The Potentiality of Omegaverse: Post-Gender, Post-Sexuality, Post-Queer Utopias Within Eastern and Western Erotica
Omegaverse is a subset of male pregnancy fiction, purportedly originating in North American fanfiction that “shipped” male characters from CW’s Supernatural franchise as romantic same-sex couples. While some male pregnancy stories, also known as mpreg stories, use the advanced technologies of science fiction to make such procreation possible, omegaverse writers turned towards biology for this queer reproduction, subdividing the male sex into a type of male that can impregnate and a type of male that can get pregnant. The males who could impregnate are known as alpha males – echoing the cultural myth of a lone leader alpha wolf – and the males who could get pregnant are known as omega males. The popularity of omegaverse fiction has far outgrown its origin in queer, non-canon “slash” fiction (though there are more than a thousand fanfiction works still being made and posted to sites like archiveofourown), spawning dozens of original titles on Amazon and original boys love comics in Japan and South Korea.
Omegaverse is highly “of the times,” a uniquely 21st century product of internet self-publishing; the ability to share and expand on otherwise niche kink literature tropes via collaborative fanfiction platforms; the word of mouth spread of weird memes and popular franchises on social media; and the globalized feedback loop of Eastern and Western content creators interacting online to create cross-cultural genres of writing. Moreover, the popularity of omegaverse stems from contemporary concerns with a lack of queer representation in mainstream media. The increasingly liberal openness to LGBTQIA conversations could be said to have encouraged this development of mpreg fiction, and it has found its supporters in the non-straight and non-cisgendered. As a trending form of international queer reproduction stories, it has the potential to transform popular media in the East and West from overwhelming straightness to compelling and strange queerness.
Yet, omegaverse fiction is no bastion of queer utopia, as it comes with its own slanted version of our sexism, homophobia, racism, ableism, and other prejudices – and it is all the better for it. The many contradictions and logical fallacies of omegaverse fiction attests to its still early developmental stage and a lack of exploring social themes in addition to overt, gratuitous sexual ones. Those who read omegaverse fiction or dismiss it might wonder why it is necessary to critically examine what might be considered trashy pornographic writing without plot. However, its very plot-lessness, its willingness to meander down the emotional and sensual paths without any ultimate grandiose (contrived) goal, allows it to say more than some didactic socially minded writing. This paper explores the potentiality of omegaverse as a deeply transgressive yet deeply conservative new kind of fiction, a universe that proposes new possibilities of queer reproduction as it binds possibilities of queerness, a fallacious and revealing conflation of sex, gender, and power that, by its contradictions and moral ambiguity, opens possibilities for birthing new slanted – in Emily Dickinson’s sense of transforming the truth to make it delightful - queer – in the sense of strange as well as non-heteronormative – stories.
I. Misogyny in Heterosexual Western Romantic Literature and Japanese Boys’ Love Comics
Many omegaverse stories are derived from historically misogynistic Western heterosexual erotica and Japanese “boys love” comics. In these predecessor texts, the main viewpoint character is a feminized victim, beholden to the harassment and abuse of the patriarchal society around him/her. His/her main lover is a domineering “alpha male” who manhandles and sometimes rapes the main viewpoint characters to satisfy his uncontrollable libido. The feminized main viewpoint character may swoon, tremble, or pine, and the female variation often ends up married and pregnant, the quintessential housewife (if she has not already bore her alpha male’s child[ren]). Conversely, the alpha male will be the breadwinner for his family, using his masculine strength, handsomeness, and ambition to climb to the top of a lucrative career-place ladder. In heterosexual fiction, gender stereotypes become biological fact; in Japanese boys’ love comics, sexual positions as bottom “girl” who is penetrated versus the top “guy” who penetrates reflect straight power and gender dynamics.
On the other hand, “male” and “female” seem to be antiquated or at least superfluous to the new labels of reproductive biopower within the omegaverse. “Alpha” and “omega” are the most important modes of categorization. Yet, “alpha” and “omega” are not easily distinguishable from the “male” and “female” stereotypes in erotic romance fiction – in fact, they seem to be the same ideas in different words, applied to queer relationships with traditional male-female reproductivity. The omega male, like the quintessential romance fiction female character or Japanese bottom, displays traditionally feminized traits – prettiness, frailty, emotionality, and a need to mother children. More so than the bottom boys of non-mpreg Japanese comics, these omegas embody the stereotypical feminine role, as they have the biological capacity to actually birth children. They even have cat-like “heats”, periods in which hyper-powerful hormones compel them to mate with an alpha male and bear their children.
