Independent Establishment: A Series of Thoughts
I originally began writing the following piece as a personal exercise because I read one smut fic and was so personally affected by the experience I decided to just write about it. Originally it was intended to sit in a google document and only be shared with my wife and the author of the original story, and whomever else fae wanted to pass it onto.
And then everybody who read it liked it so much I got bullied into posting it somewhere where it can be more easily read and shared by a bigger audience, so these things happen.
I'm proud of what I've written but still very nervous about sharing, so in the interest of pushing past my own worries I'm posting this with minimal editing for clarity.
Thank you in advance for your kindness.
Without further ado...
Introduction
I can't stop thinking about Independent Establishment.
What you are about to read is not an essay. An essay requires structure, rationality, thoughts that build on each other in a way that illuminates a subject. It is also not poetry. It is also not quite a journal.
What this is instead is thoughts I cannot exorcise from my brain by any other means than putting them to paper. I've divided it up into a series of 'parts' in a good faith effort to keep it from feeling like a series of rambling thoughts running into each other. I do not think I will succeed in that endeavor.
Throughout this work I reference both Independent Establishment itself and a number of other works it exists in conversation with from within the larger HDG ecosystem. While I have attempted to only spoil as much as is necessary at any given point for each story I discuss, this text contains unmarked spoilers for Independent Establishment and several other HDG stories including Golden Ladder, No Gods No Masters, From Pawn to Princess, Freedom's Ember, and the Lin Ralazinziq series. Readers unfamiliar with these works may wish to either turn back or risk being told about some of my favorite fiction with very little filter. I have made an effort to credit the authors of these works throughout the larger text.
Part 1: The False Hedonist and Tradition
In the culture I grew up in, hedonism is seen as a fundamentally immature philosophy. To seek pleasure as the source of all that is good in the world is a vision inherently tied to images of rich young wastrels and selfish old men on one end of the spectrum, and young wasters dying of self-inflicted poisoning at the hands of substance abuse on the other. From a very young age I remember hedonism being portrayed primarily in these tones, as a thing that is pursued only by those who do not care about the consequences of their actions for themselves or others.
Human Domestication Guide (hereafter HDG) as a setting is itself a challenge to this. The original story that became the basis for all that followed presents a blissful life as a pet being medicated, cared for, and ultimately subservient to a giant plant-like alien domme as being not just an improvement over the lives of the characters prior to their domestication, but as aspirational. To lean into hedonism in the Affini Compact is to embrace the fact that freed from the burdens of capitalism and personhood, in the hands of a caretaker with both infinite resources and infinite patience, seeking pleasure would be kind of cool actually.
In a way it could be argued that every story following the original HDG that grapples with the larger setting is in conversation with that initial portrayal of hedonism. For instance, No Gods, No Masters, a foundational work of the setting, follows a protagonist who has an actual ideological reason to oppose the Compact that stems from something other than a slavish devotion to the hierarchical order that it has deposed. The story ultimately ends with the tension between its protagonist's ideals and the Compact unresolved, but does bring her to a satisfying conclusion by asking if - under the material conditions the Compact creates - it's really worth burning yourself out fighting when it's finally possible to rest safe in the knowledge that privation is now and forever a thing of the past.
Where Independent Establishment sets itself apart is in its portrayal of a character who seems on the surface to have wholly embraced the hedonistic philosophy of post-domestication humanity. Unlike Cass Hope of NGNM, who is meeting the Affini for the first time and has great difficulty acclimating to her new social context, May Morrison is in many ways lower-d "domesticated" at the start of Independent Establishment.
May Morrison, like Cass Hope, has absolutely no love for the old Terran Accord that the Compact has by the time of Independent Establishment completely supplanted. She has taken an interest in Affini bio-modding, flirts shamelessly with most sophonts who cross her path, and has built a space designed specifically to be appealing to both Terrans and Affini in every way. Many HDG protagonists are completely alienated from their own sexuality. May is not only familiar with kink, she is an experienced top who is skilled in the art of making others feel good.
Yes, at the start of the story it is also obvious that May is, perhaps, not quite as okay with the current state of affairs as it might appear on the surface. Her diner, The Crossroads, hides a secret basement room meant to conceal those being pursued by an Affini. Her friend group consists of several people who seem at best ambivalent and at worst disgusted by the idea of domestication. And May - while she has no issue with florets in general - is more than happy to hide others from Affini, taking a real risk of mandatory domestication herself.
There is another world perhaps where Independent Establishment reads like a companion piece to Kanagen's Freedom's Ember, different in that May is a much younger woman than the protagonist of Ember and thus the subtext of the two stories would change (Freedom's Ember is partially a story of an older woman needing to watch the ipad-kid generation grow up and worrying they won't be able to carry the burdens of making a better world; Independent Establishment lacking that subtext would be more of a story about simply learning to trust others). This would almost certainly be a worthy story and sit among the small mountain of HDG fiction in my "I like this and would recommend it" pile.
I am so terribly glad that Independent Establishment is not that story.
From the very beginning of the story, every element of May Morrison - from her background to her sexual preferences to her restaurant itself - are ruthlessly interrogated. It becomes clear early on that the title of the story is ironic in more ways than one. Not only is May - by virtue of being a protagonist in an HDG story - almost certainly destined for capital-D Domestication, she is perhaps the least liberated a late-setting protagonist in HDG can possibly be. What appears at first to be an embrace of sexual pleasure and dominance on May's part is revealed to be social obligation, a twisting of a thing she does enjoy into the hard slog of work because she always does it for the sake of others, never of herself. To make matters worse, others around her tend to either be so distant from May as to not realize how exhausted this makes her or so callous that they see it as something she owes to them.
