Born to Be Bound
Jul. 11th, 2020 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI was intrigued by the description of the novel Born to Be Bound in the New York Times article that I read earlier about professionally published Omegaverse romance novels. ABO Batman fic with the serial numbers filed off? Sign me up!
I didn’t realize just how intense it would be. I can’t imagine being a literary agent and being like, Yes! This is absolutely the sort of thing that needs to be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble!!
(Content warning for everything there is to be warned for, probably.)
Starting with the Brontë sisters and moving on from there, the vast majority of het romance involves the subversion of patriarchal power structures by means of the domestication of decent and sensitive straight men who have been socialized to embrace toxic masculinity. What this means is that, at least at the beginning of the story, there is always some amount of bad behavior on the part of the male lead. Depending on how kinky the novel is, sometimes the bad behavior is indeed very bad, but at some point the man realizes that he’s wrong, changes accordingly, and is rewarded with affection.
In Born to Be Bound, the man doesn’t change. He’s an alpha, so he can’t change; that’s just who he is. It’s actually the female lead who needs to change by accepting her biological destiny as an omega. The title of this novel is just about as literal as it gets.
Basically, the male lead drugs the woman, imprisons her, and repeatedly rapes her with the intention of impregnating her against her will. When she resists him, he drugs and rapes her more. She still resists him, so he begins beating her, biting and hitting her in order to punish and mark her. This is the entire novel: drugging, beating, and rape until the woman eventually stops considering suicide as her only means of exerting her agency.
In addition, the author doesn’t come out and say that the female protagonist is fourteen or fifteen years old and “mated” to someone in his forties, but it’s strongly implied. Her youth and vulnerability make it difficult for her to cultivate allies and escape, and this is very sexy, apparently.
There’s an attempt at a plot, but it doesn’t go anywhere that isn’t a justification of why the woman deserves to be imprisoned and raped for her hubris in thinking she’s a full human being. Humans are slaves to their biology, after all, and she should have known that being claimed by the top alpha was the best she could hope for as an omega. The story’s catharsis comes when the woman “learns” to be grateful. There’s a lot of talk about how omegas exist to be dominated and bred, but no real exploration of how this has impacted society – just a lot of the female lead expressing her abject misery, trying desperately to get away from the male lead, and being drugged and beaten for her efforts.
I’m mostly indifferent to romance as a genre, and I’ve never read the giant novels about sexy cavepeople that everyone keeps telling me about, but I’ve always enjoyed the work of authors like Jacqueline Carey who write dark fantasy with strong erotic elements. That being said, Born to Be Bound is on a different level altogether.
I’m not wringing my hands in moral panic like someone whose first encounter with female-authored erotica was Fifty Shades of Grey, and I actually appreciate certain Omegaverse elements like pair bonding and same-sex parenting. Hell, I’ve had to respond to people’s comments on my own stories on AO3 in order to explain that the characters do not deliver academic lectures on safe sex because this is fiction, not a manual intended for educational instruction in the current best practices for whatever community exists to serve a particular fantasy.
I mean, don’t like, don’t read. Your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay. Born to Be Bound isn’t for me, but I’m happy it exists for the people who enjoy it. But just, wow. This is not “soft” Omegaverse by any means. Instead, the author has dialed all the genre’s tropes up to eleven without any sort of explanation, reflection, or analysis. How in the world did this sort of thing become mainstream romance fiction?
I didn’t realize just how intense it would be. I can’t imagine being a literary agent and being like, Yes! This is absolutely the sort of thing that needs to be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble!!
(Content warning for everything there is to be warned for, probably.)
Starting with the Brontë sisters and moving on from there, the vast majority of het romance involves the subversion of patriarchal power structures by means of the domestication of decent and sensitive straight men who have been socialized to embrace toxic masculinity. What this means is that, at least at the beginning of the story, there is always some amount of bad behavior on the part of the male lead. Depending on how kinky the novel is, sometimes the bad behavior is indeed very bad, but at some point the man realizes that he’s wrong, changes accordingly, and is rewarded with affection.
In Born to Be Bound, the man doesn’t change. He’s an alpha, so he can’t change; that’s just who he is. It’s actually the female lead who needs to change by accepting her biological destiny as an omega. The title of this novel is just about as literal as it gets.
Basically, the male lead drugs the woman, imprisons her, and repeatedly rapes her with the intention of impregnating her against her will. When she resists him, he drugs and rapes her more. She still resists him, so he begins beating her, biting and hitting her in order to punish and mark her. This is the entire novel: drugging, beating, and rape until the woman eventually stops considering suicide as her only means of exerting her agency.
