What (the heck) Is Cozy Omegaverse?

A Consideration of Writing with Impatience

Introduction: Seasons of Life

It’s August before Labor Day, and patently hotter than Hell. Helios has visited his wrath on the lands both east and west of the Mississippi. So, of course, the world of Bookstagramers and aesthetic food rebloggers are wishing fervently for it to be fall already.

The posts full of autumn décor, warm dishes, and cozy fall books—romances about apple cider inns and kitchen witch vibes—run the gamut from wishful to aspirational to delirious, all hoping by dint of posting to force the heat to abate. I don’t blame anyone for this; what is sweeter about fall than the anticipation? My own sister adores fall to the point where she’s decorated her apartment to be autumn all year long, and I love that for her.

Still, year over year, as ambient Halloween has leaked into September and now into “Augoween” on social media and in stores, I’ve come to somewhat resent this anticipation as a great thief of time. It’s not fall, my inner voice now insists—it’s summer. Summer is hot and sweaty and annoying, sure, but we cannot avoid the fact that it is still summer. What I always sense in this kind of posting is a phenomenal impatience for fall which has been capitalized upon by brands and restaurants, and even (rightly) by authors.

Anticipate my upcoming sci-fi romance with cozy fall vibes novelette, ERS Pumpkin Spice, this fall. I kid, I kid.

I am of the opinion that summer ends after Labor Day. Kids should go back to school after Labor Day, and September should be Back to School month. Apple season is September. Pumpkin spice season is free to start in September. But in the name of all things holy… let’s allow August to remain in summer. We can’t manifest fall simply by wishing it, and if we could… should we? I was raised with lots of sayings from the Bible, not all of which I agree with, of course, but I do love Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes 3, it reads, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” That final clause refers to autumn. We have seasons in our lives, and seasons we share with each other in the world, and we have to try our best to appreciate them. This is a struggle (take it from the mother of a toddler who would love for him to be more of a kid than a baby), but appreciating the season we’re in is very necessary to live a whole and fulfilled life.

So what the hell does all this have to do with Cozy Omegaverse? What, Ecclesiastes and wolf erotica? Am I out of my mind? Maybe.

If you haven’t guessed, the common thread is impatience. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Cozy Omegaverse: What? How?

So, I was scrolling Instagram one day, nominally doing my job as an author and a social media manager, seeing what the other romance Bookstagramers and authors are doing. I follow a lot of accounts who review romance, trying to get a sense of who and what are out there, keeping my finger on the pulse. One of them, recommended to me by a friend who loves romantasy and paranormal romance, posted about a new sub-subgenre she was really coming to enjoy: Cozy Omegaverse.

Now, of course, I’ve been in fandoms since I was a teenager. I’m a sci-fi stan, and I love Trek. I know what Omegaverse is; what is an omega’s heat cycle but Vulcan Pon Farr by another name? I view Omegaverse (fairly, I think) as more of a paradigm of writing than anything—a shared set of alternative biological and quasi-spiritual rules which may or may not shape a book’s culture and society in very different ways. It is also an affective mode of writing which elevates alpha males, aggressive sexuality, and biological determinism, none of which I have a problem with in in the realm of erotica, but which I do not personally enjoy. I want to be clear that I don’t have a moral problem with Omegaverse in general, and while I think Cozy Omegaverse, particularly the story I’m using for my case study, is a little misbegotten and could use some improvements, I do not have a problem with it existing. In fact, I like that Omegaverse is sanding off some of its more violent and brutal edges by scooting into the cozy realm.

That being said, when I first saw this book, my immediate response was essentially, “HOW?” In my mind, it’s like telling me you’ve written a Cozy Horror, or a Cozy Slasher fic, or a Cozy BDSM Bodice Ripper. It’s not that I don’t believe you, or that I’m not intrigued. It just sounds like an oxymoron to me… so I picked up the book, and I read it. Now, I don’t want to put this writer or their books on blast, so while I am using this book as my case study, I will not be listing its title here, nor any character names. It’s an example, not something I want anyone to go review bomb or make fun of. If my commentary interests you and you would like to read this book in good faith, please send me a DM on Insta, and I will give you the specifics. If you figure out what book it is, please do not say so in the comments.

Cool? Let’s go.

A Case Study in Cozy Omegaverse

Our case study takes place in a small town (already good for establishing a book’s cozy bona fides). The main character is an omega who has moved to this town to be its librarian. The place is complete with everything you would want from a cozy dream town: cafes, bookstores, a welcoming and liberal mayor, nice people, family-owned small businesses. Our heroine is coming directly off a relationship that is almost unlikely in how horrific it was, but of course we all know that these relationships exist. She is an anxious person with little experience of friendships, uncaring beta (normie) parents who cannot understand how difficult it is to be a fragile and special omega, and a frightened, self-castigating attitude toward the world; if there is any strong conflict in this book, it comes from and happens within the FMC’s internal landscape.