This is mirrored in May's restaurant itself. While the Crossroads appears on the surface to be a perfect example of a Compact diner - bright, welcoming, and run as much to serve as a community gathering space as a place to consume food - it is also an obligation that serves to not only exhaust May but to sever her from her own preferences and desires. May has a very specific flavor palette she enjoys, characterized by a love of seafood and shellfish and the particular Napo cuisine of her home planet. Her restaurant is, by contrast, a place where she mostly serves whatever it is anyone asks for as provided by her compiler, a device that every single character who frequents her restaurant has at home and could easily get any of this from.
In this way I would argue that one of the fundamental reversals at the heart of Independent Establishment is to show the ways in which denying one's own desires - denying the need for rest, denying preference, denying joy - is fundamentally a kind of false maturity. May rationalizes her decision to give in to others, but that rationalization always leads back to a fear of rejection, or of failure to live up to an imagined ideal. And worse, it severs her from her own culture, as her actual preferences - the cuisines she has a deep and abiding love for - are overwhelmed by the middle-american-friendly fare she finds herself compiling and serving. May's self-denial also becomes a denial of her own heritage, a vector for the erasure not just of the self but of everything the self attaches to throughout history.
In a world of capital-C Conservatism and its ascendancy, it might seem at first strange or contradictory for me to note this element of the story as a central theme. Tradition and heritage are often words employed by the most destructive men of our time in service of enforcing racial hierarchies and rigid gender roles. What's more, the very nature of HDG as a setting tends to place itself in opposition to our ideas of tradition.
Heritage, tradition, and culture do not originate in the halls of the Conservative, however, and appeals to tradition from those who wield them in bad faith often involve selecting only those traditions which best suit their agenda. In the context of Independent Establishment in particular, May's severing from traditional foods serves as a way of showing the reader that she is not, in fact, independent - that she has made herself a servant of the tastes of those around her and is losing parts of herself she cannot easily make peace with the loss of.
May's dominant personality, too, is a facade. Though May genuinely enjoys dominating others - just as she genuinely enjoys the happiness she provides others by catering to their tastes in her restaurant - it is obvious that this role taxes her. She sees herself in this role primarily as a facilitator, as a person who exists to make happiness occur for others, who takes on a caregiving burden.
This may seem a strange time to do it but i'd like to pause and talk about-
Part 1.5: The Burden of the Compact
A fundamental axiom of the HDG setting is that the Affini are imperialist in nature. This exists in the setting for multiple reasons, among them to facilitate the non-con fantasy, to build on the Affini's refusal to respect boundaries that prevent sophonts from receiving the standard of care they need and deserve, and to create opportunities for conflict between the protagonist and their Affini. In Sheepwave and SlyPrincess's still-running From Pawn to Princess, sweet-and-nurturing Gaelen notes that the actions he and other Affini take inherently casts them in the role of the antagonist (more on this later), and this axiom is no small part of the reason why.
Part of the Affini's justification for their own imperialism is the fact that from their perspective, every other sophont is disabled, unable to provide for themselves the standard of care an Affini is capable of. This is of course also one hundred percent true within the narrative of the HDG setting - the Affini are post-scarcity, benevolent, and while fallible they are also never going to just give up on anyone.
This presents an interesting question about May Morrison. Arguably, what May is attempting to do in her life early on within Independent Establishment is to serve as an Affini for others. At the start of the story her dominance is framed as a means of helping others, enriching others, taking on the burden of being sexually dominant because no one else is capable of it. As the chapters progress other characters even behave as though this is something that May does not just provide for others from the goodness of her heart but owes them, as though she had a duty to play the role of a top.
One might question why, exactly, May Morrison would believe that this is a thing she has to do? In a world of omnicompetent dominant plants with magic space HRT and anxiety meds, May's compulsory topping seems almost quaint. Why burden yourself with a caregiver role that requires you to constantly burn yourself out when there is no shortage of others who are not only capable of filling this role but are, by virtue of their species and position in the Compact, far better equipped to do so?
The answer to this question is that May begins the story with a sort of unquestioned belief that the exhaustion she feels in the role of the always-dominant is a sort of universal exhaustion, that everyone must feel it, and the Affini are simply better at hiding it than most humans. The realization that this is not true - that there are Affini (and other sophonts for that matter) who are dominant all the time not merely because they can be but because they enjoy it - is something of a shock to her.
Because May is alienated from her own sexuality and desires, from multiple sources: her past, trauma, and beliefs all combine to build walls that both prevent her from realizing her cognitive blind spots and alienate her from her own desires. May is independent at the start of Independent Establishment, and she is performing adulthood and maturity to the standards of the world the Compact displaced to an admirable degree. She is also trapped in a prison of her own making, a prison whose walls cannot be destroyed by conventional means.
Fortunately for May Morrison, the deuteragonist of Independent Establishment is a bunker buster who walks like a plant.
Part 2: Veridia Mulberry, Most Affini, Least Affini.
I would like to take a moment here to talk about my personal taste in Human Domestication Guide stories. While I find most HDG hot by default - what can I say, perfect plant caretakers just do something for me, a woman who really wishes it wasn't so hard to remember that you do in fact need to change your clothes every day or other people will find it weird - the stories I love the most tend to run to either end of the spectrum of "least affini" and "most affini".
To give an example of what I mean: Asherah Riker of AshInBloom's Golden Ladder begins that story as the Least Affini - she is an Affini but she is estranged from the Compact not simply by ideological issues with its mission, but by her own fear of bonding to another sophont while still grieving the loss of someone important to her. Her struggles with her failure to accept and then live up to her role as caretaker are central to the story.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Troja of Dame Harmony's Lin Ralazinziq series, a consummate dominant Affini who is not only more than happy to serve as an agent of the Compact but enjoys working on schemes that create wheels within wheels all to serve as a mechanism to bring joy and happiness to others. Each future storyline serves to build on lier skills and beliefs in this regard until by the end of The Fall of Abundance I more or less had decided that if there is a prototypical Affini character outside of the original Human Domestication Guide it is Troja.
