tentacledicks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tentacledicks) wrote2019-02-08 12:09 am
tentacledicks) wrote2019-02-08 12:09 am
'Static on the Line' Headcanon Roundup Part I (or, How Did We Get Here, Anyways)
If you're reading this and some of it sounds eerily familiar, it's probably because you saw this back when I was first hashing out the worldbuilding for this; some of it's going to be cribbed directly from those notes, while the rest is a firming and cleaning up of it.
With that in mind:
One of the primary conceits in any a/b/o setting is generally a) that there is some overarching reason for this triadic split and b) that this has societal impacts that may or may not be compounded by sexism and homophobia-lite. The reason can be [trainwreck biology noises] or [literally magic for no reason] and for me, personally, 'it's magic so shut up about it' meshes far better than trying to work out the biological mechanisms of buttbabies. Especially when those buttbabies are not actually justifiable from an evolutionary standpoint, and a Western model of gender absolutely isn't justifiable with several thousands of years of weight behind a triadic notion of reproduction and sexual behavior.
(And you may have noticed, I really do not like the 'secondary gender' wording of most a/b/o. We'll get into that later.)
So, all that in mind, why do the rank dynamics of alpha-beta-omega exist in SotL? It's magic, fuck you is why.
But it's also a little more complicated than that.
The initial vector was a magically manifested plague, originating in Europe around 1801. Watch_Dogs plays with alternate history a little bit in Chicago, so we're jumping off that--this plague starts up around 1801, because that's a fairly recent date while still having the weight of history behind it. We're in the middle of a couple wars, we're solidifying the identity of a couple of the World Powers that would come, we're not quite into the Victorian era and Victorian notions when it comes to gender and sexuality. It's a good point for an upheaval of common Western notions of gender without having the ability to completely derail them, which works well for an a/b/o 'verse that needs the rank system to be in place without completely overriding the gender aspects.
A plague! Plagues Are Bad. Especially plagues that wipe out a good third of the global population, potentially up to half in some areas. The people who don't sicken and die are all carriers, and the initial effects of it aren't actually felt... at first. Birthrates are down. Infants universally get sick right after being born, and for the first few years, almost all of those infants are dying. It's a goddamn crisis.
But, eventually, the infant mortality rate is somewhat reduced--not so much that the population is bouncing back, not completely, but enough that the fate of the human race isn't quite so much in question.
Fastforward a bit. That first generation of surviving infants hits puberty. It's now 1821 or thereabouts.
The thing about magic is it has rules, even if those rules don't make sense to the outside observer. Everyone who's come in contact with the plague is a carrier, even infants. The thing is, this generation (and eventually all that follow them) were born steeped in magic, with it becoming part of them. Coming Of Age (puberty) is a powerfully significant time, biologically and symbolically, so that's going to have a strong effect on the population now growing up in this. The previous generation are all carriers, but this generation is when we see the actual ranks of Alpha, Beta, and Omega crop up, including the sexual diversity that this introduces.
This leads to a very messy couple of decades where society scrambles to realign around this, but by the time the early 1900s roll around, the mindset that we see in SotL starts solidifying (and is further codified by the 1950s perception of both women and omegas.)
How it shakes out, in the end:
So that's how the rank plays into the actual breeding. But the thing is, sex and gender also play into the way society is shaped, and misogyny? Still a thing. An alpha woman can get her omega husband pregnant with a goddamn choir of children and still be looked down on for being a woman. In certain class spheres, alpha women are actively pushed out of polite society despite the fact that alphas, in general, hold more social power than omegas.
Like scum, alpha men rise to the top.
With such a heavy emphasis on childbearing and childrearing, same-sex relationships get a much shittier rap for a longass time. Especially same-sex, same-rank pairings; beta m/m and f/f couples are rarely heard of, while omega f/f and alpha m/m relationships are actively reviled. If you're a gay man who's a beta or alpha, you'd best hope you're attracted to omegas--and vice versa for gay women who happen to be betas or omegas. Alpha women and omega men at least have the possibility of having kids, one way or the other.
As we move into the modern era, there's slightly less emphasis on childbearing in particular (though contraception is still banned, so, y'know, not a whole lot less emphasis) and slightly more sympathy for people who experience same-sex, same-rank attraction, but there's a lot of... well, there's a lot of bunk science also floating around how rank and sex and gender all play together. There's a lot of parenting books about Raising A Perfect [alpha/beta/omega] Child, and there have been a fair number of highly unethical experiments with pre-pubescent kids trying to influence the rank expression of them. Alphas and omegas have fairly dramatic puberties, while betas have none of those rapid (and occasionally fatal) changes to the sexual organs, opting for a slightly more standard tier of hormonal changes.
