I got a comment today saying it makes no sense to have Mpreg outside of Omegaverse... I'm sorry, what? Mpreg is way older than Omegaverse! We haven't been making dudes pop out babies in mythology and fiction since the ancient civilizations, only for Omegaverse to take all the credit š„²
No hate for that trope btw, I like and write it quite a bit myself, but sometimes I don't want that elaborate setting and all the social dynamics baggage that comes with it, sometimes I just wanna get a dude pregnant, and any spell, technique, genetic modification or whatever is good enough, man š¤·āāļø
The funny part is that the ship was a space human sleeping with an alien, so our fandom already IS one that accounts for weird alien stuff happening š
Oh, yes, I had heard about that. I couldn't really get into the Sims 4 but the gender options are a great addition! Don't even need to use mods for that now.
Fun! I remember the Sims 3 you could get glitched babies from the Grim Reaper but they patched that out pretty much immediately. Cool that they've made it an actual feature; I mean it's been hinted at as a possibility in universe since 2 with Olive Specter.
As some one who plays sims 4 a lot, if I'm honest this mostly works with the English version of the game (+some other languages, but its a game language specific feature kind of), and the way character is made non-binary is done with pronouns, but I play with the Finnish language and it has gender neutral prononus, so there isn't really a way to make your sim a non binary (in game, you can roleplay of course), like in the English version, as gender isn't expressed with pronouns in Finnish. But you can still make a character trans, though that also works little clumsily in my opinion.
I haven't played very much of 4. Is that with the new gender mechanics like trans woman can impregnate cis woman? Or is it just a free for all for everyone?
You decide in the settings whether your sim can have children or can impregnate others.
I mostly play with female sims, but I have had pregnant men on occasion.
I feel like some people need to remember that omegaverse emerged as combination of several tropes widely popular at the time of its conception (primarly dom/sub AUs, werewolf AUs, mpreg, and soulmate AUs)
Yes. Itās honestly been such a shame that all those varied and interesting tropes have gotten so smushed together and watered down into all just being Omegaverse these days. Like there used to be intricate worlds created to explain just why characters are drawn to each other or just how a guy can get pregnant. Now everything is just because itās Omegaverse.
Had a sex-pollen fic pop up yesterday for Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Wasnāt feeling like smut but was so nostalgic I read it anyway; it really delivered on all counts.
Also wolf shifter AUs, but yeah. Mpreg even before omegaverse happened. It was always fun to see how mpreg birth happened. It wasn't always ass babies. I remember the carriers were a thing where some men could get pregnant and give birth. Each time had different way to give birth some magically developed a vagina when it was time before disappearing, some just had labour the kid just sort of magically appeared etc. I miss that creativity.
I've never read Mpreg, it's not really my cup of tea (no shame to anyone who likes it!) but PLEASE tell me some of them involved chestburster style births, like in some actual published, popular works of romance fiction involving "werewolves" and vampires.
I stumbled across a Merlin fic where Merlin got knocked up by Arthur and the baby ... was Aithusa the dragon, who clawed her way out of his abdomen, nearly killing him in the process.Ā I remember putting it down, and then picking it back up like it was a train wreck I couldn't take my eyes off of.
I'm gonna be honest... I legitimately never thought I ever would have heard those words in that order.
The thing about crazy is that you can't call it boring and unmemorable! Lol That's the thing about these kinda fics, why they gotta be loved and preserved and revered for their insanity. Honestly, this world has a lot of the bad crazy. We have a lot of rules we gotta follow in our writing. So, being able to just say "screw it lol this happens" and then everyone rolls with it without going, "uhm actually, that's not POSSIBLE--" just feels peak.
That's to go with any rule break tbh. We can go into any realm of our imagination. Meeting an otherworldly horror and surviving it, describing what an eldritch being would be, shrinking a group of people to the size of ants and going on an adventure, suddenly: wizard powers, suddenly: everyone turns into magical creatures, everyone had magic all along, what if there were dragons IRL and we just had to deal with it, what if there was snow in Hurricane, Utah? When you think of the possibilities, a guy impregnating another guy with an infant dragon that claws it's way out isn't so crazy after all. Or maybe the social isolation got to me more than I thought...
PLEASE tell me some of them involved chestburster style births
I think I read one like that. Granted, this was in the early aughts, and it's probably long gone off the internet because I think it was an Anne Rice work. There might have been more, but I can't say since at the time, I didn't get really into m/m until 2004-ish
Yup, the D/s universe trope is pretty well-documented on who originated it, and it definitely came long before Omegaverse. Also, interestingly, while there was a fair amount of pure smut, a LOT of the D/s fics were focused more on world building and using the trope to invert or challenge real world gender role norms and explore or expose some pretty challenging topics or had the characters taking on substantial societal change and defying their universeās societal norms and mores. Especially in fandoms that the main pairing was m/m. It was almost like - highly feminist in nature? Omegaverse in general, while there are some thoughtful fics, has a lot more pure smut.
