I was rereading this….

What is a qpr?

queer platonic relationship

I'm aro and qprs get brought up with some regularity in aro spaces. It's honestly a concept I find a little hard to fully wrap my head around (as someone who is totally comfortable as labeling incredibly close and devoted friendships as friendships), but from what I've seen, if people agree they're in a qpr then they're in a qpr. So in that sense you could say that these characters are not because they're not labeling it as such, even if they could tick a lot of the boxes. Kind of similar to how people might look at them and say they're friends, but they're hesitant to consider the other a friend too.

I would consider it a qpr for the single reason that they don't have the vocabulary for it. They don't know it exists. Maybe they will learn about it and be like "that's not it either" and that's fine, but some of the meanings of qpr fits them perfectly.
I think there are things that can and can't be retrospectively applied to ppl. (and this is a long somewhat recent example that I hope makes it clearer).


Like this warrior that was buried with feminine and masculine rites. Medically, he was an intersex that msot likely presented physically as male. We can use the word intersex even if they did not have it because it is what he was, he fit in it. Of course, if his culture had a different specific 3rd sex definition then sure, we would use that term instead, but it would not be a lie to say that This 3rd sex existed someplace in between the other two (which exists in every culture), hence intersex. Our vocabulary is different from theirs and msot likely doesn't cover the full range of what they mean. But it still fits within it without adding anything that isn't there.
On the other hand, some news outlets called him nonbinary. Nonbinary would need his culture to have a strict conception of gender binarism and no acceptance of a third option as standard while he himself would have to also deviate from whatever was considered normative. So even if he was nonbinary we couldn't make that assumption because there're prerrogatives we can't be certain of.


What I'm saying is, there is a prerogative of friendship and romance in the MCs society, and while their feelings are of friendship, their goals and desires for their relationship are typically of romance.
Their dynamic and behaviors take from both, without being romantic but queering (and I mean the literal meaning of queer not queer as in "non-cishetperiallo") the line of what people say is the limit of platonic.
We are not forcing into them concepts that they might exist outside of, nor constraints that they are not part of, we are just using a vocabulary we have to approximate what we've seen from them, without going beyond whatever they have actually given to us.
In this sense, it is a concept that can be applied to them.
Consider if they learn the term and say that's not what they would use to call themselves or if they stick to the no-labels — which sounds more like a "I don't want to use something that doesn't fit" rather than a "I don't want to use anything".
Even if they are not IN a queer platonic relationship, they are still partners in a relationship that queers the concept of platonic.
Qpr would still be a word we could use to help others understand, even if partially, what they are.