A year after the signing of the Human Domestication Treaty, the Affini Compact finally comes for Cam Pastor.
She think's she's done when her captor offers her a way out. Play her game, and she can have her independence at the end of it.
As long as she's capable of wanting it, that is.
Vibes: Predator and Prey, Games and Wagers
Major CWs: Very Explicit Sex
Love Doesn't Ask for Permission
(37K Words, Completed)
A rebel sailor wakes up after her cruiser is captured, and struggles to adjust to her new life, the loss of her freedom, and the feelings toward her captor she never asked for.
A meditation on loving the person you hate (or hating the person you love).
Vibe: Violation, Grief, The Inherent Horror of Erotic Love
Major CWs: Violent Imagery, Some Explicit Sex
What you signed up for (Cowritten with Lagnia)
(13K Words, Completed)
Moringa Oleifera hurries home, weakened and weary. It is a quiet night before the implantation of faer floret, Saturn. Fae is very, truly satisfied with faer work with her, if a bit sapped for strength. Surely from a long day of petsitting.
Saturn Oleifera, recent volunteer floret cuddles up one late eve with her tablet, a small trove of junk food, and the nagging feeling of something out of place. She is very, truly happy, as she waits for her Owner, Moringa Oleifera to return home from petsitting.
So why do they feel so empty?
Notable tags: Pain
A Queen for a Queen
(32K Words, Completed)
Lieutenant Riley Valerian is separated from her Captain and lifelong friend, Ethan Hugo, at the beginning of the Affini Compact's invasion of their world. She swears to rescue him, no matter the cost.
Captain Ethan Hugo, heir to the Directorship of the remote planet Viburnum, sends his loyal bodyguard away as the Affini Compact readies to invade, hoping to spare her from his certain demise. When he wakes up, he realizes the Compact's plans for him are very different from what he expected.
Vibes: Princessification, Corruption, Betrayal
Major CWs: Explicit Sex, some Gun Violence
Fate of a Military Wife
(9K Words, Completed)
After the fall of the Terran Accord, Penelope Hart waits patiently for her husband to come home.
Vibes: Actually this one is better experienced without knowing :)
Major CWs: Explicit Sex, Depression, Implicit homophobia/transphobia from a flawed but well meaning PoV.
Pumpkin Spice
(19K Words, Completed)
Andreana Moschata, 2nd Bloom finds herself with a naughty, misbehaving floret. She does what any sensible pet owner would do and drags her pet out on an hours-long public humiliation spree.
A fall special full of seasonal traditions and humiliating situations.
Vibes: Fall vibes, funishment, public humiliation (loving)
Major CWs: Explicit Sex
CWs for this chapter are in the beginning notes. The story as a whole contains pred/prey, meat eating and associated imagery, coercive dubcon, and a lot of explicit sex.
This is also the last chapter before What Hides goes on hiatus for a few weeks for me to get the next run of chapters ready. It's also a long one, so plan accordingly!
Not to spam too much on the author account, but I do have one more thing.
When you respond to "misandry isn't real" with "erm, this feels exclusionary to transmascs," you are projecting things onto the text of the message you read that cannot reasonably be inferred from it.
If basic, 101-level feminism makes you feel like you or the transmascs in your life are threatened somehow, the problem is located in your own assumptions. Stop relying so much on shallow tumblr discourse for your political engagement and please touch book.
I'm very happy about the community server's decision to add "Misandry isn't real" to its list of positions. Balancing the need to manage discourse within a community space like a discord server with the need to allow certain discourses for the safety of its marginalized members is always a struggle, and I don't envy staff for being in a position that requires it. It's very easy to allow discoursing that's politically unobjectionable to nonetheless turn a space into an angry discourse hive, and while HDG is necessarily political (The Affini Are Imperialist, examinations of disability are woven into the setting, the space is overwhelmingly transfeminized, and the remainder after that is still trans, among many other reasons), most of us would rather that the chill vibes remain.
So while I sympathize a lot with why it took as long as it did to make this policy decision on covertly anti-feminist rhetoric, I'm very relieved that they have.
I've seen a rise in the last few years of anti-feminism cloaked in misapplications of progressive rhetoric, decolonialism, and, for lack of better terminology, a "tumblr accent." The decision to shut down this rhetoric makes the space safer to participate in as a trans woman.
For those concerned about the position, I'd like to offer some clarification.
Several things are true:
Some men exist in marginalized groups. Those men are still marginalized. They just aren't marginalized *as men*.
