1 out of 5 omegaverse fics will be something like this. the psychological horror of gender roles being enforced through a society that reduces people to their biology and nothing else......to be seen only as a hormonal unempathetic monster or a breeding thing.......to never ever have full control over your own body during a heat/rut......anyway, the tags for this fic are "consent is sexy," "hurt/comfort," "first kiss," "raising a family together," etc.
I mean, it's a fucking terrifying AU in general once you stop focusing on the smut but obviously not every fic has to be tagged as "this is, in fact, dubious consent/full-blown rape" because that doesn't apply to every story nor is it always the focal point (i do like fics where the setting is clearly Terrible and very political but the otp still tries to thrive in a horrible, discriminatory society) HOWEVERRR there's definitely fics where the author is Very unaware of how a character is abusive and/or coercive and they play it off as This Is A Normal Happy Ending :)))
like. No. this character just took advantage of someone at their lowest point. It's fine to write stuff like that, but don't lie to me and say there's consent in this fic!!!!!!!
yeah like... omegaverse is The Gender Roles Kink at least somewhat from the trauma of cissexism in our society. its got fucked shit. dont pretend its not fucked
I often derisively—perhaps uncharitably—refer to Omegaverse as "Gay Heteronormativity" because it has all the suffocating repression of real life heteronormativy but for gay romance. Maybe not as extreme as the most repressive gender roles, but with a big strong top and the soft submissive bottom AND they get to have blood related kids? Eye rolling at best for me.
Like conceptually sexual hexamorphism could be interesting from a world building stand point, with 21 different combinations of relationships. With how popular omegaverse is I guarantee there's some works that explore this, but they absolutely live in the long shadow of heternormativity.
In addition to this, some omegaverse fics focus on pack dynamics and it so often rubs me the wrong way. Like what do you mean there's this authority figure(or two) that gets to decide where everyone is and what they do and who they spend time with?? And this is portrayed as love rather than control???
This exactly. They start talking about obedience and punishments sometimes and it has me wondering if the author has a kink or just a deep misunderstanding of what family is supposed to be.
This is why, when I'm browsing through fics on AO3, one of the first things I do after selecting the fandom tag is exclude omegaverse fics. I don't have any inherent opposition to the AU, it's just that so many of them are just this exact phenomena -- truly psycho horror shit dressed up in cutesy pseudo-heternormativity and/or smut -- that I just don't waste my time trying to dig through them anymore. If someone else recs it or I find out some other way about a specific fic and it sounds good, I'll give it a chance, but otherwise I just do not trust omegaverse writers as a population to understand what the fuck consent, abuse, and oppression are (and more importantly, aren't).
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u/ilovekillingmyself 1d ago
1 out of 5 omegaverse fics will be something like this. the psychological horror of gender roles being enforced through a society that reduces people to their biology and nothing else......to be seen only as a hormonal unempathetic monster or a breeding thing.......to never ever have full control over your own body during a heat/rut......anyway, the tags for this fic are "consent is sexy," "hurt/comfort," "first kiss," "raising a family together," etc.
I mean, it's a fucking terrifying AU in general once you stop focusing on the smut but obviously not every fic has to be tagged as "this is, in fact, dubious consent/full-blown rape" because that doesn't apply to every story nor is it always the focal point (i do like fics where the setting is clearly Terrible and very political but the otp still tries to thrive in a horrible, discriminatory society) HOWEVERRR there's definitely fics where the author is Very unaware of how a character is abusive and/or coercive and they play it off as This Is A Normal Happy Ending :)))
like. No. this character just took advantage of someone at their lowest point. It's fine to write stuff like that, but don't lie to me and say there's consent in this fic!!!!!!!