The equivalence of omega male to romance heroine may stem from the contradictory identification/disassociation of female Japanese boys’ love comics readers with bottom male characters (often the main viewpoint characters). Romance literature in the East and West is one of the few types of media – apart from non-fiction beauty, fashion, home-keeping, and child-rearing media – that caters to a female audience. Unlike many action, mystery, drama, comedy, and tragedy media which center men as their main character(s), pushing women into periphery roles, romance fiction and boys’ love fiction makes female or feminized characters central protagonists. Yet, much 21st century feminist rhetoric despises the type of heroine in heterosexual romance literature – she is a doormat, trophy wife, or 1950’s-era homemaker. This inequality of the heroine compared to her alpha male is a staple and selling point of this genre; like Cinderella, her narrative arc is about rising from the ashes of subjugation and neglect to attaining recognition and rewards through her prince’s love. Like the 18th and 19th century courtship stories deemed “silly,” “frothy,” and “witless”, contemporary romance novels have also been criticized as “trash.”
This being the case, it is no wonder that 21st century, post #MeToo female readers may feel shame at identifying with the submissive main heroines of the few stories written for them. Identifying with the oppressed woman brings shame. However, reading Japanese boys’ love comics – popular with female readers in both the East and West – is different. The female reader is not asked to identify with a shamefully submissive stereotype of woman; instead, she is invited to identify with a man, a sex automatically equated with more power and equality than she is regularly afforded. Even if this main male character is a bottom, and he is silly or emotional or saved by his top princely lover, the female reader might enjoy his femininity; his sexual/social position is not a weakness of a woman but complexifying and non-stereotypical trait of a man. Although, the bottom man is penetrated in his male-male relationship, at least, as a man, he has more equality than a penetrated woman would have with the man who penetrates them. The bottom man is recognizably feminine but not female, allowing the self-conscious female reader to vicariously enjoy his sexuality without experiencing her own self-hate. The female reader may project onto the bottom male, enjoying his pleasure, while she disassociates from his foreign maleness, allowing her to escape self-hate and possibly enact a revenge fantasy on the male sex that must now occupy her derided, oppressed position. After all, boys’ love comics are created by women for women – they are not stories of representation, but objectification, and persistent homophobia in Japan demonstrates the limited extent of their social activism (limited, though not nonexistent).
The ability or inability of women to enjoy fiction that depicts them as submissive not only evokes feminist discourse of social justice, but also complicated issues of power and pleasure in BDSM. Not all submissiveness is simply undesirable degradation; but a cursory review of criticism of hated female characters, popular on social media sites like Tumblr and Twitter, reveals an ambivalent relationship, at the very least, between many female media consumers and traditionally feminine characters in popular culture. Suffice it to say, there is a spectrum of responses among diverse female media consumers to mainstream representations of female submissiveness – only one of those responses, but a very vocal and prominent one it is, is post-#MeToo indignation, rejection, and shame.
II. The Illness of Femininity, Omega Male Mothers, and Trans Representation
Then, is there social value or revolutionary potential in trendy, 21st century omegaverse fiction? Does it simply recapitulate the misogynist tropes of heterosexual Western erotic literature and Japanese boys’ comics, further cementing them in the cultural psyche, offering some momentary escapist pleasure to its female readers, but no other food for thought beyond cliché romantic travails and sexual union? What makes omegaverse stories stand out from other Japanese boys’ love comics and the similarly objectifying Western slash fiction is its grafting of feminine reproductive roles onto male bodies, and its hyper representation of widespread yet rarely explored notion of reproductive femininity - not biological femaleness - as illness.
