When I first encountered fanfiction in the mid-aughts, I’d never considered that I could be queer, kind of in the same way I’d never considered if I could be a fish. It would have felt a bit silly to think about it, you know? A little dramatic. God only knows what unholy google search found me on FanFiction.net, but the experience was like being tipped out of a lonely fishbowl and into the ocean. No barriers, no direction, way wetter than I’d anticipated. It was only when coming face to face with another fish that it occurred to me to start wondering about what the heck I was.
Defences of fanfiction have been made on its creative merits, on its transformative merits, on its god-why-do-we-need-to-defend-enjoying-stuff merits, but one of the most important needs that fic meets is its ability to provide a low-risk space for people who are questioning their identity to actually explore it. These days, Google is more likely to take you to Ao3 where queer fiction numbers in the millions and is infinitely filterable, but even FFN would hit you with something gay on the first page back in the day. It sounded like an innocuous enough hobby when my mother asked why I was spending so much time on the computer, and the combination of Japanese loanwords and fandom slang meant that anyone seeing ‘H/D shounen-ai lemon’ in my browser history was mostly just going to be confused. Having a space where I could engage in queer content and speak with queer people was such a vital component of my personal queer journey, I’m genuinely not sure how long it would have taken me to get started without it.
Given the freedom inherent in the medium—it’s free, it’s easy and relatively anonymous to sign up—fanfiction could be a place for exploring queerness, and for pushing its boundaries. When the only constraints on what you can write are in what coding you can force Ao3 to accept, there’s a lot of room to get creative in our interpretation and expression of What Queerness Is. It also creates a space like no other for people to dig into queer sex and queer bodies, both of which are way too quickly villified elsewhere on the internet. Theoretically, fanfiction is a transformative media—you take a story that already exists, and make new art out of it, or in spite of it, or in conversation with it. And yet, the fic community keeps coming back to the same tired echo of rigid, cis-heterosexual norms with a thin coat of Gay slapped over the top over it.
All this to say, I had to explain what yaoi hands were to someone recently. It’s all about the shoulder-to-waist ratio these days. Much that once was is called something different now, but it’s hitting the same notes. We’re in the Omegaverse, and instead of seme/uke, we’ve got alpha/omega. Mpreg has become breeding kink. ‘DON’T LIKE DON’T READ’ is a prologue in the author’s notes begging the readers not to take sex advice from fanfiction. (Yaoi hands, for those who don’t know, is a tendency in boys’ love manga for the seme, or top, to be drawn with Very Large Hands, usually in direct contrast to the Very Small Waist of the bottom/uke. You’re welcome).
Regardless of we call it, the base model of queerness in fandom is this: two men (only two), nominally cis, are either In Love, or will be by the time the fic is through with them. Regardless of their actual physical characteristics, one will be assigned Large and the other will be assigned Small. Largeness™ can be quantified in height, breadth, strength, or general presence, but you better believe none of these boys are sporting love handles. Smallness™, meanwhile, is based less on actual size, but instead on how easy it is to femme the man in question. That said, a man is gonna be small, sometimes in height, always in waist measurements. Whether or not these men fall into these stereotypes in canon is irrelevant: a Large™ man gets assigned top (synonymous seme, dom, alpha, Penetrator), and a Small™ man is assigned bottom (uke, sub, omega, Penetrated). A Large man is protective, domineering, stoic, caretaking. A Small man is delicate, soft, passionate, needy. A Large man has a big dick; a Small man’s dick doesn’t usually come into the equation. We do not speak of women.
The modelling works in two directions—men with these physical characteristics will change personalities like an outfit to better fit the mould, but so too will men with certain personality traits find themselves being described as more femme or masc, regardless of their actual body types. The amount of straight-up-and-down men who suddenly acquire ‘curves,’ or ‘a waist so tiny his hands nearly closed around it’ because they’ve exhibited like, emotional vulnerability, is uncountable. There’s this womenification of feminine men that occurs, a term I use specifically because of the cisgender implications it has—these fics aren’t interested in exploring the nuances and complications of gender, they’re mirroring the worst tropes of heterosexuality. If women have historically been treated as passive creatures whose sexuality needs to be corralled and controlled by men, then fandom is doing the same thing to male characters who evoke femininity, and it’s painting it with this veneer of wokeness by calling it queer.
