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levyfiles · 4 years

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Last week the @skepticbeliever-bookclub prompted us to post a selection of our favourite shyan fics so there’d be a nice little way to highlight all the hidden gems of favourites we might already recognise and love while sharing a few we might never have found otherwise. Last December I posted a little list of some of my favourites so I figured I’d dust off that list with a few new additions of particular favourites I treasure.

Be All My Sins Remembered by spoopyy

Summary: In every lifetime, they find each other.

Review: This fic manages to take you on a long journey through what feels like a series of AUs and they all weave in and out of the wealth of their relationship with some vivid descriptions of the historical settings their journey takes them through. As someone who grew up reading Anne Rice’s epics through historical events, this fic is right up my alley. A vampire Shane passing through the wave of human society’s climb searching for a reincarnated Ryan again and again, trying to hold on to him and keep him through great tragedies and timeframes that just don’t let them be together. This was one of the first fics I read when I was only a lurker and to be quite honest, I need to give this one a nice re-read, maybe for the book club which would be loads of fun. Either way, 10/10. Would be Hurt in the heart again.

Perfect Fit by @beaniegara

Summary: There’s a legend that says anyone able to take all of statue Shane’s cock will summon the god to the mortal realm. Given the statue’s excessive size, no one has ever succeeded to prove or disprove the story. Until Ryan that is.

Review: Listen. You wanna talk actual fandom legends. This fic is one of them and it pulls out all the stops on being delicious and evocative. Also features one of my favourite incarnations of size queen bergara. Good stuff and you’re really rooting for Ryan in this lol.

a prize for rotten judgement by sarcasticfishes

Summary: “You’d drive each other crazy. You sit together at your office all day, and then you’d be commuting home together, eating dinner together, watching TV together, going to bed — well, not together, but you get it, right?”

It doesn’t sound so awful to Shane. There are worse people he could be spending all his hours with than Ryan Bergara.

Review: The moment I happened to glance at the notes of this and saw that Fie’s secondary title for this would have been Ryan and Shane move to the Suburbs, I about lost it with excitement. Primarily because the show this references is one of my favourite comedies and that is one of my all-time favourite episodes. Let me tell you though, even if the reference is lost on you, this story is so much gold rolled into a heart-gripping tale of two best friends who spend every waking moment together taking the plunge to share a home and they were roommates oh my god they were roommates. Shane is pining and you’ll pine right along with him as you’ll yell and holler for him to stop being so damn real and full of doubt. It really is worth every gasp of pain and all the more for the execution but the delivery will leave you in delight. Certainly had me yelling at the author. This fic is gonna be one of my timeless favourites; I knew it the moment I began.

Everything’s Weird and We’re Always in Danger by beethechange

Summary: Ryan perches on the edge of the bed, an indistinct shape that Shane can only just make out in the dark, so he turns the lamp back on. He wants to see Ryan’s face, wants to know that he is alright. Ryan’s cheeks are damp, his hands fisted in the hideous flowered duvet.

“It won’t go away,” Ryan says miserably. “I’ve been like this since we got here, basically, and it won’t fucking—”

“Ah,” Shane says. “Well, you know, sometimes fear…adrenaline…they can affect people. Physically.” He waves his hands indistinctly crotchward. “It’s a, a scientifically known phenomenon.” Shane feels a little better staying in the realm of scientifically known phenomena.

Review: Word of advice. You see a fic is authored by beethechange, run don’t walk because you’re absolutely always going to be treated to the best of banter, the best of prose, chemistry, organic execution and feels right up the bottom end of your heart. This fic, this changed everything I thought I knew I wanted out of a bed-sharing fic. It’s got a little bit of two treats here. You got a sex-pollen-esque situation mixed with bed-sharing and holy fucking damn that is more than you think you deserve, but read this because you do deserve the best of the best. The build up, the dialogue, the surprisingly hilarity of it, the hotness woah, and The Aftermath. When you think you know what you’re in for, you’re wrong and you’re most pleasantly surprised. Get this fic in your life and honestly? while you’re at it, you could do a clean sweep of every fic in her list of works and while my less than adequate reading time management may still be short on some of her most well-recommended pieces, I have an adamant faith that Bee doesn’t disappoint. Go get y’all juice.

