Addressing the lack of children in HDG
So, one of the more controversial aspects of HDG is that whenever the lack of children is bought up, there are generally two arguments that get bought up. The first is that "children in a kink setting are bad vibes" as if the mere existence of children would make the Affini act like pedophiles or smth. Keep in mind that this issue gets (rather poorly danced around) by the means of CG/L and ageplay anyway, so aesthetically, children (or child like sophonts) do exist in some capacity anyway. The other is that the presence of children would clash on a setting level with the domestication of the human species as a whole and that it would introduce eugenicist vibes (see: selective breeding or how we got from wolves to poodles and pugs). Now, while there is more of a strong bad vibes argument to be made here, I feel that both this and the previous point can be made moot by one simple change. Just...just have there be a rule in the Affini compact preventing the domestication of sophonts whose brains have not fully developed. Like, you can even make it a technological limitation of the haustorium in that it poses an undue risk to the sophont should it be applied to a brain that has not fully finished developing, or is still substantially underdeveloped. Like, you don't need to rule out the existence of children, and not putting children in kink scenarios should be, at bare minimum, something you as the author should be doing. But having that sort of worldbuilding absolutely removed as something you can use to paint descriptive narriatives is absurd. Like, even when it comes to Affini biorythms and the potential bad touch of a kid getting addicted to a Affini's biorythm, that can easily be explained away by the same mechanism as the afformentioned haustorium fix. If children are incapable of recieving an implant, the Affini have no reason to engineer their biorythm to affect children or adolescents. Like, holy shit people, it's not that hard to worldbuild around these potential ethical conflicts of putting the mere mention of a under-18 in a kink setting, and you can get cute scenes of, like, florets interacting with children and families. It's literally cutting off a large chunk of non-kink and non-problematic scene writing opportunities that are whimsical and kinda cute.
