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theterriblepoll · 3 months ago

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Hello. I did say I was going to write an essay.

Scent has one of the broadest interpretations in omegaverse, and in about half, the internal world building logic makes my eye twitch so I have done a lot of thinking about this.

There’s a couple of main camps on the fundamentals of it. LFG.

Type 1

is the conceit that scents are distinct and definable by anyone smelling it, and that it modulates to match emotion or illness. This implies that someone who smells like peppermint and vanilla, smells like that to everyone, which means the same is true for someone who gets described as smelling like mildew and lemon. That universe probably has a whole lot of prejudices and assumptions and astrology-esque beliefs about what someone smells like. It also uses very clear scents. This is not a world building that supports saying that your lover smells of Summer Dreams. They smell like cedar, deal with it.

If you hold to that logic throughout the worldbuilding, okay, fair enough. It’s a rough life for Mr Lemon Mildew, but you can make it logical. I’d guess that’s a genetic pressure to prevent them breeding. Could be interesting to include a mention that there’s a correlation between scents that are generally unpleasant to humans, and a genetic disease. Like, did Queen Victoria smell faintly like sour wine, and that was the indicator that she carried the hemophilia gene but no one could argue bc she was the queen? But I digress.

---- Subtype 1A has emotions and illness effect the scent by manipulating the existing baseline scent. So, Peppermint gets sharper when they’re angry, the Vanilla comes forward when they’re horny, their scent fades down when sad, gets more intense when they’re happy. People around you would have a guess, but you’d need to know someone to know how their scent is impacted by different emotions because they don’t know if angry means more or less mint.

---- Subtype 1B has scents pick up new additions that are not in the baseline scent. Normally Alex is all Lemongrass and chamomile. They get a buttery smell when they’re content. They start to smell like motor oil when they’re annoyed. You can make the argument that a person who can control their emotions tightly enough could pass as having an entirely different scent than they have as their baseline. But, this brings up the fact that no one is ever feeling nothing, so no one’s baseline truly exists. In this version, random strangers may or may not be able to tell how you’re feeling if your version of angry isn’t within the standard categories.

Type 2

starts with the idea that scents are not universally identifiable. It is often framed as something based on compatibility for making healthy offspring. In this version, you have Billy Bob, who, to his beloved wife, smells like caramel popcorn, and who, to his nemesis, smells like burning tires. The exact scent would be influenced by the person who is smelling it, and if 10 strangers smelled Billy Bob, you’d get 10 different descriptions. There might be some overall grouping, eg, Billy Bob always smells of something plant based, but you wouldn’t get exact agreement between people. So the closest you’d manage is ‘Its’ Cardamom! No its Cinnamon!’

Whether they know it or not, most writers land here, and describe scents as literal, literal, metaphorical. Eg. Orange Blossom, Sugar, and Sunset. It’s the only way to explain a world where someone would hire a guy that smells like rotten meat. It cannot be a universally agreed scent. That baby would get left in the wilderness to die.

---- Subtype 2A has an overall trend of what type of genre of scents show up in a person based on different emotions/illness. So, emotional or romantic compatibility could register as smells you have a positive association with, things that remind you of safety or home. Maybe sexual compatibility registers as food smells. Their anger, if directed at you, smells like things you hate, but directed at someone who was mean to you, smells like something else entirely. All of this could be subgrouped again into whether the variants in the scent stick within the baseline or not, but I’m not going there.

---- Subtype 2B takes the idea of individual interpretations of a person’s baseline, and joins it to things that are broadly the same for everyone. When someone is angry, they will pick up a charred or burning smell. When they’re horny, it will smell sweet. When they’re sick, it will smell like decay. There might be nuance, but anyone who smells them is going to immediately be able to tag the broad strokes of how their day is going. What this gets you is that if this is your bestie, who normally smells like snickerdoodles, they smell like burnt sugar. If it’s your rival, who normally smells like sharp pine, they smell like wildfire.

Type 3

is based in the more realistic idea that what gets called a Scent isn’t really a smell. It’s just the way that humans have to define how they process the pheromones. Actually, it’s more meta than that, we, the audience reading the story, don’t have a way to describe what it is except by using smells and scents as stand in words. If we lived in actual Omegaverse land (god help us all) we’d have a different name for a sense that we do not possess. Since we lack that, and since most Omegaverse fic is not looking to include, define, and say “they phermed of cloves and wine” or anything like that, so we use ‘Scent’ (this is where the use of Scent as opposed to Smell started. It was the acknowledgement that it wasn’t the same thing as smelling) Let’s not kid ourselves, a large portion of Omegaverse fic is about Big Horny, so maintaining the reader’s mood while saying Phermed over and over is a challenge we don’t want to pick up.

