CW: Non-consensual dynamics, Kink talk, The Whole Episode is About Sex
This week, we unzip the metaphorical pants of the internet and crawl deep into the sweaty, scent-marked den of the Omegaverse. What is it? Where did it come from? Why is everyone growling? We’re talking heat cycles, scent ruts, social hierarchies, and the very horny tropes that define the genre, plus how fan creators are challenging and reshaping it. Also, somehow the court system got involved?
This episode was almost like a cross between a chattersode and a regular presentation where M presented on what the Omegaverse was and also where we asked question about it and go them answered. We all know a little something about it. Karen and M know a lot more about it than Remy does, but even he knows something about it. We actually recorded this episode before and the audio got corrupted, so this is a rerecording of a lost episode.
First thing’s first, what even is the Omegaverse? Honestly, this Wattpad explanation of all the terms is a really good, short little read to get the basic definitions.
This article here gets really into what it is from a more philosophical lens like, a little bit of the history of it, how it’s started as fanfiction for other things, started out centered on M/M fiction, things like that, but it’s in general a really good article about how people are using this genre of fiction to explore all kinds of power imbalance, social issues, things like that. This author says “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.” There’s all sorts of good links in this article for you to explore.
This is a link to where you can download “Dogfuck Rapeworld” by Milena Popova. The full title of the essay is “‘Dogfuck rapeworld’: Omegaverse fanfiction as a critical tool in analyzing the impact of social power structures on intimate relationships and sexual consent” and it’s a good read on how writers, often women, create power imbalances using this fiction in order to explore them and warp traditional sexual scripts.
You might also be interested in reading “Romancing the beast : intersections of power, gender, and sexuality in Omegaverse fan fiction” by Kelsey Entrikin who wrote this thesis about how some writers use the Omegaverse to explore the violence of cis-hetero-patriarchy through non-real, alien, invented anatomies, so they wrote about all that through the queer lens.
And then, of course, in this episode we talked about the lawsuit that came up around the Omegaverse. So here’s the video where Lindsay Ellis really goes over this in really good detail, reading out excerpts from the books, from the court documents, giving you all the details. This is just the first video.
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