[PASSION PROJECT] ...hehehe... · 1:34am Feb 12th, 2022
This month's "passion project" came right out of the blue in a completely unexpected vector.
In my post about this month's Fanfiction Friday, I discussed my interaction with the Ranma 1/2 fandom and reading older fics and, eventually, writing for the fandom. This got me feeling somewhat nostalgic, but the problem with older fandoms is finding the communities and archives is more like tracking down secret societies and archeology than anything else...unless newer works are being published in spaces that aren't traditional for those fandoms.
Sidebar: I have a feeling that the sudden surge of people on social media going on about being alphas and whatnot has been influenced a little bit by the Omegaverse, but in the "game of telephone" kind of way. Someone reads about Alphas and betas and omegas, make a few inferences, remember that one high school textbook they read years ago that cites a debunked study about wolves and decided that their testosterone-soaked interpretation ("Brah, Alphas get all the ladies, it's science, brah!" 
) means that somehow they're Alphas, then labeled what in-universe for the Omegaverse is an omega as a beta and decided that all betas were inferior and...
You get my point, I think.
The Omegaverse is not about a bunch of self-inserts for dude-bros with waaaaay too much of their daddy's money and zero common sense [tw]raping women. It's an AU with a very heavy sex-based (slightly fetishized) component that influences everything in it. It's about the relationships between (usually) two people that can be straight or gay, lesbian or bi, non-binary or cis, any and all of these combined, even if that relationship is purely about the sex for that one story.
But...
...and there's always a "but" these days...
...you can't even think about going on the Internet without tripping over some asshole that thinks the proven-completely-bad-for-culture-and-individuals "Purity" culture is somehow new, novel, and a good idea, in spite of how many trans-teens the cult of Purity has claimed, pandemics it's ignored, depressions it's directly responsible for, and religions it's corrupted. So the Purity culture will happily slap the Omegaverse together with the "alpha" deuche-bros, and declares it all bad in a 100% uncritical way.
Okay, I'm ranting now.
On a whim, I dug into AO3 and found, to my absolute surprise, a fairly lengthy fic called Bite Me, I'm Yours (BIG STONKING NSFW warning, do not pretend you weren't warned! I'm warning the heck out of you, this is heckin warnings!). I started reading it and got sucked in by the excellent writing style and the slight suspense of the characters, then got REALLY locked in when the high-tension romance started. Yes, there's sex, and it was hawt, and I don't apologize for it, but I recognize that some people aren't interested in that, so don't read it if you're not. What impressed me about this one, though, was the sex did not feel forced.
Far too many stories just kinda jam sex in because it'd be hot or sexy or the author wants to be edgy, but you can tell it's just kinda tacked on. Very often, these entire sex scenes can be replaced with, "...and then they fucked" and have just as much impact on the story as however many words the scene used.
This one the sex just flowed as part of the story, was central to the plot, wasn't just jammed in or forced, it made sense in the story, for the characters, and as part of the narrative arc!
As this was good, I wanted more, and I pieced together from the tags and author's notes that this story was part of the Omegaverse.
Now, I should note that I've seen "#omegaverse, often coupled with the somewhat mysterious #a/b/o tag, across the Internet. Tumblr, Twitter, fan sites, archives, you name it. After first encountering the tag and finding nothing that hooked me about it, I kinda just moved on. I had no idea that this was a MASSIVE shared universe of concept connected stories, sometimes just being simple smut, other times being deep, complex narratives that are about relationships in the larger context of this AU to end all AUs.
From that Ranma 1/2 story, I leapt into She-ra, The Owl House, bookmarked stories from a half-a-dozen other fandoms for later reading, and just got sucked into the whole idea to the point where I just had to write a story centered around my favorite horse-girl cinnamon roll daughter EQG character.
...and I admit, I may have gone a little overboard in my sudden excitement. My roommate told me just now (rather screamed it to the heavens in frustrated ennui), that I just won't shut up about it and she's gonna start charging me $5 every time I mention it. 
So, yes, here I am, 12k words later when I should have been working on the bonus content for the published "My Empire of Dirt," and I still want to write more! I'm waking up in the middle of the night and the first thing I think consciously is, "Do I have enough time to jot down a few paragraphs?" I'm using my free time at work on this beast. Chapter 2 was 8,000 words long, and I had originally thought I could squeeze it in as part of Chapter 1!
I must be stopped! DON'T STOP ME NOW! 
Dudebros probably think that understanding things is "gay" because gay people ask for understanding that they're unwilling to provide.
And another beast grows... let's see where it goes!
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Yes. Yes, it is.
Oh, it's also worth mentioning that the study in question was debunked by pointing out that the wolves studied were put in a highly unnatural situation... that is not wholly dissimilar to the one modern society puts humans in. They didn't specify the second bit, but any Omegaverse writers who get criticized based on the debunking probably ought to.
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I point this out all the time...
One thing I'm hoping to do at some point is highlight the differences; create a pack in opposition to the CHS pack that behaves like the trapped zoo wolves did for that study and highlight the conditions that created that behavior. Only rough sketches on that idea exist in my mind, and it'd take place well after the mid-point of the story (or at least what I'm expecting to be the mid-point right now).