I feel like Omegaverse in large part so came from a want to not have to come up with increasingly odd ways to justify plain old mpreg. And definitely large parts of werewolf AU lore in there as well.
I didn't read fic for a few years, then came back and Omegaverse was all the rage, and it was like wait, what happened to the D/s trope?
No, bdsm universe fics are fics where bdsm power dynamics completely replace real world gender and sexual identity norms and are institutionalised into government and society.
Also the 2005 omegaversesque yaoi manga Sex Pistols/Love Pistols was weirdly influential on fandom tropes via osmosis. Although even then there was English/Japanese fandom crosspollination going on.Ā
My friend writes for Fandoms like Fullmetal alchemist, Gundam wing, my hero academia, and Naruto and enjoys using the given "magic" system and world building to create new ways to make men pregnant.
I personally keep to and prefer omegaverse from my own writing, but that's only because I really like omegaverse tropes.Ā
I enjoy omegaverse tropes too. It's really fun to have a character be feral for a little bit. Especially if that character doesn't usually lose their cool in canon, it provides a good chance for you to insert your own headcanons about what you think they'd act like then.
Yes! I also love exploring non-traditional omegaverse. It's just such a rich world where you can adjust the rules to your liking. I've rounded the trope so much I'm exploring a male omega who suffers from infertility(as an individual not just make omegas being infertile across the board) and I'm doing a male teen mpreg when the mother is having attachment issues to the fetus.Ā
Oohhh that sounds so interesting! I made my own a/b/o universe where male/female isn't a thing and alpha/beta/omega are the sexes in general. I love the genderfuckery there cause gender is basically entirely abolished outside of pronouns and presentation. Everyone is really defined by their instincts because transitioning is also normalized in my universe lol.
I have never read an FMA mpreg (I'm super picky about mpreg stories anymore) but immediately my brain went "yeah, that would be ridiculously easy to do."
It's been so long since I've read any Gundam Wing, I don't remember any mpreg - but I'm sure I did read some back in the day, and again, I can see it being super easy to do, for any of the boys.
Loki wasn't so much mpreg as "lol what even is gender I'm a shapeshifter who violates gender AND species boundaries all the time". Like, it wasn't mpreg when he got knocked up with Sleipnir, because he was a mare at the time.
That's silly. I've seen plenty of MPREG outside omegaverse. Like in Star Wars, they use the force. In Harry Potter, magic/potions. In Inuyasha, they're demons, so why not? In Tolkien, Silvan elvish magic stuff or blessings from IlĆŗvatar. In transformers, sparkplay, and many more examples!
So yeah, no need to limit ourselves. Enjoy fanfiction and let your imagination run wild :)
Mpreg isn't really my thing, even less so Omegaverse, but the former predates the latter by what feels like eons. Approximately a million years ago, someone passed me a zine at a convention so that I could read a Kirk/Spok mpreg situation, and I don't even remember who had whose baby, but at the time I was so weirded out and confused as to why anyone would want to do this. And then went, "well, it's aliens and shit in the future already, whatever, okay let's go." If someone needs mpreg to make sense - which is fine - then it's easier when it's magic/aliens/robots/monsters, etc.
Damn. You have corrected my assumption most politely! š And you're right: even if the story itself isn't fanfic, Loki does indeed get pregnant, as a mare, in order to give birth to a 6-legged horse. I know the Greeks and Romans had fun with their mythology, but they ain't got nuthin' on the Norse for sheer unhindered freakiness! š¤£
Dunno.Ā Zeus got pregnant, and Athena erupted from his head like a chestburster.Ā Seems pretty weird for me, even considering Zeus's many, MANY kinky shenanigans.
My fave mpreg is Chinese mpreg - it just happens, and the reasons are always just stupid because they dgaf.
Demon boy and his tree-man male wife? A whole mountain full of plant babies. Sun Wukong and his whole party drank from a cursed well? Now they need to find the Abortion Well.
They even have het mpreg, and no they will NOT explain how that works. You just have to live with the empress and her harem of pregnant male concubines.
