Want to introduce your audience to HDG? Some Guidelines
Hi! You might be a streamer, or a vTuber, or on Chaturbate, and you're getting into HDG, and you want to talk about it with your audience, because, y'know, fun setting, brainworms, you wanna talk about it, et cetera. Here are some basic guidelines. These are not an official position of @hdg-lorets, just my personal opinion as someone very active in the space.
Is the space you're in a NSFW/adult space? If not, no, you should not.
Let's not mince words - HDG is kink. HDG is smut. It is a world built on total power exchange dynamics and systemic noncon. If you're on, say, Youtube or Twitch, or TVTropes (I wish I was kidding), your audience can very easily contain minors. We do not want minors to be aware of this setting. Yes, Twitch has an "Adult Live Stream" category; however, I can go click on any of those streams without so much as an "are you 18+?" popup to click through. If the space you're sharing this is not explicitly and only for adults, that's a hard veto. Do not share HDG in that space. I realize this ship has kinda sailed with regards to HDG on Tumblr, but... let's not repeat that mistake, eh?
Is the NSFW/Adult space you are in broadly accepting of kink?
HDG is kink, and it's not soft either. The baseline reality of the setting is a universe in which, at any time and for basically any reason, you may be drugged, hypnotized, and coerced into a lifelong total power exchange relationship. Elements like CGL, age regression, piss kink, hypnosis, surgery kink, gaslighting, and more are commonplace. If the space you're sharing it in is unlikely to take that well... Do not share HDG in that space.
Is the NSFW/Adult/Kink space you're in broadly accepting and supportive of trans and disabled people?
HDG as a setting is made for, by, and about disabled queer people. While cishet folks are not unwelcome, the setting has very little to offer a lot of them, and generally makes very little space to accommodate them. If the audience you're talking to isn't significantly trans; if the space you're in tolerates transphobia or ableism, or is broadly fashy (like, say, anonymous imageboards tend to be)? Do not share HDG in that space.
Now, you may have noticed that this doesn't leave a ton of venues to talk about HDG. That's intentional. HDG is sharp and niche and fairly unique and those are things that we all love about it. We don't want broad appeal, we want to enjoy and protect this kinda special thing we have. There's a reason we talk about "containment breaches" whenever an HDG post hits a random subreddit and goes viral. It's not for everyone, and, ideally, if you're the kind of person who would be turned off or grossed out by it, you won't have even heard of it.
So with that in mind, what kinds of spaces are good places to talk about HDG? In my personal experience:
Places explicitly for HDG - discord servers, the Tumblr tag, the subreddit in a pinch, the dedicated quarantine channel that it feels like every other trans discord needs to have at this point... things like that.
Kinky trans-positive spaces - I crosspost my files to a handful of Hypnokink discord servers and don't feel too bad about it. That said: I would not crosspost them to hypnokink discord servers that weren't explicitly and loudly pro-trans and pro-queer.
Queer porn-sharing spaces. Like, I'm not encouraging it necessarily, but if you're queer and want to do some HDG roleplay on your chaturbate channel, or post cute plampts to your Furaffinity page, I'm not about to throw any toys out of the pram.
The important throughline here is the same as above: people who would be disturbed or grossed out by a queer hard kink non-con drugplay setting probably shouldn't hear about it.
(Again, this is just my personal opinion and does not represent the staff of the broader HDG community or the lorets.)
By the by - if you're looking for a good place to talk about HDG, I cannot recommend the HDG community server highly enough. It is, for all intents and purposes, the beating heart of what HDG is - a collaborative writing project in a shared sandbox made by a bunch of extremely talented authors and artists.
