Shebang, OK?

The miscellaneous ramblings of an autistic dork. She/Her. Minors & bigots DNI. Feel free to ask me questions!

[shebangasylum]

About me

I’m Alexandra Shebang, call me Allie. I’m a twenty-something Australian trans woman. author, programmer, nerd, and anarchosocialist with a low tolerance for corpofascist bullshit, and a desire to burn our tyrannical oppressors on the metaphorical pyre of progress.

I’m also ADHD, Autistic, PDID, and often a massive girlfailure.

My big interests- and what I blog about- are the Human Domestication Guide setting, the Sisters of Dorley novels, science fiction, and political nonsense that I have the desire to fight back against.

Also occasionally the odd bad take, but we’ve all been there at some point.

Feel free to ask me anything, seriously, I am a font of opinions.

[shebangasylum]

You have to wonder how the rest of the species already domesticated by the Affini reacted to the Terran Domestication Campaign

Like, you have to wonder how the majority of the rest of the independent nonhuman sophonts reacted to the discovery of a new, undomesticated civilisation who were beginning a futile attempt to remain feral.

Xenra #1: did you hear? There are these new sophonts called Terrans, and the Affini are on the way to domesticate them. They don’t stand a chance!

Xenra #2: *rolling their eyes* in other news, water is wet. Of course they don’t stand a chance of beating the Affini. How long do think they’ll last? I’m gonna give these Terrans a year.

Xenra #1: From what I know, they’re a bipedal, omnivorous species of warm blooded vertebrates with no real natural weapons bar some stubby teeth, and no real special attributes. They’re not particularly technologically advanced either. A year is very generous.

Xenra #2: Huh. Y’know. i’ll give them six months, but even that’s a stretch.

[shebangasylum]

Addressing the lack of children in HDG

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

[cloverthefloret]

I think it's mostly the fear of putting children in a kink setting while large swaths of this community is trans and trans folks get accused of being groomers all the time.

So even attempting on putting something that could even vaguely resemble grooming (and considering many pieces of hdg writing insist that any sentient creature will want to become subservient to the affini that's kinda hard) could cause some of that to spill out into other areas and us who love this world don't want to have it be associated online with that kind of stuff.

I personally headcannon that if florets have kids those kids can be sent to a special boarding school that lets them grow into proper independants outside of affini influence so they can choose for themselves when they grow up, kinda like those alternative schools where students learn about what they're passionate about. Chances for recreation and friendships, found family and growing up to be the best version of yourself you can be.

[shebangasylum]

Here’s the thing. I, as a trans author, already got two of my non-kink, non-HDG (in fact, pre-HDG, as I was not involved with the community back in November 2024) attacked by right wing nutters who accused me of being a pedophile and a groomer for daring to write a cyberpunk story involving children in a high school. And writing an underage lesbian romance. Like, their claims were groundless, but they still did it irrespective of the fact that this was absurd and solely because I was a trans person.

I get the desire to fly under the radar; but bigots gonna bigot no matter whether or not you hige them reason to

[mint-offical]

They want to put data centers in Australia, you know that place that runs out of water? That place? The one that is dry and known for fire? If only we had a system that said how bad those fires would be if they broke out that advises when you least want to start a fire to do harm. But honestly- It's just disapointing. Fuck Abeneasy, I don't respect him enough to look up his name cos fr. The two major parties suck, there is a reassion I vote minor ones. Fusion and Soicalist.

I'm banning myself from complaining without offering a solution:

Make a Tax Deductible Donation to Greenpeace Australia Pacific

Together, we can speak out for our planet. Greenpeace works independently, powered by supporters just like you. Your donation helps to ensur

They tend to work with legal teams to make things happen, love these guys.

[shebangasylum]

[shebangasylum]

The issue with HDG as a shared setting (2/2)

