Harmony Ticket

HDG Community Server

Channel: clrks-haze-915

2026-01-21 T02:08:36 to 2026-01-21 T04:29:52

Edited slightly to repair formatting.

HabTixTue Jan 20 2026 18:08:36 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

@haze @ticket answerers, @haze has created a new ticket
HabTixTue Jan 20 2026 18:08:36 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 18:16:00 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

to be more specific about what i am referring to in regards to Rule 14 and the guidelines wiki page that leads to my concern of potential violations (because character limits are my personal enemy):

Rule 14 exerpt
"[...] It is our goal to offer a supportive environment for volunteers' art within a shared sandbox. As such, please don't offer critique on a work, whether that be its technical proficiency, style, or content, including specific plot points and the inclusion of certain kinks or themes, unless the author has specifically asked for it. As long as it remains within the sandbox, it deserves to be celebrated. If an author wishes to solicit criticism, they can do so in ⁠beta-reading-corner."
Wiki Exerpt, more fully:
"[...] It was a "yes, and" kind of dynamic, where we tried to fit our ideas together to make everything work better. When there were ideas that clashed, we engaged with each others' feelings in an open dialogue and used the benefits of a wide universe and semi-flexible canon to make sure those ideas could coexist. [...] It all started from a group of friends trying to make something together, elevating each others' ideas and bouncing ideas back and forth, [...] the spirit of mutual understanding, compassion and earnest enthusiasm which led to most of the foundational works and influential concepts."
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 18:44:21 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

I'd also note that in february of last year, i had similar experience of receiving similar unsolicited critique in the vein of "no that wouldn't happen the affini would xyzabc", though not nearly as frustrating as this case was. [Message Link]
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 19:05:02 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

I can answer that, as one of the primary sophonts there last night, and also last time. I actually didn't realize it was you in both cases, but having pushback twice might have been a hint of something else happening here. The "yes, and" dynamic you're referencing is built over several years of hundreds of writers seeing what had come before and fitting their work into the wider context of the setting as it existed at the time. There are aspects to the setting that have opened up and become more flexible as writers have added to it, and some that have narrowed. The setting has a lot of different parts to it, and many of these parts have a lot of precedent backing them up. There are a number of ideas, well-meaning but orthogonal at best to HDG, that show up in patterns, largely with regard to the science fiction nature of HDG. The axioms of benevolence and inevitability tend to be the main culprits -- someone wants to write an evil Affini, or torture a floret, or someone wants to power scale the terran accord to offer more resistance than they are capable of giving (weapons that are hypereffective, sophonts who just so happen to be immune to hypnosis and xenodrugs, etc). These run aground of the rather large body of precedent that has been set among all the stories that currently exist, where the Affini have a particular capacity to curbstomp the accord, have a very deep bag of tricks to control sophonts, and do not, as a rule, torture them.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 19:05:16 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

As Kanagen has famously pointed out, these ideas are subversions of subversions; like a double negative, doing that just gets the well-worn tropes HDG intentionally rejects. Humanity is not the dominant force in the universe, there is no ragtag band of rebels who will save the day, they get domesticated in the first act like everyone else. But this is done in the name of those rebels' well-being, not some genocidal or extractive project. This is based on the original intent of Human Domestication Guide, where the Affini represent the massive, soul-crushing byzantine system of medical care and ableism that disabled people go through on a daily basis (there's a reason they love paperwork so much); the point is to ask, what if they really did have your best interest in mind when they acted? Which is not the same thing as avoiding every possible pain point, especially in the name of expedience; they will do the equivalent of holding a dog's mouth shut to make them take the pill if they think a floret or a civilization needs it, and "we do not immediately cede control to you" counts as needing it. So when it comes to how some ideas interact with the setting, the concrete has set on them. Stories like No Gods aren't Foundational because they're simply really good and an early story; they're foundational because they set large swaths of the setting's boundaries. In this case, No Gods definitively established that you don't have to be a frothing fashy feral in order to get got by the Affini; you just have to be there. It showed a breakaway faction of terrans who basically agree with the Affini and went, what would the Affini do? The answer being, they would domesticate them. Your ideology, your intentions, your level of agreement with the Affini, these are all completely irrelevant; attempts to govern yourself will be seen as adorable, and then gently set aside as unnecessary. That is how the Affini function, because they're imperialists.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 19:05:23 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

