Professional craft brewer, modular synthesizer nerd, queer trans lady, cross-stitch bitch, plampt trash, loudmouth cornball. Age 44, she/her. Check out my music here!
I don't particularly care about someone not liking my work. But as a gender fluid transfem there is a special circle in hell for you if you are so rotted in your soul on line go up metrics that you devote any brain cells to being mad about the fact that I or anyone else creates multiple versions of queer literature where characters have different pronouns and presentations because it increases the effective word count written. Go let an LLM spit out novels of slop if you think the only point of art is to write a bigger number.
If you're trans and you've ever put out into the world that you're mad about someone else playing with their own gender in fiction then I suggest reaching into that place where your heart used to be and filling it with sawdust and glue so you can be preserved for future generations as a cautionary tale of what isolating yourself in a toxic echo chamber will do to you.
I usually don't take the bait on this sort of thing, but literally choke on an entire bucket of legos if you think policing someone else's gender joy over AO3 numbers is a good use of your finite time in this world, it'll be faster and more painless than letting the fetid mire you've steeped yourself in like an odious teabag do the trick.
Just to be clear, if you are at the stage of fandom discourse where you are comparing allosexual trans lesbians to straight people it is time to touch grass.
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 ðŸ¤)
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
I don't often talk about this but I do truly love our community. The HDG community is so full of wonderfully creative and welcoming people. People who are always eager to help and collaborate. People who are always so excited about one another's ideas and creations. This community has introduced me to some of my best friends, to the love of my life, helped me discover so many new and important things about myself. It's changed so much over the years, having gone from a handful of people on a tiny private server to a community of thousands. And I'm really proud to have been one of the people that helped build it.
It hasn't always been smooth sailing. At times, there's been drama, arguments, hurt feelings. I've had my share of night crying over something someone said to me, or feeling like my feelings had gone disregarded, unheard, or like a crucial part of the community that I love was been lost, or changed beyond recognition. I've gained and lost valued friends. People I truly care about, love and respect have both as individuals and as creators have walked away from the community. Sometimes simply because they outgrew it, other times because of hurt. I've spent more hours than I can count mediating disagreements, trying to mend bridges, some of them fixable, others not so much.
But even through the worst of it, I love this community, I love the shared work that so many people have helped create. I love the promise of HDG, a living, breathing creative space built in collaboration with what is now hundreds of creators. Some, like myself have been creating for about as long as HDG has been a shared setting. Others are brand new. Nothing excites me more than seeing someone new come in and blow people away with a fresh take on the setting. Nothing excites me more than seeing my friends, and fellow respected creators gush over a new work (especially if it's one of mine :)).
To me, HDG feels like it's in a renaissance. New ideas flourishing, new authors creating.
And despite the bumps in the road, despite the good old days I often miss so dearly, I'm so glad to have seen this community grow, and to still be a part of it. Because it feels stronger, more friendly, and more welcoming than ever. And that's because of people like you, creating in it, reading it, sharing your love and appreciation for the creators. So thank you for helping make the community I love so great.
I really love hdg. I really love the axioms, and the versatile flexibility the narratives provide, as well as the unique challenges 'living in paradise' entails when the benevolent dorks that saved you are amazing and wonderful, but each have their own little flaws.
I really love the choice being taken from you, I love the care, the tender touch of vines on skin, I love the freedom that comes with entering its pages or penning them yourself.
What I love even more is the sophonts you get to work with when you make it. You can do so many cool things, like connecting different pieces of a lego set or building something with your friend. It feels like that wonder from so long ago that the simple act of creating felt good, unburdened by the pressures of anything else.
It's a sandbox, right? It's okay if your castle looks a little weird, mine fell over a few times.
I get sad when people leave the sandbox, but it's okay of course. The sand's kinda rough and sticky and that's not good sensory for everyone.
I really like making it, and genuinely if you've ever had an interest in the plampts I reccomend you take a peek at some works, and maybe write your own. I think something really special about the setting is how encouragement and love are its crowning jewels. There's no entry level position required, you can start from anywhere and build your own castle.
reflecting on the last year in hdg, its really amazing what has been created. like, this is without any question the best the setting has ever been. just trying to come up with a comprehensive list of my favorites from among stuff that came out since last december is an impossible task, so I'm not even going to try. maybe ill make a massive list of my favorites from this year. I couldn't possibly do a writeup for all of them.
