Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I feel that with the added gender components, Omegaverse needs its own Sexual and Romantic Orientation terms.
According to my post (that I updated/edited a little bit) I’m dealing with six cis gender options.*
I made a whole (colour coded) spreadsheet that you can download here, if you wish. The gist is this: I’ve made up new terms to describe orientations**, because I found the ones we already have lacking. If you ask me, there are so many permutations of attraction in reality, there were bound to be even more in Omegaverse because of added gender components – even when you only take cis genders into account.
Within Omegaverse, I imagine the assignments Alpha, Beta, and Omega to be the Primary Gender, and Male or Female to be the Secondary gender.
What a fun list! I go through processes like this one when I build an omegaverse world—but they’re not all the same, so I have to customize things each time.
I like that this has a/b/o as the primary gender and male/female as secondary. In stories I usually see it described as the other way around but that’s not usually how it works in the story.
Honestly, though, in a world where both men and women have a/b/o characteristics, the thing I can never get around is why male and female would even exist in the first place. In a world with a/b/o, male and female as sexes are just completely useless. As genders, they might be more interesting, but as it would be a world where people would naturally parse gender in at least three dimensions rather than two (and probably more, as at least some cultures would recognize genderless and different combinations of intersex), I can’t see the logic of splitting it down along only two axes at all.
I mean, I write it, because the amount of work it would take to reconstruct the world and character psychologies thoroughly enough to make up for a change like that would be more work than I feel like doing. But it doesn’t make sense.
Yes! The whole gender thing is confusing, even if you say ‘but this expands possible attractions/identification axes’… because how does it work?? haha. Like, I want to know how attraction works biologically in the case of that many options, ‘cause… there is literally no precedent in the animal kingdom, as far as I know. Like, humans are somewhat unique, but not that unique; gender and sex aren’t the same, but ultimately it’s a spectrum rather than a multidimensional cube. It’s easy enough to imagine attraction along a spectrum (towards male to female bodied or presenting persons).
Trying to imagine a spectrum of attraction that is actually 100% divorced from biology comes really close to being genuinely alien, hard sci-fi type stuff! Which is exciting! Because, like, you have ‘Left Hand of Darkness’ and such, but things were a lot less complicated and a lot more obviously complementary. ‘Left Hand of Darkness’ had a role for each gender in family-formation. The role of female Alphas or female Omegas (given there are male Omegas and fertile female non-Omegas) really just baffles me. Not in a bad way! But it does.
So that’s why in my mind, it’s easiest if the Alpha/Omega thing is only applicable to males, and either all females are Omegas (super-fertile, going into heat) or they’re all Betas (infertile or low-fertility). Because then the male/female division would *matter* and have a reason to exist. Otherwise, it would be a truly alien world with 3 biological sexes: Alpha, Omega, Beta (infertile or sexless drones, perhaps). If the male/female divide exists at all, then there has to be some meaning to it biologically; the main way I can imagine that meaning existing is if super-fertile female Omegas didn’t exist. Mostly ‘cause super-fertile Omegas just so obviously make male Omegas unnecessary. Why would you have a whole different (trickier) baby-delivery system if there’s a super-fertile alternative with much smoother plumbing? I can imagine how male Omegas could have been ‘triggered’ or ‘activated’ (with heats!) when the population dropped, and before that they were ‘normal’ males (who didn’t have heats or get pregnant). But then the pheromone level dropped as the birthrate of Alphas fell, say, which told them to go into heat-mode en masse (like women whose periods coincide). Something like that.
I can see female Alphas, because this would go along with Secondary Gender mattering, so male Omegas could simply prefer females and, if they’re not queer, they’d be into Alphas. Plus, it’d be a direct mirror to the mixed-sex characteristics of male Omegas. So far so semi-logical. But the existence of female Omegas where there are *so* many other options for fertility breaks my brain. Essentially, I cannot imagine a world where genitals truly are superfluous if we’re talking about humans. And if we’re not, why pretend we are? heh
Anyway, I try not to think about it too long, lest my mind break any further than it already has, haha.
Yeah, basically.
I mean, somebody pointed out—quite rightfully!—that biology in the real world doesn’t always necessarily make sense either. We have theories about why stuff is, but they’re just theories, and sometimes IDEK? WHY DO FEMALE CAVE-BUGS HAVE PENISES THEY JUST DO.
So the answer to “Why do female alphas?” can indeed just be “Who knows, but there they are!”
But my analysis brain still goes, “???”
The really important thing for purposes of the story, though, is figuring out what role SOCIETY has decided they’re supposed to fill. Because whether the character agrees or not, THAT will have a strong impact on their life and the story. And I find, generally, that to really round it out and give it the body that makes it feel real, the thing to do is to also figure out what roles at least a few other societies believe they’re supposed to play—or even better, have historically played. Because that awareness of history, both in what the characters are consciously taught and what they pick up from the human hive mind, will also have its influence in what they want and what they see as possible.
That said, we don’t really understand how attraction works biologically for any species. We tell ourselves story-theories about how “Well, probably that’s because they’re looking for such-and-such quality in a mate and thus they find that attractive,” but there’s a really big gap there that has yet to be filled, you know? Because attraction doesn’t work on a species level. It works on an individual level. It’s what YOU or I find attractive in a potential mate—and so far as I have ever seen, that doesn’t necessarily have much to do with what’s biologically good sense. Certainly not in humans, where what we’re attracted to depends so much on the experiences and information we internalize as we grow, and even the choices we make. And we STILL don’t know whether queer attraction is genetically coded or an environmental thing.
So why should people in the a/b/o universe have any clue how attraction works for them?
All that said, the proliferation of sexes and what they do and what they’re for can have a lot to do with what the writer decides is the natural ratio of sexes. If you think of it as being alpha/beta/omega first, then that’s three. And then male/female might be more of a sexual subdivision/specialization—some lean toward physical strength, some lean toward endurance.
What confuses me about THAT is that why would sexual characteristics like penis or breasts still be anchored to the male/female divide in that case? They’re mammals (one presumes). Wouldn’t it make more sense for the child-bearers to have the organs for producing baby food and the inseminators to have the semen-depositing tools? Or you could just do 52 card pickup and declare “RANDOM SEX TRAITS FOR EVERYBODY!” Or that they develop them as necessary based on environmental cues. Maybe NO omegas have breasts, until they get pregnant? Maybe everybody just walks around with kind of an industrial-sized clitoris until an omega goes into heat nearby and then BAM, welcome to the world of dicks!
But I think the reason we don’t see more wild creativity in omegaverse on that front is that because it hits a point where it changes the world and human psychology SO completely that it’s not really all that useful for the purposes of fanfiction anymore, where we want to have a story that is fundamentally about these characters that we can fundamentally recognize. And also…that is just a LOT of work. XD