The fecund female body has long been associated with physical diseases, disorders, and impurity as well as mental illness. The English word “hysteria” comes from the Greek hystera, meaning “uterus,” inspired by the ancient Greeks’ belief that the womb wandered throughout the female body, causing mental instability and physical infirmity. One prescribed cure for the uterus problem was more sex with one’s husband. Menstruation has been labeled a cause for dying crops and rusting tools, as well as a weapon used by witches to cast dangerous spells. Barbara Creed proposed the term “monstrous feminine” to describe long-standing patriarchal fears of monthly bloods that poison, vaginas that have teeth, wombs that spawn monsters, and hormones that drive women mad. In gothic stories and horror movies, the female’s out-of-control reproductive body is even envisioned as supernatural via sorceresses, werewolves, demons, vampires, and cannibals. While this monstrous femininity has been embraced as liberation by wiccans and contemporary goth culture, it also has detrimental real-world effects – medical establishments that see women as driven mad by hormones and feminine-over sensitivity neglect to give necessary timely care to female patients. This is especially the case in the Western world if the female patients are non-white.
Such fears of the female reproductive body spur not only conflations of the feminine as monstrous, but also, seemingly paradoxically, as infantile. When Women is not a mature seductress, she is innocent Madonna, sacrificing her reproductive powers to the higher authority of the patriarchy. She may stay Holy Daughter all her life, the female respected and loved because of her harmless holy virginity. If she bears children, she may pass away soon after, the stain of her sexuality not long lingering, but her legacy as receptacle of the man’s child everlasting. The trope of the dead mother, so often populating the stories of Eastern and Western action heroes in male-audience media, is not simply an innocuous step in the hero’s maturation from boy to man; it is an exorcism of the fecund female, the last resort of a fearful masculine system to subdue the power of feminine reproductivity.
The centuries-old stigma attached to female reproduction attaches itself stealthily to all women, whether they chose to get pregnant and give birth or not; thus, the actual interest and action of childbearing is irrelevant and subsumed under the patriarchal construct of behaviors and actions known as “femininity.” This is where the omega male of omegaverse stories may offer liberation and illumination of the biologically female/socially feminine tangled yarn – the omega male, with penis and flat chest, also has a womb and opens the possibility of childbearing to more sexes than the female. Moreover, he takes on menstrual cycles, exaggerating them into debilitating and nauseating heat periods; his total incapacitation in the face of his fertility-inducing hormones evoke the disturbing cultural fantasy of femininity as illness. Yet, the omega male suffers because he is feminine as opposed to female, thus making an important distinction in femininity as illness as opposed to female as ill. The way he suffers is absurd, more erotic ecstasy than tormenting malady, asking to be filled up with a magically healing cock. However, this ridiculous exaggeration, bordering on satire, of the notion of femininity as hysterical illness invites a re-examination of the construction of femininity, not familiar condemnation of the female.
Like the boys’ love bottoms, the omega male’s reproductive trials may offer the female reader some form of catharsis through identification, while at the same time being necessarily distant to affect a certain voyeuristic dissociation. The appeal of the nurturing omega man may also fulfill a desire to see masculine figures softened, to imbue the female reader’s experience of a hard father figure with the softness of one’s tender mother. That many omegaverse stories label their childbearing omega males “mom” instead of “dad” is telling. Some trans women consumers of omegaverse see this as a hopeful wishfulfilent of biological childbearing. Yet, if omegaverse stories were to let omega males be nurturing “dads,” this could open up more flexibility in prescribed gendered parenting roles and create a truly post-gender speculative future vision of queer reproduction.
Omega male “motherhood” fails to truly destabilize gendered reproduction and parenting roles in more way than one; beyond the presence of a penis and lack of breasts, the omega male mother is indistinguishable from the idealized female mother in 1950’s American Family magazines. This male mother cooks, cleans, takes care of the kids, and supports his husband’s work (the omega male mother may also sometimes be called a “wife”). The blurriness of queer male mother or bastardized female mother begs the question: are omegaverse stories successful trans female narratives or a continuation of thinly veiled female reader inserts via bottom boy characters? Many omega males also look idealistically feminine - curvy, doe-eyed, pink cheeked, and full-lipped. It may carry over from the “girly” designs of bottom boy’s love characters. Moreover, the in-universe experience of omega males is closer to cisgendered females than trans females - omega males are born with feminine reproductive abilities and feminine behavioral expectations; they do not experience gender dysphoria so much as frustration at society’s sexist oppressions; their story arcs resolve not with transitioning to another gender like alpha, but in acting according to biology, in what one might call a biologically deterministic way.