Both of these ends of the spectrum can serve to create interesting stories. On the Least Affini end you get to enjoy the protagonist and their caretaker facing similar struggles that are relatable to a normal human person, and you can watch the characters grow and change together to find an equilibrium that brings them happiness. On the Most Affini end, there is the fantasy of the omnipresent authority figure who actually wants what is best for you and can - apparently effortlessly - move heaven and earth to achieve it, while also reminding the reader that the Affini are and can be fundamentally alien. They do not think entirely like humans, and their perspective is not a human one even if they've studied human patterns of thought and belief well enough to try and communicate with us.
This brings us to the subject of this current rambling essay once again. Veridia Mulberry of Independent Establishment is my new favorite Affini in any HDG story by virtue of the fact that she broke my rubric by existing.
Veridia Mulberry is undeniably the Least Affini. She allows May to choose the intensity of the care she is placed under. She takes May based on her own desires, not on May's obvious needs. She makes decision after decision regarding May not based on what would be best for May in the moment, but what will allow May to best fulfill Mulberry's desires. Whereas most Affini, even sadistic Affini, present as perfect dommes or caretakers, Veridia Mulberry presents more as the monster it describes itself as more than once, a hair's breadth away from consuming itself and everyone around it in a literal blaze of glory just to sate its animal hunger.
On the other hand, Veridia Mulberry is the most Affini any Affini has ever been. Where many Affini are willing to ignore the boundaries of autonomy in respect to freeing sophonts from capitalistic governments, Veridia is willing to violate boundaries because that's what you do when someone else is suffering. Veridia Mulberry does not care about May's safeword only because Veridia Mulberry knows that May will employ it as a means of disengaging from getting the help and intervention she needs. Veridia Mulberry may burn itself out caring for May, but only in a distressingly literal sense and only because she loves May so much that setting herself on fire and reblooming to prove the point is really the only way of getting through to her.
Veridia Mulberry is a shaped charge made of possessive love and theatricality. Veridia Mulberry will recklessly break down every wall between it and what it wants. And Veridia Mulberry will not care about the collateral damage it does along the way, because she is here to rescue someone from themselves whether they like it or not.
If you cannot understand the appeal of a character like this, you are among the blessed who have never in your life found yourself locked in a spiral of burnout and self-recrimination because you cannot measure up to what you feel like others want or need you to be. You have never wondered if the people in your life who profess to be your friends or loved ones really care, or whether they simply feign it to avoid hurting your feelings or as a means of extracting something they want from you. Yours is a charmed life, hold fast to it and never let it go.
For the rest of us, there is something undeniably appealing about the fantasy Veridia Mulberry represents. Yes, she is frightening. Yes, she is reckless. Yes, if you met her in real life you would be correct to run away screaming as quickly as you could (not that it would help, she's already on board the train). But the pure, unrestrained reassurance she provides - the lengths she is willing to go to ensure that you know she wants you, that she will do anything to have you, that she will violate the rules of the Compact itself if it means you can be hers forever - it sends shivers down the spine.
I'd like to once again step aside from Independent Establishment for a moment to talk about the stories it exists in conversation with. Sheepwave and Slyprincess's long-form and still-active story From Pawn to Princess is written to serve as both an informational and tonal guide to the Human Domestication Guide setting as a whole. While its first two acts follow the story of Lynn Walsh and her romance with Gaelen Echeveria, the third act of the story takes a surprise turn by moving the focus to Lynn's partner, Selene. After a particularly intense sequence of events plays out Gaelen Echeveria, one of the most affable and instantly likable Affini in any story, deals with Selene's guilt and self loathing by telling her this:
"“It is adorable you think you are the villain of this story, Selene. You are not. I am.”
His body unfurled fully, into an undulating tentacled affair, with horns curling and face distorted. His core was bared, eviscerating purple light splattering the pale walls, and he leaned down over her, sparks and heat and rumbling deeper than a volcano.
“I think it is you who does not understand. Why is it again that your kind has three eyes, hmm?” His russet cape spread into wings that ended in thorny talons, his voice underlaid by a deep roar of heat and hunger.
“To watch for the predators that once flew above in the skies,” she said in a small, almost fearful voice. “We kept… ourselves and our Qualin mates safe from them, is what they say.”
“And now, us Affini keep everyone safe. We are at the top of the chain of predation now. You think of yourself as a monster, but every instinct you have points you to care so much about others you hurt yourself.”
Gaelen was practically on top of Selene now, swarming over the bed like an overdue tsunami, form undulating in the nonexistent wind. He became the thing you imagine looming above when you choose not to open your eyes in the middle of a dark and unsettling night.
“Meanwhile, I have lied to you both repeatedly about my intentions. Played every angle, twisted every advantage. Is that not the mantle of the antagonist? Deep in my core, every attempt I made to preserve Lynn’s independence was an expression of my own fear, fear not just of the mantle I chose, but of how truly far I am willing to go to uphold it. Her fate was sealed the moment she begged me not to hurt her. I would have followed her to the end of the Compact, waiting for when she broke, if it had taken weeks or decades I would have her.”
-From Pawn to Princess chapter 62, Sheepwave and Slyprincess
This exchange has lived in my mind for months as I have read more HDG stories. Gaelen, despite being a consummate sweetheart, is in fact telling the truth to Selene in this moment. He is the antagonist of Selene's story and to a lesser extent Lynn's, carefully laying traps for both that caused them to fall further into his orbit, slowly eroding their independence in ways both obvious and subtle, and ultimately taking both partially because they love him but really because he wants them. You can quibble with Gaelen whether he meets the structural narrative role of an antagonist based on strict definitions of the term, but you cannot argue he isn't the villain of this story (at least, in this moment).
This lens is useful for looking at the larger Human Domestication Guide setting in general. While it's by no means universal, one of the more striking features of HDG is the fact that the villain more or less always wins, and everyone is better off for it. A very common structure of HDG is to place the protagonist in a situation where the Affini serves as an antagonist who ultimately overcomes and acquires them, ending their arc in a satisfying place but ultimately severing them from their original desires and goals. Once you begin looking, it's hard not to see.
