I don't really get it why does anyone care if there is sex in HDG or not? I understand why you would want fics to be tagged as sex but that's sort of a different issue isn't it?
It seems like posts I've seen are treating this like the alsexual people are... idk being marginalized? by the allosexual ones. Kind of like if a bunch of straight people came into a gay space but that's.... not how this works? Sure with cishet people being asexual is more stigmatized than being allosexual but not with trans lesbians.
And I guess some people are saying ace people deserve their own spaces away from allo people but someone posting a fic on ao3 doesn't take anything away from your enjoyment right? And if the discord server let's allo people on can't you just make your own that doesn't? Nobody is entitled to be part of a discord they didn't make.
Plus it isn't like allo trans lesbians have tons of spaces where they feel welcome so why treat them like problematic invaders I don't get if?
I guess I don't understand cause if you don't wanna read allo stuff then you don't have to. But also if you do wirte allo stuff you should probably tag it correctly
Sorry if these questions are rude to ask or the answers are really obvious I just don't really understand.
I know, scary title from me because I keep coming up with dramatic titles for everything, but this is a positive post, I promise. Very positive from me.
So, HDG the community. Honestly, this community has been really good to and for me. Shocking as it may be, it's not always that easy to find spaces where one can express yourself creatively with some of your kinkier interests or personal flair. Other creative or even queer spaces I'd been in before tended to be a lot more inherently hostile to anyone inside of it, or you have standards where you have to mask and adhere to some arbitrary standard of what's "proper".
There were tons of cliques, everyone was constantly shit talking each other but wanted to maintain some fake level of friendliness, and you could tell that every single person involved secretly hated them if they weren't actually fucking one another. It was fucking horrible, filled with racism, and lots of bullshit of folks with god complexes who weren't allowed to be wrong.
But this community?
At the risk of being too emotional, I joined the HDG community at a really rough point in my life. I'd had every trans woman I thought was a friend reveal how fucking horrible they are, and a woman who I thought wanted to be more to me revealed how twisted and blackened her heart was. I'd burned bridges with a different group of folks I'd known for almost a decade because I finally felt like I actually deserved to not be the group punching back.
This community has been a breath of fresh air from literally all of that fucking bullshit. Folks enjoy and actually celebrate the broad spectrum of ideas that makes your creative voice yours. The acceptance and encouraging of all sorts of gender expressions and orientations (even if most of us are sapphic trans women), and the fact that neurodivergence isn't treated as a "You aren't allowed to acknowledge that" topic have been a wonderful change of pace from literally anything I've seen before.
The creative minds I see every day, full of passion and a desire to help add to the setting and community we all enjoy being a part of? Those are beautiful and wonderful. I can feel the passion and love for their craft with every word I see from folks in the community, even if its something silly and full of dirtposting energy. Everyone who I get to talk to, and hear them excitedly gush about whatever it is they're writing, they make it so worthwhile and enjoyable.
This space has done so much for not just me, but I see so many individuals blossoming when they get to have the encouragement to put their words to page and just create. They find the same passion so many of us have and put their voices out there, and I love how much this community wants to celebrate that because Gods know we can always use more of it.
So please, keep writing, keep putting your passion and love into it, and show us all what really gets your motor running because Everbloom knows we'll all enjoy seeing you go off. I'll be here right with y'all doing the same.
Only feralists think that Affini shouldn't take care of their florets in ways that humans think of as sex. Affini are benevolent. However they choose to take care of you is for your own good.
Because Everbloom help me, I have more thoughts that don't fit on the casual blog.
The question "what is HDG" is a common topic of conversation lately – sometimes as a literal question posed to the tag, sometimes in the form of a personal statement on the subject or an answered ask, and sometimes in the background as a subject of debate.
I have my own personal model that I use to break this question down in terms of narrower or broader answers arranged in layers. I have an answer I prefer, and I think I can guess the preferred answer most writers have based on their output, but for the purpose of this post I'm going to avoid sticking words in anyones mouth who I wouldn't feel comfortable DM'ing and asking.
Under the cut, I'm going to describe each layer working from the outside in. My plan is to give each a fair shake, but I'm not going to bother hiding my biases here, and I'm going to make the case for my preference at the very bottom (and also say a bunch more stuff because wow I really went on a tear). I would appreciate y'all keeping the notes on this one nice, chill, and respectful. Okay? Okay.
