I can't stand omegaverse
Honestly omegaverse gives me the creeps because everytime I read any it just feels like I'm reading the average everyday womans experience instead of a BL. Getting scared of being pregnant, being seen less than an alpha/man, pregnancy used as a way to trap someone, harassment from guys etc etc. Its like its making fun of women because literally everytime someone ends up being an omega its made fun of or seen as less than when they quite literally just become a woman with a dick. And I get that people want to see a gay couple have children and I honestly get that its super cute, and the appeal of someone needing the other person (in this case pheramones and bonding), but it comes off as extremely predatory everytime. No matter how any author tries to spin the story and make it wholesome, it really isn't at the end of the day, because unlike being a woman an omega at somepoint NEEDS and alpha to be normal. It makes every omegaverse love story feel forced and gross. And what doesn't help is that most omegaverse is sooooooo predatory and filled with SA. The power imbalance of every omegverse fills me with rage and I can never get over it. I don't need gender roles in my gay love stories please, can we just get normal romance.
Someone PLEASE come up with any other explanation for men getting pregnant if you really want your BLs to have their own biological children or just have them adopt or get a surrogate. I would love some more representation of real life scenarios of gay and queer people wanting and thinking about having kids and going through with it realistically.
Messages
what's obnoxious to me about most omegaverse is how the dire straits of omegas in those stories reflect the status of women IRL, and their oppression is explicitly naturalized and justified with their biological functions in those stories in ways that aren't necessarily true IRL. biology can be quite surprising! things don't always function like we expect them to, or are more malleable than people initially think. but people like simple models and explanations, especially when they validate their superiority and dominance over others. some omegaverse creators in the BL scene are grappling with the idea that reproductive ability is the root of women's oppression IRL without questioning the IRL narratives around it and challenges to those narratives also made IRL (mostly because they're simplistic, formulaic stories made for smut and wish fulfillment, not real social analysis, but occasionally a story will hint at depth).
like with BL at large, omegaverse is a way for (maybe not) straight (maybe not) cis (maybe not) women to explore a bunch of feelings and topics regarding reproduction while also being a convenient mpreg device with the distance and allure of projecting all that onto men. since most of us and the people creating omegaverse works live in misogynistic societies, those sentiments will be reflected in them as well, with various degrees of analysis and critique appearing in them. so I don't take it as mockeries of real life struggles, but not every creator is socially or even self-aware enough to engage with those aspects in ways that are satisfying to a reader who's reading through a feminist lens (or some other worldview that opposes sex-based oppression). instead, many are eroticizing the misogynistic ideas people/society have around sex and reproduction with the plausible deniability and distance given by applying those concepts to (ostensibly) men.
my introductions to omegaverse were fanfics from writers who didn't like what I eventually found out was more standard omegaverse and A/B/O tropes. so I was exposed to it as kind of a NSFW version of the hanahaki disease - a plot device to produce emotional and sexual interactions between characters, even if it was super out-of-character. I'm not an adventurous fanfic reader, so it took a long time for me to realize that what I started off with was from writers who were making the effort to go against the more restrictive and more obviously rape-y parts of omegaverse.
all this to say, I wish there were more omegaverse that questioned or subverted the standards of the trope, because so much of what comes out of the East Asian produced BL media is often quite regressive in terms of sexual politics. and yeah, that's a culture thing (and it's also present in the west), but there's always people criticizing and imagining alternatives to the status quo. maybe it's not very commercially viable, but I think it's out there.
my wishlist for omegaverse that would appeal to me:
abortions!!!
planned pregnancies!
pheromones for communication (not comprehensive or super-complicated, but imagine not being able to hide what you're feeling about someone, or it being obvious when you're horny, without the compulsion of standard omegaverse)
betas who aren't just regular-degular humans compared to alphas and omegas
and if it must be standard omegaverse, make it a fucked-up new thing introduced to humanity and not something that's apparently been a thing for ages that somehow still results in culture and norms around sex and marriage that resemble ours IRL
if you got this far, here's a gold star!
Same and when a Yaoi look good 99% it’s a FUCKING omegaverse, it’s like get out of my face
The same skinny kawaii twink omega and the ceo rapist big back shoulders monster carrier. The miscommunication in omegaverse are mount. Everest levels of stupidity. I do find it funny how betas are just regular fucking people
i agree. it can be used as a good thinkpiece of women's oppression on real world. it's so fucking funny to me that it started bc of some kink-prompt from someone in supernatural fandom. they js wanted to mix werewolf dynamics and added mpreg. lmao.