I'm hoping that I'm not just harping on things again for no reason here. I'm showing the environment you walked into in both cases with your idea. So yes, the "yes, and" does exist within HDG. Unfortunately, without realizing it, your idea is a "no, but" -- "Hey, the Affini barge in and take everything over immediately; what if they didn't, though?" The answer you got being, well, that's not really how they work. I think it's really telling that at no point did you answer a single question about what causes the Affini to change their tactics, given that this is a sizable departure from the way they work in, as you yourself pointed out, almost every other story. Your example of what your leader character, Syn, negotiates is an objectively worse deal, because she thinks terrans won't accept a better one —one that operates on capitalist logic as a post-scarcity society. It would be laughed out of the room; the Affini aim to spoil terrans rotten, and terrans have nothing the Affini want. Rule 14 is not about citing precedent, here. If it was, there'd be very little we could do in order to try and align works with that lore as Lorets. Anyone could walk in and go "so I want to kidnap some florets and rip out their haustoric implants", as happened just today in [channel], and we wouldn't be able to go "uhh, well you can't do that", because that limit is even stronger than the one you're rubbing up against. It's about craft and kinkshaming for the most part. Like, we ask readers not to say "wow, this story would be great if not for X element"; for others, X element is the selling point of the story. We ask that readers not start copyediting published works by amateur writers for free unless they've asked for it. That sort of thing.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 19:05:24 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

So yeah. I think I've covered everything here. How yes-and actually works in a years-long writing project you are coming to relatively late, how rule 14 works, and what, specifically, we are trying to tell you about the idea you're trying to write.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 19:05:42 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

(Forgive the giant walls of text. I'm trying to give as much context as I can here.)
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 19:34:33 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

@Harmony
"I think it's really telling that at no point did you answer a single question about what causes the Affini to change their tactics, given that this is a sizeable departure from the way they work in, as you yourself pointed out, almost every other story."
The Affini want what's best for their sophonts. The tale I'm trying to spin up is that they are about to be operating in waters that are distinct from the rest of the Accord, and if they rush in blindly and try to domesticate Caelus, people will get hurt because of what Caelus is. Caelus, as was established in my notes doc I shared (which I've since closed from public view) started as a research project into bioengineering. As such, the majority populace on Caelus is of a slightly different biological makeup from the rest of the humans of the Accord. Different enough that xenodrugs could cause substantial harm (re: Dog Of War), and if the Affini are going to approach by sedating any resistors so they don't hurt anyone else, people could potentially die. Not only that, but because of the frequency of works that revolve around florets undergoing anatomical changes (Affini Domestication Guide, Wellness Check, and Isekai, among others), and the general process of integration into the Compact, all sophonts of Caelus will have to undergo medical screening, likely including surgical procedures they won't be signing consent forms for. Because of the history of Caelus as a *human experimentation site*, the vast majority of the population has heard horror stories about being put under the knife by someone you don't trust. Sure, the Affini truly can help them, but that's thousands of people that they have to boil the fear out of. Finally, Caelus is not a part of the Accord. it pretends to be so that the accord would leave them alone, but they operate as an independent entity separate from the Accord. Ergo, in the eyes of Syn, the Treaty would have no legal bearing to represent them. Yes, the Affini would naturally disregard this, but Syn presents the opportunity to forge a new one. The entire purpose that Syn serves is mirroring the Affini's duty of care. Syn knows fully well that if the Affini swoop in and try to clean up shop, people will get hurt in the chaos. They don't understand that the Affini are actually truly there to help, and just like in so many other fics, there will be people who hurt themselves or others in attempting to resist. Ergo, Syn wants to mediate between Caelus and the Compact for the purpose of eliminating that possibility, like a mother cat helping her kittens to trust the scary giant human that is more capable of helping than she is. Syn knows she's not going to be able to maintain an independent colony. What she wants is to make the transition smooth, mitigate the potential of harm, because she knows what the alternative looks like. What Affini wouldn't feel a little bit of solidarity in that? They want to protect their sophonts just as strongly as Syn does, and Syn believes they can do it. She just wants to minimize the stress that comes with it. Not fix the stress after, not patch it up, but to prevent that stress and harm from being allowed to happen in the first place. She wants to provide the compact with the means to adjust their xenodrugs for Caelans, to help them understand how the people there operate differently from the Accord, how to get their trust so that they can help them more. But rushing into it with the same protocol as any other colony isn't the only option.
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 19:40:33 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

It's openly stated both in here and the wiki that the Affini are, indeed, flawed, and one of those key consistent flaws is arrogance. That's not a failure of writing, of course, but it is a commonality; they have the means to help any and every living thing, but many interactions with sophonts portray an aura of perfection, that they cannot do wrong, that any potential mistakes are fleeting and miniscule in the grand scheme of their capacity. That's another thing I'm trying to approach, is reconciling that they are not perfect, that there is always, always room for improvement, that there are ways to prevent harm that, in this case, require trusting in a sophont to carry some of the weight for a brief time.
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 19:42:45 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

And yes, of course, there are stories that do wrestle with that arrogance, such as Divaricated with Thatch's lack of capacity to help Katie in the way she deserves while trapped on Planet DirtTM, but in the same story Thatch refuses to concede that there might be someone who would be happier outside of the Compact.
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 19:46:49 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