Even concepts that play with physical sex characteristics like allowing cis men to be pregnant overwhelmingly shy away from engaging with transness. The collaborative fandom creation of the Omegaverse has resulted in this collection of tropes that impose cisheteronormativity onto queerness; we’ve collectively constructed a world that allows for the wholesale invention of physical sex characteristics, and the most interesting thing the majority of stories can think of to do with that is recreate the biological imperative? It elevates the concepts of marriage (mating) and children from social norms to natural instinct, posits that even in a world where same-gender relationships are normalised, we are only supposed to yearn for some approximation of straightness.
In describing this reiterative trend in the fic space, I don’t mean to imply that it’s the only thing being written about—just that it’s really, really popular. Of course, the second anything gets popular on the internet, people will start doing the exact opposite. The Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics tag on Ao3 has 11.5k fics in it—this compared to 123k Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamic fics, but it’s not an insignificant number. Some of the queerest, sexiest, most identity-affirming writing is being done in this space. Writers pick up the concepts outlined by what I guess we’re calling the Traditional Omegaverse and start subverting expectations. Non-Traditional A/B/O understands that sex, sexuality, gender exist as connected, but distinct concepts, and that they can be mixed and matched at will. Rather than insisting on a strictly binary view of all three, it’s a space that hands writer and reader the pieces to create and interpret as they please.
An example: a lesbian alpha explores gender identity through BDSM. So much of our language regarding sex and sex roles is already gendered—trying to play with those roles as a queer person can often involve a lot of wincing and ‘oh no, that doesn’t work for me’. In this particular A/B/O verse, female alphas have dicks (they retract! Non-Traditional A/B/O understands that if we’re making up genitalia anyway, we might as well get creative with it). A lesbian alpha engaging in vaginal penetration with a lesbian omega is considered pretty standard sexual behaviour. The traits of power and dominance become associated not with male-ness, but alpha-ness, suggesting that those alpha-associated traits are disconnected from our standard understanding of gender entirely. The A/B/O framework allows the fic to treat as comfortable, even typical, a lot of things that are considered taboo in reality, e.g. lesbians with dicks, lesbians engaging in penetrative sex, lesbians having sex for themselves and not cis men. Obviously lesbians and queer women in general engage with how to wrangle BDSM and gender all the time, but the fantasy here is about having the kind of space where one doesn’t have to wrangle—the things you want are a matter of course.
That’s not going to be every queer person’s favourite flavour, which that’s kind of the point. Another thing this Non-Traditional space allows for is the fact that queerness is different for everyone using the term. Another example: a sexual romance between two men, both omegas. In this verse, gay relationships are considered par for the course, but only if they’re between an alpha and an omega. Neither omega character is depicted as the aforementioned Large or Small type of man—after all, most people don’t fall into one extreme or another, and the goal in writing most characters in fiction (fan or otherwise) is for them to be people. But both characters have to work through their own experiences and assumptions about being an omega attracted to other omegas, something that looks different for both of them, and mirrors pretty closely the experience of being gay in real life.
Which of course begs the question: if we’re just writing gay erotica, why bother with all the bonus features using the setting enables? Sometimes it is just that people find the aesthetics of A/B/O appealing, sexually or otherwise. Sometimes it’s the fun of playing around with what a society looks like when you start turning those features on or off in different combinations. And sometimes, a made-up sex/gender framework that is malleable to the writer’s choices and the reader’s interpretations allows it to serve as a useful analogy for those things that hurt too much to handle directly.
At this point, I do want to say—it would be remiss of me not to point out that a lot of that queer, sexy, identity-affirming work mentioned above is being written by trans writers, who have seized the worldbuilding mechanics for their own, whether that be to dig into the social issues of gender and transition, or to just be horny. A lot of queer writing in fanfiction spaces is often spoken about in terms of non-queer writers fetishising communities they aren’t a part of—I have no statistics to prove this, but my personal fandom experience has overwhelmingly been of people who identify as queer, or who will identify as being queer in about three to five years time. Non-Traditional Omegaverse fic is this phenomenon distilled, a space where you can really dig into the nuts and bolts of what sex and gender mean to you. This is genre fiction at its best; when people take the established boundaries of a known concept and run them completely off the map into something vibrant and new.
