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okay, some fun omegaverse thoughts for your weekend reading, because i have a lot of feelings about this actually
fanlore ( https://fanlore.org/wiki/Alpha/Beta/Omega ) has a good in-depth dive into what this whole thing is, but essentially it's a loosely connected series of ideas and concepts in the fanfic world that can be generally summed up as 'werewolf adjacent behaviours and also dudes can get pregnant'
it started out as a very fetishy way to impose heteronormativity on m/m ships, to the point where the 'bottom' or 'omega' would have a self-lubricating asshole, pairings were split into effeminate omegas and domineering alphas. omegas were always bottoms, alphas always tops
there was a big emphasis on 'breeding' and the concept of 'mates' (which features not only in fic, but in romance and in ya these days also), and when i first encountered the concept of this verse like 4-5 years ago my overall impression was 'ugh fetishising and gross'
and to this day a lot of a/b/o stuff remains fetishing and gross, a way to impose straight norms on gay couples to make them idk easier to digest? to self insert into? because the straights can't conceive of relationship dynamics outside of a top/bottom dichotomy? im gay idk
but the nature of the trope - fucking with biology, fucking with societal gender norms and presentation - has also resulted in this universe where queer people have taken these very problematic tropes and used them to create a space to explore their own identity
if we're messing with the biological function of an asshole to make a man capable of giving birth, why can't we mess with other biology? if there's a set of secondary gender presentation norms for 'alpha' and 'omega', why can't we use those to explore what gender means?
there are a lot of trans writers in particular working in this space, as a way to explore both identity and sexuality and the intersection of the two
it's a very queer thing, to take something that hurt and denigrated you and turn it into something powerful or meaningful to you instead
when i yell about omegaverse on main, i do it as a member of both the fic and queer community who acknowledges the weirdness and wildness of the concept and its problematic history, but that's a frankly impossible thing to quickly or blithely explain to anyone lol
but the idea of the omegaverse coming to prominence in the public sphere as something that has been so....retroactively straightified that it's not even about fetishising mlm couples anymore, that it has been so thoroughly stripped of its queerness that it's about m/f nonsense
is actually deeply unsettling and uncomfortable. like lmfao first the trope is created to heteronormify mlm ships, and then when queer people start taking it back and actually making it interesting and complex and meaningful
the straights storm in and go ACTUALLY THIS IS ABOUT ME AND I OWN THIS THANK U, which in turn creates a discussion that gets boiled down to 'lol look at those weird deviant fic writers with their weird sex'
anyway fuck terfs
also actually do rt this if you're comfortable, i would like people to get/see a broader understanding of this topic than the aforementioned 'lol weird sex' aspect