Maelstrom by thewindupbird

Summary: Here’s the thing about driving halfway across the country to see someone. You can’t really deny, after that, that you’re pretty much head over heels for them.

Review: Listen. One morning on a day off, I just laid in bed and read this– all 40k+ words– while lying there clutching my pillows, hurting and loving every moment of it. The descriptions of Americana, the slow steady metronome rhythm of Ryan’s feelings as frightened and helpless as they feel when you’re relating deeply to them juxtaposed with the deep-seated struggle of understanding what it is to be with someone you love so much but your mental health is burning quiet holes in your ability to express it in a way that can be understand. Ryan’s fierce determination, breaking through the silence of their non communication is really Everything to me in this fic. i think I really left my heart in the scene in Shane’s parents kitchen. That finished me. Read this fic and understand the deep relief you get when you’ve finished a fight with someone you fiercely care about and they understand you and you understand them and it’s OK; it’s gonna be all right. Augh.

5 times Shane had to overrule Ryan’s “No Homo” + 1 time he didn’t have to by ghoulboyboos

Summary: There was only one thing that would truly drive him up the wall with Ryan, much more than any debate about ghosts ever could: Ryan’s consistent twitches of “no homo” when any sort of physical contract between them happened.

Review: I have such a soft special spot in my heart for this fic particularly because Lud manages to examine a trope I tend to avoid in such a sweet and honest way I couldn’t not love this fic. The story takes a painstaking and very real look at the “no homo” issue as it weaved through the journey that was early days Ryan and Shane. Shane’s reaction to in this and how he communicates with Ryan has such a very heartfelt and once again, real quality to it. I get in my feelings all over again about how far they’ve come and what it meant for Ryan to have Shane there. Lud really nails this piece and it’s a classic in my eyes.

A Burial on Box Hill by InkStainsOnMyHands

Summary: The Celtics believed that the yew flower symbolized both immortality and death. Meanwhile, for centuries, the buxus flower was seen as a symbol for safe passage into the afterlife.

Or,Shane and Ryan were never the same after investigating the Black Forest of Germany alone.

Review: Let me just quote my bookmark comment here. Usually I flee from tragedy like a cat spotting a cucumber but the brevity and the prose dragged me in and now I’m a functioning mess. Bless this fic. Oh my god it’s short and reads like one of those quick horror stories you’ll read to your friends just as the scary stories are transitioning from the urban legends to the ones that feel real. Big warning for main character death but still read it if you appreciate a good story told.

Body Farming by shiphitsthefan

Summary: Failed suppressants and a surprise heat: the worst of cliches, and here Ryan stands, living the trope on location with the alpha he’s hopelessly in love with. Even worse, they’re spending the night in the famous Bell Witch Cave, completely alone and with no way to contact the outside world.

Ryan knows he can survive and keep his preheat a secret, as long as Shane will stop being so protective and concerned. After all, it’s not like Shane wants to bond with him.

Right?

Review: Now judging from the reactions of many people I’ve spoken to, big heavy ABO kink is not popular here but guys, GUYS. This one. Let this one in I promise it is not what you think it is. The dynamic is organic and the worst side of the trope is subverted in all the best ways and lord help us, the smut is hot, like swelteringly smoking. It’ll stay with you.

Believer by cellard00rs

Summary: Some demons and otherworldly creatures love climbing up the power ladder. Shane is not one of these. He likes where he is (thank you very much) and has no interest in moving up. All he wants is to give his friend Ryan a nice birthday gift. So, naturally, everything goes to hell.

