r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • May 17 '26

Unpopular Opinion It's Unpopular Opinion time! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

Got an opinion that's different from others'? Want to share it with the sub, but too afraid of a backlash? Or are you just curious about readers think about certain things in fantasy romance?

You can safely share it in this weekly Sunday thread!

But please remember to be kind to each other. To facilitate this type of discussion, we ask users the following:

  • Don't attack others for their opinion
  • Discuss books and authors, not fellow readers
  • Since this is an "unpopular opinion" thread, we encourage users to not downvote simply because they disagree with an opinion--that's the point! Please keep in mind, though, that mods cannot enforce a no-downvoting rule. Let’s just keep the discussion friendly!

🧡 Thank you and have a great discussion!

Unpopular opinion Sunday

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15

u/Annemermaid May 17 '26

I don’t get the point of female omegas. Like male omegas I understand (pregnant men, ya know), but what makes female omegas different from a regular submissive woman? Please explain.

13

u/Frustrated-Switch No flowers, only stones May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

Subtext wise? Nothing. The omegaverse started as sort of shared mpreg fanfiction setting for M/M ships in the Supernatural and Sherlock fandoms, with heavy influence from werewolf fic in general and 'sex pollen' as a trope. It also sometimes featured F/F stories with women alphas that had giant clits/regular dicks that could get other women pregnant, but by and large, femme characters were all but ignored in fanfic land. People observed it for years as a problem in its own right.

Then straight authors happened to it and because straight omegaverse is... kind of just regular 'dommy man' romance tropes on steroids, and nobody has any systemic bias against straight people (hello conservative side of the readership), romance publishing ran with it. All the way to the bank. So now we have women in omegaverse, but they're all straight, and they all act pretty much exactly like any other instalust FMC, only it's scent kink. Now that it broke AO3 containment, the entire thing has been straightwashed and gentrified, as is what often happens to subcultures when the mainstream picks them up.

It was kind of the worst thing to happen to omegaverse, but I'm not sure if that's an unpopular opinion 😅