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?
“sigma” is like sovereign citizen for pickup artists: it’s an ostensible cheat code to get stuff for free and avoid consequences, only one which doesn’t actually exist.
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.
I swear I would love to see the fallout of some of these morons trying to claim the Zeta symbol. Just imagine them not realizing other scum of the earth already tainted it.
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.
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'.
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.
Basically, while the permaonline 00's highschoolers that went to college were obsessing over MBTI profiles, the permaonline 00's highschoolers that did not, or barely graduated, they wanted to seem smart and tried to do the same thing, but fucked it up due to lack of general knowledge.
And of course, the dumb version prevailed amongst the lay people because that is basically what always happens.