But of course, I might have been able to explain all this if I wasn't told,
"it feels like you're searching for someone to say "yep, looks good" so you can move on with the conversation, and each time you don't hear it you assume you just have to explain it better." (re: [Message Link])
or to say it how it felt to hear, "we get what you're trying to say, stop trying to explain it," despite the fact that *clearly* I was not doing a good enough job.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 19:47:32 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

I have more coming, but the tl;dr is that your ideas still aren't convincing me that they fit the vibes of the setting.
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 19:51:48 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

I struggle to accept that "not fitting the vibes" is grounds for this.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 20:02:20 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

The server is intended for people who want to play in the sandbox. If you keep getting told "hey, you're exiting the sandbox", from multiple sophonts with multiple levels of experience in the setting including a volunteer lorekeeper whose job it is to be a domain expert, then I don't know what to tell you. This is still true even with what else you've said here. Dog of War is sui generis (such a strange case that it is unable to be used as precedent) in how it operates; just because it happened once doesn't mean it can be used as the basis for an entire planet of terrans magically immune to xenodrugs. Quite a few stories end up like this, where very specific circumstances exist for a host of thematic and other reasons; lifting that circumstance out of its context and applying it more broadly strains the setting. Tam in the eponymous Sui Generis becomes an Affini, of sorts; the setting would break down if there were a planet of Affinified humans. Having that population full of sophonts who are immune to xenodrugs would probably also not lead to the Affini being forced to the bargaining table in order to negotiate with the leader; the worst-case scenario is that they start a new cotyledon program. The thing about Affini arrogance is that on a cultural level, they back it up. Individual Affini could make temporary mistakes while interacting with individual xenosophonts. The Affini, the species, axiomatically do not do this with populations. This amounts to a lot of special pleading for powerscaling the Affini, is my determination here. Write whatever moves you; but know that you aren't getting the special permission slip for it. Your idea has been rejected on multiple levels. Take from that what you will.
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 20:04:30 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

All I wanted when I came in here was to share an approach to this universe that I thought was an interesting angle to explore, and to have it taken even a little bit seriously. I don't care if it Doesn't Quite Fit The Vibes, or if the way I'm representing the Affini is not quite right, a little off-center, they'd actually do this or that or whatever the fuck, because we're all playing with the canon like it's putty anyway and everyone else has their own approach. What I care about is that it's interesting, that it's a new way of looking at this universe, that despite its diversions from how the affini Normally Act it's still something worth exploring. I want to keep it within the axioms, obviously, but I want it to still be interesting.
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 20:06:40 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Thousands of works have managed to be interesting while being well within the axioms. It is not their fault that your story is either uninteresting or unaxiomatic. If you don't care that it doesn't fit the vibes, then with due respect, what is this ticket for?
HarmonyTue Jan 20 2026 20:13:42 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

I will also correct you on another thing here: There is no "canon" in the normal sense of canon. One reason why we try to keep lore aligned the way we do is because every story is, ideally, taking place in the same universe. You're not writing fanfiction; you're writing an extension to HDG. As such, each addition operates on the same level of 'canonicity' as No Gods or indeed the original Human Domestication Guide, which has itself drifted slightly away from the center of what the setting is now. There is no mechanism by which parts of the setting are set in indelible stone like a Marvel movie; there is no source material to make fanfiction of. This is why a high degree of interoperability is necessary to maintain a cohesive whole, to protect the core themes of the setting.
hazeTue Jan 20 2026 20:29:52 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

@Harmony this ticket is for the fact that for a community that advertises itself on uplifting its creatives, I have been treated to a lot of pushing down. for instance:
"just because it happened once doesn't mean it can be used as the basis for an entire planet of terrans magically immune to xenodrugs."
I didn't fucking say that. I said they were subject to human experimentation. My fault for neglecting to mention it, but I was trying to draw from Helion, or at least in the timeline of events I've tried to lay out for Caelus, a group that would eventually become part of Helion.
"Having that population full of sophonts who are immune to xenodrugs would probably also not lead to the Affini being forced to the bargaining table in order to negotiate with the leader."
also not what I said, and *probably* is in the hands of the writer. "being forced to the bargaining table" is also not what i said.
"Your idea has been rejected on multiple levels."
nowhere has anything ever been implied that my idea can straight up be *rejected* for *vibes*. not the rules, not the writing guidelines, nothing. if i missed it, then my fault, but that's still going against the Uplifting Community self-advertising.
"It is not their fault that your story is either uninteresting or unaxiomatic"
this is just blatantly fucking mean to say my story is uninteresting. like what the fuck does this even accomplish other than being fucking disgustingly rude. this ticket is also for the fact that the comments from a staff member are reductive of details i have tried my best to provide, if not just plain disrespectful. perhaps i could have done better to heed the feedback of the other people in this server, but to be spoken to like this is not indicative of as positive and constructive a community as advertised. so i give up. i'll throw my work in the trash. have a good day.