How Omegaverse Came to Dominate Fanfiction, and Why That Might Not Be Such a Bad Thing
/The following post was created as part of the assigned work for Henry Jenkins's PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals. The goal of the class is to help communication and media studies students to develop the skills and conceptual framework necessary to do more public-facing work. They learn how to write op-eds, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and dialogic writing and consider examples of contemporary and historic public intellectuals from around the world. The definition of public intellectuals goes beyond a celebrity-focus approach to think about all of the work which gets done to engage publics -- at all scales -- with scholarship and critiques concerning the media, politics, and everyday life. Our assumption is that most scholars and many nonscholars do work which informs the public sphere, whether it is speaking on national television or to a local PTA meeting.
Header image attribution https://foto.wuestenigel.com/women-writing-on-paper/
One of my favorite things to explain to strangers at parties is the omegaverse. More often than not, young women and gender non-conforming people hear that title and immediately burst out in laughter; they already know what I’m talking about and are excited to see someone react for the first time to one of the oddest—but somehow incredibly popular—phenomena on the internet.
At parties, I explain omegaverse in hyperbole. I say, “Okay, it’s a world where everyone is either an alpha, beta, or omega. Alphas have massive penises that knot—yes, like a dog,” I pause here while my audience laughs, “and omegas can get pregnant. Anatomy varies, sometimes they’re intersex, sometimes they just have vaginas, and sometimes they can get pregnant through their ass? I guess?” I pause here again for all the delighted, fascinated questions (Wikipedia has a helpful chart explaining some common anatomy configurations—see Figure 1). “But they always have some form of self-lubrication; that’s called slick. No, I’m serious! People love this shit!”
figure 1
And then, I pull up Archive of Our Own and show them this.
figure 2
There are over 165,000 pieces of literature in this universe—that’s 10,000 more than there were when I wrote my first draft of this post, only two weeks ago. Then, I open TikTok. TikTok has banned the tag #omegaverse, but it’s still widely discussed in my corner of the app. @icaruspendragon has even made a social media career off of explaining the nuances of omegaverse to her 315,000 followers.
This post, simply explaining how the aforementioned knot works, has over two million views. The omegaverse has started to leave the more close-knit and insular spaces of fanfiction and entered romance publishing; even The New York Times wrote about one author’s attempt to copyright omegaverse, and Lindsay Ellis’s video essay on the same topic has already racked up over 3.5 million views.
Omegaverse may not be hitting the mainstream any time soon, but awareness of the trope is no longer limited to the few—or not so few—actively engaging in fanfiction communities. However, as I and all the people laughing with me know, omegaverse is weird, but it has a lot more nuance than I can generally explain at parties, as well as a long history in fandom.
The first official stories using omegaverse terminology popped up in the early 2010s in the fandom adjacent to the TV show Supernatural, except they focused on the actors, not the characters. Jensen Ackles was the first omega, and Jared Padalecki was the first alpha. Some of the tropes that are common in omegaverse go back further, too. Star Trek’s concept of the Vulcan mating cycle, pon farr, lines up well with the omegaverse idea of heat, and fans have been finding ways to get men pregnant in their fanfiction since at least 1988.
But that’s just the problem with omegaverse for a lot of people: it almost always focuses on men. 84% of the omegaverse fanfiction on Archive of Our Own is tagged M/M, or slash, meaning it focuses on the relationship between two men. Except, in this universe, one of them can also get pregnant. In the early discourse around omegaverse within fandom, this trope was pretty widely seen as a bad thing. I remember reading through conversations on LiveJournal where fans I looked up to talked about how misogynistic it was, how it removed women from the universe. Fathallah (2017) quotes a fan’s comment on an omegaverse fic: “‘I love these AU’s where women seem to die off or don’t exist and men can have babies,’” (p. 73). Omegaverse is also often based in incredibly patriarchal systems in which alphas literally and biologically own omegas; rape and dubious consent are also common to the trope. In place of women, omegas—again, often omega men—become the victims of gendered violence and all forms of oppression. To quote one of my students, “it just recreates heteronormativity and misogyny, but more and worse.” This just begs the question: what makes omegaverse so popular, and should we be worried about it?
