Is Omegaverse Paranormal Romance?

I’m reading an advanced reader copy of The Mating Game by Lana Ferguson1 and had a stray thought, which I’d like to explore:

A critical expectation in paranormal romance is the discovery of a hidden subculture that is a closely-guarded secret from the culture at large.

The Mating Game is an omegaverse novel where the main character who thought she was a beta can get diagnosed as an omega at the emergency room but also TikTok, HGTV, and The Property Brothers exist.2

I’ve dabbled into enough omegaverse novels to understand that they’re not really for me, but gave this one a shot since I’ve enjoyed Ferguson’s contemporary and monster-y paranormals before.

In one of her previous books, Under Loch and Key, the Loch Ness monster-ness was a mystery to be solved by the heroine and a new world to explore. In The Mating Game, I’m having trouble with the idea that the heroine lives in a world with shifters, alphas, omegas, and betas, thinks she’s a beta, has a best friend who is an omega, and yet is totally ignorant — to the point of head in the sand, lalala I can’t hear you!! — about how it all works.

It feels like the equivalent of a contemporary romance with a grown woman who doesn’t know how periods work or how babies are made (in a situation where there’s no backstory explaining away her ignorance3). The impact for me as a reader is that the heroine is too stupid to live (TSTL) — it’s not cute.

I think what this reveals is that it’s hard to have the characters explore and discover a magical subculture (and bring the reader into that journey) when it’s already commonly-understood knowledge in the world.

I’m only 25% into the book, but I’m finding that I’m so distracted by the world building that my interest in the characters is sidelined.

Which leads me to a question:

Is the issue that I’m going in with paranormal romance expectations (prompted by “shifters,” which pings paranormal to moi, an elder millennial) and omegaverse actually has different subgenre expectations?

For example, if you break down the hierarchical relationships between genre and subgenre, is omegaverse a sub-subgenre under paranormal romance, or is it a separate subgenre?

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to use the following hierarchy:

• Genre

  • Subgenre

    • Sub-subgenre4

Let’s start with some examples:

• Popular Romance Fiction

  • Historical Romance

    • Regency Romance

    • Medieval Romance

  • Contemporary Romance

    • Sports Romance

    • Dark Romance

All Regency Romances are also Historical Romances. If you say “Dark Romance,” the expectation is that you’re talking about a contemporary romance with particular subgenre conventions.5

So, is omegaverse a subset of paranormal romance, like this?

• Popular Romance Fiction

  • Paranormal Romance

    • Omegaverse

    • Shifter Romance

    • Vampire Romance

Or, are Paranormal and Omegaverse completely separate subgenres, like this?

• Popular Romance Fiction

  • Paranormal Romance

    • Shifter Romance

    • Vampire Romance

  • Omegaverse

Perhaps it seems that I’m being pedantic, but from a genre convention standpoint, I think this is an important distinction.

For example, I have learned through reading many paranormal romances that I should expect that the paranormal creatures have to hide their existence from the world at large. Sometimes every main character is already part of the world and sometimes one or more characters are slowly discovering this world exists — either way, a key element is guarding the secret.

What about True Blood and The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris? We enter the world of the TV show and book series at a point where vampires have revealed themselves to the public — the secret is out. I think what makes this series still feel like a paranormal is that the audience and characters are still constantly discovering new paranormal creatures that are not publicly known and understood, and also it’s a world where for most of history, vampires were a secret.

Are the subgenre expectations for omegaverse fundamentally different? Is the pleasure not supposed to come from that discovery element, and instead it’s supposed to be found in other elements?

For example, I get the sense that I’m supposed to be attuned to the question of biological attraction versus “true” romantic attraction (do they love each other, or is it just pants feelings?), as well as consent politics. Can an omega consent when she’s in heat? Is it similar to being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but biologically induced?

I am a naive reader when it comes to the omegaverse subgenre, even though I’m an “expert” romance reader. I can still evaluate if this book satisfies my expectations for romance, but I don’t have enough experience with a big enough corpus of omegaverse texts to actually understand the expectations for this subgenre and how to situate it within my mental genre taxonomy.

My subgenre naivety means I can’t really evaluate if this book is a “successful” omegaverse romance — I don’t have enough of a foothold to understand what I’m supposed to be noticing or what to expect. I do know it’s not meeting my expectations for paranormal, which is what prompted me to wonder if that’s actually how I should be approaching the book.

I’m not the first to observe that cover art design trends are increasingly making it difficult to accurately clock subgenre (or sub-subgenre).

Here’s the cover for The Mating Game:

With the exception of the subtle wolf prints in the snow leading up to the main characters, the style of this cover screams “contemporary romance!” to me. The previous book in this series uses a similar visual clue that this is paranormal, but in a way that’s actually even more puzzling:

(Is the floor of this hospital extremely dusty? Also why are his footprints leading to his current position, while hers are walking away? Did she walk backwards to her current position and then swivel? Are the hygiene standards of omegaverse medical facilities very different from our own? Do they throw sawdust down, like at Medieval Times, to soak up all the hormones and other bodily emissions?)

I’m so distracted!

As a cover counterpoint, here’s the cover from Cate C. Wells’ popular omegaverse series:

While I could see this cover working for either a paranormal werewolf/shifter book or omegaverse, it definitely does more to set subgenre expectations than The Mating Game.

To be fair, Wells is self-published and Ferguson is traditionally published, so there are also production differences and format expectations — for example, Wells is primarily selling ebooks, while Ferguson’s covers optimize for a trade paperback format. I also think Ferguson’s cover is trying to establish a lighter, quirkier tone than Wells, who has a more dramatic and angsty style.

I don’t have a problem with books playing with the established boundaries of subgenre — but doing so increases the requirements for flawless execution. The more an author deviates from an established path of reader expectations, the harder they need to work to clearly set reader expectations and stick the landing.

I’ve noted before that books that stick to heavily trodden genre paths can skate by with gestures to conventions that expert readers will use to fill in the blanks and create a richer, more pleasurable experience by relying on internalized subgenre knowledge. Meanwhile, naive readers will likely be completely lost.

Fanfiction works in a similar way — by building on a world that already exists in the writer and readers’ minds, the writer can embellish rooms in the existing architecture of the IP without needing to pay attention to the foundation and structural elements.

This is also why fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off6 can feel unmoored and decontextualized — it’s built on a foundation that has been purposefully deconstructed. It’s why such work is promoted in a way that gives the consumer as many clues as possible to cue them to imagine the infrastructure still exists, even while maintaining plausible deniability to avoid copyright infringement.

I read Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis and absolutely had no idea it was originally Reylo fanfic (or Adam Driver/Daisy Ridley fanfic, depending on whom you ask). I haven’t watched any of the newer Star Wars movies and there were definitely points in the reading experience where I felt like a reference was going over my head.

(And yes, I was also deeply disturbed by a student sitting on a professor’s lap during a lecture, speaking of super strange world-building that was disorienting as a human who exists in the real world.)

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Those are my stray thoughts for the day. Feel free to educate this omegaverse-naive reader or weigh in with your opinions or observations!