"HDG is a Fandom"
I mean "fandom" in its most tumblr/ao3-specific meaning here – not merely a community formed by fans of a work, but a creative space characterized by the use of some piece of media's individual components in ways not intended by that piece of media.
In the case of HDG, that means a community of fans, some creative some not, engaging with the setting as an assortment of proper nouns from (usually older) HDG stories to be liberally recombined into novel and unexpected shapes by fans, some of whom may not have read those stories.
In @sheepwavehdg's essay Past//Present//Future, she uses the term "secondary creatives" (and I will note that neither she nor I is saying this judgementally) for participants in a fandom like this whose point of reference is the fandom itself, not any of the specific works around which the fandom is oriented. Secondary creation is pretty common in the tags in my experience – role play blogs, memes, and full stories* written based on a gestalt of fandom posting.
* I'm avoiding "fic" and "fanfic" in this post intentionally, not out of any kind of judgement but for reasons I'll describe as "methodological" for now. We'll come back to this.
Putting this together and bringing it back around, under this definition, HDG is a set of proper nouns, in-universe jargon, and tropes and a community interested in playing with those pieces.
"HDG is a Writing Collective and a set of themes and allegories"
(I'm going to condense that into "HDG is a Writing Collective" going forward for brevity, but please note that the words that follow it are important.)
To expand that, I mean that Human Domestication Guide (the community) is an open, mostly disorganized collective of writers in at least loose conversation with one another writing stories in a mostly cohesive understanding of Human Domestication Guide (the setting) rooted in an allegorical framing of the forces of medical institutionalization and dehumanization scaled up to the level of imperialism and re-imagined as compassionate and healing.
This is the definition that emerged the moment HDG became a work of many instead of a work of one, and it's the definition the community server and the community wiki prefer. In fact, the wiki's outline of this idea goes into much more depth than I plan to here, and I really recommend you read it. To make my biases plain, this is also the definition I prefer.
Under this view, HDG is the gestalt of stories in that collective that we write and engage with. And under this view, no HDG story is more or less validly HDG than any other**. Ideally. More on that later.
** And to head off an argument, I've been in the Community Server since February of 2023, and I've spoken to sophonts who've been in the Community Server and its precursor even longer than I have. This was a near-universally accepted idea until semi-recently, and still is within the Community Server.
This understanding is also where the axioms you may have heard of come in. The axioms are rules, not for rules' sake, but to make it easier to see the lines where a story could cross that take it outside the allegorical space the collective has socially defined. The Affini are Imperialist because the allegory for dehumanizing systems of power in our real world falls apart if the Affini too consistently take 'no' for an answer. The Affini are Benevolent because the allegory is meant in the sense of "what if the bad thing was, if not 'Good,' at least nice, and kind, and loved you," and misery and suffering that a story can't couch in that benevolent framing takes a story's tone outside of that idea.
The reason the Rules, Axioms, and bits and pieces of Lore exist is that, because no one HDG story can (ideally) claim more legitimacy than another, the collective ideoform of HDG is fluid. Those guidelines and everything else on "Writing in HDG" are a cliffnotes version of the collective conversation that makes it easy to see where you're contributing to the conversation, and where you might just be talking over it.
In practice, this ideal of universal legitimacy isn't usually observed in its purest form – for practical reasons, it can't be. Hate fics and mean jabs at other writers, though a drop in the bucket compared to everything else, have always been around. I understand the most common approach as a social contract – good faith engagement with the underlying conversation behing is recognized as HDG. External takedowns, hate fics, and works that treat HDG as a physics engine at the expense of the themes the Writing Collective cares about are not similarly recognized.
To re-resummarize and re-word then, "HDG is a Writing Collective" defines HDG as a shared ideoform organized around a quasi-cohesive setting and themes of disability and institutionalization which is defined by social contract.
"HDG is the Creator's Vision"
My intent is not to wade into discourse, however, there is discourse unavoidably adjacent to my goal with this post.
In 2025, Glitchy, HDG's ground zero, took her leave from the community server, stating that the space was no longer for her, and a small few members of the staff team took their leave as well. I don't know what "not for me" means here. If we were meant to know, she would have said it publicly. As I said, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth.
