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randomly, alpha/beta/omega bunnies
May. 11th, 2013 07:13 am... oh dear, that's a terrible mental image...
ANYways: weird tropes that are common in fanfic and vanishing rare elsewhere - weird things fanfic does with gender.
It's not just the sex swaps that flip characters, either so they were always girls instead of guys or whatever, or so they get cursed or drugged or superscienced and have to deal. I've seen that in manga and a couple of SF things.
But this A/B/O thing that's mostly made of porn, it invents a whole new set of genders, and societies to go with them. The porn mostly makes me *facepalm* but the SF playing with gender stuff I can see the appeal of.
So now there's starting to be A/B/O sex swap, or letter swap anyway, so far I've seen people stay male but become alpha or omega, rather than get swapped to alpha female. They're treated as two different things, m/f and a/b/o, and I have only seen swaps within one letter set. And it seems like these fics are two tropes out from usual, like when SF posits a single change to the ordinary world, but subsequent SF can build on that story to tweak that change, and so on and so forth. So these stories only work because already the tropes genderswap and a/b/o exist.
There's also more than one thing around trying to use genetics and those grids or squares to figure out a/b/o biology and make it look like science. Most of them I feel would benefit from understanding the difference between chromosomes (such as X and Y) and genes (such as eye color). But it's not like I've studied biology for a couple of decades.
so the bunny part of this post is, why make it genetic? if a 'verse can have people get cursed or superscienced to make new and interesting bodies, couldn't a/b/o be that? I vaguely feel I've seen something of the like to do with werewolves. That's an infectious curse, but it's bundled with a lot of not-gender stuff. But say infectious curse is the why of a/b/o, then if it has been around for centuries or millennia everybody would be used to it by now. You couldn't predict letters by regular genetics, and it would drive scientists nuts trying. Or it could be more like the current state of genetics and sexual orientation, where there's people sure there's connections, but it's a big blurry mess picture not a neat little square. But their society would have been reshaped by this mysterious extra gender factor already.
Then add visitors from another planet.
I'm thinking Stargate style, goa'uld experimentation with nanotech, sudden infection, and instead of getting old or whatever everyone wakes up a different letter. Which would kind of resemble the Land of Light mess? But with more brain most of the time. That would be slow to notice as well, so it could be too late to quarantine by the time they realise anything is different.
Or visitors from another universe.
Always fun when someone mirrors in to a bdsm universe or something with such different basic assumptions. But then they go home and decide those dudes are weirdos. Well if they bring the weird home with them...
Trouble is if you get sudden change of whole societies by adding all the messy biological urges in a/b/o fics, you're pretty much looking at mass destruction and a whole lot of awful. Not the happy fun porn. Boo.
But there's already fics that go the dystopia route with this trope, a ton of them, so maybe there'd be a readership for a plague that messes with physical sex.
It could even be a helpful plague dropped by aliens who think we must be so screwed with only the two genders. Depending on how you decide the a/b/o thing tweaks fertility it could be meant to help with population problems. Like, switching humans from every month to rarer heats.
Stargate had that sterility plague. That was a thing people in that universe do to each other.
... Stargate has done some really weird things...
the other way to do it is to add it to the posthuman menu. Like, someone figures out how to do an upgrade that makes a/b/o. The mpreg upgrade, with interesting side effects. Then people would be choosing to become the new sexes. Society would have to adapt/adjust.
I like the social scale that a/b/o 'verses work at. a lot of fic, or superhero or SF or fantasy TV stuff, has a one off weird thing happen to only the protagonists, who get over it by the end of the story. The return to the template so the next writer has the same toys and sandbox. But picking any one invention/innovation and seeing what it would do to society is the SF fun stuff.
Bujold's Vorkosiverse has a combination of the box that makes babies, the minority group hermaphrodites, and sex change operations that are simple and effective. Any herm has decided to stay a herm, because it would be simple for them to be he or she if they wanted. Similarly anyone sticking with the two earlier sexes. And while the boxes that make babies apparently need the genetic contributors to be one male and one female (see Athos sending out for the female contributions), anyone can switch themselves so they, personally, grow male or female parts to contribute. But each innovation, existence of herms, box that makes babies, sex changes, is only explored separately. If you add them all together the possibilities multiply a lot.
And that's without thinking about quaddies or what can come out of a lab on Jackson's Whole.
Marvel's mutants who are just born that way are one kind of interesting, but seeing how society responds to people making themselves over to match their dreams, that's a lot of kinds of interesting. Like, there's a whole set of rhetoric about how people are just born this way (whichever way, sexuality, race, disability), and it's usually aimed at the idea that they can't help it so people should just live and let live. But what if all that stuff is optional? more fighting, less, same but different?
the future is going to look very very complex to us.
you know, if humans survive to get there.
I should start writing fiction and not just bunnies.
I've had Avengers bunnies so long they're about to get Jossed by actual Joss.