Some stories set in real-world “mundane AU’s” have a plot point akin to gender dysphoria, in that all children in these universes are raised unisex until they turn ten, when they get pheromone tests that reveal their alpha or omega secondary gender. The test results may cause frustration and resistance to the assigned gender, but the character who is now societally assigned “omega” cannot choose to be anything else; they are as biology dictates. The logic of this decade-late gender reveal is fuzzy, hand-wavy science - the gender reveal may more appropriately be seen as the secret heroine of a romance novel losing her undercover male disguise and being discovered as a fertile female. That does not mean trans audiences cannot read a trans narrative into omegaverse stories, or enjoy their own interpretations; simply, that there is more work to be done if omegaverse fiction is to claim the title of truly reproduction, parenting, and general gender roles questioning stories. Trans narratives in omegaverse fiction, where omegas transition to alphas, or alphas transition to omegas, not because doctors demand it but because the person chooses to do so, could open more doors.
III. The Female Omega and Female Alpha in Omegaverse Stories
Within the realm of Japanese and South Korean original omegaverse comics, women are rarely seen, as these omegaverse publications are usually offshoots of boys’ love magazines. Like in other boys’ love comics, women can fade into the background, becoming part of the crowd that admires the alpha male or the mob that harangues the bottom omega male. In a few notable cases, female characters are sympathetic. On the one hand, this logical gap attests to the simple fact that the omegaverse has not established stable lore for its many authors to reference; for, if alpha and omega are now the most important sexes, shouldn’t “male” and “female” be defunct categories? And shouldn’t female characters be able to equally bask in the limelight depending on their masculine alpha or feminine omega designation? And why are “alpha” and “omega” even considered “secondary” genders? (are they “sexes” too?) There are not popular responses to these questions as of now.
On the other hand, Western fanfiction has created some hundreds of alpha female and omega female stories, usually in the context of shipping female characters of popular series including Supergirl and Legend of Korra. Subdividing female characters into the categories of alpha or omega and pairing them into romantic relationships further replicates the grafting of traditional straight dynamics onto queer relationships. Yet in the case of the female-female pairs, the alpha partner benefits from the prestige of alpha masculinity, while the omega retains her traditionally lower feminized subject position. In the cases where the female alpha partner also has a penis, the familiar totem in East and West of masculine energy and domination, as well as testes that produce seed, the evocation of intersex representation is more apparent on the surface than in exclusively boys’ love omegaverse stories. While the omega male is internally intersexed, the alpha female - bearing breasts, phallus, and testes - is externally intersexed too. Yet, if one were to again read the alpha female’s phallus in-universe as part of her normative assigned sex, it fails to be transgressive; indeed, if this phallus is another part of the powerful alpha status, it evokes existing patriarchal narratives, recalling Freud’s claim that females are born lacking in power because they lack a penis.
The potential of the alpha female to break new ground in terms of female representation is, in the case of sporting the loaded phallic power symbol, to be aware of its patriarchal background - and, importantly, to bring new critical attention to the popular “strong woman” character in contemporary “feminist” mainstream media. It is popular and profitable for mainstream media makers to boast strong female characters, action girls with muscles, anger, and aggression to match any main male character. Yet, this has not uplifted femininity – for stereotypical feminine traits of love, nurturing, and empathy are still relegated to the sidelines, as stereotypical masculine traits retain their monopoly of story focus. The self-conscious omegaverse, borrowing not just wolf pack dynamics but also language associated with human social power, can break down the performative strong woman character type by uncovering her pro-patriarchy alpha attitude and initiating deeper conversations on what it means to make females strong in a post-gendered future.
