Asexual Sighting: Elijah (Big Mouth)

*Elijah-related spoilers.*

I enjoyed Missy’s plot with Elijah throughout season 6 of Big Mouth, but my spidey senses started tingling around the middle of the season. I thought, “Wait, are they gonna go there? On Big Mouth?”, and when I saw the title of episode 8, my brain started running around yelling, “This is not a drill!” A new heteromantic asexual has entered the chat, people! There are so few ace and ace-coded characters out there that it’s really special whenever I come across one “in the wild,” rather than seek out a story specifically because I already heard there was an asexual character in it.

Being horny has always been a major part of Missy’s character—she’s been reading The Rock of Gibraltar and having steamy fantasies about Nathan Fillion since season 1—so it’s no surprise that, when she first encounters Elijah, she’s focused on how good-looking he is. And when she discovers from his social media that he’s a devout Christian, she only finds him more enticing. “I feel like Fleabag going after the Hot Priest!” she tells her Hormone Monster Mona.

For much of the season, this aspect of their interactions is a source of both sexy tension and awkward maneuvering for Missy. She doesn’t want Elijah to think she’s a “slut” because she’s more sexually curious than he is and has some experience with boys, and she doesn’t want to scare him away by moving too fast for him. But at the same time, she digs the “forbidden fruit” angle and enjoys imagining Regency romance-style scenarios for them.

Elijah being a Christian who’s super into youth group would have made a relationship between him and Missy tricky enough on its own. But Elijah’s feelings about physical affection don’t stem solely from being taught about “purity” and “temptation” from an early age. When Missy suggests they try “dancing without leaving room for Jesus,” his discomfort ultimately doesn’t stem from its supposed sinfulness; rather, he’s uncomfortable because he doesn’t like it.

At that point in the show, Elijah doesn’t have a Hormone Monster of his own and talks to Jesus instead, urging Him to “cut in” on their dancing and getting anxious when Jesus sees no reason to intervene. When Missy asks if his religious beliefs are the reason he’s uncomfortable dancing so close to her, he plainly states, “It’s not God, Missy, it’s me. I just, I don’t think I’m ready.” However, he doesn’t understand why that is, not yet.

I first started to specifically hope that Elijah was ace during episode 6, “The Apple Brooch.” There, he and Missy have an indirect conversation about masturbating by using “gardening” imagery as a euphemism (we’d previously seen his youth pastor singing a song called “Don’t Touch Your Flower.”) When Missy asks how he manages to “keep [his] seed in [his] bag,” Elijah admits, “I don’t know, I just do. It’s not hard for me.” It hasn’t escaped his notice that everyone else at school seems “obsessed with ‘gardening,’” and he breaks the fourth wall to ask, “Like, what am I even doing on this show?”

It comes to a head in episode 8—with its title, “Asexual Healing,” I knew my hopes were going to be validated, and they were, in a pretty lovely way! Elijah takes center stage for the episode. His Hormone Monsters appear, but they get frustrated as they try to figure out what he’s into. The only “hand stuff” he likes is holding Missy’s hand, and when he asks Jay about what being horny is supposed to feel like, he realizes that he’s never felt that. He doesn’t have words for any of this, though, and doesn’t understand it—certainly, no one he’s looking to for advice understands it. But by good fortune, he discovers near the end of the episode that he has an insightful ace auntie who recognizes some of her own experiences in him. It is healing to hear him ask hopefully, “So there’s nothing wrong with me? Maybe I’m just asexual?” That doesn’t solve everything for Elijah, because he quickly starts wondering about coming out to Missy and worries that she might break up with him once she knows he doesn’t want to go any further than holding hands. But in that moment, I love that learning about asexuality is both a light bulb moment and a source of relief for him.

Like Elijah, I grew up in a very religious home. I got the “sex talk” at a fairly young age and went, “No sex before marriage? No problem!” I didn’t have any trouble “resisting temptation,” because I wasn’t experiencing any temptation. In some ways, my upbringing was helpful to me as an unaware ace person, since I never considered trying a physical encounter that I wasn’t comfortable with. On the other hand, I think it also contributed to me not figuring out I was aroace until my mid-20s; apart from simply not knowing it was a thing you could be, I assumed that I was “just” religious and didn’t start interrogating my lack of desire for a long time.

As such, this is a pretty personal character for me, and I appreciate how sensitively the show handles Elijah’s story. While it definitely makes fun of some of the religious teachings he’s exposed to, it doesn’t belittle his private beliefs, and it thoughtfully acknowledges the confusion that can arise when you’re easily behaving how you’ve been taught to act and then you look around at your peers and discover that it’s “supposed” to be hard. For a series that’s messy, awkward, and ultimately sex positive, I love that the show recognizes there’s a place for asexuals within that.