But the existence of Non-Traditional Omegaverse work also ends up being the exception that proves the rule. Because what we’ve done is created two types of queerness: Traditional Queers, which fit into that Big/Small framework I outlined before, and Non-Traditional Queers. Frankly, the word “traditional” is enough to send me running, and that’s when I hear it from straight people. When it’s coming from queer spaces, it starts to acquire the grim aura of gatekeeping—which is a wild thing to begin with when we’re talking about a sub-niche of a niche corner of fandom, and even more infuriating when you consider that we’re talking about community created tropes. Who put these gates here? The Omegaverse might be the most popular iteration right now, but it’s just a new take on the same thing we’ve been doing for years; we’ve created this hierarchy where the most popular ships and dynamics, the stories that are most seen and most told, are the ones that adhere the closest to this ideal of a monogamous, active/passive pairing whose life goals sum up to marriage and babies. Even in this space that we’ve crafted for ourselves, our fantasies lean overwhelmingly straight. The Non-Traditional A/B/O space is doing some really interesting work, but comparatively, it’s so small—it’s not that fic outside the binary isn’t being written, it’s that you have to scrounge to find it.
This isn’t a call to Halt All Queer Erotica Until Everyone Writes At Least One Masc Bottom Or Sapphic Woman. When it comes to fic, proscriptive criticism is less than useless; nothing has personally driven me to write about something more than someone insisting it shouldn’t be written about, and the joy of fic is in being able to throw it online with as much or as little connection to who you are as you want. But I think it serves us well as queers and writers to take a look at our communities and talk about the work we’re producing, and what possibilities our stories are spinning for us. It’s not surprising that, in a media landscape so starved of diverse queer content, even the stories we write for free can end up replicating the same patterns that have been pushed on us for decades.
When you haven’t been allowed to see yourself, sometimes the most radical thing you can imagine is being queer at all. But it seems like this is where the community has stalled itself, one frozen step away from the demands of straight society. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but I would love to… broaden some palates? Expand the menu? If fanfiction is supposed to be transformative, then let’s transform it.
Hannah graduated the University of Auckland with a BA in History and English Literature in 2013, and has been putting it to dubious use yelling about queerness and fandom ever since. You can yell with her on Twitter @hanpersands
Being that my knowledge of sex is at this point purely theoretical, my point of view may not be the most informed, but even now, after hearing friends talk about different categorizations (subs, tops, etc.) I still don’t understand why society has developed a taxonomy for bedroom strategies much less made rules about what is and isn’t proper. Who cares, for pete’s sake, which member of some other couple has their back to the mattress and which has their back to the ceiling? And yet, like so many other things, society has arbitrarily decreed what is proper behavior for women and what is proper for men, and we, cishet and queer alike have internalized it. Romance fic isn’t my thing, but please, don’t escape the pen only to cage yourself again.
But all this does lead me to a question, if societal norms hadn’t forbidden some practices and approved others, would we still classify them? If societal norms and reactions to these norms depend on the conception of traditional gender roles to follow or defy, would a lack of these expectations mean it wouldn’t occur to us to name them?
Thank you for articulating this so wonderfully.
I got so, so sick of ships featuring two men of equivalent height, build, and badassery in which one of them got turned into The Damsel. There are pairings I just won’t read anymore because more than half the time they get rewritten like that, completely ignoring the inherent adorability of two large, gruff, and rather prickly and inarticulate men falling gradually in large, gruff, rather prickly and inarticulate love.
I agree with several points in this article, and I would like to add one thing for consideration; that a lot of fanfiction is written by young people with limited life- and writing experience. Maybe I’m only speaking for myself, but I at least started out writing every pairing into the seme/uke dynamic, and shoving aside or vilifying the female characters “in the way” of my ship. Twenty years later I’m writing polycules, I’ve learned to care about all involved characters, and I try to keep them all IN character as much as I can. I have a feeling a lot of these things just come with age. Although that’s not to say that all teenagers write bad fics and all adults write good fics, of course. :P
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I see that the social media tendency to shoehorn morality onto a justification for not liking something has infected Tor.com as well.
Look, as someone who encountered fanfiction long before the “mid-aughts,” this is a conversation that’s been going on for as long as there has been fandom. It’s not something new or something that’s indicative of queers today not being brave enough to be transformative in their expression of queerness. Does fanfic have a tendency to skew towards heteronormative pairing dynamics? Absolutely. Have I read a/b/o fic where it seems like the writer has just put a gay man in a woman’s societal shoes? Tragically, yes. But is it my, or really anyone’s place to criticize this when fanfiction is, above all else, freely offered indulgent self-expression intended for entertainment? Especially if, as this article says, fandom is often a budding queer’s first (and sometimes only) queer community. Consider that we are not all Athena, springing from the head of Zeus fully formed in our queerness. It’s entirely possible that for some, replicating heteronormative dynamics in a fictional queer relationship acts as a stepping stone in a person’s journey away from heteronormativity.