Review: This fic is another fandom legend. When I think demon!Shane. It’s this and one other one that always pops right into my mind. This was my first exposure to the bureaucracy meets the supernatural!Shane trope and I was sold from the get-go. The Shane in this fic is everything I imagine a demon!Shane is and his ginger care for Ryan, the concept of their bond and how even though Shane is a demon and responsible for keeping the supernatural a firm secret from Ryan and the rest of the world, his skepticism is relayed through his status as a demon. I want to talk more about it but I think so much of the enjoyment comes from the surprises as the plot unfurls.

hey boy, take a look at me by weakspots

Summary: Ryan is 27, for Christ’s sake, and he’s not exactly hideous, so there’s really no reason to spend his money on a dude — a dude — whose face he’ll never see but whose livestreams he’s been jerking off to for roughly 4 months now. He should be going out and partying and fucking random chicks. Or a guy, whatever, just to get it out of his system and confirm to himself that he really is 100% straight.

Because he is. This is morbid curiosity, if anything.

Review: I’ve been a long-time fan of this universe and it was a universe I didn’t know I needed until this author gave it to us. We or rather me, a desperate audience, just devoured this with every update. Not only is it hot, but it has the delicious intrigue of secret identity, anonymous stuff and a LOT of blush-worthy prose therein. This version of Shane makes me thrive but the titillating nature of straight-identifying!Ryan being bowled over by the turn of events that leads him to his world tilting into the gravity of a camboy just--you Have to read this one!

Heartbeat by quackers

Summary: So the guy Ryan sits next to at work is a vampire. That’s no big deal, right?

Review: I could talk your literal ear off about this fic. Vampires, man. I love the trope; you don’t know me as a person if you don’t know this at least. And this fic kept me fed all damn year. It was a readable garden. If there is one thing I can guarantee about quackers’ work, it’s that their world-building is a festival of detail. The realms and alternate universes they work with while still managing to keep Shane and Ryan’s voices so familiar and real is a talent not attributed to your everyday author. This fic propelled me into wanting to write more and more because quackers makes stories so much fun! Reading their work is, to me, not unlike the feeling I got when I was younger and finding series that speak to my need to escape this crummy existence, made me want to believe in fun spicy things like a vampire that lived through centuries, cynical but still searching, navigating a world where people are still people, adjusting to differences and prejudices, finding comfort in a guy that understands that and more. I’ve talked about this fic in more than a few different posts so I’d just be reiterating a lot of things I loved about the more historical aspects of Shane’s journey, the way Ryan is so firmly curious and inventive in ways to connect with Shane. Look, even if vampires aren’t your thing, I can promise that if you visit quackers list of work, you will find something for your supernatural-lovin’ palate that speaks to a gentler side of your own curiosity about monsters and the jocks that love them. lol.

I’ll Crawl Home by carrieonfighting

Summary: “Shane was almost unnerved by how quickly he’d settled into this body, this name, this life - his friendship with Ryan was the most time he’d spent with any human before, and yet the man fascinated him.”

Review: This is the second fic I think of when someone says the words ‘demon!Shane’ to me because ohhhh my word, this fic is a masterpiece. I really am hard-pressed to find anything better than the feeling I get when I think of demon!Shane headcanons interwoven with the irl Buzzfeed reality and the idea of the Ryan as we know him being protected and watched and loved so deeply by a demon that found him so long ago and wanted nothing but to protect him. I feel an almost vicious glee reliving that moment when Ryan and Shane are on goatman’s bridge and man, I just really love canonical fic mixed with a slight twist. The writing in this makes it work so well with lines that still haunt my heart and soul like “Ryan liked popcorn. So did the demon. Genuinely, not just out of a desire to please the human – he liked the way it crunched between his vessel’s teeth. There were some aspects of taking a corporeal form that were… nice; laughing, coffee, feeling warm. Ryan made him laugh.” FUCK! The beautiful agony of it, watching the demon fall in love with Ryan through the eyes of his vessel. Just stark with pain and unspoken, well-written angst and pain with a perfect ending, I wouldn’t change for anything. I love this for us as a fandom and will always love that author crafted this piece and shared it with us. (Also every time I hear Work Song by Hozier, I think of this fic again and sigh).