Around the same time, control of site on hd.g – the original wiki, and a communal resource the lorets shared – was seized and consolidated by one or more of its administrators.
Since then, I've become aware that the parties currently in control of hd.g are undertaking their own version of the wiki rework project. Based on public communications, that project claims to be based on the creator's original vision for the setting. I haven't seen many details concerning what that means (and the few details I have seen are in conflict with both the setting's history and things those parties have said in the past, more on this later), but I can't know what that fully entails until that project goes live.
By "the Creator's Vision," then, I don't refer literally to the hd.g project, nor do I mean either publication of the original story. I refer to the subtextual claim beneath the communications about that project – a claim that I am not alleging to be intentional on their part – which is that Glitchy's Word of God about the setting is the only voice that matters.
That is a position one can hold. My purpose with this post is primarily to inform, not to debate. But it would be a failure on my part in pursuit of informing not to state clearly that this position is a relatively new one. From the moment HDG became more than just one story well into 2025, it was well understood that HDG doesn't have one single authority dictating it. The "word of god" philosophy either did not exist or was not widely known about until 2025.
If your preference is to hold to the auteur's vision rather than the collective conversation, that is your prerogative, but it would be inaccurate to say that this is honoring the setting's early history. It's comparatively very recent and discontinuous with the setting's growth during that period of history.
"HDG is the original story"
That statement is obviously true in a sense – Human Domestication Guide (2021) is a story on Read Only Mind*** with an in-progress rewrite on AO3, and the nucleation site this whole thing formed around like a speck of sky dust unexpectedly becoming a storm cloud.
*** I'm of the understanding that there is actually an even earlier publication than that, but I can't find it, and I don't have a clue as to its post date.
As a definition though, it means "HDG is the original story, everything else is 'fan fiction.'" (Fan fiction is used neutrally here, and put a pin in this.) I don't see this philosophy very much at all, but when I do, its adherents generally mean that the original story is the canonical focal point, and that you should feel creatively unrestrained in writing fan fiction in good faith**** based on that focal point.
**** What "good faith" means here is not explicit, but to my understanding its meaning is the same ideas described by "Writing in HDG," but more permissive toward veering outside those guidelines if it makes for a dramatic and/or cathartic story.
This definition is the strictest in its vision of HDG as an ideoform, but also the most permissive with respect to writing.
"Fanfic" is a bit of a loaded term, I think
I've avoided using the term "fan fiction" and its derivations "fanfiction," "fanfic," and "fic," but since HDG's primary hubs of activity are Tumblr and AO3 – two platforms whose cultures are largely defined by secondary creation – I can't avoid it forever.
The problem is that "fanfic" is actually a very annoying thing to try to define. I have a definition that I believe is the most useful in a piece like this, but it isn't common – to justify it, I will, unfortunately, have to take the scenic route.
"Fan fiction" in its simplest definition refers to derivative work – specifically, prose writing that is derivative of some other work. This definition is superficially intuitive, but I think it both misses the point of fan fiction and runs into a million little edge case problems once you apply it to anything outside the archetypal mental image of a fanfic.
To play the problem forward: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is derivative of the original Star Wars (1977) – it's a sequel that reuses the same characters and setting to tell its own story. Is that "fanfic" (or fan film)? Obviously not.
If we assume that it doesn't count as fanfic if the recycling of worldbuilding is done by the same author (which can exclude things we would label as fanfic), then is Star Wars Rebels (2014-2018) fanfic? To my (admittedly cursory) knowledge, Lucas wasn't involved in Rebels – if he was, it was as a consultant rather than a central creative on the project. But we wouldn't call Rebels "fanfic" (or fan television) either.
If we assume the previous definition but find-and-replace "same author" with "rights holder," we just run into more problems. What if Lucas decides on a lark some day to write a Star Wars? What if the thing derivative works are deriving from doesn't have a recognized rights holder??
Is The Divine Comedy (1321) fanfic???
Video essayist Sarah Z released An Exhaustive Defense of Fanfiction (2022) on youtube circling this same question, and I'm going to borrow the answer they came to (and do some violence to it, since it's been a while): "Fanfiction" is an activity, and a mindset. Something you do with the intent to do it. It's when you take pieces from existing media and recombine them in novel shapes for the purpose of playing with the pieces.