In addition, the author doesn’t come out and say that the female protagonist is fourteen or fifteen years old and “mated” to someone in his forties, but it’s strongly implied. Her youth and vulnerability make it difficult for her to cultivate allies and escape, and this is very sexy, apparently.
There’s an attempt at a plot, but it doesn’t go anywhere that isn’t a justification of why the woman deserves to be imprisoned and raped for her hubris in thinking she’s a full human being. Humans are slaves to their biology, after all, and she should have known that being claimed by the top alpha was the best she could hope for as an omega. The story’s catharsis comes when the woman “learns” to be grateful. There’s a lot of talk about how omegas exist to be dominated and bred, but no real exploration of how this has impacted society – just a lot of the female lead expressing her abject misery, trying desperately to get away from the male lead, and being drugged and beaten for her efforts.
I’m mostly indifferent to romance as a genre, and I’ve never read the giant novels about sexy cavepeople that everyone keeps telling me about, but I’ve always enjoyed the work of authors like Jacqueline Carey who write dark fantasy with strong erotic elements. That being said, Born to Be Bound is on a different level altogether.
I’m not wringing my hands in moral panic like someone whose first encounter with female-authored erotica was Fifty Shades of Grey, and I actually appreciate certain Omegaverse elements like pair bonding and same-sex parenting. Hell, I’ve had to respond to people’s comments on my own stories on AO3 in order to explain that the characters do not deliver academic lectures on safe sex because this is fiction, not a manual intended for educational instruction in the current best practices for whatever community exists to serve a particular fantasy.
I mean, don’t like, don’t read. Your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay. Born to Be Bound isn’t for me, but I’m happy it exists for the people who enjoy it. But just, wow. This is not “soft” Omegaverse by any means. Instead, the author has dialed all the genre’s tropes up to eleven without any sort of explanation, reflection, or analysis. How in the world did this sort of thing become mainstream romance fiction?
no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 10:35 pm (UTC)Holy shit.
I read a lot of romance. I have read very good and very bad romance. This sounds like the kind of book I would have thrown across the room because it was so distressing. There was one urban-fantasy series I read - Southern Arcana, by Moira Rogers - that had a really, really good kinky alpha/omega role thing going on with bonus stuff about breeding not-between-the-leads, and it was handled really well in general, and was not this.
Which I guess is my way of saying, tropes can be done very well, but it distresses me so much that the garbage like this is what "rises to the top."
no subject
Date: 2020-07-16 06:57 pm (UTC)I spit out my tea when I saw the cover of the first volume, god bless. Your reading suggestions have always been golden, and I've already bought the Kindle edition (for $0.00, no less), but lord if that isn't some Fine Art.
This is not a recommendation, per se, because this series of books is pure teeth-rotting sugar, but I'm a fan of Evangeline Anderson's Brides of the Kindred series, which is sci-fi Omegaverse with the serial numbers filed off. I mean:
A race of Alien Warriors from beyond the stars
Three very different types of Alpha Males
All focused on one thing...Claiming their Brides
Okay, so... Maybe "fan" is a strong word to describe my relationship to these books, but I appreciate how the author takes a number of standard ABO elements and transforms them into something that might be palatable for a wider audience. I also appreciate how she picks up various trends in kinky fanfiction and more or less anthropomorphizes them in each stand-alone novel in the series. Really, it's a talent.
And I think, because I have some degree of familiarity with soft Omegaverse stories, that I'm just as frustrated as you are that something like Born to Be Bred is what gets the literary agent and the lucrative book deal.
I guess I have thoughts and feelings about agents and book deals, as well as how wealthy you and your family need to be in order to get them. Hard work and talent are necessary, of course, but we're all hard-working and talented. Some people just have a few more... resources, let's say. I just didn't think that sort of thing extended this far.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-17 11:15 pm (UTC)I wonder how much of the wealth thing is just....being able to devote the time. Like, I've had an extraordinary amount more time right now (that I can't fucking use because the world is on fire and my brain is screaming) just from being able to work remotely and skip the commute; I am quite comfortable financially but I can think of other places where if I had more wealth, I could claw back even more time for writing (e.g.: hiring a cleaning service.) Like, I'm sure that being able to go to conferences where one can hobnob with agents, or can call up Aunt Mildred whose bridge club partner's granddaughter is an agent, are a huge part of the benefits that wealth can give, but just having the time to write and spend on querying and such without it destroying your home/family/career life is. Mind-boggling.