The rank of any given pairing's children is mostly up to Lady Luck. Beta/beta pairings are roughly ~20% more likely to have beta kids than a mixed-rank pairing, while alpha/alpha children (that survive) are ~40% more likely to be alphas as well. Omega/omega children that make it out of infancy have the smallest ratio of undue influence, with only a ~10% higher chance to be omega.
(Rough population metrics: betas dominate at about 40% of the population, alphas coming up second at 30%, and omegas at 20%; 10% of the population, give or take, experience a variety of hormonal issues that interfere with determining rank, which occasionally (but not always) is comorbid with more obvious intersex conditions. The sex ratio of all ranks is basically even, but popular media depictions would have you believe that All Alphas Are Men and All Omegas Are Women despite this, leaving a solid quarter of the population out in the cold. Betas are lucky to be mainline characters in media at all, accounting for the other fifty percent of the population that gets stuck as the butt of a joke. Alpha men and omega women vastly dominate the narrative, and a lot of sexuality and gender roles gets defined around that relatively small population.)
Note: part of why I keep leaning on 'sex' more than 'gender' (despite noting my loathing of the 'secondary gender' narrative) is because the way all this bullshit plays into gender politics is... something alright. Transfeminine omegas and transmasculine alphas get more support from cis doctors and legislation because of that aforementioned dominance of the narrative; by contrast, transmasc omegas and transfem alphas get the shit end of the stick, and they're having to actively combat the gendered expectations of their birth sex and their later presenting rank. It Really Fucking Sucks to be trans in SotL, especially if at any point said trans person wants to get bottom surgery--the laws against sterilization mean that gender confirmation surgeries are often ruled as illegal in the US, and most trans people who do elect to get bottom surgery have to do so illicitly.
So what this boils down to is pretty much Aiden "exclusively attracted to other alpha men with maybe a passing interest in betas (Damien)" Pearce is megafucked when it comes to the intersection of his relative privilege as an alpha and a man and the violent homophobia he faces for his sexuality.
[Part II]
With that in mind:
One of the primary conceits in any a/b/o setting is generally a) that there is some overarching reason for this triadic split and b) that this has societal impacts that may or may not be compounded by sexism and homophobia-lite. The reason can be [trainwreck biology noises] or [literally magic for no reason] and for me, personally, 'it's magic so shut up about it' meshes far better than trying to work out the biological mechanisms of buttbabies. Especially when those buttbabies are not actually justifiable from an evolutionary standpoint, and a Western model of gender absolutely isn't justifiable with several thousands of years of weight behind a triadic notion of reproduction and sexual behavior.
(And you may have noticed, I really do not like the 'secondary gender' wording of most a/b/o. We'll get into that later.)
So, all that in mind, why do the rank dynamics of alpha-beta-omega exist in SotL? It's magic, fuck you is why.
But it's also a little more complicated than that.
The initial vector was a magically manifested plague, originating in Europe around 1801. Watch_Dogs plays with alternate history a little bit in Chicago, so we're jumping off that--this plague starts up around 1801, because that's a fairly recent date while still having the weight of history behind it. We're in the middle of a couple wars, we're solidifying the identity of a couple of the World Powers that would come, we're not quite into the Victorian era and Victorian notions when it comes to gender and sexuality. It's a good point for an upheaval of common Western notions of gender without having the ability to completely derail them, which works well for an a/b/o 'verse that needs the rank system to be in place without completely overriding the gender aspects.
A plague! Plagues Are Bad. Especially plagues that wipe out a good third of the global population, potentially up to half in some areas. The people who don't sicken and die are all carriers, and the initial effects of it aren't actually felt... at first. Birthrates are down. Infants universally get sick right after being born, and for the first few years, almost all of those infants are dying. It's a goddamn crisis.
But, eventually, the infant mortality rate is somewhat reduced--not so much that the population is bouncing back, not completely, but enough that the fate of the human race isn't quite so much in question.
Fastforward a bit. That first generation of surviving infants hits puberty. It's now 1821 or thereabouts.
The thing about magic is it has rules, even if those rules don't make sense to the outside observer. Everyone who's come in contact with the plague is a carrier, even infants. The thing is, this generation (and eventually all that follow them) were born steeped in magic, with it becoming part of them. Coming Of Age (puberty) is a powerfully significant time, biologically and symbolically, so that's going to have a strong effect on the population now growing up in this. The previous generation are all carriers, but this generation is when we see the actual ranks of Alpha, Beta, and Omega crop up, including the sexual diversity that this introduces.
This leads to a very messy couple of decades where society scrambles to realign around this, but by the time the early 1900s roll around, the mindset that we see in SotL starts solidifying (and is further codified by the 1950s perception of both women and omegas.)
