I can’t wait for the days where scholarship has to muddle through ff.net and ao3 pseudonyms like “guys, I have evidence to believe that starfucker69 was a pseudonym for one of our landmark literary figures of the 21st century and that they in fact first began their writing career with filthy sinful Steggy smut.”
As an academic and a fan I both want and fucking dread this day because academics trying to tackle things like A/B/O, magic!cock, g!p, mpreg, rule 63, sex pollen like… the language academia is going to have to invent my god
future thesis: bottomdean89’s famously kudos'ed story, “A Knot to Remember,” operates at first under the conventions of the A/B/O genre, using omega heat sickness as its primary device for doing so, but in chapter 14, bottomdean89 clearly introduces the fuck or die trope to create a dialectic through which the ultimate theme of soulmates is realized
Future rebuttal: The secondary gender genre of alternate universe fanworks (colloquially referred to as “A/B/O” or “omgeaverse”) has, at its heart, an amalgamation of conventions and tropes, including chemical compulsion to copulate (”sex pollen”), coital tying (”knotting”), impregnation of those whose primary gender is considered to be male (”mpreg”), survival dependent on coitus (”fuck or die”), and metaphysical connection (”soulmates”). Rather than changing genres in chapter 14, bottomean89 merely shifts the focus from one element of the genre to another. This not only maintains thematic consistency–a predominant trait of bottomdean89′s future works–it also unites the chemical compulsion to copulate convention with the survival dependent on coitus convention in a way that is unique to the secondary gender genre. After all, the chemical compulsion of secondary gender reproductive cycle syndrome (”heat sickness”) is, at its epitome, a biological imperative, and should the characters fail to heed it, propagation of the species will not result, which can be considered a type of “death.” Additionally, situational risks to the character experiencing secondary gender reproductive cycle syndrome–such as dehydration, disorientation, hormonal fluctuations, and suggestibility–can lead to the character’s actual physical death, should they not be handled properly by a competent inseminating partner. In short, one of the primary hallmarks of the secondary gender genre is the fusion and unification of the chemical compulsion to copulate convention and the survival dependent on coitus convention, something which bottomdean89 illustrates with great skill in “A Knot to Remember,” and which allows for the ultimate metaphysical connection between the characters.