Whateley Academy is, nowadays, incredibly obscure, so I'm pretty sure this is the first time a lot of people are hearing of it. As a short summation, Whateley Academy is a shared storytelling setting started by a group of authors including Dianne Castle (best known for her works on Twisting the Hellmouth) who were active in early noughties trans writing groups around 2004. Whateley is now twenty years old, and while the majority of the original authors have since died, disappeared, or simply lost interest in the setting, it's still going strong with the addition of new blood from its niche fanbase. Fun Allie fact, I actually have a lot of connections to Whateley while not having ever been an official member of the writing team. I have a credit on one of ElrodW's stories, I was the first person to run a Discord server for the setting prior to COVID as a quasi convention known as Crystal Con (yes, I know, kinda stupid, in my defence I was sixteen or something), and I was formerly a fairly active contributer under my old nome de guire of Crazy Minh. Anyway, I'm getting off topic. As a shared setting, Whateley has a lot more in common with HDG when it comes to being a trans-focused setting. However, the main area where it differs from HDG is in the closed group of canon authors, and in having strict guidelines to actually become a canon author. The shared setting also directly matters, as the universe has been, for the last twenty years, working glacially towards a big confrontation with a nebulous puppetmaster working behind the scenes. The characters involved cross paths regularly because the setting is largely confined to the high school campus that is Whateley Academy, and it all comes together to be an actual shared writing universe. HDG's main issues as a shared setting is that there is literally no vetting process, and the shared universe largely does not matter outside of the odd crossover between different authors' works. Anyone can submit a HDG story, and so long as it complies with the axioms- a requirement that isn't even strictly necessary to begin with due to the lack of vetting- it is considered canon. The issue is that the canon of HDG is also largely gatekept by the popular authors, with the greater canon largely only becoming a thing when the in-group decides to feature other authors characters in their stories. As a shared setting, HDG fails massively. And let's be real, if I, as someone who was banned from the official server, writes a axiom compliant story and the only reason it isn't canon is that I'm exiled from the cliche, this is not a shared universe. It's fanfiction with extra steps and a mean girls cliche.

[shebangasylum]

The issue with HDG as a shared setting (1/2)

One of the long standing discussions I've had with my girlfriend regarding the setting is that HDG, for all the Lorets and the setting's most popular authors will try to claim that this is a shared setting with axioms that must be enforced lest a work not fit into the canon is that this does not hold up in either practice or examination. First off, let me make something clear. I think it is important to respect the community you are writing for. The authors who go on and on about "not respecting the axioms" and "writing whatever I want to write" are, for the most part, incredibly disrespectful with how they treat the setting. Most if not all of the stories that claim to break with the axioms are just ragebait that happens to feature someone winning against the Affini, which is just not what most of us are here to read or write. My issues with the axioms are in how their abiding is used to create an in crowd, in the form of the HDG official discord. Let's be real, the official server is 90% responsible for the community division that has been plaguing this community since Glitchy and MS-Teagan were outed. Their insistance that "this isn't fanfiction" and "works are only canon if you're in the official server" and "any discussion of the axioms will get you banned" is an authoritarian attempt to ensure that only their voices are heard by the majority of the HDG fanbase. It is not helped that the majority of the big name authors in the fandom are either in that server or are actively contributing to this behaviour. Other shared universes like The SCP Foundation or Whateley Academy have strict guidelines for actually submitting canon work and obtaining authorship. In the case of The SCP Foundation, it's fairly open for fans to submit works to the setting, but every new SCP goes through a rather stringent peer review process before being added to the wiki and being given a official number. SCP is also, similar to HDG, rather loose when it comes to the canon and allows for flexibility with the setting.

[shebangasylum]

Addressing the lack of children in HDG

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

[lllinens]

No like PLEASE end this oh my goodness 🤦🏻‍♀️ what a colossal waste of money it’s so clear the US have no intention of delivering any of this…they have absolutely no respect for the deal…

Australia has already committed hundreds of billions of dollars over the lifetime of AUKUS. The delivery of the schedule is unreasonably long, with the first Aus built submarines not expected till 2040.

The plan depends heavily on the US submarine industrial base increasing production, which has recurrently struggled to meet the existing targets. Meanwhile, Australia is paying substantial amounts upfront while much of the capability remains years or decades away.

And this doesn’t even cover the fact that strategic circumstances could change dramatically before the fleet even arrives… on top of that this new bs of accepting secondhand ships is an even bigger blow…and it says a lot about the US view of the deal..

[shebangasylum]

not to mention that the Virginia-class submarines have a per-hull costs of around $2.8 billion USD, meaning that we’re paying at least forty times the price for each of these subs; and we’re replacing our six Collins-class ships with three vessels that have already been used and thus will have a much shorter lifespan and reduced maximum depth.

[shebangasylum]

Reminder that AUKUS was a $370B AUD agreement to be paid out over the next ten years where we were promised a fleet of shiny new nuclear attack subs

laughs in “wow, I totally could never have possibly seen this coming” $370 billion aussie dollars, ladies and gentlemen, over ten years! $37 billion dollars a year to the United States, and instead of ten shiny new nuclear subs, we get three second hand Virginia-class rustbuckets that the US has already flogged to hell and back!