I use this definition neutrally, and she uses it positively. I also do not exclude it from the category of prose writing I consider literature (amateur or otherwise). Rather, I see literature and fanfic as media within the larger medium of prose writing that can overlap, but which seek different things. Fanfiction can be written with simultaneous literary intent, and literature can be written with fanfiction intent.
For the rest of this piece, I will be using this understanding of fanfiction.
Cards on the table, I vastly prefer the idea of the Shared Ideoform
I mean no disrespect to those who see HDG as a collection of defined parts to be recombined, but personally, I understand HDG as a shared ideoform – a bundle of themes and ideas and hopes and dreams expressed through a setting that is broadly cohesive, even if you can see the seams where two stories disagree on minute details – and as amateur literature. I understand HDG as a thing defined by its themes and philosophies first, and by its nouns only in subordination to those themes and philosophies.
Within the section of the community I've occupied since I got here, which largely exits on the Community Server, that has always been the understanding. Questions about the particulars of specific pieces of Lore are frequently met with "What story are you trying to tell?" as an answer, because advanced understandings of theoretical physics are not as important to us as the stories they're used to tell.
And the beautiful thing is that these philosophical intangibles can be used to tell so many kinds of stories.
No Gods, No Masters (2022-2023) is a story about how our obsessive need to control the projects we care about destroys our bodies and pushes us to violate our ideals, and about being allowed to give up that control and choose peace, and also about the Affini Compact's insistence on managing its empire itself even with respect to ostensible ideological allies. Its sequel, The Floret in the Mirror (2023-2024), is a story about the forking and and fusing of selves and what that does to our identity, about whether and when losing a part of ourself makes us someone different, as well as a psyop to get more Inanimate Object TF in the setting. (Which worked, by the way!)
Abscission (2021?-ongoing) is a story accepting the parts of ourselves we're taught to see as broken, and about finding love for those parts, and also about incredibly erotic violence. And Hypogeal (2025-ongoing) is story about love, grief, obsession, and the character of the Affini Compact when it doesn't have its panaceas to fall back on, when it has to make hard decisions and take risks, and about even more erotic violence.
I'm still reading Independent Establishment (2025-2026), which is a beautiful work about needs and wants and radical self acceptance.
And in all of these stories, the Affini Compact's nature as a textully imperialist, impossibly vast, yet loosely organized power structure is omni-present, as is the allegorical layer that, through the Compact, reimagines the structures of power that crush disabled, queer, and trans people underfoot as frightening-yet-loving. Those first three examples contributed significantly to both the lore and our understanding of the themes, and in Independent Establishment's wake its presence looms large over the collective conversation. And Hypogeal is shaping up to have a similar effect as all of those – even now, its effect on how many of us view the cotyledon project can easily be felt. Its decision to focus on a segment of the timeline in which the Affini are deprived of the means to enact their imperialist benevolence is a bold decision, but its one that only underscores more the Affini Compact's essential nature because of that deprivation. Hypogeal is a story awash in grief, love, fear, obession, regret, and determination in deep and profound conversation with the shared ideoform I believe to be HDG, a masterful execution of the themes and ideas that make that ideoform sing while very much having a voice of its own.
Because we can have our cake and eat it too, I think.
Themes aren't just for eighth grade book reports. They're complicated things that you examine from multiple angles, and which you compare and contrast with other themes. Stories can have several themes. So many themes. Themes for days. And HDG is an excellent setting for this.
Comparing and contrasting HDG's core themes, exploring novel, hypothetical scenarios within those themes, writing with original themes that intersect within the core themes in interesting ways, and testing the boundaries of the core themes are just a few ways someone can participate in the collective conversation – the shared ideoform. The HDG I love is a dynamic, living thing. There's always new ideas and new perspectives coming in to influence the conversation, yet in so many years of reading and writing here, that conversation has always stayed true to its core themes. There has been no shift – only growth.
Where does that leave the tumblr fandom?
The framing of this post structurally implies that "HDG" as a writing collective and an ideoform defined by social contract is in explicit conflict with "HDG" as a transformative fandom dominated by secondary creatives.
I think the truth is more complicated than this framing implies. Because I don't think a prominance of secondary creatives necessarily demonstrates a disagreement in the fundamental understanding the gestalt of the tumblr fandom has of HDG with respect to the writers on the Community Server. That disagreement must be demonstrated directly – and I'm not convinced such a clear divide can be shown.