This brings us back to Veridia Mulberry.
Mulberry is villain-coded to the maximum. She is described constantly with words like "inky', "darkness", and "monster". She gleefully and openly admits that she is bothered by the fact that May's heart beats without her approval. In a setting where non-con is part of the appeal, Mulberry occasionally alienates unprepared readers by finding entirely novel ways to bypass consent. May even calls Mulberry her "villain", and Mulberry reciprocates by implanting May while singing an entire villain song about how yes, she is an evil villain actually, isn't that great?
In short, my description of Mulberry as a deuteragonist is incorrect, Mulberry is obviously the antagonist of Independent Establishment.
This is my favorite magic trick Lagnia pulls in Independent Establishment's structure. Despite all the coding, all the villainous posturing, all the extreme swings she pulls, all of the dramatic moments, Mulberry is not the antagonist of this story. She is the deuteragonist, the secondary hero whose journey parallels and complements the protagonist's.
I realize this is an odd claim, but I feel I can back it up reasonably well. First, Mulberry and May actually share narrator duties throughout the story. While May certainly takes the lion's share, Mulberry frequently steps in to take over and let us see the world from its perspective. While this is often creatively curtailed so we can never anticipate exactly what Mulberry will be subjecting May to next, it's important to realize that this is not simply a cutaway to the villain's lair. Mulberry often uses the moments where she is the narrator to muse on her desire for May, on her own life and struggles, and her perspective on the world.
Mulberry is not simply a villain planning to thwart the hero's plans or planning to burn the compact down, either (well, maybe the second one, but only in a constructive way she promises). Mulberry's all-consuming hunger and her struggle with it positions her in a similar way to many HDG protagonists: somewhat isolated, missing a piece that would help her complete herself, and dealing with shaky mental health issues.
Further, Mulberry parallels May's struggles. May has a great deal of survivor's guilt that weighs on her from her time on the planet Nyrina, where she was forced to shoot a close friend in order to secure an escape for several members of the planet's indigenous species, the Rinans. While she did the right thing, the pain she was forced to cause clearly weighs on her. Later we find that Mulberry has something of a reputation on her home ship, the Karcade, because she is the Affini equivalent of an anesthesiologist specializing in euthanasia - it was her job to administer the ego-destroying class-O xenodrugs required by those humans who would otherwise have been unable to live without extreme pain otherwise. Mulberry professes that she enjoyed this process, but it also seems to leave her with some degree of guilt or conflicted emotions. When she returns to the Karcade she is so sad that May notices it even while in a regressed state.
In both cases, May and Mulberry are burdened by the trauma of doing something they believe is not only right but necessary, but cannot entirely reconcile with the emotions it forces them to live with. May is unable to conceptualize herself as anything but a monster after firing on her friend, going so far as to choose biomods that echo how she is sure that she appeared in those fateful moments before pulling the trigger. Mulberry, on the other hand, lives with the social shame of taking joy in a process that even in the ultra-hedonistic and often extreme compact is meant to carry some degree of pain and sadness. Even if Mulberry seems to enjoy the process more than the long-term result of administering class-Os, she also seems to have taken on the 'monster' role as a way to claim power in a situation where she has none.
The only real difference between the two in this sense, aside from the obvious age and species gap, is that Mulberry clearly thrives in and enjoys her role as monster. May's performance is competent but draining, a role she doesn't dislike but which gives her no satisfaction. Mulberry is flamboyant to the extreme, a lover of high camp who -whilst maintaining an air of genuine menace - is always and constantly winking to an unseen audience.
This is, to my mind, sort of the skeleton key that unlocks Independent Establishment. In the larger HDG setting, Affini are often antagonists masquerading as supporting characters. In independent Establishment, Mulberry is one of the protagonists of the story, but she disguises that fact by gleefully embracing the role and clothing of the villain. It just happens that in this case, that role is almost literally a stage prop.
As a further example of this paralleling, I'd like to move the subject onward to
Part 4: Repression, For the Sake of Others
Part of living in society is learning to tame certain selfish impulses. When you are at a coffee shop it is rude to step in front of other customers in line no matter how badly you desire to get your tea quickly. When an older neighbor is struggling with their groceries, it is good to help them even if they have sometimes been personally unpleasant to you in the past, even if letting them struggle feels good. You do not demand that stores give you food even if you want it, hell even if you need it. You do not touch people who have not asked for it. This is not how desires can be handled if we are to have a society.
There is a certain structure and logic and goodness to this. Respecting the bodily autonomy of others, for instance, is generally a good thing and I find myself wishing our governments were asked to obey this basic check on human nature. Not hurting people is good. Not stealing things others need simply because you desire them is good.
There is a problem that can arise, however, when every impulsive desire is classified as the kind of society-destroying selfishness that these reasonable demands fall into.
HDG as a setting is firmly post-scarcity and firmly a non-con fantasy setting. This provides a unique lens to view the repression of characters through because it reduces the number of truly selfish actions anyone can really take within the setting. Theft in the compact is still possible, but it is simply easier to compile any material good anyone could reasonably want. Desires for touch, play, and contact are all given a variety of outlets. There is no need to wait in line if you do not wish to, because there are a truly overwhelming amount of goods and experiences to partake in if you wish. Even desires for care and constant reassurance can be met if you are willing to sacrifice short or long-term autonomy to an Affini.
Given this fact, May Morrison's repression seems almost pathological the longer you look at it.
We've already highlighted the disconnect between May's initial appearance as a well-adjusted and capable independent and her actual emotional needs and desires in earlier sections, but what we have not highlighted is the truly herculean efforts May must take in order to maintain that facade.
