenview.
“When we were doing Gemini Grill, we retrofitted the second floor to be a restaurant, but we didn’t know what exactly,” O’Donnell says. “We wanted to see what was happening in the local dining scene and the landscape and figure out what would be best suited there.”
Classic French fare like roasted chicken are on the menu.Ballyhoo Hospitality
“Sometimes people can be intimidated by French food as they think it’s fine dining or heavy with lots of sauces,” O’Donnell says. “But bistro food is comfort food at its heart and core.”
While Pomeroy leans more into brasserie territory, Petit Pomeroy will be more of a classic French bistro. Petit Pomeroy is smaller in size (90 seats versus 280) and O’Donnell says the second-floor kitchen is about a quarter the size of Winnetka’s.
“We couldn’t do the big, expansive menu,” says O’Donnell. “We had to pare it down, which allowed us to focus on the greatest hits. It’s not a complete rinse and repeat, but we’re not going to change a lot of the stuff we do really well.”
The warm tomato tart with dried heirloom tomatoes, fromage blanc, and herbes de Provence inside a puff pastry shell made the move. “It might not be the most classic French thing in the world, but it’s been a big mover in Winnetka,” says O’Donnell.
Winnetka’s popular plats du jour are making the journey too, including top-seller short rib Bourguignon with pommes purée. “Last night we sold 48 in Winnetka,” says O’Donnell. Look for other French bistro classics, such as bouillabaisse and escargots.
Profiteroles Glacées with vanilla bean gelato and warm chocolate.Ballyhoo Hospitality
Beverages will follow a similar Gallic route with an emphasis on French wines, including sparking and Champagne, with cocktails such as the French 75, Le Spritz, and Le Pamplemousse.
For the interior, red leather banquettes and booths are paired with bistro-style chairs. Touches include brass railings, vintage posters, and wood paneling. A bar will seat eight. From its second-floor perch, views of Holy Name Cathedral across the street will be front and center.
“The drama of the room’s setting will surprise people,” says O’Donnell. “People don’t know what’s up on that second floor so I think that will be the big wow factor.”
Petit Pomeroy, 748 N. State Street, scheduled for a mid-September opening.
Tequila is the top-selling liquor at Virtue, the Hyde Park restaurant from award winners Erick Williams and Damarr Brown, says General Manager Jesus Garcia. The fact that the agave-based spirit beat out rum and bourbon surprised the team, as Virtue celebrates Black American culture.
The data reiterated the thirst for cocktails in Hyde Park, and Garcia says staff regularly turns away customers who just want to come in and have a drink. Virtue is food-focused, showcasing a gamut of southern culinary traditions. But the demand for tequila reveals an opportunity that Williams and Garcia hope to capitalize on when they open their new bar this fall, just around the corner from Virtue.
The newly named Cantina Rosa will focus on the beverage side, taking Virtue’s approach to Black culture, “leading with kindness and hospitality” and applying that to Mexican culture. Garcia grew up in Rogers Park but was born in Mexico. He arrived in America when he was 3, his family is from Puebla, Mexico. They returned to Mexico after about a decade before once more settling in Chicago. While Garcia lacks memories of Mexico as a young child, he vividly remembers his second stint in Mexico as a teen. The bar won’t focus on a particular region or spirit. Garcia is happy to show that Mexico is about more than agave and he wants to showcase bourbon and Charanda — a rum from Michoacan, Mexico.
Garcia sees a chance to fill a niche in Hyde Park, and while he doesn’t mind expanding customers’ tastes, introducing them to Mexican flavors they haven’t experienced, he doesn’t want to be heavy-handed.
“We are mindful that before it’s a Mexican bar, it’s going to a bar,” Garcia says. “If somebody comes in and orders an Old Fashioned, we’re going to be able to make that.”
This philosophy also tracks with the bar’s name. Williams and Garcia wanted to pick something English speakers could gravitate toward, something personal, yet easy to pronounce. It’s not exactly the “Martha” moment from Batman v Superman, but Garcia’s mother is named Rosa, and Williams’s grandmother is Rose.
