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It's time for fandom stats: Omegaverse edition! In which I look at the "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" tag (and related tags) on AO3. If you're unfamiliar with the Omegaverse, I recommend norabombay's primer.
TL;DR: Summary.
- Omegaverse is overwhelmingly biased toward the Explicit rating and the M/M relationship category.
- Omegaverse has been increasingly common on AO3 over time, but still shows up in less than 1% of fanfic.
- The top Omegaverse fandoms strongly overlap with the most common fandoms on AO3 more generally right now.
- A lot of Mpreg fic is also Omegaverse, and the percentage is growing -- but over 80% of new Mpreg fanfic is not labeled Omegaverse.
- Sherlock and some of the other currently very active fandoms produce most of the Omegaverse fanfic, but that's largely a function of the activity level of the fandom rather than a focus on Omegaverse specifically.
- Supernatural RPF fandom, the apparent originator of this trope, still produces a disproportionate amount of Omegaverse compared to other top Omegaverse fandoms, often surpassing 5%.
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Introduction/Goals.
I've been fascinated by the recent emergence of a new popular AU that has been spreading cross-fandom. Coming from the Sherlock fandom (and from my own particular corner of that fandom), I've been under the vague impression that Omegaverse is a fairly popular AU -- increasing in popularity over time -- and that most mpreg fanfic is in that category. I also wasn't sure if there was any Omegaverse fanfic featuring females on AO3. I decided to investigate this in more detail.
Methodology.
Based on the I wrote a program to do an AO3 Works Search for "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" for each month since Omegaverse fic started appearing on AO3. (I got the same results as you get from typing in "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" in "Additional Tags" and "[N] months ago" in the date field.) This returned the number of fanworks posted to AO3 during the given month with the tag "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" or any synonymous tag or subtag. For purposes of this post, when I talk about the number of Omegaverse fanworks, this is the category I mean.
I repeated this search process for "Mpreg", and for "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" in combination with a number of other tags (fandom tags and freeform tags).
I also looked at the "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" works in the mode that allows you to sort and filter. There, I grabbed the most common category, rating, warning, fandoms, and additional tags from the sidebar.
For the popular cooccurring tags, I threw out several like "Omega Verse" that were synonyms or subtags of my main search.
Tagging. Please note: all of this analysis, as with all of my analysis, is actually about how the tags get used on AO3, rather than how many fics people are actually writing in this category. Also, due to the way that AO3 tagging works, it's possible that these numbers may jump for a particular month due to the AO3 tag wranglers adding more tags to the "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" bundle.
Time window. I haven't yet attempted to verify the assertion that I've heard various places (including the primer above) that Omegaverse was invented in a J2 (Supernatural RPF) fic in mid- to late-2011. But that's about when Omegaverse started appearing on AO3 (there were a couple earlier stories, but I suspect they were backdated). So I ended up tossing out the first few earlier outliers from most of my analyses. Edit: Fanlore has a great article about Omegaverse that points to the originating kinkmeme prompt from Jan 2011. (H/T joannamccoyly)
Results and Discussion.
Fig 1-3. Basic breakdowns. Omegaverse fanworks are overwhelmingly biased toward the M/M category (90% are labeled M/M) and the Explicit rating (56%). Underage (11%), Rape/Non-Con (10%), and Graphic Depictions of Violence (10%) are more common here than on AO3 as a whole, and Major Character Death is less common (2%). (Please note: only the Ratings graph shows mutually exclusive categories; the others may have overlap among the categories.)
It's useful to compare the Omegaverse breakdowns to those that I did for AO3 as a whole, but I unfortunately (and inaccurately, as I later discovered) represented all those graphs as pie charts -- as if each category were mutually exclusive. Still, you can get a sense from that analysis of how Omegaverse compares to AO3 as a whole.
I also filtered for just Omegaverse fanfic NOT in the M/M tag, and found 186 such fanworks. Many of them seem to be mislabeled, but some of them seem to be primarily F/M and there are even a few F/F Omegaverse fics. Edit: More female-centric Omegaverse fic linked to from Fanlore!
Fig 4. Common tags. The top cooccurring tags refer to common tropes in Omegaverse fanfic: "Knotting", "Mpreg", and "Mating Cycles/In Heat". The next tag, "Alternate Universe", could accurately be applied to all Omegaverse fanworks (although it is not). "Dubious Consent" is another common tag -- far more popular here than on AO3 as a whole. The remaining two, "Angst" and "Fluff", are popular tags across AO3. (I intend to do further analysis of tags on AO3 in the future.)
Fig 5. Omegaverse popularity over time. (Please see my FAQ for caveats about the term "popularity".) By popularity, I here mean the amount of fanworks posted that use this tag, compared to the overall amount on AO3.The number of Omegaverse fics has increased drastically over time -- but so have the number of fics posted to AO3 as a whole each month. To account for this change over time, I looked at what percentage of AO3 fanworks each month are in the "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" category.
There has been an increase in popularity over time, and it shows no signs of slowing. Still, at the time of this writing, less than 1% of the fanworks posted on AO3 each month are Omegaverse fics.
Fig 6. Has Mpreg been taken over by Omegaverse? A lot of Mpreg fic is also Omegaverse, and the percentage is growing over time -- but over 80% of Mpreg fanfic is not labeled Omegaverse, even in recent months.
Fig 7. Fandoms producing the most Omegaverse fanworks. The top Omegaverse fandoms strongly overlap with the most common fandoms on AO3 more generally right now.
Note: these fandom tags and umbrella categories are not mutually exclusive; some probably contain substantial overlap. So the "Other" category I've shown here (which is 100% minus all the other percentages) is actually undoubtedly much larger, because, e.g., many fics are presumably showing up in both the Avengers and MCU tags, or the Supernatural RPF and CW RPF tags.
Fig 8. Amount of Omegaverse contributed by top fandoms over time. Here I looked at the non-normalized output (just absolute numbers of fanworks) produced by the top 5 fandoms in Fig 7, month by month. I also included an "Other" category for all other Omegaverse work produced; that means that the top line shown demonstrates the total number of Omegaverse tagged fanworks produced each month.
As we can see from Fig 7 and Fig 8, Sherlock produces a lot of Omegaverse fandom fanworks; no wonder I was particularly aware of this AU!
Fig 9. How popular is Omegaverse within each fandom? Focusing on the same 5 fandoms as in the previous analysis, I looked at what percentage of each fandom's fanworks (month-by-month) were Omegaverse. For most fandoms, most of the time, the number hovers around 1%. However, Supernatural RPF fandom, the alleged originator of this trope, still produces a disproportionate amount of Omegaverse compared to other top Omegaverse fandoms, often topping 5%.
Note: there may be a bunch of smaller fandoms where Omegaverse is wildly popular; this analysis won't be able to capture that, because I started out limiting it to just the fandoms producing the largest number of Omegaverse fanworks.
See also my more recent Sherlock omegaverse deep dive.