She is quickly recruited into a friend group of girls, almost all of them omegas, and each one of them has “Main Character Energy.” This is purposeful, as they are all obviously intended to be main characters of their own Cozy Omegaverse books. No one else gets much exploration, nor much in the way of description, other than our alphas (I’ll get to them). There is a great deal of impatience with almost anyone who’s a beta like the FMC’s parents—anyone who’s “normal.” We’re expected to know what normal means, and if a character is normal, they’re not just boring; the text often treats their normalcy as aggressive, lacking understanding, vulgar and cruel by dint of minding their own business or seeming incurious. In this friend group, our heroine is quickly assured that she is wonderful, cared for, liked, and deserving of the best, all entirely without qualification. Of course, everyone deserves friendships and good relationships; I don’t have a problem with that. What is frustrating is the book’s impatience with establishing friendships or spending time showing characters getting to know each other, talking like normal people, having small disagreements, or figuring out what they have in common. Instead, the story seems to have that same essentialist mindset that so frustrates me in all Omegaverse fiction: these girls are good people, and therefore they like, unconditionally accept, and understand the heroine integrally. They are mostly all omegas, and therefore they all project and establish cozy vibes in their vicinities (omegas like to nest, after all, and nesting is cozy).

It is here already where the wheels begin to loosen. The book has three modes of writing, and as a result, it is not in control of its tone; at times, this swerving results in truly discordant passages and scenes. The three modes are that of a cozy vibes romance (think of those apple cider inn fics), Omegaverse erotica (with which the author seems more familiar and writes somewhat well), and a kind of science/social-science expositional writing which does not do the book any favors. It is very important to someone here to establish the world’s rules and the science behind scent-pairing, packs, bonding, and the perfection of matching, so as to avoid (I think) the subject of spiritual fate and make this matching look both biological and thoroughly studied. I think the urge here is understandable; this is the first book in a series, and it wants to lay down a foundation for the other pack establishments in future books. The method, however, is flawed, and it results in discordant moments like the main character going into heat, and the guys (who have just met her) standing over her and talking about the science of the situation.

As I suspected it might, the Omegaverse stylings also do not pair-bond well (heh) with the attempt at cozy small-town vibes. Omegaverse is at its heart erotica. It does not use euphemisms, and it needs to acclimatize you to words like “cock” and “pussy” and lots of bodily fluids and perfuming and all that, before it gets into the wilder stuff, like knotting various orifices. This bizarre confluence results in cringe-verging-on-hilarious moments, like one of our alphas prowling around the cozy town’s cozy library looking for the scent of his perfect omega, with (apparently) a giant, rock-hard erection in his pants, growling aggressively all the while. I found myself wanting to laugh at this moment, but being unable to do so, because I had a powerful wince on my face that I couldn’t control; in other words, I was embarrassed for everyone in this situation. The characters, the book, the author. Me. All of us. Humanity in general. Maybe the universe. Somehow, a raging hard-on did not belong in that library.

This discordance unfortunately continues, and it gets worse as impatience really sets in. Since I’m more personally accustomed to romance, I was expecting something of a meet-cute, and the novel does use a common, solid romance trope to drive our alphas and omega together: Forced Proximity. The first romance novel I ever read (The Duchess by the inimitable Jude Deveraux) was a long romp through forced proximity, and I think it’s a stellar example of the trope’s ability to drive a whole plot. But… impatience is our enemy. Our heroine’s car gets stuck in the snow, and she must seek the alphas’ house for shelter. There, she finds herself thawing out and “perfuming” in the proximity of three scent-matched alphas.   

Now, I cannot express to you how much energy and anticipation lay coiled unpotentiated in this moment. It very much felt like a mouse seeking shelter from the cold, only to find itself in the den of three hungry cats. Our heroine is in the abode of wolves, and they have been smelling and looking for her all over town. I found it unsettling, but that can be a good thing, if handled well. An author could drive up the tension in every way possible—more talk amongst the boys about the thief they’re looking for and what they’re going to do to her, more thoughts from our heroine about how safe and inviting their house looks, more menace and conflict when she enters their home. Then, letting out the pressure with skill would have come as a relief.

