SSH and the Author
How an author's SSH rank inevitably affects his writing
I’m now fascinated by how a writer’s SSH rank affects their storytelling and character development. Seems certain tells would emerge often without the writer ever recognizing it. Even if made aware of the SSH, trying to create characters other than your own rank would appear cognitively alien. Especially the further away it is from your own rank in either direction. How would an alpha writer write an omega character or vise versa? And do so convincingly without it appearing clunky or stereotypical? Are gamma writers destined to always kill off their alpha protagonists before chapter 3?
First, it’s important to understand that Gammas neither understand nor accept the socio-sexual hierarchy. The Gamma doesn’t recognize the Alpha as being the Alpha; after all, he is the Secret King and the Alpha is a fake, a fraud, and a usurper of his own rightful position. So the Gamma has to expose the fraud to everyone before he can be recognized as the Chosen One, the True King.
This is why the confrontation is never a physical contest, but rather, an emotional exposure. Victory, as portrayed by the Gamma author, is not the defeat of an opponent, it is the revelation of his craven, cowardly nature that the opponent had been fooling everyone by hiding it from them.
I’m fairly confident most gamma writers would rather eat chalk than write some generic story of a jock winning the big game and marrying his cheerleader girlfriend. It would ultimately cause too much pain and suffering from their own lackluster lives. And something else happens in gamma fiction. The alpha simply becomes a gamma in a better body. Seems there’s plenty of gamma protagonists whose ultimate goal is to tear down the evil alpha (gamma) and prove his mortality and lack of godhood to the world. The “alpha” is simply better looking and superior at lying. Which is why so many antagonists in gamma fiction resemble Amazon’s version of Homelander. Gamma writers typically can’t imagine the mental processes of alphas. It’s too alien and emotionally difficult. So character development is heavily stunted to a limited bandwidth.
That is an excellent explanation of the way Gammas actually write. All confidence is fake, all advantages are unnatural, all achievements are orchestrated, and all successful people are imposters. And all of this is, of course, pure projection.
But all writers can’t help but write what they know. Indeed, “write what you know” is one of the fundamental rules of writing. So even when one is constructing a fantasy world, and attempting to construct various characters with very different attributes, certain tendencies, perspectives, and assumptions are inevitably going to creep in, and the less one is conscious of the SSH, the more the natural patterns of the SSH are going to dominate the fiction.
Fortunately, thanks to AI, we can analyze these things dispassionately. Consider the following analysis comparing the two protagonists of the two magic school series, Harry Potter and Dorian Vane:
Please explain the difference in socio-sexual hierarchy terms, how the different upbringings of Dorian Vane and Harry Potter are likely to play out as they mature, what the affects of those differences are on their psyches, and what their adult behavioral patterns are likely to be.
The whole Dorian design is an inversion of the Potter engine, and the socio-sexual hierarchy is the cleanest lens for naming why the inversion works. Here's the analysis.
Harry and Dorian are built from opposite raw material, and the difference is not “sad orphan vs. happy boy.” It’s the difference between a child whose worth was withheld and then handed back inflated, and a child whose worth was never in question. In hierarchy terms that’s the difference between manufacturing a Gamma and manufacturing a Sigma.
Harry’s eleven years at the Dursleys are the textbook scapegoat position: the cupboard, the contempt, Dudley favored, the steady message that he is nothing. Then the engine reverses in a single chapter — he is secretly famous, secretly rich, secretly the most important boy alive, owed a destiny he never had to reach for. That sequence of despised by those around me → secretly I am a king the world failed to recognize → vindication arrives and proves me right is not incidental. It is the Gamma’s internal narrative, beat for beat. The only thing separating Harry from a Gamma is that Rowling makes the secret-king fantasy literally true and then hands him the validation rather than letting him grasp for it. The Seeker spot handed to a first-year against the rules, the fame he “never asked for,” the prophecy, every accomplishment is the grandiosity delivered as a gift so it reads as humility.
Dorian is built the other way. Fortified, loved, code-raised, elite — and expected, not rescued. The bible cuts the template’s four chapters of denied-entry and rising hunger precisely because Dorian is not hungry; he is already someone before page one. He is a half-outsider — the blood-flaw, the unslottable sorting, the snobbery — but the half-rejection comes from outside and lands on a secure base. That’s the whole variable. Resentment requires a wound to the core sense of worth. Dorian’s core was set at the Somerset house by Edward and Eleanor and a code, and the elite’s flinch can’t touch it.