They’re still orchestrating the bar bites menu, offering tacos and more. The drink menu is already finalized. They worked with celebrated barman Paul McGee on the beverage list and the bar’s layout. While Williams and Garcia are confident in operating a restaurant — they met while working at Mk The Restaurant — they brought in McGee, seeing how he helped make Lost Lake in Logan Square a successful tropical drink destination.
Garcia began his restaurant career at 15 as a busser at Chef’s Station, a since-shuttered restaurant in Evanston. He held several positions at Mk before delving into wine and serving as the restaurant’s general manager. He remembers meeting Williams and noting that he “came across as very genuine and intense.” The two bonded over strong work ethics and Williams credits Garcia’s leadership at Virtue in making the restaurant successful.
The space, a former laundromat, will be redecorated with local art, pottery, and seating options for big and small groups. Stay tuned for more information about Cantina Rosa as fall approaches.
Cantina Rosa, 5230 S. Harper Avenue, planned for a fall opening.
Capcom has released a list of fixes and updates it will make to Dragon’s Dogma 2 “in the near future” — including the much-requested option to start a new game when save data already exists.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 only offers a single save slot, and presently, players who want to start the game again — perhaps to try a different specialization — can only do so by manually deleting their save file at the system level first. This can be a fiddly process involving disabling cloud saving and, for Steam players, actually locating their game save on the hard drive.
Capcom said it would add “the option to start a new game when save data already exists” as part of the first wave of updates to Dragon’s Dogma 2. This doesn’t mean it will actually add a second save slot for a new character; the update will simply make it easy to overwrite your save from within the game itself.
To all Dragon’s Dogma 2 players!
We’re planning to release patches including the following updates and fixes in the near future, and will release them as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform.
Capcom also said it would add a frame rate cap of 30 frames per second to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game. As it is, the game runs with an uncapped frame rate, meaning it can sometimes run faster than 30 fps, but this can result in inconsistent and juddery performance (especially for players without variable refresh rate displays). A 30 fps cap should ensure a more consistent and stable feel to the game.
Capcom also said it would add options to switch off the motion blur and ray tracing graphical effects to console versions of Dragon’s Dogma 2, but it warned that doing so “will not affect the frame rate significantly.” Frame rate improvements will come in “future updates,” it said. PC players will now get better-quality results from the DLSS.
Another target for an early fix is the Art of Metamorphosis item that allows you to change the appearance of your character. Previously in very limited supply, the stock of this item is being increased to 99 at Pawn Guilds. This change appears to be targeted at criticism of the game’s microtransactions, which include the sale of Art of Metamorphosis at $1.99. With this change, it will only be inability to afford the in-game price that would push players toward paying real money to change the looks of their character or Main Pawn. (No changes were announced for other rare items available to buy as microtransactions, such as Wakestones or Portcrystals.)
Other changes coming soon will make it possible to acquire your own dwelling earlier in the game, as well as various text display and bug fixes.
Capcom said it would release the updates “as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform.”
The acclaimed chef behind Ina Mae Tavern in Wicker Park and Frontier in West Town is working on a new restaurant. Brian Jupiter is partnering with his chef de cuisine at Frontier, Azazi Morsi, on a project on the Northwest Side in Portage Park called Migos Fine Foods.
The restaurant will center around delivery and carryout with 12 seats at 5044 W. Montrose, near the Jefferson Park border. Jupiter says it’s convenient; he lives about 10 minutes away in Albany Park while the Algerian-born Morsi lives in Portage Park. The approach is fun, fast, and casual — affordable eats that customers can enjoy more than once a week. The restaurant should open in early April. They’ll also have a small patio.
Brian Jupiter is opening a third restaurant separate from the ownership group at Frontier and Ina Mae.Pioneer Tavern Group
The menu includes halal fried chicken and tacos. Renata Jupiter is handling the sweets with cakes and cookies from her business, Adry’s Pastries. Brian Jupiter describes the doughnuts as being similar to beignets, but a little longer. They’ll have various toppings. They aren’t serving alcohol, but Frontier mixologist Edgar Garcia is creating some agua frescas.
