Omegaverse has some interesting ramifications I'd like to explore, but I like the fanfic version where they're just weird humans better than the version where they're werewolves, because WOLVES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. NOTHING WORKS THAT WAY. I'm trying to come up with a way to have omegaverse shifters where the two traits are not connected. Maybe have them as a subspecies of humans, who also have a predilection to magic, including shifting?
I would be interested in this if you also got rid of the ass pregnancy? I work in a hospital, ass pregnancy really disturbs me, I stare at the ceiling and think about all that E. coli and a fetus/baby being exposed to it even if only during birth and it skeeves me completely out. If people want to have male characters or amab characters get pregnant, cool, I can see why they'd want that, but for fuck's sake can you think of some other place it could go?
Spoiler: nsfw I was thinking all omegas have uteri and vaginas and all alphas have dicks and balls, and DFAB alphas and DMAB omegas have vestigial versions of their usually-gender-associated parts. Just kinda POed right now because I was thinking of writing this as origfic and selling it on Amazon and basically got yelled down on Reddit because no no it's too different from what everyone else already does...
Oddly enough I have pretty much the opposite reaction. It probably helps that I’ve not worked in a hospital. I’m not overly troubled by minimal or no handwaving on this topic. If the level of detail and realism fits the style, I’ll roll with it. I’m much more likely to be put off by a story that does make an effort to find another way. That often ends up treading real close to potentially squicky ground, where a male body is the default and any deviation from the default is the reason that that’s a secondary category of person who gets a different set of rules. There are stories that can do this and still not put me off. I think it may be one of those things that has to either fall below a certain threshold of realism or I start getting antsy about uncritical depictions. In any case I am overall happier with my odds of finding something I’ll like if I don’t bother too much with things that look like they will probably fall in this category. I’ve bothered writing this whole thing out because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone express much of an opinion on the topic that wasn’t opposite of mine. That’s not a problem, I just am curious whether nobody else thinks this (seems unlikely given how hard it is to find a unique opinion on the internet), I just missed or forgot when people voiced similar opinions (completely possible), or “I’d prefer we stick with the ass pregnancy” is just an awkward stance to take (I mean.....). (Please don’t take this as a commercially relevant opinion, I’m too poor and distractable to have a market presence.)
Spoiler I personally find the ass pregnancy fine unless the story tries too hard to get into details and falls short, in which case I just end up thinking too hard about the mechanics of it and it starts pissing me off. My usual setup for rping a/b/o is omegas have vaginas and wombs etc, alphas have dicks and the sperm-producing bits, if they're amab omegas they also have smaller dicks and afab alphas have basic vaginas but neither of them lead to any of the actual required plumbing to be fertile that way, and betas just have whatever genitalia is appropriate to their biological sex, they just aren't fertile. I don't feel that that way treats male anything as the default but I may be missing something.
Spoiler: nsfw I’ll admit, that’s part of why I prefer Absurd Magic Werewolf Nonsense variations of a/b/o—the ones where everyone is human and the whole of human society is built around this and there’s none of the magic or mating bond or biting kinks just sorts of reads like... It feels a little “I want to write a story about sexism that doesn’t have Icky Girls in it” to me (shoutout to the fic that had all the male omegas in dresses too just to drive that point home). It’s fine that other people prefer it the other way around. But I think that the unrealistic kink nature of a/b/o is always going to have Unfortunate Implications ones way or another, so it’s a matter of picking your poison.
Magic and mating bond and shit is fine, as are werewolves; I just can't stand it when they talk like the wolf side of them is why they're like this rather than the magic. No. Wolves aren't even a tiny bit like that. You're thinking of reef fish. The omega would be the alpha's offspring and would be forbidden to reproduce and shoved out and possibly starved to death, and only the alpha pair would be mated at all, to each other, and one of them could be replaced by a challenger at any time so it's not for life either. And none of them would have babies out of their butts unless something was horribly wrong. Someone write werewolves that work like that, please.
Spoiler: nsfw Also I'd be much happier if more A/B/O remembered that women exist. Male-written porn of worlds containing only high-femme women and futanari is creepy in the exact same way... Come to think of it, what does it say about human attitudes to sex that people hear "lowest-ranking" and think "cumdump"? @BaseDeltaZero Taklamakan Zoo. (NOT worksafe or brainsafe.)
At this point I am almost one-hundred percent convinced that basically anyone who writes werewolves or likes werewolves knows that Real Wolves Don't Work That Way because you can't take three steps without falling over a pile of triumphant 'look at how very much wolves don't work that way' articles. Most of them probably don't care though.
Having wolves work the way people used to think wolves worked is one thing. Blaming having assbabies on being wolves is just going too far for me.