Instead, the author’s impatience results in disappointment. Their desire to make sure this moment of danger dissolves safely into coziness ultimately lets all the air out too quickly; their desire to avoid conflict wastes the moment’s dramatic energy. Experiencing this criminally discarded setup, I felt the frustration not of a reader, but of a writer. The scene stutters along from here, anxious to reestablish its coziness with hot chocolate and the boys controlling their raging hard-ons, talking about the science of scent-matching, and overall pissing away its momentum, before overnight descending into a sex scene anyways. All three tones jut into each other, getting in the way, uncertain what we’re doing here, creating a three-mode pileup. I won’t at all say that I always get this kind of tone and pacing right myself, but this is the reason I seek out critique and beta readers; it’s the reason I listen to suggestions that I rewrite, and why I workshop my material. I think it’s very possible that this piece’s beta readers are Omegaverse regulars who probably enjoyed the comparative novelty of coziness, and offered critique on the sex scenes, which are done well enough and work within the mainline of the genre.

The biggest issue, I felt, were the date scenes and the way the book handled the boys. There are three alphas in this already-established pack, and while they have short perspective chapters, those are largely wasted. We learn very little about each boy’s perspective and outlook on the world in these bits, and the alphas don’t detail why they even like the heroine. They do go into why they like each other some, which was the nugget of a real strength, but I felt there just wasn’t enough of it. The boys’ perspectives could have been used to drive tension, a plot, some kind of mystery, but the book is so allergic to tension or conflict that they do none of this. The heroine has a date with each one of them in sequence, and each one ends in a thoroughly Omegaverse sex scene, lest anyone start to worry we weren’t going to get to rutting, mini heats, and knotting. It is only after these extravagant sex scenes (it’s fine; this is erotica, I guess) that the date’s apparent purpose is in any way satisfied: the heroine asks the guy something about himself and learns it. This was buck-wild, practically a mockery of romance; I almost wanted to say, “Why are you even bothering?”

Moreover, each of these dates in keen on establishing a different cozy bona fide: a lovely outdoor date that was so overdone I felt embarrassed, a date to a book festival where the alpha buys every book the omega shows a passing interest in (this made me cringe quite badly), and an at-home cooking/recharge date that could have been the strongest in the bunch… if it didn’t run into the book’s second-largest major sin: Cozy Materialism. This sin made me wince every time.

What is Cozy Materialism? I can only describe it as a shortcut born of the book’s first sin, Impatience. Instead of establishing and earning a real feeling of coziness, closeness, and true warmth, the story reaches for a shallow Pinterest board of coziness to coast purely on vibes. It felt more like an Amazon Shop list, linked to an aesthetic Instagram account about coziness, than anything real. What is cozy? Whatever these mood boards and Instagram Reels say is cozy. Hot chocolate with marshmallows? Check. Bath bombs? Check. Coloring books? In the cart. Candles, snack boards, vacuous book clubs, macramé dream catchers, all in stock at a coziness store near you. This, more than anything, made me want to rip my hair out.

“Well, Tara,” you might rightly say, because you’re very smart, “how the hell would YOU establish cozinesss if you had wolf porn to get to?” That’s an excellent question, and I’m so glad you asked. First of all, I think the needs of establishing real coziness in a story are fundamentally in tension with the needs of erotica, especially when impatience is involved. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it takes a deft hand. I think there are ways to write prose with a cozy affect; to do so, one must be willing to describe sensuous experience sumptuously. One moment that proves illustrative is the book’s description of a dish of paella, which our FMC depicts, essentially, as “tasty.” It’s so tasty she starts eating it in a porny, salacious way, which leads to a sex scene on the counter with all three guys involved in some fashion. The book is so eager to get to this moment that it is not willing to be sumptuous about the paella. This is true again with the hot chocolate, with the pies she takes from the boys’ restaurant (the taste of which might have told her and us something about the character of the cook, who is one of the alphas), with the dinner one of the alphas makes for her—everything. Impatience gets in the way every time.

Coziness is inherently personal, and it takes time to establish. It lives in the details—not in bland, vacuous, Pinterest board aesthetics, but in a person’s life, likes, loves, and experiences. Just going through the character’s thought process as to why she decorated a space, took up a hobby, or likes a book goes a long way. This author might describe a scene in the following fashion: “She decorated the nest in peach and green throw pillows with tassels, lots of florals, a bunch of soft blankets; omegas like to be cozy, after all.” Contrast that with this description of the same stuff: “She chose to pair the springy blush of peach with a deep, jewel-tone teal. Though she knew it was out of fashion, the color combination reminded her of the living room her mother had decorated in her childhood, and the floral accents—also out of vogue—looked like the squashy old couch where she had lounged with her mother, watching old BBC costume dramas. Winding herself up in a blanket in the cold, she could almost dream herself back to a hot summer with the AC blasting, safe inside on the couch without a worry in the world.” Which one of those descriptions is cozier? Notice the use of the personal in the latter, the sharp sense of who the character is and the context she’s lived. It takes more time; it takes more words. More importantly, it takes the characters getting to know one another, not finding themselves fated to be with each other through biological determinism.