Morsi and Jupiter plan on expanding their operations to catering in May. The restaurant is separate from Pioneer Tavern Group, Brian Jupiter’s partners at Frontier and Ina Mae (the group also runs Lottie’s Pub in Bucktown). The new restaurant won’t have an impact on Jupiter’s duties at those two other restaurants.
Migos Fine Foods, 5044 W. Montrose, planned for an April 2 opening.
An upcoming Taiwanese restaurant in Andersonville will champion beef noodle soup — a Taiwanese staple that has been embraced by many as the country’s national dish.
Taiwan-born chef Rich Wang has worked at award-winning restaurants like Boka in Lincoln Park and Fat Rice in Logan Square. His first solo project, Minyoli, is aiming for an early April debut at 5420 N. Clark Street. It’s the former home of Korean-Italian hit Passerotto, and more recently, an outpost of Loop restaurant Land & Lake Kitchen. He will present a traditional beef noodle soup with a deep and herbal broth infused with warm spices like cardamom and cinnamon; springy noodles made on-site and cut by hand each day; and melt-in-your-mouth cuts of beef shank — “the cherry on top,” he says. He’ll also serve lu wei (or lou mai in Cantonese), which Wang roughly translates to mean braised snacks.
The menu allows Minyoli to pay homage to juàn cun, Taiwan’s distinctive and fast-disappearing cultural enclaves. Wang was born at one of these “military dependents’ villages” in Tapei before he immigrated to the U.S. with his family at age 14. He’s watched with interest and concern as villages like the one he grew up in dwindled amid a governmental push for “urban renewal” across the island nation.
Renderings show a sleek, minimalist aesthetic.Minyoli
Juàn cun initially emerged in the late 1940s toward the end of the Chinese Civil War to house Chinese military personnel and their families. Over time, these enclaves generated unique culinary and cultural mash-ups, and at their height numbered more than 800 throughout the country. However, they have grappled with issues of poor housing construction, disrepair, dereliction, and abandonment. As of 2019, fewer than 30 juàn cun remain in Taiwan. The beef noodle Wang will serve originates from juán cun.
“It was rough and provisional housing, and as you can imagine, a lot of Chinese culture suddenly merged into these small neighborhoods and engendered a unique cuisine only found in Taiwan,” he says. “It’s great that people are moving into better neighborhoods, but I want to remember the cuisine.”
The restaurant’s debut will realize a long-held goal for Wang, who at age 30 left a career as a corporate attorney for the hospitality industry. His culinary chops extend beyond the U.S. border, as Wang cooked for three years under lauded Cantonese chef Tam Kwok Fung at his Michelin-starred restaurant in Macau.
Wang has also spent a month at a hand-pulled noodle “boot camp” in Lanzhou, China (a city famed for its noodles) where he earned an official certification in the technique. While he won’t have the staff or time to make hand-pulled noodles at Minyoli, the experience was memorable. “It was the middle of December for eight hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. “There were no breaks and no heat — I was wearing my down jacket pulling noodles for a month.”
In Andersonville, his team will braise tofu, eggs, and meats in the same master stock as the soup to complement the noodles. Wang also promises a small cocktail menu featuring Taiwanese liquors, beer, and cocktails, as well as a dessert menu with ice cream flavors like taro, black sesame, and red bean.
Minyoli’s Taiwanese focus will extend to the bar menus.Minyoli
Minyoli’s long and narrow 1,775 square-foot space on Andersonville’s main drag is undergoing a facelift with an abundance of light natural wood, woven basket lampshades, and exposed brick walls. Wang also notes that while the overall aesthetic leans into subtlety, it will also feature pops of a very particular shade of aquamarine.
“That specific color, you can find it everywhere in juàn cun, probably because it was the cheapest paint available at the time,” Wang says. “That color specifically reminds me of my childhood.”
Minyoli, 5420 N. Clark Street, scheduled to open in early April.
A few weeks ago, we informed you about the political happenings in Austin around animal welfare, in particular, around the city seeking to pass a resolution allowing the euthanization of dogs with bites on their records. We want to keep you updated on progress and current events on an ongoing basis.