Queer people have a long history of being inundated with (often puritanical and moralistic) criticisms on how to be queer The Right Way. In such an environment, fandom has often been for us a room of one’s own; sometimes the only such room we have. Let’s keep it that way.
A/B/O only accounts for like, a small, small niche of queer fanfic. I have zero idea why so much of this article is focused on it – rather than an article about queerness in fanfic spaces, this mostly seems like an article about how you wish there was more of the kind of A/B/O you like. Which is valid, but doesn’t really seem like a transformative message.
All thots on yaoi aside, does the author know that there are genres of fanfiction that aren’t omegaverse? It is not the sum total of queerness in fanfiction and in fact only makes up about 1.5% of fic on ao3, which means there are well over nine million works on that site (4.6 million of which are m/m) that do not include alphas and omegas.
This entire article rubs me the wrong way. To highlight specific issues:
“If women have historically been treated as passive creatures whose sexuality needs to be corralled and controlled by men, then fandom is doing the same thing to male characters who evoke femininity, and it’s painting it with this veneer of wokeness by calling it queer.”
Very few people write fanfiction with “LGBTQ+ activism” in mind. You appear to be viewing a medium that must have the freedom to be pure garbage with zero literary finesse through a lens that expects thought-provoking, meaningful content. Someone’s exploration of their sexuality does not need to be “woke”. LGBTQ+ people are, in fact, allowed to have top/bottom preferences in their fictional pairings.
“Even concepts that play with physical sex characteristics like allowing cis men to be pregnant overwhelmingly shy away from engaging with transness.”
Mpreg and A/B/O kink are not the same as depicting a trans identity. If you think it is, you need to figure out why you think so. I don’t understand how you could be an avid reader of A/B/O, but somehow not see how people have been eviscerated for depicting trans men or trans women as getting pregnant for various reasons. One of the most common criticisms is “my identity is not your kink” and if the person is trans themselves, add in “A/B/O is still harmful!”
Current fandom culture does not allow unconventional exploration. Until people stop getting dogpiled and mass-harassed for creating imperfect work, they aren’t going to take risks. They are petrified by how the LGBTQ+ community cannibalises and judges itself. Your article does not help with this.
“A lesbian alpha engaging in vaginal penetration with a lesbian omega is considered pretty standard sexual behaviour. The traits of power and dominance become associated not with male-ness, but alpha-ness, suggesting that those alpha-associated traits are disconnected from our standard understanding of gender entirely.”
This is a massive double-standard. I suggest you examine your personal bias, as you appear to have zero problem with depictions of masculine women with penises having penetrative sex with other women (because that’s ‘alpha-ness’ and not ‘masculinity’), but take issue with depictions of feminine men with wet anuses being penetrated by bigger men (which could just as easily be described as ‘omega-ness’, a term that doesn’t appear in your article, rather than ‘femininity’). You might find you’re inherently biased against m/m depictions because they’re more common, rather than the f/f you’ve described actually being subversive.
“This is genre fiction at its best; when people take the established boundaries of a known concept and run them completely off the map into something vibrant and new. But it seems like this is where the community has stalled itself, one frozen step away from the demands of straight society. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but I would love to… broaden some palates? Expand the menu?”
You are talking about fanfiction, something people of any age or skill level can write. Of course most of the work is going to be basic and unpalatable to people who crave more-challenging narratives.
What you bring up in this article is not new. The points you’re making have been being discussed for decades in fandom spaces, even in the era of Yaoi hands.
Let us also consider the timing for this particular article: you are demanding a lot of work from LGBTQ+ people in an era when anti-LGBTQ+ panic has been pushed to a new level. LGBTQ+ people who write kink work are labeled as predators because of the fictional kinks they have. LGBTQ+ people get doxed on the regular if they make the mistake of having any personally identifying information anywhere on their social media. It is year 3 of a global pandemic in which 6 million people have died, meaning it is quite likely a lot of these people have experienced the loss of friends and family members that significantly impacted them. Many LGBTQ+ people are feeling demoralised and bleak.
Timing and personal stresses are not counter-arguments to your article, so I’ll point out: your default is to assume people haven’t examined their kinks and fictional preferences. You base this on nothing but personal belief.