#shyan fic #shyan #shyanbookclub #otp: we took an oath

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algernoninwonderland · 5 years

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Why the Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics is a rubbish idea, and how to do better

I’ve been reading fanfictions for almost a decade now, younger me really liked Johnlock and Stony and things like that. I’ve read some godawful things and some genuinely great stuff. But if there’s one thing I’ve always felt quite iffy about, it’s the a/b/o dynamics and the omegaverse things.

I genuinely believe that the entire premise of the omegaverse is rubbish and really easy to use to portray harmful ideas, relationships and power structures as something hot and sexy and whatnot when it’s clearly terrible.

Let’s:

1. Take a look at what the a/b/o premise is 2. See what is utter rubbish about it 3. Propose a few ideas to avoid writing an omegaverse fic (if you still wish to write one) which present these ideas at face value

But before we begin, a few things:

First, the themes of rape, sexual violence and abusive relationships will be discussed during this, so there’s a tw tag for these things.

Secondly, I do not believe that depicting terrible things in art means you automatically condone them. Take the way Toni Morrison deals with that scene between Pecola and her father in The Bluest Eye, for instance (that’s the one example that comes to my mind but there are countless others). But I also believe that you have to be responsible when you depict terrible things, and that you should try to make sure what you produce cannot be interpreted as an endorsement of these things.

I’m not here to tell you you are a bad person if you enjoy omegaverse fics, I don’t know you and I’m not here to judge you as people, I wish to engage with ideas and the way they may impact people.

At last, I am not here to tell you what to think or what to write. These are just my thoughts and suggestions, nothing more. I have no authority over you, I can’t tell you what to do.

Are we good?

Alright, then, let’s get started!

1. What are these Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics all about?

There are posts all over the internet for that’ll explain you that in more detail than this post, a Fanlore wiki page here if you want to read that, it does a great job at tracking down the history of a/b/o, but I’ll sum it up here with a few extra things I think are relevant.

So, in the omegaverse, the society is split between two, or three categories. Characters are either alphas, betas or omegas, well-established roles, socially and genetically: Alphas are in a position of power, the sexually ‘dominant’ ones, whereas the Omega is the opposite of this and the one to carry the Alpha’s seed and whatnot (there are no other ways to put it); the beta is sort of a middle ground between the two.

This introduction of these concepts and that distinction between so-called Alphas, Betas and Omegas comes from a 1970 bestseller, “The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species” by zoologist L. D. Mech, and we’ll talk a little more about that thesis later.

So it is not surprising that the omegaverse tropes are really common in werewolf fiction and werewolf AUs. Teen Wolf and Supernatural have thousands of these fics on ao3 alone, and there’s more on many other websites.

The classic narrative scheme is the following: the strong and domineering Alpha is in heat and mates with a submissive Omega, bonding with them in the process. The great majority of these fics are M/M fics.

What we have here is the superposition of a social role and of biological functions: the Alpha is in a position of absolute power from a social, and material standpoint, and is the one who gets to impregnate their partner/partners, they have the most sexual power. To put things crudely, they are the ones to make use of their penises whereas the beta/omega does not have this sexual intensity and plays a more passive role.

In the omegaverse, you need Alpha blood and an Alpha’s social status to have sex the way an Alpha has sex, you need to have Alpha blood to live like one. These two things cannot be dissociated. And sex… There’s a lot of it in the omegaverse, I mean it’s basically the offshoot of other kink fics and is pretty much a kink itself.

2. So, OK, the hierarchical aspect of the relationship is a bit weird, and maybe Mpreg is as well, but that’s it, right?

Well not only. Remember that thing about the 1970 bestseller? Its own author acknowledges that it is biologically incorrect and does not apply to wolves at all. There are no such things as Alphas, Betas and Omegas in wolf packs.

But did that keep people from using these notions even though they have been proven to be rubbish?

I mean, the alt right seems to love them and uses them unironically so, I don’t know… And so do some fics. Does that mean that all a/b/o fics are inherently fascist? For the most part, I don’t think so. But they don’t always try to detach themselves from that either.