Nintendo will broadcast a new Nintendo Direct presentation on Wednesday, Feb. 21, a showcase focused Switch games coming in the first half of 2024, the company announced Monday. The new Nintendo Direct starts at 9 a.m. EST/6 a.m. PST, and will run about 25 minutes, Nintendo says.
Wednesday’s Direct will be viewable on Nintendo’s YouTube and Twitch channels. The presentation be on-demand, meaning the entire showcase will go live at once.
Nintendo notes that its newest Nintendo Direct presentation is a Partner Showcase, meaning that third-party publishers and developers will be the focus during the video showcase. In other words, don’t expect a big blowout on Nintendo’s first-party slate.
Nintendo’s currently announced first-party lineup includes Switch games Princess Peach Showtime!, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Of course, Nintendo may have a few surprises in store as well. The company still has Metroid Prime 4 on its release schedule, and is rumored to be sitting on a handful of remakes and remasters.
Less likely to appear during February’s Nintendo Direct is the company’s next console. “Switch 2” is reportedly coming sometime in 2025.
City-building survival game Frostpunk 2 will put settlers in the same perilous conditions as the first game — in a time of ice age, where the environment becomes bleaker and bleaker. But, according to a new gameplay trailer, it looks like it will up the ante from the original game’s unforgiving, dystopian conditions. The sequel is slated to come out sometime in the first half of 2024 on PC, and will debut on Game Pass.
In Frostpunk, you manage a city of settlers in a town near London during the industrial revolution, weathering a cataclysmic environmental event. Ice storms have ravaged most of humanity; you must find a way to keep the generators for heat, while assigning workers and making constant tradeoffs in order to keep people fed, housed, and, most of all, alive. The game’s motto was “The city must survive” — your citizens believe they are some of the last living humans, and letting the generator die means freezing to death.
Frostpunk 2, which is set 30 years after the original, takes these ideas and runs with them — the city has lasted this long, the motto is now “The city must not fall.” It looks as if each of the core conceits of the original game got a glow-up. The top-down design of the city is just as vivid and picturesque. But the gameplay trailer reveals more sophisticated UI features in the building layout, including what appear to be design elements related to new heating technologies. When Frostpunk 2 was first announced in 2021, the announcement trailer noted generator technology evolved to run on oil — but that these upgrades would come at a price.
In Frostpunk 2, players must navigate political conflict and worker rebellion. It appears workers now have agency to fight back against the Steward’s — that’s you, the player — choices, in the form of voting things down. The gameplay trailer shows the inside of a civic building, in which workers vote on equal pay. The trailer also shows off a few narrative flashpoint moments, where citizens ask for specific things, or voice specific complaints: At one point, a miner named Ian Mactavish shouts “where are the homes you’ve promised.”
That might be the most frightening bit this sequel promises, honestly — being able to put faces and names to the working population. The original game gave you basically no good choices: You’re forcing people to work 18 hours, feeding them sawdust, and attempting to puzzle out whether militarism or religion is the best way to enforce adherence. It looks like in the sequel, you’ll have to face the brutal consequences of your choices.
Until my early 20s, I believed I was a “normal” sex-haver. I assumed any guilt or repulsion I felt after intimacy was a universal experience. It wasn’t until a year ago that, after hearing me mention that I had repeatedly dissociated after kissing various Tinder dates, my friend said: “You know what asexuality is, right?” I stuttered, offended; of course I knew what it meant, but only in that “jock calling the nerd asexual because he won’t ever get laid” way. She called my bluff and showed me a video from an asexual YouTuber who echoed many of my secret opinions about dating and intimacy. This set me on the path to find as many video essays about asexuality as possible, which explained that I wasn’t broken or in need of the “right person”; my love would just come from somewhere besides sex. Any blueprints for where I might find it or what that love might be instead were a mystery, as I quickly found that asexual representation in media is an absolute travesty.