Arguing for the use of contructions like misogyblanc and transmisandry is not actually intersectional. You're misapplying the concept if you do that in its name.
Patriarchy bites men in the ass sometimes. This is not oppression, and in fact feminism has spilled a lot of ink on the patriarchal coercion of men to uphold the very system that does this. Scratch the paint, and you're usually just seeing misogyny.
Statistically, most men aren't doing great right now. This is because most people aren't doing great. The fact that shit rolls downhill onto the lion's share of men under capitalist patriarchy is because of capitalism.
Some men catch flak that's aimed at the social class of "Men." This is normal punching-up behavior that occurs along every axis of oppression. It isn't "misandrist" to say "I hate men" any more than it's "reverse racist" to call me a cracker. You're allowed to have hurt feelings about it, I guess, but you aren't being oppressed.
A lot of this is a wider problem with online discourses. The language of social justices is technical jargon – its words have specific meanings, but those meanings are lost in translation as a discourse grows online and follows the usual cycles of linguistic evolution.
Misogyny is not when someone is "mean" to women. Misogyny is a bigotry. It's oppression, and oppression is definitionally structural. Coining an "opposite" word to describe the phenomenon of "someone is mean about men" is an abuse of social justice language toward unjust ends.
Because the thing is, the language of social justice is designed for talking about oppression. That word, too, has a specific meaning – oppression is, to paraphrase, the unjust and/or harmful treatment of a minority group. "Minority" and "majority" have specific meanings too, and they have nothing to do with numbers. A "minority" group is a marginalized one, a disempowered one, a group upon which power is exerted by some social force, and a "majority" group is one who is relatively empowered (or priveleged) by that social force.
I need to be really clear about this. When someone talks about a feminist issue, and you chime in with "what about men? don't you know men have pain too?" you aren't being progressive. The suffragettes dealt with it, racialized women continue to deal with it in the intersections of antiracism with their feminism, we all had to deal with this shit a decade ago from MRAs, and now we're dealing with pseudo-progressives reheating the MRAs' leftovers in a tumblr accent. When you do this, you are perpetuating bigotry, plain and simple.
To close out, in addition to recommending Whipping Girl, I'm going to recommend Talia Bhatt's substack for anyone looking to learn more.
This is very funny when you consider Whipping Girl is particularly transmisandrist towards transmasculine and transmasc people. So basically anyone parroting the “go read Whipping Girl” throughline is going mask off on being transmisandrist.
I cannot believe I am having to tell other transfemmes and transenbies, in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty six, to maybe not be transmisandrist, but I guess this is where we’re at now.
"Whipping girl is not a good book if you’re trying to be intersectional" in the tags is rather telling. If the use of "transmisandry" is meant as an intersectional thing, it grievously misapplies the concept. I encourage you to read the original essay, if you haven't. Intersectionality is not concerned with naming and categorizing every overlap between identities. Its concern is multiply marginalized people, using black women as its case study, and the way the USA's approach to anti-discrimination law is woefully inadequate in addressing bigotry toward multiply marginalized people.
For a modern example, in the oral arguments earlier this year in the cases West Virginia v. BPJ and Little v. Hecox, Amy Coney Barrett rather infamously asked how the law could possibly discriminate against transgender status. You see, the law permitted trans boys to play on the boys' team – it only barred trans girls from playing on the girls team. Because the law permits both women and trans people to play sports, according to US law, it can't be found to be discriminatory. Our laws are not equipped to provide relief for people marginalized along more than a single axis, and intersectionality as a framework is designed to counter that problem.
So "transmisandry" fails as an attempt at intersectionality. Transmascs are trans, and are subject to transphobia. Transmascs (esp trans men) are also subject to enforcement mechanisms under patriarchy to fall in line and not act too feminine in a way similar to cis men, but that is only oppression in so far as the way transphobia makes them especially vulnerable to it. Men are not an oppressed class.
I'm very happy about the community server's decision to add "Misandry isn't real" to its list of positions. Balancing the need to manage discourse within a community space like a discord server with the need to allow certain discourses for the safety of its marginalized members is always a struggle, and I don't envy staff for being in a position that requires it. It's very easy to allow discoursing that's politically unobjectionable to nonetheless turn a space into an angry discourse hive, and while HDG is necessarily political (The Affini Are Imperialist, examinations of disability are woven into the setting, the space is overwhelmingly transfeminized, and the remainder after that is still trans, among many other reasons), most of us would rather that the chill vibes remain.
