Why Write Omegaverse Fiction?

I recently saw someone shorten “omegaverse” to “OV,” which I think means the trope has made it. Also known as alpha/beta/omega dynamics or a/b/o, omegaverse has become an incredibly popular and ever-more mainstream worldbuilding trope in romance.

What is omegaverse fiction, and why bother writing it? I can’t give you insights for anyone else, but I can tell you why I often choose to employ the trope in my own works.

What Is Omegaverse Fiction?

Let’s start with the basics. What the heck is omegaverse? I’ve written some primer posts here and here, so for fuller explanation, you can start there. I’ll give you a brief recap here though.

Omegaverse is a worldbuilding trope that adds “secondary sexes” to characters. In addition to being male and female (or men and women), characters are also assigned one of three secondary sex designations: alpha, beta, and omega.

Alphas are usually hyper-masculine, while omegas are feminine coded. Alphas play the masculine reproductive role, while omegas, even when they are men or “male,” take on the feminine reproductive role. (It’s seahorse biology, to some extent.)

Betas are somewhat of a wild card. In some stories, they are just normal people. In other stories, they are infertile and incapable of reproduction. And in yet other stories using the omegaverse trope, betas don’t even exist.

What’s the Appeal of Writing Omegaverse?

All right, so now that we know a little bit about omegaverse fiction, you’re asking: “why?”

That’s an excellent question. I’m going to answer it as a writer, so I’m thinking in terms of why I like writing omegaverse fiction. This isn’t necessarily true for another writer, and it’s not going to explain much about why people like reading it.

From a writer’s standpoint, though, I like omegaverse, because it provides me with a pretty easy method of doing a lot of things I like to do. In my fanfic writing career, gender-bent characters and characters cross-dressing or doing drag was always a pretty prominent feature. With omegaverse fiction, there is often a built-in reason to put guys—omegas—into some fairly “femme” dress.

It extends beyond mere dress, however: omegaverse allows us to put men into (hyper)feminine roles. It’s drag performance, but on steroids. These men are not just in drag, not “cosplaying” gender, and they are not simply being hyperfeminine on a stage. Instead, they are hyperfeminized right down to their biology.

Flexibility in Worldbuilding

That, in turn, allows for some interesting worldbuilding. I’ve written on different dynamics at play in omegaverse before. Omegaverse can be and often is dystopian, in the sense that highly restrictive gender roles are forced on omegas, and sometimes on alphas alike. This, I’ve argued, allows writers to explore the darker side of “being a woman” in our current society, without the baggage of misogyny. We take men and force them into the gendered box usually reserved for women, and we hold them up—and we can see how exploitative, restrictive, and oppressive these roles and ideals are.

In other senses, omegaverse can also be utopian. Queerness abounds in omegaverse. Many of the writers I know present queerness as incredibly normalized within their omegaverse world: it’s simply accepted that some people are going to be attracted to the “same sex.”

At the same time, there still exists degrees of “straightness” and oppression against certain pairings. In some worldbuilding, omegas are not supposed to get together with other omegas, and alpha-alpha pairings are frowned upon—similar to modern homophobia.

What all this boils down to, often, is that omegaverse is a way of exploring gender and gender roles. It can be both utopian and dystopian. It’s also incredibly flexible in terms of the worldbuilding: I’ve already noted you can dispense with betas or you can keep them in; you can explore homophobic attitudes by pairing omegas with omegas and alphas with alphas. These kinds of stories are rarer; most omegaverse fiction I’ve encountered really wants to explore the alpha-omega pairing.

Okay, There’s Also the Kinky Bit

Omegaverse fiction is sometimes known as “wolf kink erotica,” and not entirely without reason. The terms alpha, beta, and omega come from an outdated theory about wolf packs, where leader is the “alpha” male, the beta(s) are his second in commands, and omegas are scapegoats who are liable to be chased off from the pack.

Like wolves, alphas and omegas in omegaverse romance books usually have “heats.” Omegas in particular will go into heat, which sets the stage for some pretty spicy scenes. Alphas also have knots—exactly like male canines, including wolves and dogs.

I’ve discussed why this likely appeals to writers and readers alike: in short, it’s a great excuse to have the characters get down and dirty. It’s also an excellent way to have characters get over any dislike of each other, explore consent, make the omega character vulnerable and in need of protection, and so on.