IV. Heterosexual Omegaverse Stories: Queering Straightness
In Western fanfiction and original omegaverse romance literature, alpha and omega dynamics are not only applied to same sex couples, but also to heterosexual couples. This has elicited some protest on the grounds of reiterating existing unequal gender dynamics, and indeed, it is a short step removed from traditional bodice-ripper literature. While in earlier fiction, uncontrollable testosterized maleness drove male lovers to ravish needy, estrogenized heroines, in omegaverse fiction, alpha testosterone and animal ruts drive male lovers to mate with heat-mad female heroines. Yet, critics stumble in condemning straight omegaverse fiction as more degrading than gay omegaverse fiction; for if the attack of the feminine omega male by the masculine alpha male is construed as less serious than violence male characters aim at female characters, it is due to sexually objectifying gay male relationships to the point that they are titillation rather than human. Thus, it is important to discard the notion that alpha male and omega female relationships are any more unethical by some mysterious universal standard of writerly moral code than alpha male and omega male relations - they are, as previously stated, nearly the same, as the female reader is so embodied in the feminized bottom omega male.
Indeed, applying omegaverse dynamics to straight relationship dynamics has a way of uncovering the social constructs of power mistaken for inherent aspect of biological sex. It is not the male lover’s inherent maleness that makes him dominate his female partner - it is his “alpha-ness,” a word that is correlated to social constructs of strength, independence, and aggression. If the heroine loses her head to the male’s advances, it is not her natural wanton femaleness - it is her “omega-ness,” a strange word to the reader who must consciously remember it as constructed traits of softness, love, and dependence. Alpha-ness and omega-ness act as a second language for translating and recognizing the strangeness of extra-textual-gender-roles-mistaken-for-biology.
Intriguingly, in omegaverse stories, omega-ness may also be ascribed to male characters and alpha-ness to female characters, subverting existing gender dynamics. While not as widespread as omega female and alpha male fiction, omega male and alpha female fiction is used to play with fan pairings like Reylo in Star Wars. Such fanfiction subverts existing real-world gender dynamics and introduces female domination into women-oriented fiction, not just as a perversion linked to the male masochistic fantasies, but as a fulfillment of female desire. When rendered empathically, the omega male in a relationship with an alpha female deconstructs toxic masculinity, opening space for the male partner of the female to honor his own softness and sensitivity, a much-needed rejoinder to a patriarchal culture that harms men as well as women. Moreover, by positioning him as desirable, these fanfictions dismantle the conservative gender dynamics peddled by profit-driven romance publishers, which make a point of limiting their male leads to alpha males only.
There is hardly an equivalent for the omega male and alpha female dynamic in other fiction - perhaps only in speculative sci-fi that makes males child bearers and females impregnators. Yet omegaverse fiction, specifically mundane AUs, make the feminine male and masculine female relationships less far-off, more a real parallel possibility than an exotic elsewhere. In fact, procreation through childbearing omega male and impregnating alpha female resemble trans and queer real-world couples where the male partner gives birth. Additionally, in the universe of omegaverse fiction, which prioritizes omega and alpha over male and female, such relationships may be accepted as normal, curtailing the stereotypical minority or coming out narrative, which may offer relatable and important content, but run the risk of limiting the stories that can be told about queer characters to stories of pain and isolation.
V. Reproductive Futurity and Forced Pregnancy
It is important to note that the queerness accepted in the omegaverse - that is male-male, female-male, and dominant female-submissive male couplings which are marginalized in our extra-textual reality yet normalized in omegaverse so long as they follow the rule of alpha mating with omega - is only a queerness with reproductive futurity, in essence a queerness that is straight in its function of population enhancement. It is hard not to recall Foucalt’s writings of the entanglement of power and sexuality, and his concern with a chronological development in the Western world of nations’ involvement with citizens’ sexual activities to not merely maintain law and order, but also to encourage a certain kind of population replenishment through married, monogamous female-male couples. What is envisioned as the picture-perfect nuclear family, with mom, dad, and children stems from the capitalist nation’s motive of replenishing its population, thereby securing future producers and consumers to uphold its economic power. Lee Edelman positions queer negativity as a resistance to this childbearing futurity, highlighting how the nation-sponsored myth of the innocent, desirable, vulnerable Child - a powerful tool for demonizing people (often queer) involved in non-childbearing sexual activity - may be dismantled by upholding the non-childbearing couple. Certainly, the pressure to have children is familiar to people straight and queer, cisgender and trans, and it is important to reckon with the politics of power behind it, a policing of sexual activity inside and outside marriage as well as reproductive freedoms.