So while I sympathize a lot with why it took as long as it did to make this policy decision on covertly anti-feminist rhetoric, I'm very relieved that they have.
I've seen a rise in the last few years of anti-feminism cloaked in misapplications of progressive rhetoric, decolonialism, and, for lack of better terminology, a "tumblr accent." The decision to shut down this rhetoric makes the space safer to participate in as a trans woman.
For those concerned about the position, I'd like to offer some clarification.
Several things are true:
Some men exist in marginalized groups. Those men are still marginalized. They just aren't marginalized *as men*.
Arguing for the use of contructions like misogyblanc and transmisandry is not actually intersectional. You're misapplying the concept if you do that in its name.
Patriarchy bites men in the ass sometimes. This is not oppression, and in fact feminism has spilled a lot of ink on the patriarchal coercion of men to uphold the very system that does this. Scratch the paint, and you're usually just seeing misogyny.
Statistically, most men aren't doing great right now. This is because most people aren't doing great. The fact that shit rolls downhill onto the lion's share of men under capitalist patriarchy is because of capitalism.
Some men catch flak that's aimed at the social class of "Men." This is normal punching-up behavior that occurs along every axis of oppression. It isn't "misandrist" to say "I hate men" any more than it's "reverse racist" to call me a cracker. You're allowed to have hurt feelings about it, I guess, but you aren't being oppressed.
A lot of this is a wider problem with online discourses. The language of social justices is technical jargon – its words have specific meanings, but those meanings are lost in translation as a discourse grows online and follows the usual cycles of linguistic evolution.
Misogyny is not when someone is "mean" to women. Misogyny is a bigotry. It's oppression, and oppression is definitionally structural. Coining an "opposite" word to describe the phenomenon of "someone is mean about men" is an abuse of social justice language toward unjust ends.
Because the thing is, the language of social justice is designed for talking about oppression. That word, too, has a specific meaning – oppression is, to paraphrase, the unjust and/or harmful treatment of a minority group. "Minority" and "majority" have specific meanings too, and they have nothing to do with numbers. A "minority" group is a marginalized one, a disempowered one, a group upon which power is exerted by some social force, and a "majority" group is one who is relatively empowered (or priveleged) by that social force.
I need to be really clear about this. When someone talks about a feminist issue, and you chime in with "what about men? don't you know men have pain too?" you aren't being progressive. The suffragettes dealt with it, racialized women continue to deal with it in the intersections of antiracism with their feminism, we all had to deal with this shit a decade ago from MRAs, and now we're dealing with pseudo-progressives reheating the MRAs' leftovers in a tumblr accent. When you do this, you are perpetuating bigotry, plain and simple.
To close out, in addition to recommending Whipping Girl, I'm going to recommend Talia Bhatt's substack for anyone looking to learn more.
Cameron settles into her hiding spot for Round 3 of Mimica's game. The two are tied 1-1, and the stakes are higher than ever.
CWs for this chapter are in the beginning notes. The story as a whole contains pred/prey, meat eating and associated imagery, coercive dubcon, and a lot of explicit sex.
A sapphic dark romance about becoming a Fairie’s pet and a video game’s victim.
Both of these synopsis contradict each other. Somehow, both of them are true.
Faonari Windborne is an elven adventurer in the magical world of Reverie, who has recently become afflicted by a Realitycurse. Hallucinations plague her of a terrible realm where magic isn’t real and people are forced to work through chronic pain. Fortunately, a beautiful manipulative fairie fey named Aurelia knows just how to help her. Unfortunately, it may involve taking her soul and turning her into a pactling - a bonded familiar enthralled to their patron.
And…
In a modern world similar to our own, Reverie is a beloved VR fantasy game that Riley adores. Thanks to a patented drug sold by the gaming companies, it feels like she’s really there playing as Faonari Windborne. Lately though, she’s been having strange interactions with a fairie npc who wants to turn her character into a pactling thrall. As she falls deeper into the mystery of Reverie, it feels like maybe the game is more real than the rest of her life.
It's round two of Mimica's game. Cameron starts thinking about strategies.
No CWs for this chapter that merit being spoiled in a post, but the story as a whole contains pred/prey, meat eating and associated imagery, coercive dubcon, and a lot of explicit sex.
Cameron wakes up on the couch, feeling warm and fuzzy.
Finally posted the next chapter of this monster!
No significant CWs for this chapter, but the story as a whole contains pred/prey, meat eating and associated imagery, coercive dubcon, and a lot of explicit sex.