When Mulberry first takes May as a floret it denies her access to the class-E xenodrugs she has been taking, anti-anxiety medications that allow for normal function. I'd actually like to stop for a moment and further drill down on how unusual this idea alone is for an HDG story. From the story that originated the whole setting to every single work that is considered foundational following in its wake, Class-E is usually employed narratively as a way to force the central character of a story to break from their maladaptive coping mechanisms and experience relaxation, free from anxiety or panic, for the first time. If they can be said to have a consistent symbolic value across most HDG stories it's of the value of medication and proper care, or the fantasy of being freed from mental distress.
Independent Establishment, by contrast, takes this common idea and inverts it. May's class-E regimen is revealed to be a tactical overdose - she has been taking a quantity of the drug so beyond her actual needs that it has effectively turned into a full filter on her emotions. May has been effectively taking so many xenodrugs that she is compulsively masking at all times.
(Small aside, but given that Class-E xenodrugs reduce coordination and motor control, I must assume May is just absolutely on that anime hero level of physical capability. If HDG got a fighting game she'd be banned from competitive play almost immediately even after her third round of nerfs).
Speaking on a personal level, in most HDG stories class-E reminds me of klonopin or xanax - drugs that provide immediate relief for acute panic or anxiety. In Independent Establishment they feel more like lithium. Lithium is, in certain cases, still prescribed for certain mental health diagnoses, but it is a very heavy drug and has an unfortunate effect of causing you to feel somewhat severed or dissociated from yourself and your emotions. It is not the kind of drug that should be taken unless you absolutely need it.
May Morrison does not need lithium, but she takes it because May medicates herself not simply to deal with anxiety but to avoid dealing with any of her physical or emotional needs. When not on enough class-E to tranquilize a smaller terran May exhibits many physical behaviors that betray her immediate emotional state: she gives little kicks, curls toes, and flaps her arms among other things. When she is sad she cries so hard that she shudders. Her emotions are part of her physicality. May actually protests going on a reduced class-E regimen partially because of this, worrying that others around her will be disturbed if she shows any negative emotion in an obvious way.
Yes, this is an act of emotional repression, but May justifies it to herself because it's for the sake of others. Other people's days might be ruined if she is sad. Other people's joy might be compromised if she cannot adequately perform the right emotion in the right moment.
It's notable, again, that May runs a restaurant. Food service, hospitality, and retail are customer-facing jobs and beyond the physical labor all three require, the most intense demand of each is the emotional labor that goes into them. There is an expectation in all of these businesses that we suppress our immediate emotional state for the sake of facilitating a smooth and pleasant experience for the customer, pushing through exhaustion, depression, and frustration all in the name of creating a pleasant environment for people who are often indifferent to our existence and sometimes outright hostile. May's attitude could be seen as a holdover from our current era of food service in some ways, a lesson she has held onto long after the environment it was adapted for has collapsed.
This fact seems to elude May, and here again we see the ways in which her lower-d domestication is far less complete than it might initially appear. May might have a library at home stocked with a mix of floret, independent, and Affini authors which she uses as an example of her open mind, but she has fundamentally never understood that she is free from having to perform her emotions in such a restrained fashion for the sake of others.
Mulberry is also in many ways a repressed character, though its breaking free from this repression triggers slightly earlier than May's. Mulberry is cursed with two things that make her life as an Affini difficult: an all-consuming "hunger" to control and give pleasure to other sophonts and a lingering trauma associated with class-O xenodrugs. Mulberry's fascination with class-Os could be a whole section of this essay on its own, but for now it's sufficient to say that her history with the little drug that brings total oblivion is complicated and clearly weighs on it.
Mulberry, like May, first begins to break free of this repressed desire in chapter ten. As May violently rejects the courtship the two have begun to weave, Mulberry decides it cannot possibly live without May and rejects her rejection in turn, violently pursuing and then capturing her. It's a moment that marks the beginning of a series of dial turns of intensity for the story, each one revealing more about the degree to which our protagonists have held themselves back thus far.
On my re-read of the early chapters of Independent Establishment I noticed for the first time just how much Mulberry actually backs off after chapter ten. The entire ticking clock the rest of the story is built around - May's contract, which signs away one part after another of her trappings of independence to Mulberry - is Mulberry finding a way to hold back after feeling that she has destroyed any chance of bringing May to a place of true fulfillment as a floret.
Notably as Mulberry finally begins to shed this repression and reclaim her confidence, it reveals to May that the layer of moisture on its skin is in fact also an ATD-E. Mulberry, like May, has been using a massive dose of a drug intended to alleviate acute anxiety or emotional stress to function. Unlike May, Mulberry has actually been pressured into doing so by other Affini, a rare example of repression originating from within the Compact in the larger fandom space.
It's important to understand that while being unshackled makes both May and Mulberry more dangerous to themselves and others around them - the back half of the story after the soft ending is almost more defined by the number of Affini who are sexually coerced by Mulberry than by its ageplay/ABDL elements - the means of their repression were killing them. In the case of both characters this is metaphorical to some degree. May is in no danger of dying from an overdose of meds, but she is absolutely dying inside and starved for real friendship and connection early on. Mulberry, on the other hand, seems like she is teetering on the edge of either entering an emotional shutdown of the type that as readers we know tends to cause Affini to rebloom prematurely - the closest thing to death an Affini can experience.
Independent Establishment's thesis is that in a world with infinite resources - where the last enemy is time and even it may someday be tamed - the second to last enemy is repression. To hide away parts of yourself you find pathetic or unlovable or monstrous or even simply cringe is to fail to live in such a world, to shrink yourself into a kind of half-existence that cannot be enjoyed, only tolerated.
To do this - even for the sake of accommodating others - is tantamount to a kind of self-negation.
This is going to be a strange tangent and I apologize: in Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wind in the Door, the protagonists are pit against a force of universal evil: the Echthroi. These monstrous beings are described as being creatures that are in some way nothing, and can take control of others by exploiting the emptiness within them. They threaten not to kill the protagonists but to X them - to reduce them to a kind of empty thing, no longer part of the universe of life and knowledge.