Omegaverse writing seemingly reiterates and reinforces the nation's mandate to bear children, even if it goes against the wishes of the designated child bearers. There is a certain horrifying dystopian element to it, recalling the nightmares of enforced female childbearing in media like Mad Max: Fury Road and A Handmaid’s Tale. Some proponents of omegaverse fiction argue that the mandate to “mate” and “breed” - popular animalistic terms for reproduction tossed around in the omegaverse - is self-consciously employed, and in the case of putting the omega male in the position of the powerless feminine womb, offers a scathing critique of extra-textual patriarchal control of the female body. Indeed, the echoes of pro-life debates ring strongly throughout many omegaverse stories, and the result of many impregnations, whether by consensual sex or rape, are births, not abortions. The strongly pro-life ethos of the omegaverse - where not only are womb-bearing omegas are socially expected to give birth, but also that the omegas feel bodily and emotionally attached to an unborn fetus - circles back to Foucalt’s vision of the nation’s economic imperative to populate. In the case of omegaverse stories sold for profit versus free omegaverse stories posted to fanfiction websites, forced pregnancy sex stories are a commodity that benefit publishers and creators. Omegaverse stories with forced male omega pregnancies are not currently critiques on sexual assault and control of female reproduction; because they must resolve themselves into clean happy stories where the omega male mother loves his children and husband, the sexual violation and forced reproduction (either by the husband or another alpha) are romanticized, and an anti-abortion message tacitly approved. This is not just an aspect of omegaverse - in fact, it is inherited from straight female forced pregnancy stories. However, omegaverse has the added layer of voiding queer negativity with its male-male and female-female parental units, insisting the acceptability and desirability of queerness be in its ability to produce the innocent, economically lucrative Child.
If omegaverse were to reject the edict of reproductivity = goodness, and the production of Child = a legitimate (queer or straight) family, there would be more space for transness, asexuality, and a challenge to general extra-textual gender roles. Beyond the identifying masochism/disassociating sadism of forced pregnancy titillation, an omegaverse that complexifies biological sex, social gender, and reproductive expectations offers exciting possibilities for slanted liberatory narratives. When the omega male has to wrestle with the edict to give birth, the alpha female to impregnate, both sexes to act as flat pornographic symbols of animal over-sexuality, the reader gains the ability to reveal the secret motives of commodified sex in their world. For sex is a commodity in our world, sold not only in sexy media, but in beauty products, fashion items, sex toys, strip clubs, and prostitution. In addition, the result of procreative sex is children who require clothes, food, education, medicine, and various other costly things that benefit the economy. By rejecting the sanctified image of the Child, its potential parents are liberated and real children, so messy and unruly and un-innocent, have space to be human. Parents are not ads or ceaselessly lusty pornographic bodies; children are not punished for being anything less than sugar sweet. Depictions of asexual alphas and omegas within omegaverse fiction could also open the universe to in-text queer utopic possibility. However, depictions of asexuality, so lacking in all media, is predictably lacking in current omegaverse stories.
VI. Betaness of Background Brown Bodies
Where asexuality does appear in omegaverse stories is in the beta characters, the supporting periphery friends or parts of the faceless crowd. Beta characters are the third sex/gender in most omegaverse stories, biologically the same as real men and women. As such, they pale in comparison to their alpha and omega counterparts. Betas do not experience the alpha’s testosterone-driven ruts, leading alphas to ravish swooning omegas; nor do betas suffer the omega’s estrogen-crazed heats, which compel omegas to fill their empty wombs with alpha seed. The beta sex, evoking subordination and inferiority with the title “beta”, may be best understood as equivalent to an extra in a movie or a “mob” character in a video game. Some stories use their boring averageness as a plot point: in these stories, the main viewpoint character might have lived a peaceful and unremarkable life as a beta, until an encounter with their alpha soulmate sends them into a heat, revealing their “true omega designation.” Another instance of fantastical science - no reason or deep narrative rationale is given for this switch of genders. Moreover, once more, this does not align with trans experiences of dysphoria, for the beta-turned-omega had not inwardly felt they were really omega - in fact, when their biology forces them into an omega position, and society and the medical community pressure them to act like their biologically assigned sex, the beta-turned-omega actively resists their assigned omega-ness, along with all the gender stereotypes and reproductive expectations that come with it. The beta-turned-omega plot draws some parallels to a sexless child undergoing a traumatic puberty, emerging on the other side as a fertile young woman. It also evokes the “glow up” or “magic makeover” the boring chick lit heroine undergoes to win the attention of her Prince Charming. Yet, the main character generally cannot remain beta if he/she is to win love; for his/her betaness collapses character archetype (“boring background extra”) with sex (“realistic/average hormones and sex traits”) and sexuality (“low libido bordering on asexuality”), to make them the unideal romance hero/ine.