I am writing a HDG fic and I need some help from the community for world building!
I am wonder how extensive censorship is in the Affini Compact when it comes to sophont species texts and other media. I am writing a fic where a human and an affini discuss a real world book series that reminds me a lot of the Affini.
As far as I am aware, the Affini censor media that could been seen as spreading feralist ideas, but how far does that go? I know the Affini produce their own propaganda.
Do they censor only post affini colonization works and preserve pre-colonization works for the sake of knowledge? Would that media be reserved for only Affini eyes? Only the eyes of aophonts they think capable of handling it without becoming feral?
Do they go back and edit pre-colonization works of art or texts to have pro Compact messaging or propaganda? Do they outright ban types of media from being accessible to sophonts?
Is it only extreme content like Mien Kampf and Atlas Shrugged? Or would Dune or Three Body Problem? What about horror like Exquisite Corpse and Girl Flesh?
I know different authors will have different takes on this and I want to hear as many as possible before deciding on if/how to integrate censorship into my fic.
A thing we say a lot around here is that "HDG isn't a physics engine." What you're trying to do with the thing narratively and thematically is at least as important as how it fits into The Lore (tm).
I am writing a fic where a human and an affini discuss a real world book series that reminds me a lot of the Affini.
I think most authors who see this are going to want to find a way to make this work, because we love intertextuality around here.
I think the convenient thing for you is that this answer isn't defined in broad strokes. Sophonts under the Affini Compact often have very personalized experiences. If you wanted, you could actually get away with with two humans in the same region of space having wildly different degrees of censorship applied to their experiences, just by virtue of flags some clerk somewhere applied to them in the bureaucracy.
If the bureaucracy thinks there's a high likelihood your character can handle exposure to something without it screwing them up or radicalizing them somehow (for definitions of "radicalize" that include feralism), I think you can justify that just fine.
The bigger (but easily overcome) Lore hurdles to me (and I'm not a loret or anything so grain of salt) are:
There's a notion that some time between the current day and 255X, there was some catastrophe that wiped out a lot of our stored information, like literature, digital archives, etc.
HDG takes place 300 years and change from the present day, so a lot of the contemporary pop culture we would like to invoke in a story would be older to your characters than the American Revolution is to us.
Both of those ideas are routinely ignored though. I'm pretty sure I read a story where a character watched SPOP. I don't think the book series you want to refer to would be any harder to justify!
Aight so.
Talking about HDG again cause ya girl is still writing her story that essentially deconstructs a lot of the, frankly, colonialist, ableist, classist, anthropocentric biases all the way down in the works and the community (8 Chapters in rn), but I wanna talk about this weird sort of Trend I keep seeing as of late and it's that there is, an attempt by not one group of authors or community members, but generally quite few people who are, in my opinion, doing their utmost to essentially rewrite the rules and history of HDG to try and get a "Return to form" with it.
Now I'm not saying that people are doing this disingenuously, in bad faith, or what have you, or that the complains and concerns they have are necessarily unfounded. I do think however it's heavily reliant on the idea of "Authorial Intent".
So uh to put it blunt: Intent, in of itself, is insufficient to analyze and understand a work.
Yes we're rehashing Death of the Author, yes we have a good reason.
People talk about HDG and they like to talk about the works that are written as if they exist in a vacuum, that they are merely the product of the writer and what they wanted and that's all we should consider: but I think that doesn't really work in the context of literary analysis because Authors don't exist in a vacuum. People are a product of their culture, their material conditions, their personal experiences, the language and medium they use to tell their stories, etc. Stories are influenced explicitly by this.
This is pretty clearly laid out when people try to continually change and try to define HDG, as a Setting, the Original work, etc. as "It's the CGL Setting", "It's a Disability narrative", "It's about XYZ". This can all be true... but the setting can also be a Colonialist narrative (Such as in NGNM), it can be not about CGL, it can just be the plant r4p3k!nk setting. It's the product of the shifting backgrounds of the writers and how they and their community choose to interpret it.
What drew ME to the setting personally was NGNM and the way it approached questions around Imperialism and power dynamics in relationships resulting from those systems, because it addresses a VERY real concern in the modern day and asks us to consider how structural power imbalances affect the way we view our partners and our relationships to them. It asks a lot of questions about identity specifically for Queer muslims. And it succeeds in doing all of this, following the core precepts of the setting, without sacrificing the autonomy of the main character, the relationship in the end between our Protagonist and the Affini feels, though maybe not equal in the grander structure of society, feels like there's at least an understanding of equality there. The affini actually HAS to confront the shittiness of their imperialist, patronizing system and reconcile it with their relationship with the protagonist and our dear Author very much is drawing upon the broader cultural and political contexts of their world. If we read simply based on authorial intent, we would lose a lot out of this piece and we wouldn't be able to really interpret it in the myriad of ways people have.
