Heavy disclaimer: Alpha/beta/omega dynamics is a popular trope that’s used in a wide range of stories and my thoughts on it do not apply to all cases. I’m most familiar with it through the lens of male-focused fanfic, typically m/m but sometimes also featuring m/f and that’s the situation I’m keeping in mind while writing this, which should be pretty evident right from the first line.
I’ve always thought the reason a/b/o bugs me is because it’s just sexism without centering women, but I started thinking about it further recently with no apparent trigger and what I actually think is more that it bugs me because it’s just… kind of lazy. I love worldbuilding. Absolutely love it. I’ll forgive a lot of sins if they’re presented alongside a coherent setting that’s wildly different from the real world but still makes sense even in the details, but I’ve seen very little of that in a/b/o fic over the last fifteen years or so. I think the most developed setting was one where the default relationship was a triad, couples were extremely strange, and if two people hit it off they’d generally speedrun trying to meet someone else so that there wouldn’t be too much of an imbalance in how long each of them had known each other. In terms of how things might be different from the fandom’s canon it’s generally even more lacklustre – the biggest thing I can think of is that in the MCU if Sam is classed as an omega he’s almost always had to hide it somehow to be in the military. And… that’s about it. Apart from that, there’s an entirely new axis of discrimination and biological division that is often both even more important than and a lot more rigid than sex and/or gender that’s dropped on top of the existing setting but somehow changes absolutely nothing about it.
To me there are potentially hundreds of questions about this situation that mostly boil down to two: 1) what is the purpose of this change? and 2) what are the effects of this change? Why do the a/b/o classifications even exist? We already have a perfectly good reproductive system, so what purpose is served by evolving a second set of sexes that exist alongside the ones we already have? This is going to differ depending on what aspects of the trope you care most about. Some people seem really into the possessiveness and fetishising the differences, with everyone calling each other “alpha” and “omega” all the time, others are more into the physical aspects of varied genitalia (essentially “[fandom] but make it queer and trans/intersex”), others like ruts and heats and having a structured version of the sex pollen trope, etc etc. If I’m writing a fic with a big difference like this, this is going to be one of the first things I think about. I need to know what the difference exactly is so I can figure out how it happened and why. For an example, I’m going to go with the ruts and heats partly just because it’s the easiest. It doesn’t actually require a whole second set of sex classifications, it just needs a reason for my male characters to occasionally get really horny, which is much more in the scope of a single blog post that isn’t the length of a novel. So, what might cause that to come about? What if, as a species, we just weren’t very fertile? In the real world cis women tend to ovulate most at a particular point in their menstrual cycle. I also once read an article that suggested that cis men might actually have a similar hormonal cycle. Whether that’s true or not, I can use it here and decide that much like the stereotype about women who live together syncing up, if a cis man and cis woman cohabitate they might also sync up until they’re both hitting their most fertile points at the same time, and they’re more likely to successfully reproduce if they go at it like rabbits at that point. Over time we get a situation where that male equivalent cycle becomes more common and stronger to the point where it’s a very noticeable and default biological fact.
What’s more, because this is my fantasy fun times, I can play around with it a bit more and say that this reduces the strength of rape culture because the stereotype has actually come to be that men are more likely to want a relationship and male sexual aggression has been evolutionarily selected against – their best chance of reproducing is when both partners are fertile, not by just randomly banging a bunch of women and hoping to get lucky. (It doesn’t prevent them from doing that, nor does it prevent coercion within a relationship, but it could make them more frowned upon.) That doesn’t mean that every male character is soft and fluffy, just that it’s an accepted stereotype that men aren’t as into one night stands the same way they stereotypically are in the real world. If you wanted you could also say that people tend to imprint on each other when they go through a heat together to mimic the mating bonds that often pop up in a/b/o fic.
With a bit of thought I’ve now come up with something that uses the aspects of a/b/o that are (theoretically) most important to me, where there’s a reason for them to exist, and where some aspects of our society have changed because of them. Meanwhile in almost all of the a/b/o I’ve read there’s nothing. If we go back to the MCU, Natasha is almost always classed as an alpha, but (possibly because I don’t tend to read Natasha-centric fic – I’ve tended to use roleplay to explore general character stuff and fanfic for shippiness or wild AUs) I’ve never seen even the slightest thought about how that might affect her story arc. The Red Room specifically trains female assassins for a reason and that seems to go very much against the idea of including alphas, so why was she there? Was there a systemic issue where they can’t determine someone’s classification before puberty so they had to either train some alphas or waste massive amounts of resources by cutting them out when they finally showed? Was she an exception for some reason? Did she have to hide it, and how did she do that without ever getting caught? Did they have a way of temporarily masking an alpha as an omega for missions? How did any of these examples impact her psychologically? It’s not just Natasha, though. The only time I’ve ever seen anything even vaguely analogous to transgender or intersex people is in the case of Steve and Bucky, who sometimes have their classifications changed by the serum (very much not the same thing). It’s also rare to see anyone who doesn’t perfectly fit the stereotypes of their classification except, again, Sam or another male character not being a “typical omega” and being very unusual for that fact, and a single fic I read where omegas were viewed differently and more obviously valued and respected in Wakanda. Is there no widespread individual variation of personality that doesn’t fit these classifications? No feminist movement? What’s the situation with suffrage or property ownership if historical sexism can be mapped so perfectly onto a system that’s far more universally true than the sex stereotypes that underpin our own struggles?