For one thing, multiple writers and creators who I tremendously respect first engaged with HDG on tumblr. For another, I browse some of the tags sometimes – near daily recently, but it comes and goes. The posts I find in Latest can feel a little janky a lot of the time. For example, I feel like I see posts that exaggerate the extent to which feralism can exist visibly within the Affini Compact without getting rooted out, and sometimes I see something that actually just completely misses the point (which I have less than no interest in naming and shaming). But that latter situation isn't the norm, in my experience, and the general shape of the rest of it still feels right at a basic level. There's a general focus on affini as caregivers for florets, who come to surrender their autonomy not in exchange for that care, but because that care is inevitable, inescapable, and textually understood to be desirable. As an outsider to the way tumblr engages with media: for the most part, I think most of y'all get it, at least on the fundamentals.
Inconsistencies like the 'feralism' example above mean that the conversation on tumblr can look very different from the conversation in the community server, where I spend more of my time, and in the stories that are posted there. I would love to see the conversation, the "tumblr ideoform" be more correct about those details that matter to the themes. (It's pretty hard for Bob the Feralism Advocate to do his advocacy within the Imperialist, Inevitable Compact, after all, and the way we understand the intersection of Benevolence and Inevitability requires that florets and their owners be inseparable in ways that folks sometimes have friction with.) What I would hate even more than that, though, is for someone to be discouraged out of this space by the feeling that they're doing it wrong.
Please don't let that feeling strangle something beautiful in you.
If you feel bad for having spent time talking 'at,' the setting rather than 'to,' I bet the difference between those things for you is less than it seems. If you feel bad for having missed something, some theme, some norm, some whatever, you can change your approach. I'm not the same writer I was in 2025, or '24, or (especially) '23. The way I understand the setting has changed over time, both along the lines of the community zeitgeist and from my own reflection on things I could have done better, took for granted, should have thought more about, etc.
And if you're a hard fandom prefer-er, a "transformative works maximalist," and feel bitter that people in my camp exclude something with HDG's nouns for eschewing HDG's themes and allegories? Well, because of the way the shared ideoform I prefer to participate in is defined by social contract, I'm never going to explicitly endorse that approach, but neither will I explicitly condemn it. I have no quarrel with you.
In the absence of concord, may there at least be peace between our houses.
Because it's just online writing – it means a lot to us, but it's also not worth starting blood feuds over, y'know?
Asexuality and HDG (and You)
HDG's relationship to asexuality, especially sex aversion and repulsion has been absent from the text of this post so far, but its specter haunts everything I've said so far, if you can detect its presence in the subtext.
I'm going to state a bold claim: HDG was never about asexuality.
Not even in the original.
Asexuality in HDG existed, and still exists, in the rejection of allonormativity, and in community norms that make space for ace-spec sophonts. The original story uses the structure of hypnokinky dark romance erotica to tell the story of a rebel pilot coming to accept her coerced relationship with her new owner and caregiver, and its asexuality manifests in the way it declines to portray this relationship as sexual or romantic*****. It's an asexual work that isn't about its asexuality.
***** It should be noted that in Human Domestication Guide (2021), and to a lesser extent the rewrite, this relationship was not portrayed as wholly un-carnal – both versions still have significant scenes with "drugs that make you need to be touched," and the earlier version includes more groping and the like – but it still reads to me as an allosexual and alloromantic reader like a caregiver/dependent relationship that happens to involve sex-adjacent physical touch, not as a sexual relationship, and certainly not as a romantic one.
Some of the works in the original's wake chose to maintain that relationship with sexuality, either declining to involve it at all, or including it in largely irrelevant scenes that could be skipped without losing the plot. Other works in the original's wake decidedly did not do that (even in the early days). Others still chose to explore sexuality from the perspective of characters (and often authors) who are ace-spec but not sex averse/repulsed.
The throughline has been that the principle relationship structure HDG is built around, an affini owner and a xenosophont floret, is not universally inherently sexual. Those qualifiers are important. "It's a big local group," and the setting is flexible enough to allow Owner/floret relationships to take on all sorts of characteristics without sacrificing the element of caregiving it's built upon.
This is what I meant when I described asexuality as a specter haunting this post – I've described HDG as being about institutionalization and crushing systems. I haven't described it as being about sex. I also haven't described it as being about sex's lack. If sex is relevant to the story you want to tell, there is space enough within the shared ideoform to tell that story.