You lose out a lot if you simply viewed it as "Kana wanted to simply write a story about an anarchist getting dommed by a big plant lady, also some other stuff happened and how anarchists respond to the affini"
On the flipside: The original HDG story is very much dripping, generally unconscious or nonvocal about it's broader cultural contexts, which I can only imagine has been the source of much misunderstanding and misinterpretation over the years of the Author's beliefs and message, which may be the source of so much scrutiny of it in recent years and why there's been a push to reimagine it, but I would argue that kinda proves the point.
How authors feel about a work, change. And they change their intentions behind a piece all the time, Ray Bradbury famously changed his intention of Fahrenheit 451 over time and The evil witch lady from england who wrote that small little known series of novels has retconned and changed so much about the meaning of her stories so many times over the years it's mocked.
I think, personally, the Original HDG story has a lot of issues. People will say "I think this is a disability narrative" and I think it is not a disability narrative, but a narrative written by a disabled person. Which may sound like a lateral change, the distinction is important. The Original HDG, and much of the setting I feel falls into a weird sorta place that a lot of pre-trans lit narratives were, which is "Once the person is 'cured' they become good". In the case of the example of trans people it usually manifests as: "Evil person is deeply transphobic, does bad things, gets to transition, magickally is a nice person and is cured"
Likewise, disability narratives as presenting in HDG are often like "Well once I have the cure or special alien vitamins that cure my disability, I'm fixed and better and no longer have my impairment".
That doesn't make these stories unique, it makes them run of the mill stories. And note the trans example isn't simply a coincidence, cause that's also what often happens in HDG.
Obviously though: Disabled people who get accommodations are still disabled. Being disabled doesn't mean we're unable to advocate for ourselves necessarily, it doesn't mean we want to die, it doesn't mean we need to "be cured". That we don't fit the normative expectations of ability is something that, frankly, is not examined in HDG and you would think for as much as people harp on about how Anthropocentric the depiction of the affini is, that would be something people would consider. (There's obviously the point to be made about how due to the nature of affini society, every non terran is disabled and faces ableism anyways, the fact the seats and chairs are too tall inaccessible to most terrans for example is played up often times for jokes or kink, but it is like a real life existing form of ableism that chairs, stools, benches, etc. are inaccessible). If anything I would argue ableism and ableist narratives are cornerstones to making HDG work.
Also some disabled people are just assholes anyways (Case in point the person writing this who has chronic pain, uses a cane and sometimes a wheelchair, and is also Autistic, Plural, has some kind of Trauma thing probs) and would remain assholes anyways.
That being said, I'm not ignorant to the point that *that's the point*. It's kinking off of ableism. It's what it says on the tin, There isn't much beyond that by authorial intent... but these narratives do have real world consequences and it's important, I think, to at least acknowledge that. Especially because now it's an open setting, and people are going to regurgitate however they want to view these things without examining them and that has actual real world consequences about how disabled people, colonized people, and queer people view themselves and this work and the world around them.
And it doesn't matter what your intent was at that point, it's grown beyond you and no amount of struggling will put Chaos back in the jar. Luckily, hope is fluttering out and we may yet have people rewrite and reinterpret the setting to tackle these things head on... though I doubt it given the community's track record with BIPOC authors and it's mostly white, american allosexual, transfemme audience and writers.
And lest we forget: NO YOU ARE NOT A BAD PERSON FOR LIKING HDG! NO GLITCHY IS NOT ABLEIST! NO I AM NOT ATTACKING YOUR FAVORITE KINKY FANFIC! Keep it real, don't get it twisted.
Perhaps I am misreading you but I don't think I agree with your assessment of the orignal's thenes. OG HDG to me, is not a story about a disabled woman having her disability cured / fixed /what have you. In fact I would go so far as to say that Elvira herself.... it's not that she isn't disabled (I genuinely don't remember if she is or not but I don't recall that being a huge part of the work, feel free to correct my memory) it's more that, Elvira's disability (or lack thrreof) is tengential to the actual commentary going on. OG HDG's disability metaphor is one of institutions, not individuals. The affini compact itself is the source of metaphor. It is the way they infantilze and disregard agency, but also simultaneously bend over backwards ro accomofate and provide.
