Socchan (
soc_puppet) wrote2023-06-19 07:22 pm
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Entry tags:
Today's brainrot
Me: *shaping dough at work, casually thinking about how to describe a particular fanfic that ended up going in a very racist direction*
Me: ...This is an omegaverse fanfic, why do I keep trying to describe the POV omega character as "the uke"?
Brain: Same difference, honestly.
Me: ...What.
Brain: Hadn't you noticed? Omegaverse omegas and alphas are basically ukes and semes for Western media fandom.
Brain: I mean, it's not a perfect 1:1, but it's pretty damn close! And yeah, a non-zero number of people are doing subversive things with omegaverse, but a non-zero number of yaoi/BL manga-ka also do subversive things with seme and uke roles, so.
Me: ...Okay, this is going to get its own post, because I am not going to derail an important post about anti-Black racism in fandom with this.
(I don't know if I'm actually going to make a post about the fic in question, but wow did the author make one hell of a racist decision with it.)
Me: ...This is an omegaverse fanfic, why do I keep trying to describe the POV omega character as "the uke"?
Brain: Same difference, honestly.
Me: ...What.
Brain: Hadn't you noticed? Omegaverse omegas and alphas are basically ukes and semes for Western media fandom.
Brain: I mean, it's not a perfect 1:1, but it's pretty damn close! And yeah, a non-zero number of people are doing subversive things with omegaverse, but a non-zero number of yaoi/BL manga-ka also do subversive things with seme and uke roles, so.
Me: ...Okay, this is going to get its own post, because I am not going to derail an important post about anti-Black racism in fandom with this.
(I don't know if I'm actually going to make a post about the fic in question, but wow did the author make one hell of a racist decision with it.)
no subject
I guess all omegas are ukes but not all ukes are omegas, maybe.
no subject
no subject
I'd argue both seme/uke dynamics and omegaverse ones tend to default to what is essentially repackaged biology-is-destiny gender roles: a person's physical body (being an omega, being the smaller/weaker member of a gay couple) implicitly or explicitly makes them submissive, passive, and into being sexually penetrated. At the best, both are ways of examining cultural heterosexuality (what is it that makes gender roles work the way they do? what happens if we swap out some key assumptions about who they apply to in which way?) and at the worst they just regurgitate it but with more penises.
no subject
On the other hand, I've read at least one BL manga and seen a BL hentai where the more effeminate/uke-coded guy was the penetrating partner, while I've only read one omegaverse fic where the omega was the penetrating partner. And I've read two BL manga titles where the characters switch ever (only one of which I remember the name of), and aside from that one omegaverse fic, kinda... none. So it's not just the gender presentation thing, it's also the "Whoever is assigned seme/alpha will always penetrate, and whoever is assigned uke/omega will always be penetrated, and ne'er the two shall swap" thing that really gets to me.
I don't know if you were here for my adventures in Making Betas Sexy, but I explicitly worldbuilt for omegaverse queerness, and that included the split attraction model. I'd probably about faint from joy if I ever saw a fic where, for example, the omega was only penetrated during heat, and all the rest of the time they were the penetrating partner.