anger is good said:
i could bet actual money that lily is aro and thinks sexual attraction = love.
No.
Powerlevel time: I'm
actually ace/aro. This is not how the thought process works. Unless there is something deeply, fundamentally wrong with the way you interact with other human beings, there is no way that you assume a friendship is romantic. It's simply
not how you look at another person. Like I'm trying right now to explain in text what the difference is but I literally
do not know what it's like to develop romantic feelings for somebody. The only correlation I can make is that, based on observation, I do not (and do not WANT to) interact with or think about friends that I love in any way that approaches romantic.
Obviously things are different per individual, but if you're aromantic this is an emotion you do not feel and unless somebody on the outside tells you 'Oh, you must have a crush on them!' the correlation isn't going to be made. And most people are going to be able to recognize fairly early on that it's not the case. Kids flirt with adult concepts before they understand them, but as they grow up they figure out pretty quick that just because they're a girl and their best friend is a boy it doesn't mean they have a crush.
Kids figure that kind of thing out on their own. I imagine that when you develop your first crush you understand that it's very different from the friendships you've had before (or so my observation of the species has led me to deduce).
You can tell by Lily's writing that she isn't aromantic, to say the least; as I mentioned before, you can read how an author approaches characters in their general fiction and get a reasonable understanding of certain facets of their experience. A man writes relationships differently than a woman; an asexual or aromantic author writes differently than somebody who... isn't. Again, can't speak for everyone, but speaking for myself, since romance isn't part of my life, when I write I have to consciously remind myself that oh, right, that's a thing some people go through I guess.
Lily's romances read as being written by a horny man, but they are still romances-- she likes to focus on them cuddling and talking and being supportive of each other (well, she likes to have the subservient partner be supportive of her self-insert OC, anyway). Their conversations can get suggestive and deeply creepy, but she's obviously writing out from her own romantic experiences, not just conflating sexual attraction with romantic attraction.
So no, Lily definitely is not
aromantic.