They are a twisted reflection of institutional ableism of our own society, particularly when it comes to social safety nets for the disabled in the US's meager social wellfare programs. The American social wellfare programs are condescending, uncaring about the wellbeing of disabled people. They are a cold unthinking bureaucratic machine. The individuals within typically are not intending to inflict harm, but so often do through a failure to accommodate or institutional failures elsewhere (lack of funding, laws limiting who can access, etc).
The affini compact is a bureaucratic machine that does not care if you want help, or if you object to the means, nut they *will* help you.
Being disabled for so many people (especially those too disabled to work) is a series of options and opportunities being taken from you. The ability to make your own decisions, the ability to plan your own future, for many on social security even romance is a risky prospect as if your partner has sufficient income you will lose access to your benefits, rendering you entirely financially dependent on your them (hmm, I wonder how that might tie into the ownership kink setting, further depriving you of personhood, agency, etc. Even accepting financial gifts can disqualify you!
Speaking of, there are so many failure points. So many things you can accidentally do or not do to lose your benefits. Many of the things you have to do are specifically things that are difficult for disabled people (make specific meetings at specific times on specific days that you cannot miss because the next available one is months out), stay on hold for hours, etcetera etcetera. The Affini Compact is the opposite. It does not matter if you want their help or not. You could actively fight it and that means you are all the more likely to receive it. If they deem you in need of care, you will be cared for, that is a promise and a threat.
The Affini Compact deprives you of choice. Binds you to another who will take away your agency, but not abuse you (I wonder why someone who cannot marry without losing all financial independence would want that) and will do everything it can to take care of you. That is the disability metaphor in OG HDG, not Elvira's personal arc, but the society she is thrust into.
I'm reblogging this to second and yes-and Sapph, because this analysis survives Death of the Author too.
I don't think it much matters what the authorial intent was behind the OG HDG, because the reading of it as being about disability as one's belonging to an oppressed class of person has been around as long as I can remember.
A story doesn't have to challenge an oppressive structure and show victory over it for that oppressive structure to be a theme. OG HDG's exploration of disability as a theme is in its depiction of it. It presents a society that uses all the coercive tools of the medical institution – its mood stabilizers and other pacifying drugs (Class-E and to a lesser extent Class-A xenodrugs), its infantilization of Elvira and the total denial of her agency and personhood, and its devotion to bureaucracies, and it lets the reader connect those dots themselves.
I had a thought that didn't quite fit in my bigger post from before, which is that like. You can write what you want. Like you can just write it!
I spent a lot of words in that post stating that the HDG I love is a shared ideoform defined by social contract, and that's still very dear to me. But nobody here is a cop, or at least I hope that's the case.
Folks complain about getting banned from the community discord server, but that's a discord server. It's a moderated space intended for participation in that shared ideoform, and it has rules based on that fact. And you have to be breaking those rules pretty hard and pretty consistently to eat a ban from it. Nobody's walking on eggshells in there.
And out here, I care a lot less. I still care a little – the shared ideoform I care about requires that social contract to function – but I'm not really worried that some story that gets the size of the Terran Accord wrong is going to existentially threaten that, y'know?
I'd rather you take the shot. Do it. Write the thing.
I really wish I had the spoons to read more, and every post I see from someone despairing about their place in this little weave of storytellers or calling it quits on writing makes me sad. That could have been another Hypogeal, or an Independent Establishment, or something else that blows my socks off.
Even if it isn't that, I would rather it see the light of day. Write the thing. Write it scared if you have to.
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 🤭)
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
An introductory feralbreaking lecture in which one common strategy to mollify a feral's resistance is demonstrated for the class.
This story uses ‹single angle quotes› for dialogue spoken in the local affini dialect and "double quotes" for dialogue spoken in Terran languages.
The following contains extremely non-consensual touching and intoxication, psychological manipulation, needle play, and internalized imperialist attitudes. Reader discretion is advised.
"Wakey wakey, cutie~"
Something pulls me out of a deep, dark sleep. A gentle touch at the back of my neck. A feminine voice, gentle, patient, and soaked through with undertones and reverberations like a mesmerizing, alien chorus behind a singer.
I float up with concerning ease from the sea of syrupy, languorous sleep, a sleep deeper than any I can remember.
My eyes open to see a dark room, small, lit warmly by lamps in the corners. The space around me is very brightly lit by something behind me. The floor angles up ahead of me, and that space is filled with dim shapes squirming in the dark, dotted with colored points of light–
The weeds–
I turn around.