If you’re an mpreg writer like me, then it’s also one of the best possible vehicles for making ostensibly “male” characters get knocked up. Not all omegaverse romances are mpreg, but the trope is an excellent worldbuilding trope for mpreg stories for that reason.

So, yes, there is definitely some appeal in the … spicier side of the omegaverse trope. I’d argue that a lot of writers (and readers) are initially attracted to it for that very reason.

Why Write Omegaverse Specifically?

A lot of what the omegaverse concept accomplishes could be written about in other ways. What it really provides is a shorthand—a codified way to discuss these concepts.

As I already noted, there are many different ways of writing omegaverse: some writers choose to include all the of wolfy elements, with shifters. Some drop those bits. Others go for something in between. Some are writing dystopias, while others play with some more utopian interpretations.

I’ve written omegaverse in many different forms at this point, and one of the questions I come back to is: why omegaverse specifically?

A lot of what I write could simply … not be omegaverse. There’s no real reason that, say, the ravens of the Zodiac books should use omegaverse specifically. Same with the selkies in the Mythos Island series. They could use an entirely different set-up.

Why write omegaverse then? The answer lies partly in the fact it’s a codified system that already exists. It’s a language that writers and readers have agreed upon and, to some degree, understand.

I could make it so the selkies or the ravens or the people in the Omega on Top series don’t use the omegaverse worldbuilding system. But I would largely be reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day, I’d simply be using new linguistics to talk about the same (or similar) concepts.

So there’s one reason to employ the omegaverse trope: it’s familiar, to both readers and writers. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s popular with readers—there is, after all, a reason it’s become codified, moving from one fandom across several others and then making the jump into mainstream fiction.

The other reason is that omegaverse, in a lot of ways, does simply boil down to an exercise in linguistics.

The Linguistic Reality of Omegaverse Romance Books

A/b/o dynamics are, at the end of the day, simply labels. Yes, we can argue about the importance of genre concepts like “heat” and alpha knots, but the long and short of it is that those things are, to some degree, dispensable.

What “omegaverse” boils down to, then, is the idea of “secondary sexes” being labeled “alpha” and “omega.” This gives rise to a linguistic reality where “male” and “female” have largely been replaced by “alpha” and “omega,” and from there “man” and “woman” have been detached from the concept of sex.

I can achieve something similar by, say, using the Cyrillic alphabet and naming “men” or “males” with the first letter of the alphabet, and the “women” or “females” with the last letter of the alphabet. We could use kanji or basically any other writing system to achieve the same effect.

So, as I noted, why reinvent the wheel? What omegaverse is really playing with is notions of sex and gender and sex-as-gender. Any other terminology that tries to pry the concepts apart achieves the same effect—so why invent new terms?

A truly new system could indeed make it necessary to have new linguistics. But omegaverse has proven itself so flexible, it becomes very difficult to invent a system that feels truly “divorced” from omegaverse. So even if I were to do this, I might end up with readers suspecting that what they are reading is indeed omegaverse—just dressed up in new clothes.

At this point, then, the question is not “why write omegaverse,” but “why not write omegaverse?”

Discover the Vast World of Omegaverse Novels

I’ve repeatedly said that omegaverse is an incredibly flexible concept. That, coupled with its current popularity, means there is a wide array of omegaverse romance novels for readers who are curious to try them out.

There is, obviously, my own omegaverse novels, which run the gamut. You have Omega on Top, which features regular old humans. You have the Mythos Island series, in which the selkies simply do not play by human gender concepts. And you have books like The Raven Before the Dove, which invoke omegaverse in a more classic form.

There aren’t just gay omegaverse books, though. You can also find plenty of M/F omegaverse romance books these days. In addition, not all M/F is “straight.” And there are omegaverse books that explore omega-omega and alpha-alpha pairings, as well as polyamory, asexuality, and more.

In short, no matter what you’re looking for, there is something within the realm of the omegaverse that might appeal to you.

Of course, that’s if you like “wolf kink porn.” If that’s not your jam, then you might want to leave the omegaverse aside—at least for now.

If you’re not sure, then you can always try out a book or two in the omegaverse. Not all of them go hard on the “wolf kink” bit (although, if werewolves are your thing, there are a lot of those kind of books out there), and not all of them are m/m or queer or straight. The huge variety speaks to to the flexibility and malleability of the omegaverse trope—it’s like entering a new, yet familiar, world with every different book and every different author.

Maybe that is the biggest appeal of writing omegaverse—it’s new and different every single time.