Repression in Independent Establishment is like a form of self X-ing. It is a hollowing out of the self and a replacement with something that moves, walks, talks like you once did, but is not you. It is to take a thinking creature and replace them with a philosophical zombie.
This topic feels a bit heavy. I think it's best to move to something lighter: The literary importance of peeing your extremely thick and obvious diapers.
Part 5: The Literary Importance of Peeing Your Extremely Thick and Obvious Diapers
I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone who followed Independent Establishment up to the end of chapter thirty and then jumped off the train because the author warned you that the ABDL content was going to ramp up dramatically in the last few chapters. If this is you - if, somehow, you have encountered this essay, an essay I am not sure how widely I will be able to share - then I want you to know everything is okay. You have reached a satisfying thematic conclusion for the story. Lagnia has been unfailingly lovely to all of you.
I, however, am cruel and base in my intentions. You are all cowards, and when judgment comes at last you will not see the light of God.
This is only partially a jest on my part. I have no actual ill will towards anyone who can't handle piss and diapers in their non-consent plantfucker sci-fi erotica, we all have our limits and it's good to respect them. I do, however, want to stress that even with a neatly provided 'chicken exit' as it were from the rollercoaster ride that is Independent Establishment, the story can't be neatly severed from this kink because it is thematically relevant. If you jumped off the ride early, you have not seen some of the strongest payoff you will ever encounter anywhere.
I've spent a significant portion of the previous segments laying out what I see as the core themes of Independent Establishment - repression, alienation, and self-negation. What I have not addressed is how the story takes its core characters from a place of repression into a place of healing.
It does this, in part, through diapers.
ABDL as a kink is so core to the narrative of Independent Establishment that even in the soft ending for those who can't handle it ramping up, it also can't be excised from the story. No other kink would entirely serve the narrative purpose that ABDL serves, either.
In order to unwind the alienation May suffers from at the beginning of the story, she needs to come to terms with her own sexuality. The easiest way to demonstrate this journey - the most effective - requires her to come to terms with a kink that is not only offputting to many people but specifically requires her to demonstrate vulnerability and patheticness and a desire to be cute, traits May is absolutely terrified of showing to others for fear of being judged. This is highlighted in chapter 15, "Princess in the Mirror", when she nearly shuts down at the thought of wearing a diaper even in the context of doing it with an age regressor right beside her.
You could, theoretically, accomplish this same arc with certain other kinks as well - perhaps there's an alternate universe with a foot stuff edit of Independent Establishment, or a vore stuff, or something similar. While I grant that any of those would work at least partially, ABDL in particular serves the narrative function far better.
ABDL is a kink split across two main components - a paraphilia (for the particular texture/sound/quality of padding) and a roleplaying/regression component. Both of these are relevant in the case of May as a character. The regression and humiliation component of ABDL is obvious here - May likes being submissive and likes feeling small and helpless, but also enjoys having license to be mischievous or take control. The freedom to act childishly provided by regression allows both.
The sensory component of ABDL is also equally important, something which makes Independent Establishment relatively unusual in the halls of its particular kink. I have read a lot of diaper smut and while I've seen many stories that pull thematic relevance and character arcs from the regression component of the kink, I can name relatively few that not only highlight its sensory aspects but make them just as key a component. May is so divorced from her own desires at the beginning of Independent Establishment that she is, to some extent, in a state of sensory self-denial. When Mulberry finally forces her into padding one of the most consistent things she is forced to realize over and over is that she enjoys it physically - not simply because it arouses her but because she just likes how it feels.
In this way you could argue May's padding is as much a crucial texture of the story as evil hot chocolate and seafood and pictures of cool sticks. All of these things are sources of pure sensory pleasure that May often denies to herself because she feels she cannot indulge in them without revealing that she has preferences, desires, and needs that do not revolve around the needs or opinions of others - something which terrifies her to her core.
I would be remiss not to speak about the other major diaper-enjoyer of our story. Mulberry prefers to regress others rather than be regressed, but ABDL is equally important to understanding her as a character and part of why this specific kink is so well suited to Independent Establishment. In the theoretical vore or foot stuff edit of the story, you could retain some of May's slow reclaiming of her own pleasure, but you would lose so much of Mulberry I'm not sure you'd even have the same character at the end.
Mulberry is tied to the Karcade, the oops-all-regressed-terrans ship, by her backstory. This is not an incidental choice because it informs much of not only why Mulberry begins the story in the state she's in, but also why other affini react to her in the way they do. Mulberry was given the grim duty of administering class-O identity-destroying xenodrugs to the regressed sophonts on board the Karcade, a task which paradoxically she found physically euphoric and emotionally destructive. Her obvious joy in such grim work alienates her from other affini, but masks her true nature: Mulberry is an extremely doting caregiver whose love for her charges is possessive and overwhelming.
Without the particular context of the Karcade - without her preference for caring for regressed terrans in particular - Mulberry loses a great deal of texture as a character. Her desire to nurture and care for smaller creatures is most obviously expressed through her love of regressing May and alternating between caring for her as an absolutely ravenous domme and an overbearing helicopter mom who keeps taking cute photos of her toddler.
I love this about Independent Establishment. It's so rare to see a story approach ABDL both with a deep understanding of the kink and what feels like a fresh lens, finding a way to both highlight its themes through indulging in the kink and finding new ways to let those of us into the kink have our brains slightly fried (I am never going to not think about class-A powder or May waking up in a straitjacket as she gets unregressed or the fact that May somehow gets more effectively dominant the longer she's in diapers, which is just really funny).
Actually on that note I do have at least one more note I should hit:
Part 6: Good Girls (Don't) Dom
I've spent a good amount of this text so far laying out the ways that May is alienated from her own sexuality and desires. However, I've mostly done so through the lens of her submissive desires and needs for sensory stimulation. I have deliberately left off her genuine desire to dominate others.