Some positives: While I don’t always think the book is sophisticated enough about relationships generally to manage a deep look at polyamory, I still like that the version it depicts is non-toxic. Even with all the alpha stuff, the guys aren’t aggressive with each other, nor are they possessive about “their” omega. They share with each other, support each other, lift each other up, do frequent check-ins, rely on each other’s strengths. While I was disappointed that they didn’t seem to be in actual relationships with each other beyond familial/pack bonded/buddies, I was glad that it wasn’t aggressive or toxic. Even when handled ungracefully, and even when it’s used to avoid even the smallest scintilla of conflict to drive an utterly nonexistent plot, I can see at its core how this is meant in a good-hearted fashion, and it’s refreshing. Theoretically, it’s great; in praxis, the execution lacks skill. On the whole, that’s actually fine. I hope this author keeps writing, and that they improve over time. Omegaverse still has that gossamer shroud of fanfiction about it, and it offers a mimetic, shared space where writers can innovate, and themes and materials upon which one can iterate. That has always been a strength of fanfic for newer writers, and it’s a strength here.

Another positive was that I could also see an attempt to dive into the politics of this world, and an attempt to push back on biological determinism within the genre itself; I just don’t think the author quite had the chops to do much with it. The constant lancing back to scientific speak, and the failure to use moments like the graffiti clean-up to establish, develop, or properly deepen relationships, reveal an aimlessness that belies a lack of skill that will come with time. I want to note that I think something being called cozy or fluffy is not an excuse for poor or aimless writing, and while it’s good to keep the anxiety low, that doesn’t mean the stakes should be nonexistent. Character development has to feel both real and earned, and that comes from events, conversations, and strong dialogue. We have to remember that writers have seasons to their lives as writers, and this writer is in her spring. That’s okay. Some of the best advice I ever got was that there is nothing wrong with being a learner—so long as you learn.

What I find interesting is the degree to which trying to be all of these things—erotica, the first part of a series, and cozy—really makes no one happy. While I thought the sex scenes were the deftest part of the writing, some who read a lot of Omegaverse clearly found them lackluster, boring, and repetitive. I read more romance, so of course that was the part that I found… lackluster, boring, and repetitive.

I suppose the moral of the story here is the same as it is with adding three guys to your pack: Be sure you’re good enough to do one thing well, before you try taking on three at once.

Some Suggestions for Cozy Omegaverse

My partner’s immediate response to my descriptions of this case study, and my reactions, were ways of writing something like Cozy Omegaverse in a more compelling manner. I had similar reactions, and if you’re interested in writing something like this, I have some suggestions for doing it well.

For the story in question, my main critique for the setting is that the alphas should have been new to town, not the omega. It might have been better if she was from this town, returned after a bad breakup to take over an aunt or grandmother’s cottage, and was now reconnecting with her childhood friend group, and the alphas are the ones just coming into or new to town. It would be much easier to establish a deeply personal, cozy vibe that way, with memories of the cottage and established friendships to rely on, and the weird, unearned connection with her new friends wouldn’t feel so jarring. Additionally, trying to make up with her friends and reestablish a connection in a low-stakes environment would have made for a cozier, more rewarding read. The friends could also be knowledgeable about the ex, and a lot of that history could be fleshed out in dialogue—even in disagreements—rather than in the character’s mind. We would be able to see just how twisted her perceptions are of that relationship and herself by checking them against her friends’ memories. This is true as well of her parents and her relationship with them, which is also framed as toxic in a very “tell, don’t show” kind of way. Aside from a first instruction to develop the relationships between the omega and her alphas, had I been beta-reading this book, this change is one of the major ones I would suggest for a rewrite.

For Cozy Omegaverse in general, I think it would be much easier to tell a cozy story about a pack relationship already in situ. This author referred to the coziness of pack life, as experienced by one of the alphas growing up, and that sounded like a potentially better setting for this kind of story. There are excellent romance and erotic stories that can be told about existing relationships. How does it feel to be the omega in a pack whose last child is leaving for college? How might they rekindle the flame with the other members of the pack after becoming an “empty nester”? How would it feel to be the beta in a pack when an omega first comes in, and how might that beta make the omega feel better, safer, or more at home? How would it feel to be a pack after the loss of their home and one of their alphas to a fire? The pack comes together, mourns, rearranges their relationships, and have to establish a new home, coziness nestled together amongst their memories of lost domestic bliss.