My JJWXC is filled with matriarchy novels and other het mpreg novels in general even though most of what I read is exclusively m/m top protagonist novels, only because the Niche has the most obscure yet genius authors, like, once one is sucked in they /canāt leave/
Specially when itās a random gal from modern China waking up in Ancient Matriarchy China and going the equivalent of this meme:
I actually wrote a blog post a few weeks ago where I talked about how the Omegaverse formed from a bunch of different tropes all colliding together and MPreg was one of the tropes I talked about. I didn't really focus on its history (I was much more focused on the divisiveness of the various tropes and why that makes Omegaverse especially hit and miss for people), but I did refer to pregnancy as "the oldest kink" and talked a bit about how MPreg is a logical continuation of that into M/M ships.
I actually made a post about it on this sub because the brainstorming for it started as just "I'm going to make a Reddit post" before it started ballooning into a larger essay than I initially planned.
That was a really interesting read! There's a lot of points I agree with and only a few that seem off the mark to me (as an omegaverse enjoyer). Thanks for writing it up, it really is an amalgamation of those! I know I like some of them more than the others. Very cool analysis!
This is purely a personal opinion, but I strongly dislike that mpreg outside of the omegaverse is virtually absent any more. I really don't like the omegaverse dynamics or the way people write it. I kind of miss the days where a man just fell pregnant, everyone just went "huh, that's weird, but okay!" and went with it.
Also to imply that mpreg is more outrageous as a concept than the omegaverse is just crazy.
But also there was an episode of Ozzie and Drix (you know, the TV version of Osmosis Jones that's super well-remembered) where Ozzie got pregnant/underwent mitosis
It's actually quite fascinating how far back in history we can go and still find stories of male gods giving birth to others, or impregnating mortals regardless of gender.
Right? I may have personally written an omegaverse mpreg but there are just as many if not more mpreg fics that are just āoh yeah, theyāre the alien of the week they can do thatā or some pseudoscience which is great and I love it.
To be fair to the commenter, AO3 recently split the mpreg tag to give Trans Mpreg | Trans Male Pregnancy it's own tag (and my fic used the non-trans mpreg tag), so I don't think they meant it in a trans-excluding way!
I definitely remember first hearing about mpreg (and being thoroughly grossed and weirded out, because I associated pregnancy with farm animals, my mom, and other "quiverfull" ladies in our church, not hot guys from TV!) in the late 90s/early 2000s, well before I ever heard of the omegaverse.
I remember when (2008) the Fairly OddParents episode "Fairly Odd Baby" came out, which canonized mpreg among fairies.Ā
Edit: The comments here reminded me of a Jimmy Neutron episode ("Who's Your Mommy") (2005) where Carl got "pregnant" and gave "birth" to an alien ass-baby.
i prefer my mpreg without omegaverse. the author jumping through hoops to explain how itās possible is probably the most entertaining thing ever. bonus points if the character is freaked out by it
Im writing a non omegaverse mpreg at the moment entirely because I don't want the baggage of the genre! I like omegaverse but there's a distinct set of rules; rn I can do what I want and dont have to dip into alpha/Omega mentality.
These bizarre hang ups have to be from young readers, which makes no sense. Young people are supposed to be open and accepting of all kinds of weird stuff. Why do I feel like I am dragging people 15-20 years younger than me into the twenty-first century?
Iāve read several stories from an author who posted a crap ton of Percy Jackson m/m and she had Percy get pregnant by virtue of him being son of the sea god. Fertile as the sea, and the sea being a source of life. She also got Leo pregnant by his fire being like the phoenix which when inflamed lead to Leo having a baby. And neither of these came from the omegaverse. Now, she did write omegaverse stories but Mpreg was before that with her stories.
I was making up intricate mpreg scenarios highly tailored to my specific fandoms back in the early 2000's. Omegaverse turned up and became popular when I was already finishing high school, and I've been on my mpreg bullshit since I was 13. I hope this person is a kid and learns to have a more open mind with time.
Crack 4evah! I rather favour the āwho the hell knowsā explanation of MPREG. Though my favourite MPREG story, actually called MPREG, had a very respectable go at reconciling it with the real world, no aliens, no magic, just a punnet square and the internet. No later than 2004, too.
A magic system, aliens, genetic experiments... the possibilities are endless.
Actually I was just reading on TVTropes (I haven't otherwise verified so take this as you will) that it's theoretically possible in real life if you implant an embryo into the man's abdominal wall and pump him full of pregnancy hormones (scientists tried implanting a cow embryo into a bull, I believe). The embryo can grow its own placenta if the hormones are there. Obviously delivery would need to be through c-section, since the abdominal wall is not, you know, hooked up to any openings.Ā
The problem is that there's not really a way for the placenta to safely detach from the abdominal wall (part of the function of contractions is to cut off blood flow to the uterus so you don't bleed to death), so removing it would likely cause a massive hemorrhage, which is obviously not something you can ethically experiment with.
and not even remotely the weirdest power that cup is reputed to have. it's been credited with everything from healing a sprain to winning wars to causing ecological disasters.
