“Do Not Mention Children” - Canon Guidelines
Children exist in the Affini Compact.
Terrans can have parents, siblings, even children of their own. The Affini, too, have something analogous to childhoods, though they don't have the same 'blood' relationships as terrans and various other sexually reproducing species.
Your writing can therefore talk about familial relationships, and you can explore kinks which rely heavily on that cultural context (more on that later).
HDG is in many ways a kink setting, but it is also a setting that many people have tried to make consistent and coherent, and as such we can assume that the cycle of life continues.
However, when it comes to the details of how that cycle works, we urge you not to explore them in this setting. It is simply too fraught a topic.
Science fiction, as a genre, can absolutely explore questions of eugenics and the complicated ethics of raising children inside of a propaganda-heavy space empire that imposes its own values on its subjects and it's entirely reasonable to want to explore those questions.
We - as a community and fiction setting - can not explore those particular ethical questions here.
Unlike traditional science fiction, the HDG setting is a collaborative writing universe outside of any individual's direct creative control. It's also firmly rooted in kink, which dramatically changes the context of the ethical and moral framing of anything juxtaposed against it. And after the point in the timeline where the Affini are involved, everything is inevitably rooted to some extent in kink.
We can't have a discussion of multi-generation domestication and the way that affects those who experience it sitting side by side with the mean plant petplay smutaganza.
We can't have people sexualising society-scale eugenics; we value maintaining a safe space for marginalised folks to explore their own questions and express themselves within the universe.
Likewise, we cannot have people kinking off of children.
If you want to explore any of those topics, you'll need to do it in a different setting, and not one which is the collective passion project of hundreds of authors and orders of magnitude more readers.
In the past, there have been instances where individuals acting in bad faith have attempted to cast the HDG setting and its authors in the worst possible light based on deliberate misinterpretations. As a result, we are well aware that including any content related to these subjects is a magnet for negative attention which can have repercussions against the setting as a whole.
Children may well exist in the Affini Compact, but bigots exist in the real world, and we cannot leave room for bad-faith interpretations leading to accusations of paedophilia or supporting real world genocide. This is not saying 'no kink at pride', it's saying 'we don't want to be on the evening news'.
In short, do not include children as part of your HDG stories.
This is partially a moderation decision, because nobody wants to deal with the fallout of the inevitable consequences of trying to pin this stuff down. It's partially a pragmatic decision, because we're a pile of marginalised queers and our work will not be viewed in the most generous light by the people who want to hurt us. It's partially a decision taken for the health of the community, because there are some differences of opinion that can be waved away with "idk, bond canon?" and there are some which fundamentally alter the fabric of what we are working with.
The policy does not mean that familial relationships spontaneously dissolve when the Affini arrive, or that Terrans within the Compact literally spontaneously appear out of the quantum foam, fully mature and pre-traumatized. These rules exist for out-of-universe reasons, and don't need to be justified in-universe. An adult meeting their mother is fine. An adult meeting their adult child is fine. An adult meeting their adult siblings is fine.
A child existing on-screen, or being clearly referenced, in parts of a story which are not clearly set meaningfully pre-Affini is not fine. Showing flashbacks to the childhoods of characters born before the arrival of the Affini, who are adults by the time they meet the Affini, is perfectly fine.
When assessing if a situation falls into a prohibited category, please do your best to apply reasonable suspension of disbelief and narrative discretion based on the intent of this policy. For example: you can set a story 200 years after the Affini took over Terran space, featuring a 30 year old floret who brings his owner over to weekly dinner at his 60 year old biological parents' house. This is fine, even though such a situation would logically require the existence of children cotemporaneously with the Affini, so long as you don't explicitly present scenarios which raise the question of how Affini and children would coexist. It would cross the line to have the parents have been florets during the son's childhood, having mom pull out baby photos with Affini present, or mention the floret's seventh birthday party in Mx. Chrysanthemum's class.
To draw a parallel, it's like the inverse of content ratings In traditional media. In a typical TV show, introducing a baby character is fine, but showing the act of procreation would exceed the rating criteria. When it comes to HDG, sexuality and kink are the norm, and you can introduce adult characters which logically would have had to have been raised around Affini, but any content which requires asking or answering the question “what would childhoods be like in the Compact” exceeds the acceptability criteria, as it forces the kind of ethical implications and discussions we aren't equipped as a community to handle.
