What Could We Make of #ABODesire's Portrayal of Consent Violations?

posting my twitter thread on this topic here hoping it could aid in shaping the discussion into something more fruitful. apologies if the sentences read oddly constrained; they are indeed tweet-sized.

there seems to be two dominant discourses surrounding #abodesire’s portrayal of consent violations & both seem dismissive. it’s not fair to disregard the genre-specific world-building but it’s also a disservice to dismiss the non-consent because of it when it’s intentional. 

through science fiction, the omegaverse dramatizes the gender inequality between men and women in real life where men’s desires are treated as necessary and uncontrollable under patriarchy. being in heat is akin to compulsion and rape “isn’t a thing” if it is your biological imperative to do so. 

in their thesis, milena popova calls this defamiliarization, where the sex/gender dynamics in the show feel familiar to our real-life experiences but are made strange by the characters' biological imperatives, making it easier for us to see the power structures that also govern these dynamics in our world.

by taking inspiration from animal lore, the omegaverse makes coercion inherent to its biological frameworks and this premise naturally limits the characters’ “agency & ability to seek, give or withhold consent” in this dramatized, parallel version of a hierarchical social structure. these scenes are deliberately portrayed as explicitly non-consensual as they parallel real-life consent violations taken to the extreme through the science-fictional elements of the genre, like how alphas being dominant and omegas being submissive parallel male/female gender scripts in our world.

so, we read these scenes not just as rape scenes but also as narrative devices that showcase how consent can easily be rendered meaningless when biological imperatives are written in. this is why it matters that we don’t dismiss these depictions for a more digestible romance story. 

seemingly, in the context of abo desire, these dubious/non-consent scenes aren’t added for shock value or to rationalize assault; they reshape the romantic dynamics we see in the show. we are confronted with the question of what counts as a valid foundation of romance in this world. the show is still ongoing but what we are seeing so far is the series acknowledging how these violations have changed these characters as people and their relationship dynamics with others. it doesn’t dismiss the weight of these scenes just to preserve the fantasy of love or “redeem” the sexually transgressive characters. by acknowledging the coercion in these interactions through the characters experiencing trauma or changing their relationship with the perpetrators or by renegotiating their boundaries, the show allows for the romantic dynamics to be reshaped in a way that critiques rape culture.

(quoting the scene where during gao tu's heat, a background character is worried for him and notes he could be in trouble "if he meets an unscrupulous alpha or a high-compatibility one) in abo desire’s omegaverse, the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality are confronted and aren’t presented as morally neutral. like here in this scene, they are worried because there are factors beyond biology, like constructions of (alpha) masculinity, where alphas can lack moral principles and this can influence their sexually transgressive actions.

so, i find these two dominant discourses dismissive because they ignore the cultural work done in this show to interrogate consent and its limitations. by ignoring these coercive dynamics in order to safely enjoy the romantic parts of the show, we would be the ones normalizing non-consent. by completely eliminating control and autonomy from humanized subjects, the show forces us to think of the limitations of consent (wanting vs consenting) and why/how we excuse some coercion in real life but (hopefully) not here in this fictional world where it’s easier to see. 

in the context of this show, i think it’s useful to ask these questions: how is the coercion framed? it could be biological (heat/rut) and/or hierarchical (alpha/beta), etc. how is the aftermath handled? what is the purpose assigned to these scenes? e.g. exposing power imbalances.