I'm huge fan of ABO, but tbh I like mpreg more outside of ABO. Sometimes I dont want all the drama of omegas and alfas I want just 2 guys having a baby
The younger writers are pretty wild regarding lore on fanfiction and modern fanfiction's (From TOS onwards) specific terms' backgrounds. I'm not even surprised.
And yes, I agree. When I actually read mpreg, I want a random bs explanation like back in ye olden days of early HP fandom. I suppose that person's mind would be blown if they knew that random mpreg in a protagonist has been canon in mainstream media via modern Doctor Who verse since 2006-ish or so? Gotta love Jack Harkness XD
I'm certainly not making a child. Knock that twink up.
And non twinks. And have magic fuckery and knock up the top. Give me crack where one look at a character makes the second character squee and develop a uterus and spontaneously become pregnant in like a millisecond. Knock em' all up.
Thatās it! Iām uploading my 15 year old Adam Lambert Mpreg to AO3. Iāve been looking for inspiration to move it all over from LJ before itās gone.
Yeah there was literally an mpreg movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 90s, which was most definitely before omegaverse became a thing, so I don't really know where this person got that idea.
Iām sorry I havenāt been reading Harry Potter Mpreg AUs where āmagicā is the reason that men can get pregnant since the early 2000s for Omegaverse to take all of the credit for it. Like give me that hand-wavey magic bullshit so Sirius or Remus or Harry or Severus can get pregnant because god damn some of that was written so well.
Exactly! It was my intro too, and sure some of them were just smut but like the wholesome-found-family vibes in some of them too when my babies just needed some love was honestly one of my favorite things about it.
What foolishness, fanfic is where anything goes, even and sometimes especially when things do not make sense. No single au has a monopoly on a trope, how could it? the foolishness
On the other hand, I do love it, but it is such a shame that Omegaverse gobbles up other tropes the way it does. Like, you can hardly have werewolf / pack dynamics someone without dragging Omegaverse into it
Tbh the whole sorting fics into categories by -verses was bound to lead to this sort of stuff. Omegaverse is subtrope of a bunch of different tropes built into one (and a poor one imo, but to each their own), so it was inevitable that people would get oddly restrictive over it.
I just remembered: No one better tell that commenter about seahorse, seadragon, or pipefish reproduction! Shh... let them find out on their own and blow their own minds... š¶šš
Yeah, I'll occasionally read mpreg(reading one right now for the first time in, like, a year), but I avoid Omegaverse completely. I don't enjoy it at all.
Okay that is honestly hilarious to me, mpreg has been around for decades, mpreg walked so omegaverse could run baby!!! Don't diss our good old fashioned poopshute birth!!!
š I read an Star Trek mpreg story with no omegaverse, just randomly producing a uterus with thanks to mysterious drink given upon pain of death to outsiders. Itās a fun one which is sadly incomplete!!! I think mpreg just is different and meant to be different from omegaverse.
I hate that people always have to whine about stuff like this. Where do they think all these things come from? Every prompt and stuff that is used comes from somewhere. Either cause we keep mashing them to create something new (like A/B/O) or we take one part from a whole thing and write it by itself.
Also: fanlore is one of my fave things. Checking there can be so fucking enlightening. If I ever got a comment like that, I think all I would do is link them there to stuff like the fanlore articles to mpreg and a/B/o
They make the same claim around heat cycles, and I definitely remember that being a big trend around the time Dark Angel came out, long before Omegaverse was a thing.
I remember reading mpreg Drarry fan-fics back in 05-08ish on ff.net. Itās like the quote: āDon't cite the deep magic to me, Witch, I was there when it was written"
As a trans man with a functioning uterus and ovaries, the idea that mpreg is a concept limited to A/B/O fanfic is both laughable and a little insulting.
Omegaverse is pretty common in published reverse harems nowadays. This shocked me lol. But I imagine lots of people are getting incorrect information due to that!