As for guidelines to make your writing as accessible as possible for folks across the ace spectrum – that's a different post (which I'm still working on). There's plenty of suggestions floating around the tags already, but to me, the big one is informative content warnings on sexual content (however you personally define that), as well as around mentions of anatomy that could conceivably trigger a reader's dysphoria.
But please don't succumb to the idea that you don't belong here for writing sex. Even between an affini and a xenosophont. We've been doing it since the ROM days, all the way back in '21 and '22.
Putting in a good word for the server
This is a bit of an aside, but a fundamental law about any online space is that the loudest voices shaping public perception of that space are not in it, and have negative attitudes toward it.
I'm not here to say anyone who had a bad experience there is lying, but the disproportionate volume of its detractors compared to the folks who love it, and thus have very little of note to say about it on tumblr dot com, creates a distorted impression.
The HDG Community Server is a big place administered and moderated by a small number of volunteer staff, with different vibes between different parts of the server. I can't speak to the gestalt – I spend my time in the handful of channels and swath of forum threads devoted to conversation about stories and the setting specifically, and I avoid "general chat" in any big-ish server like I owe it money – but in my experience it is and has been a remarkably kind, caring place. One not without its flaws, but one characterized by care and the mutual lifting up of everyone in the space.
You can see for yourself here. It's a moderated space, but I promise, we don't bite. (That would violate rule 16 🤭)
Conclusions
(holy shit this got away from me)
My hope with this post is that it provides a foundation for understanding some of the dreaded discourse the tags seem to be drenched in these days. I certainly have my preferences toward my understanding of HDG, but my larger goal is to clarify, and to give language to the feelings that have been eating folks up.
Anyway, I have smut to write. I hope this helped <3
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
underrated phenomenon i haven't yet seen explored enough in hdg: owners annoying their pets
it's literally half the shit we do with our companion animals
we love poking them and moving our hands near them in stupid ways and just generally getting on their nerves, and we're pretty sure that's part of why they love us
sort of in the same way we love our siblings and friends for getting on our nerves in silly ways
so why does it feel like i haven't seen a lot of this in hdg?
just affini who revel in poking their florets a bunch and produce the widest shit-eating grins when they whine at them to quit it
Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen
“These artifacts were excavated by archaeologists from a burial site in the 1970’s. The remains were returned for reinterment” Okay cool, cool cool. So you just, like. Dug up the grave of a respected family member, stripped them naked, mailed their body back to their family and kept everything they were lovingly put to rest in. Like a graverobbing bastard
Reminds me of the time when of the elders from my hometown started touching a totem pole in the Museum of Anthropology out at UBC and got yelled at by the staff, only to tell him that the pole had been stolen off of the front of her bighouse when she was ten years old.
Museum collectors did the equivalent of kidnapping a family member when they were away fishing.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires all institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate remains and artifacts so if you can identify the source of something on display absolutely get a hold of that institute’s repatriation office
Here’s the thing I feel like a lot of folks don’t get: I’m not trying to forget what you said. Honestly, I really tried not to. I can’t control what I do and don’t remember—forgetting things just happens. It’s annoying for you, I know, but for me it’s distressing as hell and when you make a big deal out of it rather than just reminding me you make me feel ashamed. I’ll remember that, at least.
It costs you nothing to be kind to people with memory problems. Please. It’s scary enough without people treating memory lapses as a personal failing.
Chronic pain will have you like, “maybe if I put my feet on my headboard and hang my head over the side of my bed, I’ll finally feel comfortable enough to sleep…”
When I was a kid a lot of adults responded to my being bullied by telling me "they're just trying to upset you! Ignore them and they'll leave you alone!"
And on some level this is true, because many (though not all) bullies will get bored with a target who can successfully pull off a fully deadpan Grey Rock technique in response to bullying.
But: 1. intentionally suppressing powerful emotions is difficult, and doubly so for children, exponentially so for kids with RSD, and (more importantly) 2. putting the onus on the target to put a stop to bullying does nothing to address the root cause of bullying, which is: bullies. There are people who find entertainment and self-satisfaction in putting other people down, or even physically assaulting them. The problem is literally right there in the admission that "they're just trying to upset you."