Looking at May through the lens of her desire to dominate is interesting because of all of the aspects of her life she is obviously not doing well in, providing dominance to others is something the May of early chapters clearly believes she is good at. Even as late as the post-chapter-30 "May finally learns to enjoy being a floret" arc, she still insists that she was fine as a dominant, that she was good at it, that she should have been allowed to continue.
May is obviously mistaken about this. While she's certainly attentive and skilled and thoughtful as a dominant, she takes no real pleasure in it. The few times we see her dominate another before Mulberry takes her, every single instance is fraught with self-recrimination. May only asserts her boundaries as a dominant once, and she is immediately punished for it and swallows her own discomfort as much as she can. This is not a healthy dominant's behavior, especially when contrasted with the effortless way in which Mulberry approaches the role.
A level one reading of May might lead readers of the early chapters to believe she is not a dominant at all - that any interest she has in the role comes entirely from her desire to make others around her happy. It is notable that when May begins attempting to negotiate a power-sharing relationship with Mulberry, she admits she wants to dominate Mulberry not because she has any actual desire to but because she feels like being Mulberry's full-time submissive and pet is her getting "all the good bits".
That is the level one reading of May. Going one level deeper, May is obviously very capable of being a dominant when she is not completely burnt out.
The best early example of this occurs in a conversation between May and Asherah Riker, herself a bit of a switch:
I chuckled through the tears and the scent of cloves filled my nostrils, giving her a look. “No fair, you can’t just perfume a smile on my face.”
Her head tilted in a half shrug. “I didn’t.” Rows of leaves raised from the top of her head, forming two shaggy ears. “But if you would like me to…”
Another smile came to my face as I finished the tea, setting it down and looking at the giant xeno.
Riker looked like many things, I didn’t really know her story in full, but unfair, ironically, did not appear to be one of them. There was a patience to her, a slow, almost Terran way of thinking.
“That’s very sweet, but if my face was going somewhere dark and damp I would prefer it to be while I’m yanking your leash.” I grinned to her.
Huh, I meant every word of that.
-Independent Establishment by Lagnia, chapter 27
May's surprise in how genuinely she means this flirtation is telling in more ways than one. First, it obviously throws into doubt every moment before this one in which she's expressed similar sentiments, exposing them once again for the posturing they were. Second, it demonstrates that the falseness of those earlier moments comes not from May having no dominant desires whatsoever but from May having neither energy nor genuine desire to dominate in them.
A curious thing that occurs from chapter thirty's soft ending onwards is that May multiple times acts as a direct facilitator for Mulberry's domination of other Affini. This could be read as merely being an extension of her submissive desires - May is, in fact, acting as Mulberry's vessel in many of these moments. However, the longer the pattern persists the more obvious it becomes that May has wants that can only be filled by being dominant.
Very specifically, May prefers being dominant sporadically and as a form of role reversal or when her mood has been sparked by cuteness aggression. Her purely submissive role with Mulberry gives her a place to fall back to, and her desire to tease, fluster, and generally - to steal the story's own verbiage - "be a little shit" is allowed to exist in its purest form.
May is not dominant, but she is an A+ brat who frequently enjoys bullying other submissives, and it shows. Only after she's hit the heights of humiliated submission - permanently padded, turned into a silkmoth, dressed in cute little outfits chosen explicitly by Mulberry - is May actually able to dominate others in a way that feels natural and joyous.
Part of what made this story so special for me personally is that May's experiences echo my own. The first time i offered to dominate someone else and genuinely meant it, I experienced the exact surprise May exhibits in the quoted segment. It's a very peculiar thing to realize that your understanding of your own desires and sexuality is incomplete, and it can be disorienting. Coming to that closer understanding is always worth it, and I cannot stress enough how much I enjoy the experience of seeing a piece of myself reflected back in fiction.
Mulberry as well plays into this. While she might initially seem opposed to May domming at all given her incredible disinterest in being dominated herself, Mulberry delights in enabling every single one of May's wildest brat escapades. By the end of the story she has deliberately unshackled May's ability to curse specifically so the two can have more fun playing games of May misbehaving and being corrected.
I cannot stress enough how good these two really are for each other.
Part 7: Conclusions (for now) and Colonial Power
I really could continue writing this essay forever.
When I first started writing I assumed this was going to be something short, in the vein of 4-5000 words. I have now almost doubled that count. To make matters worse, I could probably double it again if I do not find a stopping point. I have so much more I could say if I don't mind repeating myself occasionally. I haven't even dipped into May's history as a partisan and how some of her self-loathing is based on trying to atone for crimes she's already long been absolved of, or how May's relationship with Physalis is obviously a "you two are bad for each other but genuinely love each other" masterclass, or Emile (god, Emile, My Beloved).
I have to stop somewhere, though, and I think it's only fitting that I stop in a place that's near and dear to my heart: metatextuality.
Dame Harmony, author of Lin Ralazinziq and one of the best writers in this entire space, has already written and published an essay of her own celebrating Independent Establishment. If this essay reaches a hypothetical reader who hasn't yet read hers, I urge you to do so. In "Independent Establishment, Institutionalism and the Nature of Mistakes", Harmony makes the case that Independent Establishment cannot be a foundational work of the Human Domestication Guide setting, but only because it requires so much knowledge and familiarity with the setting to truly appreciate.
I agree with Dame Harmony in this matter. While she presents the challenging nature of Mulberry as a protagonist as an example of this - walking non-consent identity-death-drug-deliverer that it is - I would actually like to submit something else.
Independent Establishment is a story about the Affini Compact being confronted with itself and not knowing what to do about it.
