GLR July-August 2023

ESSAY

Fanfiction and the Omegaverse H ANNAH M ATTHEWS

W HEN 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 that I could be a fish. It would have felt a bit silly to think about it, you know? A lit tle 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 di rection, way wetter than I’d anticipated. It was only when com ing face to face with another fish that it occurred to me to start wondering about what the heck I was. Defenses of fanfiction have been made on its creative merits, on its transformative merits, on its god-why-do-we-need-to-de fend-enjoying-stuff merits, but one of the most important needs that “fic” meets is its ability to provide a low-risk space for peo ple who are questioning their identity to explore it in a new way. 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 loan words 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 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 no-cost, it’s easy, and it’s relatively anonymous to sign up—fanfiction could be a place for exploring queerness, and for pushing its bound aries. When the only constraints on what you can write are in what coding you can force AO3 (Archive of Our Own, a fan fiction repository) 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 sex and the body. Theoretically, fanfiction is a transformative medium: you take a story that already exists and make new work out of it, or in spite of it, or in conversation with it. And yet. I find that the fanfiction community keeps coming back to the same tired echo of rigid, cis-heterosexual norms with a thin coat of Gay slapped over it. Regardless of what we call it, the base model of queerness in fanfiction is this: start with two men (only two), nominally cis, who are either in love or will be by the time the storyline is through with them. Regard less of their actual physical characteristics, one will be assigned Large and the other Small. Largeness™ can be quantified in height, breadth, strength, or general presence, but you better be lieve none of these boys are sporting love handles. Smallness™, Hannah Matthews is a writer based in New Zealand who contributes to Tor.com, an online e-zine, from which this article has been adapted (posted July 7, 2022).

meanwhile, is based less on actual size than on how easy it is to top the man in question. He is only sometimes small in height, but always in waist measurement. Whether or not these men fall into these stereotypes in canon is irrelevant: a Large™ man gets assigned the position of top (cf. seme, dom, alpha, Penetrator), and a Small™ man that of bottom (uke, sub, omega, Pene trated). A Large man is protective, domineering, stoic, caretak ing. A Small man is delicate, soft, passionate, needy. A Large has a big dick; a Small’s dick doesn’t usually come into the equation. We do not speak of women. To be clear, it’s not that there are no real queer people that fit into this model, or that real people shouldn’t contain or inhabit any of these characteristics. It’s that this rigid structure is pre sented as the norm, a “default” queerness. These fics aren’t in

terested 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 sexual ity 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. The issue is not with men being feminine, but rather that if a man has feminine characteristics, he must be small, pene trated, and sweet, the greater implication being that this is what queer sexual norms look like. Instead of playing with what is pos sible, these tropes create a new framework and force queer char acters (or characters being written as queer) to fit into the shape of this new binary. Even concepts that play with physical sex characteristics, such as allowing cis men to be pregnant, overwhelmingly shy away from engaging with transness, instead reinforcing this new binary. The collaborative fandom creation of the Omegaverse or Clarke and Lexa or “Clexa” fanfiction takes place in the Harry Potter universe. Image Source: InsurgentOutcast—DeviantArt.

July–August 2023

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