Terminology aside, for this version, you usually see betas and non-des people with a reduced or non-existent ability to scent people the way that Alphas and Omegas can. As and Os would have an extra or stronger sensory organ. This is also where you see others being physically impacted by someone’s emotions. Someone’s best friend dies, and the scent of their grief is so bad that it drops people to their knees

Here we get really abstract in the descriptions of how someone smells. It’s almost always implied to be an individual interpretation of the scent, so writers can go as far as they want. You want to say that guy smells like a wet dog that rolled in garbage? Go for it. You want to say that the other guy smells like the freedom of a springtime drive in a convertible? Coolio. I don’t know what that would be, but it’s about the emotions so it doesn’t matter. You’re evoking it, not describing it. It’s about the describers perception, not an impartial determination.

Unlike the other two types, you are almost always going to get clearly identifiable designations with this. If it’s that closely based on something adjacent to pheromones, there would be things that were universally understandable statuses. Rut, Presentation, Pregnancy, Mated. Biology more than emotion. There would be a recognizable Omega or Alpha part. There’s not a lot of a room for ‘no one noticed they were an Alpha bc they scented like baked goods’ in this style. It would be undeniable.

---- Subtype 3A same principle as above. This has everyone get a clear understanding of what Angry, Sad, Sick, Horny smells like. It’s not manipulation of their baseline, it's an added pherm. It doesn’t matter if it’s a total stranger or if you and your bestie disagree about what the baseline is. You walk by an alley and you can smell Distressed and Injured Omega down there. You probably don’t use smell based descriptions for it. They don’t smell like patchouli, they smell sad. You don’t have a flowery description because it's too obviously an emotion.

---- Subtype 3B again, continuing from above. Personal interpretation of what the other person is giving off. You can probably notice what the emotion is, but the way you register it changes. So, you know they smell like horny, but that’s your kid sister, so it's repulsive to you, it's not an abstract thing. You know she smells horny, but you register it as Ew Gross. Her girlfriend feels differently. This one leaves open the idea of biological predisposition to Sadism. Someone could almost always interpret pain+horny as being a great smell, even though for others, it’s awful. You could also make an argument for something kinda like psychopathy, where the way they register and respond to scents is wildly out in left field.

-----

Hope you had fun in the biology section.

Time to discuss society, which is what you were talking about in the first place, but the biology stuff was an unskippable cutscene. I’m not sorry.

For the sake of branching possibilities, I’m not opening the box about how long Alphas/Betas have existed in the world, and will assume that it's as old as humanity.

Even with that, there would be a lot of differences between cultures and points in history about the acceptability of scents being broadcasted. We’re gonna have to put that to the side as well, and work within the world your post implies. We’ll cleave close to the current American culture where it would be considered incredibly rude to walk around forcing your emotions down other peoples’ throats.

We’ve got some options within that which are influenced by the types above, and by how much of the population is Alpha/Omega. The more common it is to have and be able to smell scents, the more likely it is that society expects you to mute that shit. That's based on the fact that more smells means more conflicts, and society doesn't do great with increased conflicts. Blockers and suppressants are a great choice if you’re writing something even vaguely modern. That makes it an external factor that society can require, and someone’s scent coming through can cause story drama. It can also become a classist element, where someone can’t afford the good suppressants, so they always have some of their emotions leaking through. Which is used as proof that they are just too low to control themself.

There’s also the option of neutralizers, either the equivalent of febreeze, or just wearing a countering perfume. After all, no one can tell you smell horny if the scent of roses is strong enough! That brings up a separate type of rudeness though. If you doused yourself in roses, is that actually less obnoxious than smelling like horny? These would also be something that neutralizes what you're currently putting off, but doesn't stop the next strong wave.

But, if everyone gives off a scent, all the time, and they always have, maybe the neutral/good scents are fine, and the bad scents are not. So you only put on blockers because you lost a grandparent, and smell too sad to be in public.

If As and Os are less common than non-des, I think there’d be even more pressure on individuals to exert control on their own scent. Probably comes with an implication that it's uncivilized to just broadcast that. What do you mean you’re seventeen and you still can’t mask when you’re upset about your girlfriend cheating on you?

Or go hard the other direction, and it's considered unsafe not to be able to scent someone’s emotions, especially with Alphas. After all, if you can’t scent that they’re getting angry, you might provoke them, and they’ll hurt you before you even realize you’re in danger. That social choice provokes a much, much bigger shift in the overall world building, though, and probably has a history of isolating As and Os in separate communities for safety.