“If fanfiction is supposed to be transformative, then let’s transform it.”
Standard A/B/O works with recycled traditionally-cishet tropes are, by way of their non-canon nature, transformative. The overwhelming majority of stories that people have seen their entire lives are cishet and it’s normal for people to tell similar stories in a LGBTQ+ frame. You are never going to know why these people are writing fanfiction that pushes zero boundaries when you have openly admitted you won’t look at their responses to your article and have even said you think it was a good idea you mitigated your chances to see their reactions.
AO3 is neither book club nor writer’s guild. It’s not even a community, although communities may be active on it. It’s an archive where people upload their work, with more stories being written by average people who will never seriously take up writing craft or imagine unique stories. This is not the bad thing you seem to think it is.
You were quite happy to acknowledge RS Benedict, someone who said “fanfiction makes peoples’ writing worse”, when the reality is fanfiction is now accessible to average people, not just wordy nerds. When average people know fanfiction is an option, it inspires those average people to create average works for stories they love. Anyone who knows how to form a sentence can write fanfiction. Consequently, most of it is going to be mediocre at best.
If anyone wants to see actual transformative change, I would suggest they quit waxing poetic with regards to what their LGBTQ+ peers are writing, pretending they’re accomplishing anything other than tearing down average LGBTQ+ people because they aren’t creative enough.
Those who wish for change should start a group. Run a challenge. Create prompts. Try to inspire LGBT+ writers to inch outside their storytelling limits and comfort zones rather than write treatises about how more LGBTQ+ people should tackle the massive undertaking that is having the creative bandwidth to make something new and interesting.
Those who want a more transformative fanfiction experience should further consider not doing things that make average queer writers feel bad for not being better writers or not having the emotional wherewithal to explore subversive LGBTQ+ themes. Most importantly, I would also suggest those people understand there is absolutely nothing wrong with LGBTQ+ writers cranking out nothing but pure trashy tropey romances that make them happy.
Queer fanfiction is not LGBTQ+ activism.
If you want to see change, start by changing your approach.
You seem to be approaching this from a very cis perspective. As a trans person, I find things like omegaverse to be anything but hetero/cisnormative. It’s a world where sex and gender are universally accepted to be completely separate things— to me, that sounds like a gender utopia! Obviously people write it in different ways, but a lot of omegaverse content lets men have vaginas and women have penises and it’s not a big deal. No one hate crimes them, and they don’t have to go through years of medical and legal red tape to be acknowledged for who they are. A story where a man can be pregnant without outing himself, dealing with endless questions and misunderstandings, and facing constant discrimination may sound heteronormative to you, but it’s blissful escapism for me. Maybe it doesn’t engage with transness. Great! It doesn’t have to. Sometimes it’s exhausting to have all of our experiences reduced to struggle and otherness. I think “a goose” (great name) raised a good point in their comment: the present moment is an absolutely terrifying time to be queer. Sometimes I want to read porn about a man getting his male pussy fucked without a full exploration into the realities of dysphoria and social ostracism. Fucking sue me.
btw, the goose’s comment was just really good overall. I won’t restate the whole thing. Go read it again.
Non-traditional omegaverse is not “the exception that proves the rule.” The rules you made up aren’t really rules, they’re genre tropes: you see them often enough to notice their prevalence, but you don’t pay as much attention to the many instances where they aren’t there, unless the author goes out of their way to subvert them. Sure, maybe the big-alpha-small-omega trope is “traditional,” but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way this genre can be written. I think in recent years especially, you’d have a hard time finding a fic that checks every single box in your “rule.” Like any genre, people mix and match tropes as they serve their preferences. Also, I’ve noticed that the tropefulness (is there a word for that?) of omegaverse fics varies by fandom. Maybe your takes sound weird to me because we roll in very different circles; that’s all the more reason not to make sweeping generalizations like this.
Honestly, this whole article boils down to you thinking your reading of this massive genre of media is The Correct One, and therefore this media is Problematic. It sounds like the way that YOU respond to this writing is that it’s enforcing heteronormativity. I totally get why you feel that way! You make some really strong arguments for why many omegaverse tropes can be read as heteronormative. But that doesn’t mean you get to speak over the many queer creators and readers of omegaverse who are using this fascinating alternate universe to explore our kinks and identities in ways you don’t understand. As with all art, your interpretation of omegaverse is valid but it isn’t the only possible one, and it definitely doesn’t invalidate the joy that a lot of us queer folk find in this genre.