I gotta say that “male bodies considered default” is such a subtle squick that I had no idea I’d be going there when I started that paragraph. I had to erase and rewrite over and over for quite a long time before I managed to write something that rang true. I’m not sure whether that’s the deepest point of that well. It’s as far down as I can see right now. I don’t think people who write my squick are doing a bad thing. If I have a strong negative response I pretty much guarantee you someone has an equally strong positive response. Neither of us may have the faintest idea why a specific story affects us the way it does. The author may have no idea it’s there either. That doesn’t even mean it was necessarily unexamined. I think maybe fiction can work the same way as me rewriting that one sentence again and again, but it might be less obvious why exactly it does or doesn’t resonate. And even if it’s nothing other than a joyous, totally uncritical romp through my squick, that’s still fine. It’s porn, not the constitution. I can read something else. If I hadn’t read any things I thought were squicky, I’d have much less information right now on a specific way in which I relate to my culture and its values. I hope nobody moves to stop the porn until we run it all by this fairly obscure and probably highly subjective standard I have just thought of so we can make sure it isn’t problematic. If we started doing that type of activity, I’m pretty pessimistic about the chances that my favorite things would survive the purge. And I wouldn’t have these new thoughts to dig through for more information. It’s almost like if you don’t depict something that exists, it doesn’t erase it from being but it makes it way more difficult to examine.
Spoiler: nsfw What are your thoughts on male omegas with a vag which only forms when it's time to give birth? Shoving a baby out through your behind would probably do some serious damage.
I personally find that to be totally reasonable handwavium, unlikely to squick, and I have no further questions. I would if it appeared on House, but not in most porn. I have not adequately considered the case of porn of House. I think if the story doesn’t seem to be asking that kind of question, I will usually be happy enough to agree.
I mean, prostitutes are often low status, and rape of people of lower class is often seen as justified, but lowest ranking tends to be beneath contempt. Well, the pic links seem to all be dead. Probably for the best.
Spoiler: nsfw Yeah, and that's part of the attitude I'm referring to. The human view of sex is fucked up, not that we didn't already know that. The description of what's going on in it is bad enough. I actually went and read the one chapter of the manga that isn't loli, and it's everything the review suggested. Here's a worksafe page.
Spoiler: response to something spoilered; anatomic information I would...really not worry about what people say on Reddit, because...sometimes it seems like Reddit is 4chan lite? That's fair enough too, which is why there's lots of different porn/romance/what have you out there :) I have issues with Bad Science in Fantasy. You can convince me that magic exists, but you can't convince me that there's no electricity whatsoever in your fantasy world. Maybe technology doesn't work because human magic use causes massive interference with it, that's believable. "Electricity doesn't work" or "electricity stopped working" nopes me out because while I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, I copyedit journal articles kind of a lot and you can't not learn things. Electroconvulsive therapy (when properly done) and defibrillators both work because our hearts and brains run on electrical impulses, so if you're telling me "electricity stops working one day" I picture every critter with a heart and brain dropping dead that day and can't go further, except to wonder what happens to physics in a universe without electromagnetism. (And this is why I play Ford.) So, I can totally see where you're going with this, but my sperg brain reacts to this argument (for your amusement, not to seriously argue, because your point is quite valid) with "wait, what? But the female is biologically the default!" I really, really like your explanation that werewolves are fucky because humans who get turned into werewolves think they ought to be fucky that way, though, that's good shit and works for me! In fanfic, if the werewolves are fucky in canon, I also do not regard this as the fanfic writer's problem. I can't. I like Twilight. People do what they want in fic; that's what it's for. I don't think people shouldn't do the things that I don't like, I just get irritated when I'm reading something I am enjoying and then it takes a hard right into Nopeville. Spoiler: see spoiler above for details of why this is spoilered I wish I'd known that the URL was readhentaimanga.com before I tried to look at it on my lunch break, because it's totally firewalled and probably would be at most workplaces. I won't get into trouble, because our firewall is known to be fucky (you also can't go to pinupgirlclothing.com, I shit you not) but someone else might?
I could see it because there's serious remodeling to the pelvic area even in normal afab pregnancies (the carrier grows a lot of new blood vessels, their pelvis widens, et cetera). It's weird, but not "your unborn baby is swimming in shite" weird, and frankly the male omega would have to grow something like a uterus to contain the baby anyway because babies kick and move and you don't want that happening in your intestines, either. There's a book called The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman that did male intestinal pregnancy very seriously and probably broke my brain for mpreg forever. It was SUPER dangerous. But people did it anyway. (Please note, I'm talking only about science stuff, not social stuff, wrt this question?) Oh look I found a way to bring marsupials up, sorry and no one's surprised I'm sure. Of course marsupial reproduction is weird in LOTS of ways that human/placental mammal reproduction is not. But it's possible to have a baby not go out through the door it came in, because marsupials do that, and some of them do have transitory (median) vaginas.