The only effective method I've ever seen reduce bullying in kids is encouraging them to call it out in their peers. Pretty much nobody thinks of themself as a bully, even when they know they're being shitty, because they'll justify it as "they deserved it because they did something stupid/mean/weird" or "it's funny."
But it's much easier to recognize bullying when someone else is doing it. And kids care a lot more when it's their friend who says, "hey, that seems mean. Don't be mean."
I’ve seen a lot recently about how the modern HDG community has tons of issues. I want to help, I don’t want to contribute to the problem. What do I do? I love HDG so damn much, and I really don’t want to make things worse.
I see so much about what the fandom is becoming, but when I look at Ao3 and read fics, I don’t really feel it. That’s what worries me, as I’m scared that my enjoyment of what people are currently making is the wrong thing to do.
"HDG is an open, collaborative setting, constantly being driven forward and expanded on by people just like you sitting down and deciding to tell a story."
So. When I first joined the community, I saw this, this has been the welcome message for a very long time now.
This is something that cannot be un-said. this is pandora's box. A reality of having made this promise, of making something open and collaborative, is that people will add ideas that those who began wouldn't have thought of. that there will be conflicts in vision, artistic differences, etc. this is normal and to be expected.
HDG is and always will be a community project now, not something that belongs to anyone, especially not those who aren't actually writing in it.
I happen to agree with the take that much of being written nowadays doesn't meet my personal standards for reading, but I have an eye disease that makes reading stories difficult, so my time being wasted on something I won't enjoy is a massive bummer. for this reason I rely on word of mouth, my friends, and seeing what people are losing thier minds over in the discord this week to curate my experience. other than a lack of tags and warnings for sex- which ive talked about already elsewhere- this tends to work perfectly.
Having to do curation doesn't mean HDG is dead. That would be like saying a music genre is dead because not every single album that comes out is a banger. people change, tastes change, art changes.
It is factually true that now that we get 3.5 new fics per day, with over 30 chapter updates per day, there is a lot of noise. About half of it is just not amazing, or doesn't really get it. that's a reality of scale, there's no avoiding it, and I would frankly rather be part of a community that welcomes and celebrates "bad" art than the gatekept hallucination of a past that never existed where only the finest, most pure artists who all totally got it wrote HDG.
Elitism is the mortal enemy of earnestness. and being earnest is what I think matters most.
When it comes to Elitism, especially those who have some kind of platform and use it mainly to spread negativity, I would point to a gamedev statistic I read somewhere that 99% of all feedback comes from 1% of a userbase- the loudest, most disgruntled, and least representative. the hyperinvested, the trolls, the power users, the conflict seekers, etc. They'll dominate forums, they'll scream about how everything is wrong- and they are completely off base from what the median user thinks.
There is a massive negativity bias at play, and it compounds at multiple levels. I think the most illustrative example of this is that because the (quite lovely) current staff team for the HDG discord have no interest in doing advertising, the narrative about what it is like is entirely controlled by people who aren't even in it, and haven't been for ages, because they got banned for being assholes.
So in general, my honest advice is to not worry about it? even if I personally find the mass proliferation of untagged stories that treat sex as the presumed default very annoying, you aren't hurting anyone if you enjoy reading them. The tumblr fandom is just that- a fandom. its not the main creative space, and nothing that happens here matters anyway.
The main creative space for HDG isn't even the discord anymore, I don't think, or at least not consistiently. its the DM convo where an author is losing thier mind brainstorming, thier friend spamming emotes about how hard theyre cooking. its a group chat with ten perverts, or a discord they made because we learned you can only have ten people in a group chat.
Write for yourself, write for your close friends. I always have- every one of my stories exists because I or someone close to me wanted to read something specific and then realized it didn't exist. Despite the mildly terrifying scale of a readership I have, I'm really writing for like, a dozen perverts I hang out with in VC because I like to make bottoms squirm. Read what brings you joy, not what someone you've never spoken to thinks you should be doing.
I'm in a posting mood, so I thought I'd rework a reblog I shoved into my drafts to rot into something standalone. Something I love about HDG as a setting.
I sometimes see takes about HDG from people who've skimmed a story or two, or who've only engaged with it via the small sliver of its readership that insists on evangelizing (the worst possible introduction to all this). One of the more common takes I see is some version of "HDG would be so much hotter if its antagonists were all pure evil villains who hook humans up to the evil mindbreaking machine because they're just evil."
