NOTE: OH GOD I'M SORRY I TYPE SO MUCH I JUST LIKE WORDS AND THIS IS AN INTERESTING CONVERSATION AND YEAH. :x
I'm not saying there aren't people (writers and readers alike) who aren't, uh, confused (to put it lightly) about what constitutes consent and what doesn't, because I've definitely had my share of "WHOA HEY SURPRISE GRAPHIC RAPE SCENE OUT OF NOWHERE WTF" moments. But I don't think that's a problem inherent only to ABO fics as a genre, so much as it is "this is something that happens in fics, and ABO fics are not an exception to that". It happens a lot in non-AU fics and it happens an appalling amount in BDSM fics.
It's still pretty discourteous to not warn your ABO fic if it's going to have explicit dubcon/noncon. I'd really like people to stop being bad about labelling things with warnings (or explicitly choosing not to warn).
I think another point I'd like to bring up (I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I think it's worth considering anyways) is that ABO verses with overt dubcon/noncon scenes (as these are the ones we're talking about) often contain enough worldbuilding such that it's overtly dystopian ("In an AU where Xs are considered property..." or "In an AU where Xs are required to go to suchandsuch for breeding...") as opposed to subtle ("And I realized he truly loved me, because he broke my car and told me never to speak to my male friend again"). And I feel like that change (the fact that the rape culture is basically turned up to dystopian extremes) is overt enough that the reader knows that the societal structure displayed is not normal/acceptable and is basically used for worldbuilding/exploration concepts or kink.
To throw in a real-world analogy, I guess, this would be something like a sketchy porn shop stocking "XXXTREME BACKDOOR SLUTS 9" vs a mainstream magazine in a grocery store with the headline "Women, here's how to not act too smart! You won't get a husband if you're too smart!"
However, I do agree with you fundamentally in that there should be a tag or warning or something, somewhere on fics just to be like "hey, fyi, I'm aware this is totally an eroticized rapefic" ("NC-17, noncon" usually works just fine, it's not even hard, guys) because otherwise sometimes you do come across moments where you're reading something and suddenly you have that moment in your head where you're like, "uhhhh does the author know she just wrote a rapefic? A warning would have been nice, thanks!"
But I don't think in this case that it's a propagation of rape culture or that it serves to normalize rape culture. I just think it's lazy, discourteous, and inconvenient for other people who might want to write in the verse without making it, you know, all about the dubcon kinkfic. But then, that's also not 'cause they're writing ABO fic. That's because they're bad at warning things that should be warned for.
tl;dr:
I don't think it propagates rape culture for ABO fics to be considered inherently about dubcon because a) ABO is really just fandom shorthand for "dystopian rape culture AU with a lot of dubcon and always these kinks and sometimes those kinks" and fandom/fans know this, contrast with twilight where it's known as "a love story" instead of "a creepy story about some stalker guy" and b) no really, it's a massive dystopian AU, no one has ever said they (reader or writer) didn't see it as somewhat dystopian/fucked up, so there's less room for "oh i wish my boyfriend was like edward". So I think there IS the innate "don't do this at home, kids" assumption around its very name.
But I totally agree that people get confused sometimes and seem to think (in a meta, outside the scope of the fic universe context) that something coercive and rapey isn't actually coercive and rapey (BDSM fics, whyyyyyy), and to separate the "this is about rape but it's sexy so i read it anyways" group from the "this isn't rape, it's ~romance~" group, we should just make everyone warn for noncon and dubcon even if it's implied, because seriously guys, wtf, it's not that hard to have good warnings.
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I'm not saying there aren't people (writers and readers alike) who aren't, uh, confused (to put it lightly) about what constitutes consent and what doesn't, because I've definitely had my share of "WHOA HEY SURPRISE GRAPHIC RAPE SCENE OUT OF NOWHERE WTF" moments. But I don't think that's a problem inherent only to ABO fics as a genre, so much as it is "this is something that happens in fics, and ABO fics are not an exception to that". It happens a lot in non-AU fics and it happens an appalling amount in BDSM fics.
It's still pretty discourteous to not warn your ABO fic if it's going to have explicit dubcon/noncon. I'd really like people to stop being bad about labelling things with warnings (or explicitly choosing not to warn).
I think another point I'd like to bring up (I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I think it's worth considering anyways) is that ABO verses with overt dubcon/noncon scenes (as these are the ones we're talking about) often contain enough worldbuilding such that it's overtly dystopian ("In an AU where Xs are considered property..." or "In an AU where Xs are required to go to suchandsuch for breeding...") as opposed to subtle ("And I realized he truly loved me, because he broke my car and told me never to speak to my male friend again"). And I feel like that change (the fact that the rape culture is basically turned up to dystopian extremes) is overt enough that the reader knows that the societal structure displayed is not normal/acceptable and is basically used for worldbuilding/exploration concepts or kink.
To throw in a real-world analogy, I guess, this would be something like a sketchy porn shop stocking "XXXTREME BACKDOOR SLUTS 9" vs a mainstream magazine in a grocery store with the headline "Women, here's how to not act too smart! You won't get a husband if you're too smart!"
However, I do agree with you fundamentally in that there should be a tag or warning or something, somewhere on fics just to be like "hey, fyi, I'm aware this is totally an eroticized rapefic" ("NC-17, noncon" usually works just fine, it's not even hard, guys) because otherwise sometimes you do come across moments where you're reading something and suddenly you have that moment in your head where you're like, "uhhhh does the author know she just wrote a rapefic? A warning would have been nice, thanks!"
But I don't think in this case that it's a propagation of rape culture or that it serves to normalize rape culture. I just think it's lazy, discourteous, and inconvenient for other people who might want to write in the verse without making it, you know, all about the dubcon kinkfic. But then, that's also not 'cause they're writing ABO fic. That's because they're bad at warning things that should be warned for.
tl;dr:
I don't think it propagates rape culture for ABO fics to be considered inherently about dubcon because a) ABO is really just fandom shorthand for "dystopian rape culture AU with a lot of dubcon and always these kinks and sometimes those kinks" and fandom/fans know this, contrast with twilight where it's known as "a love story" instead of "a creepy story about some stalker guy" and b) no really, it's a massive dystopian AU, no one has ever said they (reader or writer) didn't see it as somewhat dystopian/fucked up, so there's less room for "oh i wish my boyfriend was like edward". So I think there IS the innate "don't do this at home, kids" assumption around its very name.
But I totally agree that people get confused sometimes and seem to think (in a meta, outside the scope of the fic universe context) that something coercive and rapey isn't actually coercive and rapey (BDSM fics, whyyyyyy), and to separate the "this is about rape but it's sexy so i read it anyways" group from the "this isn't rape, it's ~romance~" group, we should just make everyone warn for noncon and dubcon even if it's implied, because seriously guys, wtf, it's not that hard to have good warnings.