"Oh! I see our little helper has woken up~!"
There's a weed close to me, reaching for me.
I push away with my feet, but the creature's vines grab my limbs and pin me before I can even think of standing. The tendrils pull me back toward the xeno, back onto a soft surface that I realize with horror is a pet's bed.
The vines turn me back around to face the others.
‹Now that our subject is conscious, permit me to begin my demonstration!› the creature says, I think. The polyphonic wall of sound is nothing like any language I've seen, and it makes it hard to think.
‹Today, I will demonstrate a basic comfort-based approach to breaking in your little cutie. For those not in attendance or who do not have the lecture notes, the human I have in my vines is small, and her skin's pigmentation falls near the middle of her species's typical range. She was abducted by her superorganism's 'military' in 2552 by the Terran calendar.›
The creature's vines coil around me, touching me much more directly than they should be able to.
I look down.
I'm in a dress. A short dress, with flimsy fabric that does nothing to stand between me and the creature's touch.
I struggle. "Let me go! Fuck off!"
The creature speaks again, ‹the file our lovely, hardworking clerks put together on her suggests an independent streak. Her prospects for independence were determined when the Coccinea's boarding party rescued her. Her attitude, as demonstrated by her propensity for deragotory terms for people and their precious florets as well as her willingness to use violence, shows significant radicalization since her data footprint trailed off.›
Its vines squeeze. ‹Our little subject is not a problem case, but neither is she fit to be an independent. Her profile indicates that she should break easily and beautifully with the proper application of basic techniques.› A vine squirms into my vision, tipped with a thorn– no, a needle. ‹Any questions before I begin?›
I thrash and shake my head. "No, please, please no!"
‹Why have you not given her any Class-E's?› says something in the writhing crowd.
‹Excellent question,› says the thing behind me. ‹I've omitted any mood stabilizing drugs by design. I hope to fill my starshine's future days with nothing but bliss, but today, her acute stress response is an asset~.›
The alien drags the needle along my shoulder. "Don't worry, little blossom. This won't hurt a bit~"
The needle sinks into my flesh. Something squirts inside me, and then it pulls back out.
‹I've dosed our little subject with a Class-A/C cocktail. It's very basic – the Class-A stokes her touch hunger, and the Class-C floods her system with bonding hormones that make her clingy. The precise names and the proper ratio are all in your notes. It's very important not to overdo it with Class-C's – as I'm sure you learned, the standard suite of xenodrugs for humans does not include them, because they barely need the push.›
My body feels hot. My breath quickens, and the movement of air against my skin feels like a mosaic of sensation. I feel blissful heat where its vines touch my skin, and aching, burning hunger where they don't.
I thrash harder. "Please don't, please don't, please!"
The weed turns me around to face it. Its two eyes glow purple like luminous spheres of glass assembled from little tiles. A third "eye" sits where its neck meets its torso, rippling and pulsing. I look away from the lights on instinct, but something in me tells me to look deeper.
A vine strokes down the back of my head. "Ssh, I know petal. This is scary for you, but I promise you that it's for your own good."
"What the fuck does that mean!?" I shout.
The vine strokes through my hair, and I struggle harder. I hate how good it feels.
‹It's very important that you do not rise to your little feral's provocations. Validate their feelings, make them understand that you're here for them, and be as roots holding fast within the soil. Your little human wants stability, ferals especially, no matter how much they claim to want otherwise.›
Its face turns down to me. Something stirs in my chest, fluttery, electric. I feel cold and isolated, like I need–
It caresses my cheek.
Against my will, I press into the touch, energy stolen from my desperate struggling. Tears form in my eye.
"Please, I don't want this, just let me go I don't want this I don't–"
"I know petal, I know. I'm here for you. Would you like me to hold you closer?"
I hate the way my heart says 'yes.'
‹Different ferals call for different theatrical framings,› the thing says, turning its 'face' up to its audience. ‹Suppressing your little one's physical resistance might be advantageous, or it might not be, but you want them to struggle. The typical human response to acute stress is characterized by the activation of their sympathetic nervous system – faster heartbeat and breathing, tendency to think more quickly but less deeply, optimized for responding to danger.›
My clothes start to feel scratchy under my dress. I struggle anyway, but the horrible texture and the touch hunger feel like hell.