As with everything, there is an impatience inherent in a series like this, and even in the genre itself. It’s all about the meeting, the establishment of a bond, and not what comes After. This series wants to move on to another pack formation after this one… then another… and then another. How does the princess meet her princes THIS time? How about this time? How about now? Again, I think we find ourselves obsessed with a single season of life sometimes, when there are so many other kinds of stories to tell.  

Impatience and the Language of Erotica

There’s an extent to which erotica, and romance in general, always struggles with impatience. It’s difficult to avoid, because romance stems from a shared emotional tapestry, its impetus often burbling from somewhere deep inside the author’s consciousness. Consider Twilight, which is, I think, among the least impatient romance series I’ve ever read. Meyer isn’t chomping at the bit to get to a sex scene, or even to a kiss; she indulges and glories in the small touches and little moments of an emerging romance. Still, her stories are redolent with impatience—not with the relationship, but with everything else. One of my personal complaints with the series has been its impatience with the necessity of Bella having other people in her life (except Jacob, another love interest), and with her emotional state when there isn’t a love interest in play.

The pages simply listing months in New Moon absolutely devastated me, and not for good reasons. While they aptly demonstrate something deep about loss and depression, they also imply that Bella simply doesn’t exist without a love interest in the picture. She doesn’t follow up on her friendships, deepen her relationship with her dad, or find a balm in books or school. This is the phenomenal emptiness of Bella Swan when she doesn’t have Edward in her life, and while I see the emotional truth of it and why it appeals to people, I didn’t at all enjoy it. I know a lot of readers like Bella’s emptiness, as a vessel into which they can slip while reading the book. This is an affective difference in reading and playing video games that I have, which I undoubtedly share with many other people; I prefer for the main character to be a person separate from myself, about whom I can learn and discover things. I do not want an avatar. I do not want a clumsy Everygirl. I want a specific, breathing person.

Meyer is also somewhat impatient in her worldbuilding, in that she really only builds what she needs. This is perfectly fine for romance, and even preferable genre-wise, so no shade here. She is still very creative in the paranormal elements she does create, which I appreciate, even if I find a bunch of it… buck-wild and weird, and honestly I wish she were more conventional in some places. Since Meyer, the paranormal romance and romantasy genres have largely shared these tendencies; they build what they need, both in terms of characters and world, to serve the romantic story at the core.

As a demonstration, consider something like Neon Gods, which does with edginess what my case study does with coziness (also, but not equally badly). It rides the line (I think) between five-pepper romance and erotica, and it feels very much like it’s being pulled in three different directions as a result: urban fantasy worldbuilding, romance, and erotica. It has an interesting world and several additional female characters, all of which are established (like our case study) to write further books about other gods and heroines. However, also like our case study, it struggles to explore that world before the impatience to dive into its romance and erotic scenes begins to predominate. If you read it, you can actually feel the story and the author’s impatience to just get on with it. As a result, I found myself suffering from a kind of world-discovery mental blue balls. (Is that a thing? We’re making it a thing.)

It’s possible that, because I don’t read enough recent erotica or romance, I’m not properly normed on the current expected pace of an erotic story. It’s possible that I spent too much of my young adulthood reading 18^th and 19^th-century novels, one of which takes a million words to kill its heroine. Consider me both an outsider and insider voice, I suppose. There’s value there, and I hope it offers you something, but I will always accept that there is something here I may be fundamentally missing. While mine is an educated perspective, it is still the perspective of someone who prefers older, slow-burn material—and of course, it is still couched in the experience of a single person.

I personally write science-fiction romance within a larger science-fiction world build out in a number of purely science-fiction modes: live games, novels, short stories, the wiki, tabletop games, sci-fi murder mysteries, etc. I generally want folks coming to a Starship Valkyrie story, even a romance, with the feeling that they’re learning something new about the world and how it feels to live within it. There’s something here for an Omegaverse author—or really any paranormal or romantasy author—to consider. It might be worthwhile to develop a full IP and setting in a number of genres and modes, instead of the narrow aperture of a short Omegaverse erotic novel. A cozy romance, followed by a cozy mystery, followed by a cozy drama, all within the same cozy world with the same cozy characters, might create something real and lasting that sticks with the readers. It is because of the time I’ve spent in and with it that I honestly think I could write a Cozy Romance in Starship Valkyrie if someone wanted it. I’m willing to explore, establish, and spend time in the world, with its characters, and help you to do so as well; that is how you create a feeling of coziness.

It’s a relationship. You have to earn it, and earning it takes time. All things in their season.