... and yet all I do is keep telling myself to start any kind of thing at all...
ANYways: weird tropes that are common in fanfic and vanishing rare elsewhere - weird things fanfic does with gender.
It's not just the sex swaps that flip characters, either so they were always girls instead of guys or whatever, or so they get cursed or drugged or superscienced and have to deal. I've seen that in manga and a couple of SF things.
But this A/B/O thing that's mostly made of porn, it invents a whole new set of genders, and societies to go with them. The porn mostly makes me *facepalm* but the SF playing with gender stuff I can see the appeal of.
So now there's starting to be A/B/O sex swap, or letter swap anyway, so far I've seen people stay male but become alpha or omega, rather than get swapped to alpha female. They're treated as two different things, m/f and a/b/o, and I have only seen swaps within one letter set. And it seems like these fics are two tropes out from usual, like when SF posits a single change to the ordinary world, but subsequent SF can build on that story to tweak that change, and so on and so forth. So these stories only work because already the tropes genderswap and a/b/o exist.
There's also more than one thing around trying to use genetics and those grids or squares to figure out a/b/o biology and make it look like science. Most of them I feel would benefit from understanding the difference between chromosomes (such as X and Y) and genes (such as eye color). But it's not like I've studied biology for a couple of decades.
so the bunny part of this post is, why make it genetic? if a 'verse can have people get cursed or superscienced to make new and interesting bodies, couldn't a/b/o be that? I vaguely feel I've seen something of the like to do with werewolves. That's an infectious curse, but it's bundled with a lot of not-gender stuff. But say infectious curse is the why of a/b/o, then if it has been around for centuries or millennia everybody would be used to it by now. You couldn't predict letters by regular genetics, and it would drive scientists nuts trying. Or it could be more like the current state of genetics and sexual orientation, where there's people sure there's connections, but it's a big blurry mess picture not a neat little square. But their society would have been reshaped by this mysterious extra gender factor already.
Then add visitors from another planet.
I'm thinking Stargate style, goa'uld experimentation with nanotech, sudden infection, and instead of getting old or whatever everyone wakes up a different letter. Which would kind of resemble the Land of Light mess? But with more brain most of the time. That would be slow to notice as well, so it could be too late to quarantine by the time they realise anything is different.
Or visitors from another universe.
Always fun when someone mirrors in to a bdsm universe or something with such different basic assumptions. But then they go home and decide those dudes are weirdos. Well if they bring the weird home with them...
Trouble is if you get sudden change of whole societies by adding all the messy biological urges in a/b/o fics, you're pretty much looking at mass destruction and a whole lot of awful. Not the happy fun porn. Boo.
But there's already fics that go the dystopia route with this trope, a ton of them, so maybe there'd be a readership for a plague that messes with physical sex.
It could even be a helpful plague dropped by aliens who think we must be so screwed with only the two genders. Depending on how you decide the a/b/o thing tweaks fertility it could be meant to help with population problems. Like, switching humans from every month to rarer heats.
Stargate had that sterility plague. That was a thing people in that universe do to each other.
... Stargate has done some really weird things...
the other way to do it is to add it to the posthuman menu. Like, someone figures out how to do an upgrade that makes a/b/o. The mpreg upgrade, with interesting side effects. Then people would be choosing to become the new sexes. Society would have to adapt/adjust.
I like the social scale that a/b/o 'verses work at. a lot of fic, or superhero or SF or fantasy TV stuff, has a one off weird thing happen to only the protagonists, who get over it by the end of the story. The return to the template so the next writer has the same toys and sandbox. But picking any one invention/innovation and seeing what it would do to society is the SF fun stuff.
Bujold's Vorkosiverse has a combination of the box that makes babies, the minority group hermaphrodites, and sex change operations that are simple and effective. Any herm has decided to stay a herm, because it would be simple for them to be he or she if they wanted. Similarly anyone sticking with the two earlier sexes. And while the boxes that make babies apparently need the genetic contributors to be one male and one female (see Athos sending out for the female contributions), anyone can switch themselves so they, personally, grow male or female parts to contribute. But each innovation, existence of herms, box that makes babies, sex changes, is only explored separately. If you add them all together the possibilities multiply a lot.
And that's without thinking about quaddies or what can come out of a lab on Jackson's Whole.
Marvel's mutants who are just born that way are one kind of interesting, but seeing how society responds to people making themselves over to match their dreams, that's a lot of kinds of interesting. Like, there's a whole set of rhetoric about how people are just born this way (whichever way, sexuality, race, disability), and it's usually aimed at the idea that they can't help it so people should just live and let live. But what if all that stuff is optional? more fighting, less, same but different?
the future is going to look very very complex to us.
you know, if humans survive to get there.
I should start writing fiction and not just bunnies.
I've had Avengers bunnies so long they're about to get Jossed by actual Joss.
... and yet all I do is keep telling myself to start any kind of thing at all...