There’s (yet another) side of the biology where you have to ask if a person’s scent can impact someone else beyond the level of liking/disliking it. We don’t have time to go into that either.

I think in most fic where we’re sticking close to current American culture, scent blocking of some kind would be considered a social norm. At a minimum, it would be like wearing deodorant. Yeah, you'll forget at some point, and sometimes your deodorant does not make it through what you had to deal with that day. You didn’t wake up and intentionally choose to stink it up though, bc the social pressure against that is very strong. Extending the analogy, some people would need to put on more blockers throughout the day, some people just don’t ever have a strong scent, so if they forget their blocker, it’s not a disaster.

Sometimes you get so stressed during a physics test that your blockers lose the fight, and the whole room smells like your panic and they have to move you to another classroom so people stop coughing.

What you can’t avoid in the social side, is that if hiding scents is expected, how important is it that you know someone’s designation? Are you relying entirely on non-scent indicators? Can a person pretend to be a different desig? Is desig not that big of a deal? Does this mean that gender is the first division, then designation? Because that decision has a massive world building impact.

Or. Are blockers and suppressants not really a thing? Not that people haven’t tried, and sure, there are perfumes that can overwhelm your scent short term, but there isn’t something that can actually hide it. In that case, society would demand that from the moment you have a scent, you learn how to control and suppress it when needed. If you have a scent from birth, you're learning that in Pre-K. If your scent shows up at presentation, you're not back in class til you have a grip on it. It would be incredibly gauche to do otherwise, and kids that struggle would end up in separate classes so as not to disturb the ‘normal’ kids.

So NOW, stack the biology options onto all this about social preferences and norms.

v1 Scents are universally defined, and normally no one wears blockers, but you are, unfortunately, Mr Mildew Lemon, so you have a bad scent and you have to wear them anyway or get bullied. Just wearing blockers would become proof-positive your scent must be something terrible. If you have a good scent, and you put on blockers, you’d get the same kind of pressure that people with long/curly/red hair get about never cutting it. If you normally don’t wear blockers bc you smell like something nice, and you suddenly start? Prepare for gossip, bc there must be a reason. Pregnancy? Broken bond? Rut/Heat?

v2 Scents are individually interpreted, so you have to wear blockers in society since there would unavoidably be people who gag on your scent. But maybe it’s also important to know some emotional status, so blockers are something that reduces, but doesn’t eliminate a scent entirely. You won't get bowled over, but if you get close you can tell. If it’s really only letting the emotional shift through, then something like the smell like smoke would prompt everyone to tense up, because you’d know someone is mad nearby.

v3 Scents aren’t a real thing, just pheromone based vibe checks, so it isn’t a smell annoying you, it’s their literal depression funking up that side of the office. Society would say that guy has to take a suppressant, medically prescribed, to wipe out their entire scent until they get themself under control. Pheromones are not just one location out of your body, so it would be a whole thing with soaps and sprays and pills.

And don’t even get me started on what happens if you choose to add scent based soulmates into this. That’s another 2000 words.

I can’t open the box on the full cross tab of how different biological rules intersect with different social norms because I stopped working to come write this in a compulsive blitz and I want to finish what I was doing. So I’ll leave you with this.

TLDR

American culture now, applied to Omegaverse, makes a world where there are even more tools to hide someone’s sexuality, trauma, mental health, physical health, or anything else society would prefer didn’t exist. You wouldn’t have to worry about Johnny in Marketing smelling rank. HR would haul him in and enforce the social expectations. If you show up to school with your scent loudly out? It would be like a dress code violation. You'd be given what you needed, or you'd be sent home.

Showing off your scent would be more extreme than when women proudly don’t shave their legs and under arms. It would be an activist event. It would be socially impermissible, and something that only happened in clubs where you have to have an invite to get in the door. For modern america, scent would be a deeply private thing.

One of the things I don’t like in a/b/o fics is all the talk of people’s scents smelling bad to others based on designation, mood, whatever. I just would not want to live in a world where I’m constantly smelling something foul bc someone I don’t even know is having a bad day. Someone’s always having a bad day.

I also don’t like when others can tell the MC is turned on bc of their scent. I can see how it could be hot or romantic but my secondhand embarrassment trigger is hairpin, and this sets it off every time.

(Anyway I love a/b/o fics but the scent trope always gets me)

#biology #scents #world building #I asked for permission for a reason #this is abbreviated

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