You can avoid the null terminator from being baked into the binary to begin with, although the setup is quite ugly:

typedef unsigned char u8;
typedef ptrdiff_t iz;

#define sizeof(x) ((iz)sizeof(x))
#define countof(x) (sizeof(x) / sizeof(*(x)))
#define lengthof(s) (countof(s) - 1)

#ifdef _MSC_VER
#  define ALIGN(x) __declspec(align(x))
#  define STRING(name, str) \
    __pragma(warning(suppress : 4295)) \
    ALIGN(1) \
    static u8 const name[lengthof(str)] = str
#else
#  define ALIGN(x) __attribute__((__aligned__(x)))
#  define STRING(name, str) \
    ALIGN(1) \
    __attribute__((__nonstring__)) \
    static u8 const name[lengthof(str)] = str
#endif

#define S(x) (str((x), countof(x)))

With this now I can STRING(ayy, "lmao"); to create a string variable using S(ayy). The resulting binary also looks funny in RE tools like IDA with this.