The policy is not intended to disallow people to explore kinks which draw heavily from childhood or childhood trauma. For example, the following scenarios are allowed under the policy:
These situations involve physiologically and neurologically mature adults, despite variances in terminology or behaviour from what is culturally normative for those situations. Psychological regression (sometimes referred to "age regression", in which a sophont experiences a mental state or exhibits behaviour consistent with an earlier stage of development) as part of a trauma response, coping mechanism or dynamic falls within this allowed space. CG/l dynamics (caregiver/little, a kink/relationship dynamic involving partners taking on caregiving and dependent roles which may or may not involve age regression play) also fall within this allowed space.
This policy prohibits the following scenarios for multiple reasons, and applies equally to alien species as well as digitized or artificial sophonts:
¹ Given that most digitized and artificial sophonts do not have biological bodies which experience aging like humans do, maturity should be determined based on the appearance of any avatars or piloted bodies, and whether or not their baseline cognitive maturity is comparable to that of an adult. A robot constructed three years ago with comparable mental faculties to an adult human would be considered a mature sophont. An AI that has been operating for centuries which has never progressed beyond intellectual and emotional behaviours expected of a small child would not be considered a mature sophont.
² Mentally not yet mature is distinct from aforementioned psychological regression of an already mature sophont. Consider the difference between a young digital sophont who is a child (not yet mature), and a fully developed and mature digital sophont who begins to act in a “child-like” manner (regressed). The former has never reached a state which could be described as maturity in the first place, while the latter has.
Any attempts to discuss eugenics, selective breeding, or similar topics are not allowed, as are things which come so close as to force the discussion (e.g. the textual presence of reproduction or children). This isn't because it's wrong to want to discuss those things, it's because a group of hobbyist writers creating a shared setting is not a context where any one of us can exercise sufficient creative control to have that discussion without creating implications this community cannot withstand.
In-universe acknowledgement of the existence of historical human atrocities is not necessarily a problem, but these are serious subjects which should be handled responsibly with appropriate seriousness and caution. Irreverent comparisons between real-world suffering and the behaviour of kinky space aliens is not an appropriate handling of such material.
As an aside, while this policy isn't explicitly about other kinks which are only tangentially related to this topic, we want to briefly clarify how this policy does or does not affect those kinks. For kinks such as breeding or oviposition, many creative stories have already included policy compliant scenes involving these kinks, with props such as inert compiled eggs or seeds in place of any viable reproductive material. As these props cannot result in any sentient life, there is no problem.
Pregnancy kink has also been brought up, where a similar approach may be applied: actual reproduction is a no, but one could use Affini bioengineering and medical technology to mimic any physiological processes involved. Inspiration could also be taken from non-human biology for the laying of sterile eggs, etc.
There are issues around this subject that will always walk a fine line, and crossing some of those lines is inherently incompatible with maintaining the kind of setting we strive for. Based on extensive discussion between clerks and loret team members, we have come to the conclusion than an adult in a child-like headspace does not cross that line, while a sophont occupying a physically immature body does.
While we acknowledge that having a sophont in such a psychologically vulnerable position presents issues of consent, those issues are already present in the inherent petplay of HDG. An affini taking advantage of an adult in a child-like headspace is very much analogous to an affini taking advantage of somebody who's been turned into a pet.
To be explicit about it, there's a major ethical distinction between fucking a dog and fucking a dog-girl who's so deep in petspace she basically acts the same way, because the context gives things a very different meaning. It's normal to be intimate with a person, so being intimate with a dog-girl isn't transgressive in that respect. Instead, the scenario involves playing with the question of what it means to be a person instead of a pet.
Fucking a regular dog is something else entirely - there is no moral ambiguity or question involved, as non-sapient animals simply cannot consent under any circumstances.
We firmly believe that the same separation between dog-girl and regular dog exists between an adult in a child-like headspace and a child, which is why the former is allowed while the latter is not.
To help clarify that distinction, we note that it's already commonplace in HDG works for florets to be depicted as much more emotionally open, candid, trusting, and earnestly curious, and these traits are socially valued within the Affini Compact. However, in cultures like the Terran Accord which value hyperindividuality, performative confidence and selfish profit-motivated behaviour, these are all traits negatively associated with weakness, as well as childishness and immaturity.
Scenarios of adults occupying a child-like headspace are operating within a similar thematic paradigm. An adult in a child-like headspace isn't transgressing the boundary between adult and child, but the normative societal expectations of how an adult should behave, which traits are devalued and seen as something to 'grow out of', and the internalized cultural baggage we have around childhood and adulthood.