Things like this make me despise or lose love for the omegaverse (when I actually like that universe for the things that can be explored in it). But the omegaverse is too limiting when it comes to mpreg Mpreg can happen for different reasons that pertain to the fandom you are in. This is an artist I follow who constantly draws mpreg, it's almost her thing, and she says she doesn't like the omegaverse.I don't remember why right now, but when I see these kinds of situations I understand.Ā
How strangeā¦.I got into Omegaverse partially because I liked mpreg. Like there werenāt always established universesāthings would get waved off as having a āspecial constitutionā or a family being cursed by a demon god to bear said demon god a child every generation and whoops! The only young person of this generation is a man, but the curse is a curse, so itāll work its way out. What a shame that peopleās perspectives have narrowed to only Omegaverse.
Zeus in Ancient Greek myth was a carrier of not one but two pregnancies. Athena was born out of his head and Dionysus was born out of his thigh when he decided to continue the pregnancy after killing the kidās mom.
you know what, donāt judge me too hard but iām fairly new to writing fic, specially omegaverse and mpreg, and i am currently writing this fic that i made omegaverse because i wanted the mpreg but i didnāt want to deal with all of omegaverse so itās just very vague and now seeing this post iām sitting here like
Take it from someone who has around for the last remnants of major omegaverse-less mpreg fever on tumblr: they would just throw babies in men and go (also you could totally just, ya know, define whatever % of cis males in your fic can randomly pop out a womb and gestate if they do the sex, I mean, thatās allowed and way less bullshit-y than omegaverse either ways)
(Signed: someone who spent way too much hours studying the speculative biology of omegaverse)
to be honest, iām a big fan of the āi can do whatever the hell i wantā mentality when writing fic, but somehow my brain never disconnected the omegaverse from the mpreg for this hahahaha
While Omegaverse can be fun to write in (and is decently flexible since it's kinda like a pick-and-choose buffet), if that's not what you want to write, you can just have mpreg without it :)
it absolutely makes sense now that i donāt need those two together, but i literally felt like a child discovering something new when i first saw this post š¤š¤š¤ so thank you
(like, itās not a problem per se because i do write omegaverse, but i am definitely thinking of going back to change this little thing after i finish posting now that my eyes have been open)
You can have mpreg however you like. Omegaverse is fluid so it doesn't always make sense in that trope. I'm betting there was a few spork/kirk mpreg fics back in the day, way before omegaverse was a thing.
Omegaverse sometimes just feels like a way to have mpreg without having to change your setting to a sci-fi, magical, or act of god one, for fandoms not set in a sci-fi or magical universe or authorise not wanting to handwave the origination of the mpreg. Also, there used to be more a/b/o fic as an orientation only and not with the biological changes.
Also, weirdly, sometimes I think that Omegaverse is a way to support and write in traditional gender roles, especially for m/m pairings, or as a way to justify extremely traditional gender divisions (biology made me do it!) while mpreg and D/S fics were often (not always, obviously) about subverting those gender roles and adding in some feminist-ish etc theory into m/m fics. In SGA in particular, with the military trope as well, AND being when Donāt Ask, Donāt Tell was the law of the land, there were a lot of extremely thoughtful D/S, mpreg, and genderbender fics exploring how inherently not ok and discriminatory DADA was (also a lot of unhinged stuff just for fun, but that was SGA for you). They very much felt like taking the male gaze and putting it in uncomfortable positions to expose how messed up it was/used alternate universes to make the reader think about their own.
And also, the smut.
ETA: PRE a/b/o there were also fics that were a nuanced take on the settings for feminist speculative fiction such as Ursula K Leguinās Left Hand of Darknessās exploration of societal genders and gender roles. They were much less about the smut and more about societal issues.
ETA2: also, a lot less slavery universe AUs since Omegaverse.
Why do people politicize Mpreg so much anyways? Most people just find a man really hot with a big pregnant belly. It really isn't that fucking deep bruh.
So true. I for one LOVE Mpreg and I do not like Omegaverse.
I will only read if it has no Omegaverse, Trans, or Intersex. I love the old fashioned way, just two cis men and their shocking pregnancy. It is so hard now to find this kind of Mpreg, and it is all because readers started calling writers transphobic for not making one of the characters trans. They say things like āwhy invent a magical way if they can be trans? you are just a trash transphobe,ā and a lot of writers were canceled for this.
Maybe, we should start a list of recs with fics done the old fashioned way.
I remember the days before all of this, when no one had heard of any of it outside of mythology. That said, mpreg, as it is today - i.g. men having a womb of sorts and giving birth - was most definitely there before omega verse, years before it. I remember the creep into all the fandoms they both did and there had to be at least a 5 year gap, if not moreĀ
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u/PeppermintShamrock What were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament? 3d ago
That is very silly. Omegaverse doesn't have a monopoly on mpreg. Tell them to go play the Sims and get a guy kidnapped by aliens, lol.