There’s no easy way to show an identity based around the lack of something rather than its presence, but when you start throwing out SpongeBob as my LGBTQIA+ rep, I know it’s not a serious conversation. Good asexual (aka ace) characters do exist — Bojack Horseman’s resident goofball Todd Chavez is beloved by many for his swagless slacker schemes — but most rely on negative stereotypes that perpetuate the myth of inhumanity among those who don’t build their love lives around sex.
Asexual people in media are represented as dispassionate outcasts who avoid close relationships; they are cold and calculating celibates (like Sherlock Holmes), or they force sex upon themselves to fix their perceived inadequacies (like Olivia from whatever the hell The Olivia Experiment was trying to be). Asexual representation isn’t nearly as prevalent in media as gay, lesbian, or bisexual rep, but three of Netflix’s biggest teenage shows of 2023 — Sex Education, Heartstopper, and Everything Now — featured aces as core characters with storylines dedicated to understanding their identities. Much like their queer antecedents who introduced the general public to non-cis, non-hetero ways of life, these ace characters have to come out and explain themselves. Despite good intentions, it’s hard for each character to not read as a first attempt.
Sex is everywhere in our society, especially during high school, when hormones rage, emotions deepen, and the world cracks open like a spoiled fruit. Putting those primal feelings into words is hard, but that hasn’t stopped Sex Education from highlighting as many sexual identities as possible, including a brief storyline in season 2 in which theater kid Florence (Mirren Mack) recognizes her own asexuality. In a conversation with sex therapist Jean (Gillian Anderson), Florence voices her discontent with social pressures to date and hook up, poignantly stating that she’s “surrounded by a feast” but isn’t hungry. As soon as Florence accepts her ace identity, the series moves on from her; Florence’s sexlessness was a problem to be voiced but not an orientation to be explored.
Photo: Samuel Taylor/Netflix
It wasn’t until the final season this year that the show’s creators went all in on asexuality with Sarah “O” Owen (Thaddea Graham), a woman of color and sex therapist at Cavendish. O acts as a rival and antagonist to series protagonist Otis (Asa Butterfield); so much of the season revolves around Otis’ attempts to reclaim his place as the sole sex therapist on campus. During their bizarre election where students vote for who they most trust to therapize their sexual dilemmas, Otis tries to prove that O is untrustworthy and unreliable by revealing that she ghosted several former partners. To save her reputation, O comes out as asexual and says she ghosted partners because she didn’t know how to talk about it yet — although given all the scheming and scratching she had pulled over the course of the season, you’d be forgiven for thinking her coming out might be a ploy for sympathy. I did.
This misunderstanding became a prevalent enough internet discourse that Yasmin Benoit — an ace activist and woman of color who served as a script consultant for the season — took to X (formerly Twitter) to reveal multiple scenes and lines were changed or cut that addressed both the racial bias and acephobia that O faces throughout the season. Without this additional context, I found it difficult to be as offended as I should have been when Otis accused her of using asexuality as a way to tarnish his image. The show instead portrays O spending most of the season trying to maintain her pristine image, all the way down to her slick influencer branding. This emphasis on her insincerity sometimes obscures how terrible it is that Otis attempts to claim her space and ruin her life.
It isn’t until episode 7 that her backstory dump — which delves into how her schoolmates singled her out for her race and Northern Irish accent, how she felt abnormal because she didn’t have crushes or intimate fantasies, how she felt safe in her sex clinic but felt if she ever told the truth no one would trust her because “who wants to have sex advice from someone who doesn’t have sex?” — finally brings her closer to the character Benoit seemingly set out to create. For me, the damage was already done: O remains a messy, calculating, and isolated asexual, rather than being the thoughtful representation the ace community deserves.
The final season of SexEducation is a mixed bag, but it tries to create a three-dimensional ace character; Heartstopper felt content to stop at character. The show’s second season does a lot to darken its light and fluffy image: It tackles biphobia, abusive parents, and disordered eating. But it never quite knows what to do with Isaac (Tobie Donovan). The laconic bookworm finds himself courted by James (Bradley Riches), and their awkward flirtations are drawn out for most of the season until they finally kiss in a Parisian hotel’s hallway. Isaac seems repelled by the intimacy and is sent into a spiral — though we don’t see it. Isaac’s explanation to James in the following episode is familiar to asexuals: He has never had a crush on someone and hoped that maybe James would be different. But he wasn’t.