Yet in the beta’s strange cleaving of average/low sex drive and social power lies an interesting opportunity for social commentary. It invites a re-examination of how consumers of sex media allot their attention to certain characters based on exaggerated sex drive, and how unrealistic celebrity ideals of beauty may not simply be aesthetic, but also tied to a historical economy of reproductive power. The beta characters are marginal positions, affording space for observation and critique of the figures in the spotlight, often gross caricatures of over sexuality, exaggerated gender behavior, and self-obsession. In fact, comedic boys’ love comics and webnovels outside the omegaverse use beta-coded background characters to poke fun at action and romance story genre conventions. What is unique about omegaverse is that it positions this outsider-ness with assigned sex and, by the logic of biological essentialism, low sex drive/asexuality. The beta-coded background characters in non-omegaverse media are portrayed as incidentally undesirable and undesiring; in omegaverse, sexuality, beauty, and social power have a one-to-one correlation since beauty, strength, personality, and sexual orientation are assigned with sex at birth. It is an absurd conflation of extratextual intersectional identity formation - and one that is worth exaggerating to the point that its conspicuousness blows up and offers fragments for examination.
Within largely homogenous Japan and South Korea, beta characters are mostly the same race as alphas and omegas; but within the U.S., a melting pot of various skin pigmentation, designations that indicate desirability and social status must be considered more carefully. The stable beta (not secretly omega) character in the omegaverse is a comparatively sexless part of the background, paralleling the background characters in decades of Western films, TV shows, novels, and other media who have often been non-white. It might be more appropriate to say, the roles available to brown bodies in Western media have mainly been background beta-coded roles - assistants to heroes and villains, shoeshines, food servers, house servants, throwaway soldiers, the token brown friend, and so on. They are simpler characters, childish in their devotion, dependent on the fair main characters’ direction, bearing the traces of the happy slave of the antebellum south and the white man’s burden of Rudyard Kipling’s British Empire imagination. Brown characters in Western media have long carried a “beta” - subordinate, lacking - position. While they have not had the opportunity to star in much original or fandom Western fiction, self-consciously exploring the brown character’s reckoning with socially assigned beta-ness in future omegaverse would open the genre to transcend simple romantic erotica - it could, by considering sex, power, race, and family-making, become truly subversive satire. That more humane representations of brown bodies need to happen in Western media is clear, but the same holds true for Japanese and South Korean media, which paints an overwhelmingly pale picture of its populace that fails to acknowledge its dark international, immigrant, and mixed citizens. Especially since manga, anime, and webcomics are highly popular amongst young people of color outside Asia, this would be a chance to fully embrace international storytelling and diverse representation.
VII. Omegaverse Future – Reclaiming Popular Culture, Imagining Sacred Unions
That omegaverse fiction bears the weaknesses of preceding Eastern and Western romance literature, including simplistic views of reproductive rights, feminine reproduction as illness, bias towards futurity and against extra-textually non-queer childbearing, and racism is not surprising. Additionally, omegaverse holds no obligation as a subset of titillating male pregnancy erotica to address these concerns - yet, because it constructs a world of normalized difference, where absurd sexuality and social status collapse and co-mingle in entrancing new shapes, it would be a strength for it to deeply invest itself in the different bodies occupying its ordinary yet slanted universe. That the omegaverse did not grow from didactic identarian LGBTQIA YA fiction is a current strength - it has skipped over the miserable coming-out drama and gay angst, allowing breathing room for strange eroticism to bloom, unremarked upon by outspoken liberal morality. Instead, it is perverse, sometimes mixing the cheap excitement of bland heterosexual erotica with the clandestine pleasures of abject horror and lurking demonic pleasures of Marquis de Sade’s writing.