Truly, Donald Trump is the master of the art of the deal!

Like, holy shit, your taxpayer money at work, getting stolen by a foreign ally in return for second hand trash.

[shebangasylum]

Fighting Anti-Trans legislation in Australia

To date, Australia has been one of the few western nations not to suffer the indignancy of legislation designed to make life for trans people a living hell. In the US, and in the UK, the introduction of laws that have cracked down on the right of existence of trans people, restricted our ability to use public facilities, and made us liable to discrimination and brutality on a scale that has not been seen for eighty years.

This week, in the Australian senate, a private member’s bill was introduced by a member of the Nationals Party. This bill aims to introduce a binary definition of sex, and to exclude transgender Australians from using bathrooms that align with their gender, from competing in gendered sports, and open us up to harassment by excluding us from the protection of the Sex Discrimination Act.

This act has been met so far with a resounding lack of effective defence by our elected officials who would otherwise support us. Labour and our progressive independent parties have been floundering and refusing to take action while right wing fascists like Senator Mikalea Cash have been able to walk right over them by spouting familiar rhetoric like “define a woman” and “biological males are not woman”.

It is vital that we fight back, and that transphobia is not allowed a new footing in yet another nation.

If you see this post in your dashboard, I ask that you help spread the word by reblogging, by liking, and by engaging. I also ask that you sign the following petition by Equality Australia, and encourage other people in your social circle to do so.

Equality Australia

We use legal, policy and communications expertise - backed by the people power of our community - to ensure decision-makers deliver for the

Together we can make sure that the same rhetoric, hatred, and bigotry that has infested the world’s largest superpower is not allowed to infect our island nation.

[shebangasylum]

Fighting Anti-Trans legislation in Australia

To date, Australia has been one of the few western nations not to suffer the indignancy of legislation designed to make life for trans people a living hell. In the US, and in the UK, the introduction of laws that have cracked down on the right of existence of trans people, restricted our ability to use public facilities, and made us liable to discrimination and brutality on a scale that has not been seen for eighty years.

This week, in the Australian senate, a private member’s bill was introduced by a member of the Nationals Party. This bill aims to introduce a binary definition of sex, and to exclude transgender Australians from using bathrooms that align with their gender, from competing in gendered sports, and open us up to harassment by excluding us from the protection of the Sex Discrimination Act.

This act has been met so far with a resounding lack of effective defence by our elected officials who would otherwise support us. Labour and our progressive independent parties have been floundering and refusing to take action while right wing fascists like Senator Mikalea Cash have been able to walk right over them by spouting familiar rhetoric like “define a woman” and “biological males are not woman”.

It is vital that we fight back, and that transphobia is not allowed a new footing in yet another nation.

If you see this post in your dashboard, I ask that you help spread the word by reblogging, by liking, and by engaging. I also ask that you sign the following petition by Equality Australia, and encourage other people in your social circle to do so.

Equality Australia

We use legal, policy and communications expertise - backed by the people power of our community - to ensure decision-makers deliver for the

Together we can make sure that the same rhetoric, hatred, and bigotry that has infested the world’s largest superpower is not allowed to infect our island nation.

[shebangasylum]

Story idea

Renowned feral breaker Affini's floret gets killed by feralist insurgents during the domestication of a planet, the insurgents manage to escape, Affini goes on a rampage of revenge and has to be domesticated as a result.

Name of Iohannes Wick, third bloom, he/him.

It could be a four-part story with a spinoff too!

[shebangasylum]

If HDG is a sneaky way of the Affini doing the preemptive work of domesticating our planet

Then why the frell are they blueballing me, domesticate me already

I need to be kibty.

[hope-system-hdg]

We're already here??? Ask your local plural hdg fan :3

-🌹Rosalea Carminia, Third Bloom (Fae/Faer)

[shebangasylum]

lol, I have one of u lot too.

[shebangasylum]

Domestic Cat, Ion is a domestic cat named ion. it is the floret of a big spaceship affini, because spaceships are somehow the first thing that came to my mind when i thought of this

Photography Synthesis. is a synthetic (digitized) photographer. they also synthesize xenodrugs of course.