Photo: Samuel Dore/Netflix
When his friends cajole him for details about the kiss, Isaac snaps, yelling that he knows they don’t find his life interesting with its lack of romantic drama. It’s a sentiment shared by series creator Alice Oseman herself, who identifies as aromantic and asexual (aroace) and in an interview with The Guardian stated, “The world is obsessed with sex and romance. And if you don’t have that, you feel like you haven’t achieved something that’s really important.” In her novel Loveless, she tries to explore narratives where romance and sex aren’t the main focus with aroace protagonist Georgia. But where Georgia has 400-plus pages to grow and change, Isaac’s character can only come out in bits and spurts around the central romance between Nick (Kit Connor) and Charlie (Joe Locke). We never get to know his personality or desires, so Isaac’s frustration with his friends seemingly comes from nowhere.
Literally two minutes after his outburst, Isaac meets an artist exhibiting a piece about their aroace identity, and everything they say resonates with him: the loneliness of existing in a world that prizes romance and sex when you don’t feel those attractions, the confusion that comes with feeling different without the words to describe it, the freedom of letting go of those external expectations and existing as yourself. Isaac immediately accepts himself as aroace. It’s a beautiful sentiment hamstrung by the fact that Isaac was just given the answers to his identity problems, no introspection necessary.
Image: Netflix
By contrast, Everything Now is a show without easy answers; its depiction of disordered eating, substance abuse, sexual intimacy, and mental health struggles are important if not always easy to watch. While much of the series focuses on recovering anorexic Mia’s (Sophie Wilde) return to high school after a brief hospitalization, it was her friend Will (Noah Thomas) who captured my heart. Will is boisterous, confident, and fashionable, traits that he claims won the lusty affection of the cheesemonger at his workplace. Except the cheesemonger doesn’t know his name, and when “Cheese Guy” eventually does try to hook up with him, Will runs away. Will is embarrassed about his virginity and chooses to lean into the stereotype of the promiscuous gay man, as if cultivating the image of a sex-haver will absolve him from engaging in something that repulses him.
After a drunk Mia reveals his lie to a party full of their classmates, Will hides in the bathroom. He’s uncharacteristically quiet and embarrassed, compressing himself as tightly as possible into the bathtub. His sulking is interrupted by Theo (Robert Akodoto), a nice and popular schoolmate. Despite Will’s protestations, Theo stays and comforts him. Will echoes O and Isaac here: He feels broken for not wanting sex, and that something must be wrong with him. Theo suggests that maybe Will needs a connection to engage in romantic or sexual intimacy, and the next day the two kiss passionately and start dating. Although it’s never stated outright, Will’s requirement for emotional connection to precede intimacy is a sign that he’s demisexual, an even smaller sliver of the asexual pie that often goes unrepresented. Being in a relationship isn’t an easy adjustment for Will; he worries that Theo will eventually want sex or something more that he isn’t willing to give. The anxiety overwhelms Will and, despite Theo’s willingness to take things slow, he refuses to discuss his fear of intimacy and ultimately ends the relationship.
These Asexuality 101-esque narratives feel reminiscent of the early aughts, when queer characters were defined by their otherness in an effort to educate rather than represent. They’re the type of stories that I needed to hear growing up, stories that gently told me that I wasn’t broken while placing me on a path toward self-acceptance. After a year of research and introspection, however, their lack of nuance feels half-baked, especially in comparison to the three-dimensional queer characters who surround them. Asexuality is a complicated identity where multiple conflicting truths can coexist. Aces might feel little to no sexual attraction, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t date, fall in love, or even have sex if we so desire; seeking fulfillment through solely platonic relationships is equally valid, and, too often, narratively unexplored. O, Isaac, and Will hint at a future where we might see asexuality with all its complexity on our screens. Maybe by then, the universal feeling won’t be that we are broken. Maybe it will be that we are just a little different.
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