Omegaverse’s most intriguing incarnation, not the urban fantasy werewolf, but the sentimental 1950s American Home mundane alternate universe, parodies the sugar sweet straight nuclear family while dripping with longing for some form of softened sentimentality to open its doors to queer men, queer women, and their offspring. Passionately anti-mainstream through an extra-textual lens, the omegaverse is torn between amoral eroticism and the conservative idealization of the child-bearing future. For it voids histories of homophobia, the AIDs crisis, gay community uprisings, and PRIDE movements. Yet it also undeniably exists in the context of these topics to be enjoyed by queer communities and their allies as pleasurable trash, comforting escapism, or revolutionary anthem. In fandom space, omegaverse is a bold act of reclaiming popular culture, disidentification of queer communities situating themselves within and against the dominant culture, as theorized by José Esteban Muñoz. If and when it wrestles with its inherited biological determinist agenda, pulling apart the layers of “are my feelings of desire entirely a function for myself as a sexually reproductive animal?” It may be close to imagining a utopia of yearning, what Muñoz calls a “queerness… a longing that propels us onwards beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. …that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” That is not to say that omegaverse queerness is compensation for whatever are deemed injustices of the world, merely the after effect of disappointment and injury; rather, it might reclaim the presence of the transgressive in history and present times, transforming the now to be contradictorily, imperfectly, and ambiguously queer.
This paper’s fascination with the omegaverse stems with an acknowledgement of the niche, kinky fan trope’s meteoric rise and what this author anticipates will be a future as mainstream Eastern and Western entertainment. In an age where web novels are regularly turned into Netflix shows, fan artists are discovered online, and fanfiction writers get their work published by major publishing houses, it would be no surprise to see companies cash in on the omegaverse’s popularity. Yet, it would be a tragedy for omegaverse to come to suffer the same blandness of mainstream media that use sex, violence, and death as spicy seasonings instead off deep thematic material. The omegaverse has been, from its conception, obsessed with birth and reproduction, a subject which is glanced over in uncomfortable feminine-fearing popular culture. While omegaverse’s current stories echo the 20th century consumerist American Dream family, the universe also opens space for deeper examination of its human character’s place within the universe’s life-death cycle. For a literature that preoccupies itself with sex, soulmates, conception, and life-giving cannot help but situate itself in the tides of time and a grand history of birth and decay. Non-romantic media that denies the significance of love and the right-to-life of the mother also cuts itself off from the cosmogonical, rendering its thrills flat, its stakes meaningless, and its world saved an empty world. That is why one leaves mysteries, thrillers, and suspense texts with a profound hollowness – the consumer gorges themselves on nothing, just hours of hot air.
Yet, desire can be deepening, as 1960s and 70s New Age admirers of Eastern Tantra gleaned. Elevating sex to the level of union with a complementary cosmic entity and elevating spiritual union with the cosmos to the level of sex could be a compelling next stage in erotic omegaverse fiction. The soulmate trope so popular in omegaverse already borrows the language of deeper sexual philosophies, philosophies that see love as holistic and identity-shifting. As it is, the references to soulmates in omegaverse merely indicate bodily compatibility, sexual chemistry, the cliches of romantic fiction – but if omegaverse is to insist on exploring the “soul” in relation to intimacy and love, characters must be given the existential substance of the soul, and interpersonal relationships must breathe with vital force beneath the flesh’s surface. Additionally, it must also contend with the humanity of those who cannot or do not wish to procreate, and their place in the life cycle.
Despite the poetic exaggerations of “must,” this writer does not seek to curtail what kind of media should be made – for what creative greatness could come from moral or intellectual censorship? What this paper strives to do is to honor the potential of omegaverse with sincere critical review; to begin conversations that examine its current strength and weaknesses; and to encourage scholarship and creative work that draw on “high” and “low” culture, with the passionate curiosity to transform what is into what might be there.
