OK, turns out I hadn't reviewed ARA before, so I did so.

Squick level is so individual that its a hard thing to argue about. I'm a hetero male who's been reading in the scifi/fantasy genre, including my fair share of graphic-graphic novels, fanfic, etc., for decades (not too much romance, though). so I think its hard to shock me with something I haven't run across in some version previously...and when I encounter something I'm also better at recognizing sooner when its probably not my thing, and either moving on to something more enjoyable, or just browsing through it until we get back to whatever attracted me to it in the first place. I mean, if ARA were a hardcore m/m, my reaction would have been "well, OK, I can appreciate the craft, but not really what I'm interested in" (as another example, I have friends who love yaoi, but it does nothing for me)...but that's not the vibe I got from ARA. The core of it is more about the relationships between the characters and what I think haikujaguar noted as "emotional intimacy" in her post a week or so back, at least for me. Its also why I enjoyed her Kerishdhar books so much.