How it shakes out, in the end:
- an obligation to have children is paramount;
- contraceptives are banned, as are sterilization methods (Aiden mentions this in narration) and abortions;
- omegas and alphas have set breeding cycles;
- omegas frequently have twins and triplets, with heats roughly every three-to-eight months if they're childless or two-to-three years if they've had children;
- alphas increase the likelihood of multiples, but go into rut every four-to-seven months or when triggered by extended contact with omega heat pheromones;
- neither can properly be impregnated by/impregnate others outside of those set breeding cycles;
- beta females have a more standard 20-day ovulation cycle, and beta males are capable of insemination at any point;
- but the Magic Plague? the one killing off infants soon after birth? yeah that's still a thing;
- omega/omega children are often stillborn, but rarely survive to infancy;
- beta/omega children are not as robust as beta/beta children, but have a higher survival rate than omega/omega children;
- beta/beta children have a mortality rate of roughly 50%;
- alpha/beta children are more robust than beta/beta children, but the alpha parent can almost never carry to term;
- alpha/omega children have the highest survival rate at roughly 80%, but omegas are the only ones who can carry in these situations, because;
- alpha/alpha children are miscarried at alarmingly high rates, and alpha females who can carry to term are rare as hell (this is part of why Aiden calls Jackson and Lena 'little medical miracles', because by all rights, Nicky shouldn't have been able to have them.)
So that's how the rank plays into the actual breeding. But the thing is, sex and gender also play into the way society is shaped, and misogyny? Still a thing. An alpha woman can get her omega husband pregnant with a goddamn choir of children and still be looked down on for being a woman. In certain class spheres, alpha women are actively pushed out of polite society despite the fact that alphas, in general, hold more social power than omegas.
Like scum, alpha men rise to the top.
With such a heavy emphasis on childbearing and childrearing, same-sex relationships get a much shittier rap for a longass time. Especially same-sex, same-rank pairings; beta m/m and f/f couples are rarely heard of, while omega f/f and alpha m/m relationships are actively reviled. If you're a gay man who's a beta or alpha, you'd best hope you're attracted to omegas--and vice versa for gay women who happen to be betas or omegas. Alpha women and omega men at least have the possibility of having kids, one way or the other.
As we move into the modern era, there's slightly less emphasis on childbearing in particular (though contraception is still banned, so, y'know, not a whole lot less emphasis) and slightly more sympathy for people who experience same-sex, same-rank attraction, but there's a lot of... well, there's a lot of bunk science also floating around how rank and sex and gender all play together. There's a lot of parenting books about Raising A Perfect [alpha/beta/omega] Child, and there have been a fair number of highly unethical experiments with pre-pubescent kids trying to influence the rank expression of them. Alphas and omegas have fairly dramatic puberties, while betas have none of those rapid (and occasionally fatal) changes to the sexual organs, opting for a slightly more standard tier of hormonal changes.
The rank of any given pairing's children is mostly up to Lady Luck. Beta/beta pairings are roughly ~20% more likely to have beta kids than a mixed-rank pairing, while alpha/alpha children (that survive) are ~40% more likely to be alphas as well. Omega/omega children that make it out of infancy have the smallest ratio of undue influence, with only a ~10% higher chance to be omega.
(Rough population metrics: betas dominate at about 40% of the population, alphas coming up second at 30%, and omegas at 20%; 10% of the population, give or take, experience a variety of hormonal issues that interfere with determining rank, which occasionally (but not always) is comorbid with more obvious intersex conditions. The sex ratio of all ranks is basically even, but popular media depictions would have you believe that All Alphas Are Men and All Omegas Are Women despite this, leaving a solid quarter of the population out in the cold. Betas are lucky to be mainline characters in media at all, accounting for the other fifty percent of the population that gets stuck as the butt of a joke. Alpha men and omega women vastly dominate the narrative, and a lot of sexuality and gender roles gets defined around that relatively small population.)
Note: part of why I keep leaning on 'sex' more than 'gender' (despite noting my loathing of the 'secondary gender' narrative) is because the way all this bullshit plays into gender politics is... something alright. Transfeminine omegas and transmasculine alphas get more support from cis doctors and legislation because of that aforementioned dominance of the narrative; by contrast, transmasc omegas and transfem alphas get the shit end of the stick, and they're having to actively combat the gendered expectations of their birth sex and their later presenting rank. It Really Fucking Sucks to be trans in SotL, especially if at any point said trans person wants to get bottom surgery--the laws against sterilization mean that gender confirmation surgeries are often ruled as illegal in the US, and most trans people who do elect to get bottom surgery have to do so illicitly.
So what this boils down to is pretty much Aiden "exclusively attracted to other alpha men with maybe a passing interest in betas (Damien)" Pearce is megafucked when it comes to the intersection of his relative privilege as an alpha and a man and the violent homophobia he faces for his sexuality.
[Part II]