•  BenVimes   ( @BenVimes@lemmy.ca ) 
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    5 months ago

    Wasn’t the “sigma” personality just invented by incels when they realized that “being alpha” didn’t work the way they thought it did and therefore they needed a new paradigm to keep their worldview from collapsing? Or am I remembering that wrong?

    •  sp3ctr4l   ( @sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ) 
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      5 months ago

      So, to my knowledge, here is how this went.

      They took the disproven wolf analogy literally and resulted in Alphas and Betas.

      Alphas are basically confident, attractive, and charismatic. Alphas get and say what they want.

      Betas basically lack at least 2 of these attributes. Betas were also initially ‘nice guys’ before that term got memed into oblivion, ie, they would be negotiable, willing to accept compromise.

      Basically Alphas are bad boy / jocks and Betas are shy but polite nerds.

      And for a while this permeated.

      At some point, the communities using these terms more or less realized they were nearly all, in actuality, Betas.

      Then, Gamma Delta and Omega all came about in roughly the same time, and the system was reworked.

      Alpha: Confident Successful Leader

      Beta: Cooperative Loyal Subservient

      Gamma: More Confident than Alphas, but doesn’t care to lead groups, therefore is aloof / adventurous.

      Delta: Basically ‘Enlightened Loner’. Someone who isn’t interested in much socializing and has little or no outward personal connections. (Basically a nice way of framing being a NEET or hikikomori, a cope)

      Omega: Someone who is so above all this nonsense they don’t give a fuck, because they are so smart and successful without anyone’s help.

      Next we got Sigmas: Somehow even more OP than Omegas, Sigma males are intelligent, capable of manipulating any social hierarchy to their own ends, capable of doing basically anything but they are so cool they just do that shit when they feel like it and then vanish when bored. Almost every video about a Sigma Male will show John Wick.

      As you say, sigmas came about within around 6 months of the term incel and incel communities / identity becoming decently established in internet culture. So yeah, this is an even harder cope than Deltas, as theyre now all acting like they could absolutely do x if I wanted to, I just don’t feel like it.

      Finally we now apparently have Zetas.

      Zetas are apparently somehow even more OP than Sigmas, being a kind of hybrid of Alphas and Sigmas. Its something like… I am a highly conventionally successful person and am very skilled and talented and clever but whoo boy do I get tired of social interactions some times.

      (In reality, this is basically anyone who has held down a decent job for a few years and is quite egotistical, but not constantly assertive or boastful).

      Zetas are fairly new and still being actively reworked.

      I think the idea of a Zeta Male can best be explained by the number of previously but no longer successful tech bros being laid off or fired ot divorced recently.

      So basically its TechLead and people like him doing fanfiction of themselves.

      So… Alphas, Betas and Zetas are very social. Deltas are not, Sigmas and Gammas are social occasionally and Omegas hate socializing but do it anyway.

      Basically this shit reads like someone who has only watched action movies attempting to develop character archetypes, and that is largely because so much of this just is directly based off of action movies from the 80s onward and boys and men trying to find their favorite analogues.

  • Wanna know the funniest part? All this bullshit is based on a disproven theory about wolves, but then 4chan adopted as a kinda meme and then these fuckers took it seriously. Absolute fucking clown shit.

    In my experience the people who describe people as “Alphas and Betas” are almost always described as “betas” by their own language.

    • Omegaverse works are most frequently focused on male-male couples composed of an Alpha and an Omega,[6] though heterosexual Omegaverse works have been produced,[11] and by 2013, about 10% on Archive of Our Own were labeled male/female.[8]

      The origin of the Omegaverse is typically attributed to the fandom surrounding the American television series Supernatural, as a fusion between werewolves and the male pregnancy subgenre of erotic fan fiction.

      I read that wiki page and I can’t help but come to the conclusion that primarily gay werewolf fanfic is being used to promote fascism?

      I prefer my absurdist and surrealist humour to be works of fiction D:

    • Yeah, omegaverse fanfic is (one reason) why I would probably just burst out laughing if a guy tried to call himself alpha in front of me. I know too much, and and would be too tempted to break their little minds with an impromptu fandom history lecture. It predates destiel.