Fans in 2023 have had over a decade to hone their criticisms of the practice, even as it has grown. The problem is no longer just misogyny but transphobia as well. Fans argue that omegaverse writers have created an entirely new universe to avoid writing about transgender men, who can get pregnant in this universe, the one we live in. It creates a new type of gender essentialism; in omegaverse, sexes are signaled not only by appearance and genitalia but by unescapable scents. An important caveat here: male omegas are still men in omegaverse. They are almost always addressed with he/him pronouns, and if they do in fact bear children, they are often still called “father.” Omegaverse allows for a separation of sex and gender, in which reproductive organs don’t necessarily determine if you are a man or a woman or any other gender. Reproductive organs do, however, determine social and hierarchical statuses in these invented societies.
All of this is true, and they are all valid criticisms. Why then, does it remain so popular amongst fans, who are often queer women and gender non-conforming people? We don’t want to live in a world where our gender identities are re-prescribed in new ways, and we don’t want to live with the constant threat of sexual violence like omegas often do in our fanfictions.
Popova’s (2021) article “Dogfuck Rapeworld” (title referencing a self-satirizing meme fans use to talk about omegaverse) argues that the writers, often women, create power imbalances in order to explore them and warp traditional sexual scripts. In her construction, it creates a new layer of intimacy that exists for the sake of romance and kink. It becomes a space of exploration for intimate and sexual desire, one that removes the potentially triggering reality of sexual violence on women’s bodies.
Fans use omegaverse to explore the deepest violence of cis-hetero-patriarchy through non-real, alien, invented anatomies; not just the kinks. Kelsey Entrikin has a fantastic dissertation on the subject through the queer lens, but I first came to this realization as a long time, avid reader and writer of the trope. In omegaverse, omegas live in the most oppressively gendered society imaginable. They’re often not allowed to work, kept as sexual slaves, and bound by heat cycles that periodically make their lives miserable. They’re sometimes dramatically smaller than alphas and have overwhelming weaknesses to things like an alpha’s scent or command. And yet, omegas survive and find ways to work the system.
Sometimes, omegas work their way through society by hiding their status. Sometimes, they kill their captors and escape sexual slavery. Sometimes, omegas create intimate and sexual relationships with other omegas in order to keep themselves safe from alphas. In my own fanfiction, I’m interested in how omegaverse functions under capitalism, how labor and wage inequalities might be rectified in a world that is even harsher than our own.
Dystopian science fiction can take us to the worst edge of the current world and ask what if? Sometimes it’s through a climate apocalypse, or a nuclear disaster, or after a collapse of capitalism, but these ideas all explore the looming problems of real life. In omegaverse, writers take us right to the worst parts of cis-hetero-patriarchy; they reject the world we live in in order to explore the complications of sex, gender, and sexuality more deeply. They ask what if? in a way that allows not only complex looks at how things like reproductive rights function but also indulgence and enjoyment. Right next to a rant about inequality, there is full on erotica.
Omegaverse plays with some of the most problematic facets of gender and sex. Returning to my wise student’s words, omegaverse “recreates heteronormativity and misogyny, but more and worse”; but that’s the point. It turns up the dials on problems that deserve attention, and fans use that to say something, even if they don’t know what they have to say yet.
When I explain omegaverse to strangers at a party, I don’t tell them about the nuanced representations of gender and power; that’s not what makes people read a work of literature, at least not if they’re reading for fun. Even so, omegaverse makes those arguments. People can read for indulgence and come out hyper-aware of facets of society they might not have been paying attention to. Radicalization and joy are a powerful combination (even if they came together through wolf porn).\
Biography
Yvonne Gonzales is a PhD student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she studies fan culture and transformative fiction. She earned her bachelor's degree in English at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the connections between fan subcultures and the larger patterns of culture that create and maintain fandoms.