What about the sex? Yes, let’s talk about sex. That’s the main reason why 14yo me once clicked on one of these fics, out of curiosity and because I was 14 and didn’t know better. I regret so many things.

Sex in the a/b/o fics is very explicit, very anatomically inaccurate (though it’s not why we click on these in the first place, or smut in general, but none of the gay/bi/pan men I personally know enjoy a/b/o), and quite often, it’s very fucked up sex. Dubious consent, underage sex, outright rape, you name it, that’s what tags are for.

Sex in the omegaverse is a traumatic experience with that strong sense of hierarchy, a possessive alpha and their possession, an omega. It often comes with knotting, too. And if you don’t know what that is, you’re really lucky, don’t google that, ever. Just know that, at least in the beginning, sex doesn’t feel good for the beta/omega, and when it does, it still comes with quite some pain.

I’d argue that sex in a/b/o fics is not too far off from the uke/seme dynamics in yaoi, the two even overlap: there’s an “attacker” and a “receiver”. This is not just dom/subs, which can still be healthy, it’s almost spelled out “the way these have men have sex is downright abusive”. I won’t discuss the rape tropes in yaoi here, many have done so before and better than I could ever do it, but they’re here.

The Alpha is the attacker, depicted with hyper (and obviously toxic) masculine traits and quite the emphasis on his… Membrum virile. He is not the one who has to carry the child in the case of a Mpreg fic. He can’t act any other way, it’s in his blood, it’s his nature, his instincts, he can’t help it if he’s in heat and wants to fuck. Oh, I sure wonder what that sort of justifications makes me think of. I’m sure you’ll find it.

The Omega, on the other hand, is in a position of inferiority because of his role during sex and due to his social status: he is submissive, abused, soft-spoken and physically weaker than the Alpha. He is belittled because he is the one who can give birth to a child, yet a prized possession — not a being, a possession— ��because of that. Change the pronouns from “he” to “she” and there you'll have a nice surprise. (It’s really not surprising at all).

I’d like to quote a prompt also featured in the Fanlore wiki page for a/b/o, and think about it for a little while.

“There are three types of men, alpha males, beta males, and omega males. Alpha males are like any ordinary guy with the exception of their cocks, they work just like canines (the knot, tons of cum, strong breeders, etc) The beta male, is an ordinary guy without the special cock. Omega males are capable of child bearing and often called bitch males”

The use of “bitch” here is extremely revealing, don’t you think? We’ve got both the animalistic aspect and the misogynistic undertones that come with it. And we, readers, are supposed to find that sexy.

So, what we have is M/M fics dripping with rape culture, misogyny, homophobic clichés (the rampant homosexual and his uncontrollable and violent sexual urges). And don’t get me started on the transphobia and transmisogyny, and racism (when there are POC in at all, which is to say rarely).

Does this mean all writers who write a/b/o fics are rampant misogynistic, homophobic people who endorse rape culture?

The answer is complicated. But, as a former member of the “not like the other girls” group, I’d say that internalised misogyny is very, very pernicious. Rape narratives are ubiquitous in modern “Western” culture. And a/b/o often perpetuates homophobic clichés.

3. What do we do now?

With such a terrible premise, it would be wise to not write anything a/b/o at all.

But perhaps with a self-aware approach, perhaps by subverting these tropes, by dissociating this “biological” aspect from the societal one or by throwing them out the window completely, writing something a little more interesting is possible.

Showing that these categories are rubbish and an artificial construction, for instance. Have the rape victim get away from his rapist, or even better, no rape at all. Have the couple adopt children.

But, personally, I believe writing something else than a/b/o is still the better option.

Fan fiction, fan content can be so much more than these terrible shitty things if we try our best to know where ideas come from, what they imply and how to execute on them.

#fanfiction #omegaverse #discourse #tw: rape #tw: homophobia #a feminist and queer approach to fiction #alpha #beta #omega #a/b/o dynamics #a/b/o verse

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