1000 stories in one year. its insane, its beautiful, its wonderful, its a little terrifying. The range of tones this shared world can express just keeps growing, and it didnt come at the cost of anything. there is more of every niche than ever before.
It's inevitable of course, that since the median hdg fic was released within the last 14 months, that the vast majority of the BEST of the setting has come out this year compared to every other.
I think my favorite thing about whats happened is that this explosion of creativity means that so many of my favorites this year, like Personhood, Hypogeal, Sunk Cost and why it's a Fallacy, A Prince And His Lillies, No Fate But What They Make, and Independent Establishment, were all from relative newcomers, and in many cases the author's first ever story.
So many creative creative projects like this become bogged down in entrenched and enfranchised oldheads (like me, god, i count as an oldhead now, how terrifying) but HDG has truly shown it relies on no one. The thing that binds the setting together is not the clout of individuals but a shared love of storytelling in a world constructed piecemeal from literally hundreds of hands who have contributed in many ways, big and small. And ain't that just fitting of the affini compact itself?
Every single person(and pet) who took a peice of themselves and did the terrifying thing of hitting post on ao3 did something amazing, and everyone part of this beautiful living thing should be proud of what we have created. it makes me so happy and proud to be part of the most vibrant writing community ive ever seen, and here's to 2026 being even better.
One of my favorite @sheepwavehdg stories, Hope for the Future, is a tale of a fabric artist and the extremely hungry Affini who stalks her. As somebody who loves to cross-stitch, creating my own rendition of the eponymous fabric art from the story proved to be irresistible!
The fabric is a special piece from a small Bulgarian shop: https://easystitch.net/shop/starry-night-aida-fabric/
Read Hope for the Future here: https://archiveofourown.gay/collections/SheepwaveHDG/works/56971246
44,115 words as of chapter 8; the planned scope for this story is long
Ace-Friendly: So far, yes
Noteworthy tags: Cotyledons, and also
When the captain of an illegal SETI operation awakens paralyzed in a mysterious laboratory, she can't remember how she got there or what has happened—but her owner does. Now she must navigate this strange, frightening new life as a cotyledon—something between a test subject and cherished pet—all the while unlocking her forgotten past piece by piece with the help of her affini guardian’s hypnotic bioluminescence and unconditional, mandatory love.
A story about being helpless and becoming okay with that.
This is a longform hurt/comfort with heavy emphasis on hypnosis, conditioning, medfet, and dollification. CW for surgery, PTSD, implied suicide, and minor character death. Hypogeal is set in the Human Domestication Guide universe, though no previous works are required reading to enjoy it.
The first thing that caught my eye about this story was the fact that SlyLittlePrincess was beta reading it, and recommending it the way folks on the community discord recommend starting HRT.
The second thing that caught my eye about this story was seeing reading channels on multiple servers I'm on absolutely explode looking at it.
So, what the hell. Let's read a bit of it...
...What do you mean it's suddenly midnight? Why am I sobbing violently into my pillow?
As said yesterday, I am lighting the beacon on this one. We have another example of a new author stepping into the scene, and crafting something so insane that the entire community blows up about it. This story is doing something fairly unique, very painful, and incredibly potent.
The rest of this review will contain at least some spoilers below the cut, so if you haven't started on this one, do yourself a favor and start on it. I'm calling it now, this is the next Independent Establishment. This is the next How A Floret Finds Out. Honestly, that doesn't even go far enough. This has the potential to be something like the next The Place Where We Can Stop Running. Like, I'm coming right out and saying that, if it continues at this level, this is a story that will have an impact on what Human Domestication Guide is, on the stories that get told in the future of this setting, and I say that in the most complimentary way I can.
Go read Hypogeal. To call it incredible feels like selling it short.
More analysis (and spoilers!) under the cut.