(I'm being a little hyperbolic.)
The complaint is that making the affini axiomatically benevolent is a coward's move that robs them of their hot, Evil Woman potential. It's an annoying act of projection (critiquing HDG for failing to meet a standard it isn't necessarily concerned with), but more than that, it's missing one of my favorite qualities of the setting in the process.
A really common thing HDG does is put its characters through the kinds of mind breaking, incongruously happy, lotus-eater-esque bad ends you see all the fucking time in popular media, but without all the caveats those endings usually come with to inform you that they're Bad Actually (tm), like "but it's all an illusion" or "sure you're happy, but at what cooooost?" Then, it looks you in the eye, and it dares you to say that the character was actually better off before they were like this.
Many endings in HDG stories are about characters sacrificing their principles, or having those principles ripped from them, specifically because those principles are killing them.
So many endings in HDG stories are about characters being manipulated and groomed, but specifically into being a version of themselves that can be happy and fulfilled.
So, so many endings in HDG stories are about finding healing and life on the other side of being deprived of your agency and your autonomy, or possibly even because of that deprivation.
So it's really funny to me whenever I see one of these takes like "it would be so much hotter without the moral ambivalence, hashtag let women be evil" because they're mistaking the juiciest part of this whole predicament as a flaw: The inherent eroticism of being made into a version of you that isn't who you were before, but is still at least fine. Not worse, in a way that you can comfortably and uncritically write off as ruined and not care about, but fine. Probablt even better off.
It's the erotic horror of realizing that the scary mind breaking identity death non-consent could fix you, for whatever value of "fix" is most compelling to you.
"Sharpness" and "comfort" get talked about a lot in this space as different, discrete things, but I disagree with that framing. The sharpness and the comfort in HDG aren't separate forces in conflict with each other, they're complementary. They feed into each other and build off of each other. Every story finds its own balance of the two (and the difference between sharp and comfy is personal and blurrier than you might think), but I think you need at least a bit of both for the thing HDG does to work.
I don’t have a DNI against minors because I believe teenagers have to right to information, gods knows I found worse places on the internet than tumblr at their age. Places with far more misinformation and hatred… even hellsite as this is.
So I talk with them. Answer their questions. Give advice about being trans or poly or any such thing when asked. As long as it’s appropriate.
I treat them like people. Because they are people.
And in turn they avoid interacting with the more explicit parts of my blog. I don’t have the most nsfw blog after all. But I’ve got kinks, and I’m not ashamed of them.
If you "domesticate" people by equating them with animals, aren't you afraid that one day, "wild" people will gather in a huge "pack" and tear you and your "pets" to pieces.
I would be very glad if you left us to our own responsibility, we do not need foreign rulers, I believe that we, the people, are capable of determining our own destiny.
And we don't need alien masters.
-No respect../Freedom-lover625
Your question lacks its mark, which is just as well: It's an accurate statement. I am indeed not afraid, for the same reason I wouldn't be afraid on an island filled with adorable little rabbits. For one, terrans have few natural weapons and fewer engineered ones that are capable of hurting an Affini at all, and even the least capable Affini can easily control a "huge pack" of terrans and prevent them from hurting any sophont, including each other. For two, if you're in contact with us, you're already pets; the only difference is whether you have an owner or will be left as a barn cat in paradise. For three, half of you would have owners found for you before you gathered, and the other half would be allowed to try to give both you and the feralbreakers some enrichment.
Your hypothetical sprung ex nihilo from your head; unfortunately, Affini are the avatars of logistics. It's managing to organize the gathering without the NFPO catching wind of it you should be worried about.
But for four… terran history is rife with the worst atrocities performed on the least capable, the least fortunate, the softest and the gentlest of you, precisely as you threaten. If we were to 'leave you to your own responsibility', you would be creating new permanent underclasses within the week. You had your chance to prove your capability to self-regulate, and you turned out not to want to take it. Let this be a reminder: Push until you receive a response if you like, but know that you give up any moral high ground to complain about the response you receive. Accept your mistakes with dignity. That would be the thing a person would do.
This goes for your little "pack", too. Look for the twelve-foot yellow bird in Opanowi Park on Saturday at 8 PM local time, when your group next meets.
