Omegaverse … Novum?

I was watching a video essay the other day and something clicked in my brain. It’s something that I hadn’t thought about in relation to Omegaverse and Shifter fiction in general. Now, I can’t unthink it. So, let’s get into it.

Omegaverse/ABO and Shifter stories share common DNA with Science Fiction – the Novum. If you’re not familiar with the term, you probably are still familiar with the concept. Discussion tends to focus around Sci-Fi, but other Genres can use it too. Fantasy sometimes does. So do Alternate History stories. The Novum is that thing that makes the fictional world go round.

It’s not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin can be anything, as long as the characters want to find it, steal it, deliver it, protect it, or destroy it. The Novum is what makes the story possible to begin with. Let’s look at Jurassic Park because it has examples of both. Nedry gets hired to smuggle out some dinosaur embryos. Those are a MacGuffin in that the writers could have selected embryos, freshly-laid eggs, a baby dinosaur, or a flash drive with genetic data. The Novum, the Big Lie, the thing that you have to suspend your disbelief so that the whole concept of the movie works, the Novum is the idea that you can clone dinosaurs from DNA preserved in amber.

Bringing It to the Omegaverse

So, in Omegaverse and Shifter stories, what’s our Novum? When we think about what a Novum is, what it does in a story, it’s obvious, right? The Novum is the Alternate Biology of humans in our worlds. That alternate biology, whether we’re talking about just human/animal shifting or we’re talking about the Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics of Omegaverse stories, is key to these other worlds functioning.

Whether we’re looking at fanfiction tales of our favorite stories or wholly independent stories, this x-factor of a shifter biology is what makes us consider everything else: How do interpersonal relationships work? What does society look like? Who has control and who fights it? What are the demands of the world? How has history changed or what factors kept it mostly the same?

But … Wolf Science!

I don’t actually like calling the study that a lot of wolf-shifter stories, including Omegaverse, get inspiration from “bad science”. Like … that gets used and it’s unfair. It’s unfair because it’s not bad science. It’s how science is supposed to work. People who studied wolves in captivity put together a hypothesis about wolf behavior based on how those wolves interacted. Later, when the scientist (Dave Mech) who wrote the book got to study wolves in the wild, he saw that theory was wrong and published those findings, stating that the original theory was wrong, at least for wolves in their natural habitat.

Wrong science is only bad science when we don’t correct the things we get wrong, especially when we find out we got them wrong.

As for that being our Novum … it’s no worse that pulling DNA from a mosquito stuck in amber. Or psychedelic worm droppings. Or particles that inconsistently remove weight from shrunken mass. What makes a good Novum work is how we apply it to our stories. When I read an Omegaverse or Shifter story where the characters are compelling and the new reality of wolf dynamics feels like it’s deep in the bone and blood of the world, I’m able to suspend disbelief and enjoy a great story.

At the end of the day, that’s what we’re really looking for, an escape into a story.

More about Novum:

SFE: Novum. (n.d.). https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/novum