What the hell is the Omegaverse, and why is it all over TikTok?

Welcome, dear reader, to the Omegaverse. The phrase has been part of fanfiction communities for the better part of the last decade, but it gained mainstream traction on TikTok in the past month. The tag #Omegaverse has over 357 million views on TikTok, and corresponding keywords like alpha, omega, and beta have racked up views in the millions as well.  It’s garnered enough online attention that, in a recent video with 66,800 likes, TikTok user 420sadbtch69 forewarned their followers, “One of these days, BuzzFeed or Vice or something’s gonna come up with an article being like, ‘Alpha, Beta, Omega: Here’s a guide to Gen Z’s Secondary Genders.” With excruciating self-awareness, here is an explainer on the Omegaverse for a hapless millennial trying to understand yet another TikTok trend. The Omegaverse, explained The Omegaverse is an alternate universe (AU) of speculative erotic fiction that started in the Supernatural fandom. Smut fics are notoriously nonvanilla, and beyond being extremely graphic, Omegaverse fics have been criticized for depictions of assault and sexual violence because much of it revolves around nonconsensual mating and forced birth. Fics within the Omegaverse often depict feral sex scenes between two male characters, whose “secondary sex” is assigned as…
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