Terror of the Accord and Affinity to the Compact are names for fics i wanna make someday:tm:. Someday. when? Good Question, i have a ton of other stuff i wanna do

floret florist. their flower shop is also their affini. =)

xenosophont astronomer named something that sounds like plantfucker. part of first contact with the affini, hoped that she'd be made a floret. responded to being pet by petting the affini back and was florted within the hour

this isn't mine, but. restaurant called fried florets that specializes in. florets (as in, the parts of plants, not the pets). after the compact arrived a bunch of florets went to it thinking it would fry their brains, so now they have to make recipes with a bunch of xenodrugs

human named equinox who knows what horses (equine) are and spends a lot of time trying to tell others what a horse is

...yes

[shebangasylum]

lol, I’ll put whatever I want at the header of my posts, Raqi

A) actually, miss “I socked the HDG discord and they banned me”, I do have two HDG stories published on AO3. Maybe do your fucking research on me before making bullshit claims about me. B) *points at the Tumblr UX team* ay, I’m not the one who chose how posts here get formatted, take it up with them. C) that last line was clearly intended to be biting, Raqi, but I have to say, I can outbitch u any day, girl. No wonder the Lorets banned you for “just asking questions”, you have the personality of a particularly sour lemon covered in rusty nails.

[shebangasylum]

-_- So you know that I’m not saying that the way misandry is used and has been historically used is bad, right?

I thought I was done with this drama. I thought I could move on.

But I swear to fuck that I would never have thought that it would be necessary to make a post clarifying what I meant by “misandry is real”.

Misandry, as a phrase used by men to criticise feminism, is not a valid concept. It’s a phrase whose etymological and historical roots lie in criticism from the 19th century against first wave feminism, more specifically against the suffragette movement. I agree with this stance. I support this stance. I am myself fairly hostile to cis guys on principle because they’re kinda dickish. I consider myself a feminist.

This does not mean that when you say “misandry isn’t real” that I’m not going to get my tits in a knot because the way in which the message was delivered was broadly applied in such a way that it threw transmascs under the bus.

I am not transmasculine. I am not a flavour of nonbinary either, although one of my headmates is (Lowe uses She/They). I am, however, conscious of the fact that transmasculine and trans masc people within the overall trans community are often overlooked, treated as secondary, and constitute a superminority of our overarching minority. Statistically and representationally they are often screwed over and it is boneheaded blanket statements like the one issued by the official HDG server that contribute to this erasure of those people.

As a result of overly defensive responses to my callout post, I have received a fair amount of backlash. I do admit that I did not respond to a lot of this with the greatest grace or maturity, for which I apologise. I am only human, don’t jump me for being a bitch on the odd occasion.

However, I am also being targeted as if I am defending the concept of misandry as perpetuated by the MRA movement that is currently the most aggressive users of the phrase. This is an unfair assertion. Admittedly, it is my fault for being an aggressive reactionary and for immediately getting as vitriolic and combative as humanly possible in the face of criticism. However, anyone who knows me should be aware that this is a fucking Tuesday for me. I am a combative, fairly hotheaded individual who does not react well when I experience pushback, and I will add that I do not consider this a healthy behaviour of mine and am stricing to fix it.

but it’s kinda out of line to treat me as if what I’m saying doesn’t carry any sort of weight, especially since the overwhelming response to criticism by the clerks and the HDG discord server higher ups has been to double, triple, and quadruple down on the implications of transmisandry by frequently referencing Whipping Girl as if Whipping Girl is a perfect text that universally addresses the issues of feminism and intersectionality without having had to have several revisions and an admission by the author of being unintentionally biased towards a white transfemme perspective. Which is admittedly the author’s own and sole experience, but as an asian transfemme it is distinctly uncomfortable to see this being touted as wholly reliable for an argument about misandry sparked by a post which didn’t need to be made to begin with.

Like, I have to make this clear, as an author in the HDG community I have seen zero evidence to suggest misandry was being levelled at or against the HDG community, or that MRA influences were creeping into the metafiction as a whole. This post was made in such a way that it was both alarmingly ignorant of the fact that there are more than just transfemme voices in the community, but also seemingly made because apparently we as a niche kink fiction community need to be taking political stances. I read and write HDG to escape from the corpofascist bullshit of the real world. I do not need it encroaching on the community surrounding the stories.

We’re all in this together, folks, maybe we shouldn’t be throwing each other under the bus or making unnecessary political statements that literally nobody was discussing three days ago.

[shebangasylum]

say would you like to hear some hdg puns i came up with

sure!