The basic framing device of Hypogeal is a cotyledon recovering from an implantation surgery where something went wrong, having more or less completely lost their memory. The story is split between an affini caring for them, and hypnotic regression into the protagonist's shattered memories.
This dance is important, because the protagonist's memories primarily involve watching their crew die around them as they're stranded in deep space with no realistic hope of rescue after a series of very human snap decisions and mistakes. It is a harrowing story to tell. And it's all foreshadowed with devastating precision and care. This is stupidly hard to do right, and you can tell it's working if you want to laugh one moment and wail in pain the next, which... is very much the Hypogeal experience.
The horrifying experiences on the Last Signal are also, importantly, real and human. It shares this crucial quality with From Pawn To Princess, where the events of the prologue are heinous and horrifying and cruel, but they're heinous in ways that make sense, both for an uncaring capitalist hellscape and for a group of people doing their best to survive in a desperate situation. Things are bad, but they're not bad out of malice or evil, just the uncaring logic of a thousand algorithmic bean-counters who can't conceptualize you as a person because it'd make their jobs impossible. The situation is dire, but these people care about each other - they just end up making terrible snap decisions under severe duress.
Y'know what's really different from From Pawn To Princess (very minor spoilers for that here, by the by)?
When the affini show up in From Pawn To Princess (and if you haven't grok'd that this comparison is high praise for Hypogeal, uh, now you know why I keep comparing it to one of my favorite stories in the entire setting), they fix things. They have the medical technology, they have the tools needed, and things get better almost immediately. The drama shifts from "will I die horribly" to "how can I manage to understand and live in this new world; how can I accept that things actually are better".
But this is a cotyledon story. So when what's left of our bedraggled crew gets rescued by the affini, things are not just suddenly okay. The affini can't just fix everything, can't just make everything okay. They can and do try their absolute best, but the required knowledge must be built up before they can truly help in the ways we're used to. They can't even communicate at first. There's a moment in chapter 7 where, without wishing to spoil too much, this reality comes crashing down in a way that left me stunned. Without words. GOD DAMMIT. FUCK.
By the by, can I just pause to say that the scenes of the two species desperately trying to figure out how to communicate with each other with extremely limited information is impossibly clever from both perspectives? It's not the only incredibly clever thing in this story, but it's one I wanted to pause and draw attention to, because holy shit it's so fucking smart. Gives me the same feeling I had watching the scene from Apollo 13 (1995) where they desperately have to jury-rig the CO2 filters to survive. I watched that movie when I was a kid. Reading that chapter gave me goosebumps. And then it went ahead and twisted the knife in a way that made me bawl like an infant. FUCK.
I am deeply curious how the tone of this story will shift as we get further into it, but I trust Astra to nail it, because... well... look at this shit! It's incredible! It's hard to even describe how good Hypogeal is. I keep stumbling over my words, trying to find the right way to express these feelings, and I keep falling back on that same response: loud, angry swearing.
Fuck. FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK! ALSKDJFALSKJDLAKDN;LMKCNV;BNSFEDJLKGHNSAERUOIGHE§U$R%HGNKJ§EHNGJEN!!!!! STACKABLE IDAHO! FUCK!
I have. No idea. How this community keeps consistently attracting this level of talent. Seeing just how insanely fucking good this and openAngel's opening salvo are is humbling; the skill on display is palpable. I cannot wait for more of this story, and I am excited to see more of this author.
1 and 3, without a doubt. They give me the most freedom and the others have some serious caveats.
Especially #5. I feel like if I brought Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut back from the dead, they'd look at everything around us and go "why the FUCK did you bring me back for THIS"
cuz I knew I'd be punished? duh! like c'mon, boys aren't supposed to dress like girls or want to, I would have been reprimanded, don't pretend I wouldn't have.
"uh huh. and why didn't you say anything about this when you were in the infinitely precarious position of being a child with practically no rights surrounded by adults who could have and would have and maybe even did gaslight and discount and argue over and bully and emotionally or physically or sexually abuse you into complying with their ideas of who you ought to be? hmm? why didn't you mention this at the time in your life when nobody would have taken you seriously or believed that you are an honest and trustworthy narrator of your experiences & identity? huh? 🤡"
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