The Gentleman's Guide to Heat

The Gentleman's Guide to Heat is a Kingsman A/B/O fic by azrielen. It's an early example of the A/B/O trope from 2015, focusing on Eggsy's heat cycle and his relationship to Harry Hart. Notable for its treatment of the A/B/O trope, the fic is mainly a Five Things Character Study from Eggsy's perspective and only rated explicit for the subject matter of heats.
It is an extremely popular fic, being the most kudos'd A/B/O Kingsman fic on AO3Kingsman works in Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, sorted by kudos. Accessed 14 June 2020. as well as the fourth most kudos'd Kingsman fic overall.Kingsman works, sorted by kudos. Accessed 7 Mar 2023. The fic has been translated into Russian by GilbertBruegelПутеводитель джентльмена для омег. Posted 2 Mar 2015. Accessed 12 Feb 2020. and a podfic by Dr_Fumbles_McStupid is available.[Podfic of The Gentleman's Guide to Heat]. Posted 7 Apr 2015. Accessed 12 Feb 2020.
==The Fic==
Dedicated to j_gabrielle, a prolific Hartwin writer in the Kingsman fandom, and to Ryvchan, who wrote Alpha Kingsman the first A/B/O fic in the fandom, The Gentleman's Guide to Heat is a Five Things Character Study focused on five heats Eggsy goes through. Although not the first A/B/O fic in the Kingsman fandom, it has proven to be popular for a relatively short fic. It's the most kudos'd A/B/O Kingsman fic on AO3 at 8252 kudos as of June 2020.The Gentleman's Guide to Heat. Posted 28 Feb 2015. Accessed 12 Feb 2020. The fic is also the fourth most kudos'd Kingsman fic overall, being beaten out by three relative long fic ranging from 20k to 160k words. It was azrielen's first A/B/O fic, a trope the author would not return to until seven years later in the Encanto fandom, and their first Kingsman fic.
The fic largely reads as gen, however the fic also shows the progression of the Harry/Eggsy relationship and, because it deals with Eggsy's heats, is rated Explicit. Like many other fic that came out after the first Kingsman movie, The Gentleman's Guide to Heat involves the fan theory (canonized in the following film) that Harry survived being shot by Valentine, although it makes no attempt to explain how Harry's survival was accomplished. The summary for The Gentleman's Guide to Heat on AO3 is:
Because it's an earlier example of A/B/O, written just as the trope was beginning to proliferate from the original fandoms of Supernatural and Teen Wolf, it features the typical gender distribution: Alpha Harry because he's the top and Omega Eggsy because he's the bottom. The fic does, however, feature an interesting subversion of the typical traits in A/B/O, given that Harry manages to keep from immediately ravishing Eggsy at one point and Eggsy has been written with an unusual amount of agency and a proactive personality that was uncommon for a character assigned "omega" in an A/B/O fic. One commenter even pointed out this was slightly unusual for the time period it was written in:
and comments from the author also seem to indicate that Eggsy's proactive nature within the story was a conscious decision.Comment Thread: "A/B/O can get OOC and damsel-in-distressy sometimes. I wanted to show a progression through different elements of it." Posted 28 Feb 2015. Accessed 12 Feb 2020. The author's note, however, indicates that it was written in the "traditional" A/B/O framework, rather than being deliberately "non-traditional":
==Selected Comments==
==References==
Category:Kingsman
Category:2015 Fanfiction‎