‹In most feralbreaking scenarios, you will trigger this response one way or another. For today's purposes, its purpose is to happen hard and fast, so that we can utilize the response that comes next.›
"Fuck off!" I shout, "Fuck off fuck off fuck off!" My skin burns with the craving for touch and my heart freezes with longing for something I refuse to name. I fight with everything I have.
‹Once her body's stamina for acute stress has been depleted, she will be in a precipice point. She will seek an end to the danger at a cost she would not normally accept. Her values and consciously held beliefs will fall away for the raw and primal desire for relief – relief that only you can provide.›
It worms a vine down my back, under the dress. Her touch is heaven. I know if she held me close, it would complete something in me. Holding back my traitorous body saps my strength.
I try very hard not to think about how little difference it makes.
The vine lifts away from my back. The fabric of my awful dress rips and tears.
"No, please no nononononono!"
The dress comes apart. Cool air kisses all over my back. My brain fizzes out for a moment.
‹Once her body has accepted that the danger has passed, her parasympathetic nervous system will alter her physiological state once more in an attempt to return her to homeostasis. Adrenaline and cortisol will be replaced by endorphins and other chemicals related to the bonding and reward mechanisms in her brain.›
"Please, I give up, I'll do what you want, just please stop please!"
"Ssh, it's okay," the thing coos. I want so badly to believe it. If I give it what it wants, maybe it will be okay. I try to bury the thought.
‹It's very important not to let your little one dictate the terms of her relief. Among other things, we are conditioning her to behave. She doesn't get to make decisions anymore, after all, no matter how adorably she pleads. Compromising with your little one will only undo your hard work.›
The willpower holding back my tears fails, and they fall freely. "I just wanna go home, I just wanna go home, please I don't want this I just wanna go home!"
‹That said, it's crucial to recognize when your spicy little feral is bargaining with you, and when they're bargaining abstractly as a defense mechanism. This sweet little one knows she isn't going home. She isn't making a deal with me, she's spilling forth her desires as her need for comfort drowns out reason.›
It looks down at me, and I meet its placid violet eyes.
"Would you like me to hold you, little blossom?"
I– I can't–
"...please..."
It pulls me in tight and encases me in vines. "It's okay, little one, it's okay. I have you."
The fight in me melts away.
I clutch the vines of its chest and sob into it.
‹Baseline humans are comfort seeking little things. The purpose of this exercise is to teach them how they can get that comfort, and from whom. Our subject's trainable little brain will learn much more quickly in the neurochemical environment we've cultivated, and her bonding hormones, magnified several-fold in their effect by the Class-C, will attach her to me in very little time at all.›
One of its vines tips my face up to look at its own.
"Do you think you could say 'Thank you, Mistress' for me?"
I don't want to. I don't want to. But I feel too burned out to argue.
"Thank you, Mistress," I say through tears. The words make my heart flutter. Its vines on my skin feel like heavenly light and the way it holds me close fills an icy chasm in my heart. I shouldn't like the way this feels. I'm too tired not to.
"Good girl," it says.
My heart soars.
I realize, as it squeezes me gently, how fucked I am. If I ran now, and if it let me, I don't think I would surive the separation. An inch of distance would kill me. Another horrible thought bubbles up from my traitorous heart, and I don't fight it.
‹That's all for today's lecture! And do remember – my little subject may look compliant now, but you should expect a few more repetitions of this process before the results are permanent. If you will excuse me, my little starshine needs some aftercare~›
I had a thought that didn't quite fit in my bigger post from before, which is that like. You can write what you want. Like you can just write it!
I spent a lot of words in that post stating that the HDG I love is a shared ideoform defined by social contract, and that's still very dear to me. But nobody here is a cop, or at least I hope that's the case.
Folks complain about getting banned from the community discord server, but that's a discord server. It's a moderated space intended for participation in that shared ideoform, and it has rules based on that fact. And you have to be breaking those rules pretty hard and pretty consistently to eat a ban from it. Nobody's walking on eggshells in there.
And out here, I care a lot less. I still care a little – the shared ideoform I care about requires that social contract to function – but I'm not really worried that some story that gets the size of the Terran Accord wrong is going to existentially threaten that, y'know?
I'd rather you take the shot. Do it. Write the thing.
I really wish I had the spoons to read more, and every post I see from someone despairing about their place in this little weave of storytellers or calling it quits on writing makes me sad. That could have been another Hypogeal, or an Independent Establishment, or something else that blows my socks off.
Even if it isn't that, I would rather it see the light of day. Write the thing. Write it scared if you have to.
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 🤭)
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 had 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.