    •  sp3ctr4l   ( @sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ) 
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      5 months ago

      I am 100% certain the people that came up with Omega picked Omega due to ‘Alpha and Omega’.

      I posted a big blurb on this elsewhere in the thread but basically, Gamma Delta and Omega all were introduced after Alpha and Beta was seen as too simplistic.

      At the time, Omegas were meant to be… even more manly than Alphas because they didn’t give a fuck.

      The be all, end all, of male archetypes.

      This did not work as the power creep continued with Sigmas.

      At this point I await the addition of Tau Psi Rho and Epsilon males. Basically because any of those greek letters sound cooler than ‘Zeta’.

      •  t3rmit3   ( @t3rmit3@beehaw.org ) 
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        5 months ago

        It’s funny, because I saw Omega being used on 7chan way back before it emerged into use among the rest of the alt-white manosphere guys (probably around 2012), and they (or at least, some of them) were aware of Omegaverse, and used it derogatorily as a sarcastic term for “betas” who thought they were “alphas”. I would not be at all surprised if the overlap with 4chan is how it bled into wider use, and lost the sarcastic meaning.

        •  sp3ctr4l   ( @sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ) 
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          5 months ago

          sigh

          that is entirely possible.

          wouldnt be the first time a totally contextually misunderstood term was more or less accidentally appropriated to have some new meaning, making its widespread adoption and widespread lack of its contextual origination even more infuriating.

          This is kind of but not really similar:

          What in the fuck is up with the PC GTA/RDR community using the term ‘mod’ incorrectly?

          In every other context of video gaming ever, a mod is something that adds or changes a single player game, or a modded multiplayer game basically includes the server set of mods that all behave equally for all players.

          But in Rockstar Online communities, modding means to be using a cheat engine. Something like what would be called hacks or aimbots or teleporting yourself or others or spawning anything on command, some other kind of client side exploitation software.

          I have no idea how this happened or is the norm.

          In any other game ever, a ‘modded’ server would mean oh we tweaked some global vars and we added these weapons and this vehicle and this new mechanic.

          In Rockstar games a modded server is not a term that makes sense to these people because modding is cheating and only players can run mods… even though you can absolutely run an emulated private server through RedM/FiveM, and you can absolutely (and basically have to) run server side mods (as a barebones setup will be lacking MANY core and ancillary gameplay functions).

          It fucking baffles me.

          • WRT R*, I have seen hacks referred to as mods in some korean MMO communities, because client mods are lumped together with hacks in their ToS under “game modifications”. No clue if that’s what happened with R*'s stuff, but wouldn’t be surprised.

            •  sp3ctr4l   ( @sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ) 
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              5 months ago

              Every single GTA V or RDR2 centric discord I have ever been on is full of people who use the vernacular I described, to the point they will mock and then ban you for questioning it, as if theyve always been right.

              Its possible I’ve just had extremely bad luck.

              Its also possible that these people are primarily console players who just got computers to play only Rockstar games, I guess if you had 0 experience with PC gaming and 100% with consoles, it could explain only hearing the term modding as something illegal or cheating.

              Or it could be along the lines that you’ve said: Younger generations just read official documentation and have near 0 knowledge of anything that came before?

          • I’m going to guess the “mod = hack” comes from people adding mods to the client, to do things like change textures to make them partially transparent, letting them see the enemy before they see them.

            This stems from online games having to send an enemy player’s position and expected movement, before they do it, so the user’s client can render it in time. That means enemies get spawned into a client scene before the user sees them, then the client manages visibility,.and sends the user’s actions so the server can determine the results.

            Making walls partially transparent on the client, allows things like predictive aiming to shoot at an enemy just as they become partially visible but before they can see you on their client with opaque walls, giving an unfair advantage.

            Other mods would allow a client to automatically parse the enemy’s position, auto aim and auto fire. They aren’t hacks as long as they use the game’s official API for mods… and some games did expose that data to mods, making unfair mods possible.

  • Are you required to use a special character in your, em, I wanna say 'gay male sexuality alphabet’ (?)?
    For security reasons??

    Bcs like, dont tell me underscore male doesn’t exist. Or pound males. Or question mark males. Or drop table males.