At the end of the day, millions of people writing stories about gay couples will never be the ultimate weapon of heteronormativity. Currently, the LGBTQ+ community is actively under attack by legislators and hate groups. I promise you, gay porn authors are not the biggest threat to us right now— can we argue over fanfic literary analysis after we’ve secured basic human rights?
If you feel uncomfortable with how omegaverse is written, that’s fine, you clearly have good reasons why you feel that way. It’s your responsibility to choose what you consume, but it’s not your place to determine what others should create. As fans have said for generations: don’t like, don’t read.
By the way: I’m leaving this as a side note because I don’t want to undermine your actual arguments by pointing out what I assume is just an oversight. But as a transmasc person, I really hope you don’t speak this way about the many real, non-fictional men who happen to fit your idea of “small.” “Femme” is a label that a lot of queer people use to self-describe, and it’s generally more about behavior than innate physical characteristics. Saying that authors “femme” male characters by giving them curves and small waists or making them short is pretty tone deaf. Again, I get that this was unintentional, but it kinda hurts to hear that as a short, curvy, very much non-female person. I think you raised a very valid point but you could have worded it better.
I’ve been in fandom since the 90s, and this was a frustrating read.
I remember when Teenage Me felt like a bizarre outlier for liking Kuwabara from Yu Yu Hakusho, because the BL fans I encountered saw him as too ugly to be worthy of fandom’s attention. I remember when people got super uptight about enforcing whatever they understood of seme/uke dynamics, or treated it as borderline perverse to prefer a shorter character topping. Fandom did not even pretend to be anything but hostile to discussing bigotry. Slash and yaoi were separate things; whenever they came into conflict someone in slash fandom would inevitably talk about how bishounen were “basically girls” while someone in BL fandom sniped back about how hideous they thought real men were compared to the impossibly elfin beauties in manga. Fun for a closeted trans guy!
That was all around the time that “yaoi hands” was a thing.
I can’t reconcile what you’re describing with the fics and art I regularly see. I was annoyed by the same tropes you’re describing back in 2004; I’m startled when I run across them now because there are enough options that I can ignore them. Simply pointing out that there’s a McDonald’s every 10 miles in US cities doesn’t encourage people to look at local restaurants. Complaining that enormous movie franchises don’t have enough gay characters does not ultimately elevate queer creators. Those observations can be useful, but at the point where you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of works self-published online by unorganized individuals and your takeaway is, “We gotta step it up,” you more or less have to gloss over the tens of thousands of people who already are.
We have “taken a look at our communities and discussed the work we’re producing” to the extent that it is some people’s sole angle of engagement with fanworks, and it’s crossed over with classic fandom pastimes like ranting about pet peeves until it’s overwhelmed opportunities to talk about actionable issues. Whether done in good faith or not, the most it’s ultimately accomplished when dealing with problems of scale is to convince people who care that they’re not good enough to risk upsetting anyone with their labors of love.
I think a version of this piece written with more curiosity would have spent more time and thought on the people you acknowledge as doing good, interesting work. You might also find interesting trends at play in who the writers of many “heteronormative” dynamics are, and why they explore them in fic genres like A/B/O; it is not necessary to subvert or provide an alternative to these tropes to explore them in meaningful or cathartic ways, and it is dismissive to assume the people playing with them don’t know exactly what they’re about.
I tried to express this point in a previous comment, but I think actually describing the content of A/B/O made it too graphic for the Tor.com commenting rules. I’ll try again.
Yes, fanfiction tropes can be critically analyzed. That’s very interesting and potentially useful stuff. I agree with many of the author’s remarks on omegaverse/ A/B/O, although I’d challenge others, and I would be interested in deeper analysis.
However, A/B/O is a fetish erotica genre, a fact that is curiously absent from this article. Yes, some of it is perfectly SFW. Most of it is not. It is being produced for entertainment and titillation by amateurs and the majority of it is very poor quality. (I don’t mean this to be cruel; it’s just a fact.)
I question the decision to call on hobbyist erotica writers to produce realistic and/or radical depictions of queer life during their leisure time instead of fantastical niche erotica. I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but a lot of people have no political or representational aims for their participation in fandom. Sometimes, it’s just a hobby where you write very strange sex scenes for fun.
I think having a call to action, in this case, weakens the article by moving it into the realm of intra-fan arguments rather than scholarly analysis.