Subverting the Dominance

“Yes, my brother is well known for resorting to tricks,” Thor said grumpily. “In combat, he is more than capable, yet he finds it more amusing to turn his victims into playthings.” “But he didn’t,” Nat countered. “At every opportunity, we expected him to try to play us; he didn’t even make a move.” “What mean you? The son of Cole has just admitted to falling prey to one of his tricks.” “Yes, but not commanded,” Phil said. “Not, well, not dominated.” Thor’s eyes went wide, horrified.

This is the piece I was working on for my Birthday Prompt, but I ended up getting stymied and so I wrote Somehow I Miss Box Socials as an alternative. Still in the realm of playing with gender, but a lot less finicky about the details.Achika, given our discussion on Omegaverse the other day, I thought I'd start with an example of a nonsexual but distinctly gender-biased worldbuild in which we're just dealing with a shift in expected gender roles, without most of the Omegaverse baggage. This is the Dom/sub verse, which I initially encountered in astolat's Dangerous If Unbound, the fic that got me into Person of Interest. (Bear in mind that her version is highly sexualized.)So here we have Thor, from a rigidly gender-biased culture, being introduced to the modern human understanding of gender roles. The use of Dom/sub, as opposed to Male/female, makes it a little easier to conceptualize how Thor is conflating simple biological sex with gender roles, which are far more mutable. It should also show the different ways that certain characters have been forced to fight back against the hand that nature dealt them, or at least how society perceives that nature.