I think part of what I find useful in the a/b/o setup is that its heavily sex/gender-coded society and the myriad social issues that come from that more closely resemble my personal experience than does the idealized gender-equality world some fics seem to live in. Like, most of longsufferingly's stuff, delightful though it is, is so cheerfully sex-positive and gender-equal and embracing of queer orientation and relationships that I can't relate to it. My world does not look like that. Yet if you start bringing homophobia and misogyny into the fics, you run the risk of making them "issue fics," which very few people want.

Whereas in a/b/o fic you have many of the same old social pressures, though slightly disguised. In a/b/o fic, biology actually does affect matters of sex and gender as much as many people believe it does in RL, which means that the resulting social situations are both familiar and less politicized. I think in some ways this makes them easier to write about, because you've got both the emotional distance of "la la writing in a dog penis universe" and the fact that the situations do not actually map directly from RL to a/b/o.

In fact, I think that's a hazard of a/b/o fic: the temptation of equating the situations of omegas in an a/b/o universe to the situation of women in ours. They two are not and shouldn't be the same. Both women and omegas exist in most a/b/o universes, and although I don't think I've actually seen any fic where, for example a beta (="normal human") woman interacts with an omega, either male or female, the basic fact that some omegas (most or all in certain universes) are male is bound to change what it means to be a woman in that universe.

This leads to the other difficulty of a/b/o fic that I've been thinking about lately, which is that IMO, just about all a/b/o fic (including my own) is fundamentally artificial in its worldbuilding. We have a society with different organizing principles to our own, and yet the world they live in looks... almost exactly like ours. People go to college and live in dorms and solve murders, and there are some small social differences to help accommodate heats and such, but one gets the impression that walking down the street, the universe would be basically indistinguishable from ours. Which is silly. Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder" rather overstates the principle of small changes in the past making big changes in the future (think "butterfly effect"), but idea is sound. If a significant portion of your population is experiencing periods frenzied, uncontrollable sexual impulses on a regular basis, your society is going to look different. For example, segregation of alphas and omegas becomes pretty much imperative, especially prior to the invention of suppressants; what is that going to do to history? What if Significant Historical Figure X was born an omega? How are our ideas of slavery and liberty, tyranny and representative government, appropriate and inappropriate social behavior going to change?

The world is going to look totally different, is what I'm saying.

All that said, I don't actually want a/b/o fics to be set in some completely different alternate universe (or at least not all of them, although I will happily read any ambitious experiments in that direction), because I think a big part of their impact, intellectually and emotionally, is that contrast of mundanely familiar with utterly alien. The frisson of weird at that intersection of the two is one of the things I love.

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(Somewhat-related aside: for original fic with that same contrast of familiar/alien, I have found no one so consistently wonderful as Carol Emshwiller. I haven't read all the stories linked there, but I've read other things, and she is amazing. Ursula Le Guin is another one who's done some very interesting stuff with gender and social organization; The Left Hand of Darkness and the sedoretu stories are just the beginning.)

Soonish, I think, I'm going to put together a list of Essential and Interesting A/B/O Fics. I need something to refer you all to.

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