One of the trends I've seen among other readers of this story is that May draws immediate sympathy and affection, which is by design. May is a human, she is by her nature as the protagonist immediately relatable to us. She is also dealing with largely human problems - toxic "friend" groups, unfulfilled desires, exhaustion, disappointment, fear. She is easy to imprint on and identify with.
Mulberry is in some ways a harder bridge to cross. May eventually transgresses the boundaries of others, but only under Mulberry's direct influence. Mulberry, on the other hand, is a serial transgressor. She violates May's consent in a way that is not unusual for the setting, but is presented in a way that makes it clear how shocking and violating it is. Her desires for May are always frightening, and a real fear heading into the last few chapters of the story is the very real possibility that Mulberry will destroy May's identity utterly for her own pleasure or based on her own opinions about what is good for her. She's threatened it multiple times by that point, after all.
What I find interesting about this is how much of this disconnect, this fear of Mulberry, comes from the fact that she is bad at socially performing the role of an Affini. Yes, Mulberry takes May without her consent, but the Affini compact as a whole was built to enable exactly this. Even those who volunteer for domestication within the compact are often compelled and coerced into the vines of an Affini, and the major criterion for becoming a floret - beyond being a danger to oneself or others - is more or less "does a particular Affini want you badly enough to just take you".
This is part of the appeal of Human Domestication Guide as a setting, and I am not approaching that aspect of it from a place of moral judgment or finger-wagging. I just want to point out that Mulberry is, to some extent, what we're here for. Minus the masking, minus the facade, the Compact in many ways is just doing what Mulberry does on a grander scale with only slightly more paperwork.
One of the hardest axioms of the setting for new HDG readers to come to terms with is that this is an explicitly imperialist fantasy. The Affini genuinely see themselves as stewards of the future of all sentient life, and they are very willing to annihilate and assimilate parts of cultures they see as incompatible with their own even as they preserve the lives and happiness of all other living creatures. This is, by any metric, monstrous. It stands as a stark counterpoint against the axiom of benevolence, the guarantee of real happiness to every character in the setting (even if it comes through unethical mechanisms).
How would one resolve this contradiction? If you had to make a person who embodies this monstrousness and benevolence and synthesizes them into a single ideology and path of action which is internally consistent with itself, what would they act like?
""I devised a plan that would give my floret what she needed, and I gave it to her. She is whole now, as am I, The Wild has been fulfilled to the—”
Little Holly wobbled, the biggest smile on her face as she almost fell, at least five vines surged to catch her, and lay her down gently in the vines of her draconian mother.
"—Fullest. Look around you, at the happy, satisfied faces. This is the Moon Gate festival, it exists to give our kind a set of surprises for a night, to relax, to be tamed, did I not do that?"
"Veridia that is unfair, none of them consented and—"
"Would you hesitate for even a moment to give any sophont, regardless of their species abundance? Would you hesitate for even a microsecond to give someone the drug that would make them happier?"
I flared my roots. "Because if you would. I would call you a coward, I would march you to a domestication center myself."
"Veridia there are rules!""
-Independent Establishment Chapter 44, Lagnia
In this scene, Mulberry defends a non-consensual rampage she has just gone on through a festival of while under the influence of a Class-O drug tailored for Affini. And you know something?
Within the context of Human Domestication Guide as a setting, consent is a virtue the Affini do not respect if it conflicts with ultimate happiness. The Compact's justification for this is that happiness is more important than autonomy, that true freedom and autonomy can only be found with all of your needs met - and if it requires violating your freedom to meet your needs, violating your autonomy and freedom is not just permissible but the direct obligation of every Affini.
In a world that operates according to this logic - a world that is truly organized around this principle - Veridia Mulberry is one of the few Affini who is willing to apply this philosophy consistently. Mulberry's hunger for control and domination and to give her love to others keeps her from fully retreating into a genteel sort of green man's burden approach to the compact's philosophy, urges her to see other Affini through the exact same lens she views xenosophont life.
She struggles with this. I've re-read Independent Establishment twice in the course of my writing and on each successive re-read, I was struck by how often Mulberry is tempted to hold herself back or begin masking again, how scared she is initially to really show May who she is. How cathartic it is in the last group of chapters when Mulberry admits she will never be normal - how what initially read as her surrendering now reads as a triumphant moment, a decision to truly be herself and damn the consequences, because what she is, who she is, isn't something to hide.
Because the Compact desperately does need something like Mulberry.
Mulberry's refusal to mask even when she finds herself capable of doing so at the tale's conclusion is cathartic partially because it's wonderful to see anyone reject masking, and partially because she refuses to engage in any kind of hypocrisy. She unflinchingly stands up for her ideals, argues that they are in accordance with the larger goal of the Compact, and calls two different shipminds cowards for scolding her.
This, I think, is the root of why I find Mulberry admirable. It is afraid of itself, not really because it ignores xenosophont consent but because it hungers. Because it understands the mission of the compact, the entire Affini ethos, not as a detached philosopher but as a creature within it, a creature who lives to bring love and pleasure to others through subjugation and control. And it refuses to pretend that in a world built around facilitating this that there are barriers it shouldn't cross, that it should treat other Affini who would benefit from its ministrations any differently from pets.
It's easy to love May. Based on reader reaction, it can be harder to love Mulberry. But I love her so much. I love her not because she's done nothing wrong or because she's a big scary domme lady, but because she's something infinitely more beautiful than those two things by the end of the story: truly, deeply honest about herself and what she wants.
I love Veridia Mulberry. I love May. And I love this story. I love that it turns a mirror onto a thing I love and makes me see it in a new way. I love how its intertextuality with other stories both draws depth from the characters it includes and adds depth back to them in turn.
And I love that it makes me want to live. To embrace myself, my own desires, and my needs with confidence. To be honest about the world I want to make, the role I want to play in the lives of my friends and partners, and to pursue that happiness.
Independent Establishment is the story of a woman who loses everything she's built and instead receives everything she needs. And I long for a world where that describes all of us.
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turnnoffyourmind
