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random-thought-depository · 4 months ago

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"I saw a post on r/196 calling the Affini slavers which is really fucking funny to me because you can just tell whoever made that post has never actually read the fucking thing"

I haven't really read the original Human Domestication Guide story cause it really isn't my thing, but I've skimmed enough of it to see that it gives us a sample of an Affini floret contract (it's in chapter 7), which I can just paste here:

1. Above all else, you, Elvira, must obey your Guardian, Akash Nele, Third Bloom in all things. This is for your safety, wellbeing, and care. ☐ 2. Your Guardian, Akash Nele, Third Bloom, owns you. You are her property. You do not have political rights in the Affini Compact. ☐ You do have a guarantee of your wellbeing, as defined in Section 57 of the Human Domestication Treaty. ☐ 3. This guarantee of wellbeing does not preclude your Guardian from disciplining you, as outlined in Section 61 of the Human Domestication Treaty. ☐ 4. As the property of your Guardian, she may add, remove, or modify conditions of your wardship at any time for any reason within the limits established by the Human Domestication Treaty. ☐ 5. Your full name is Elvira Nele, Second Floret from this moment forward. ☐ 6. Below this line are additional terms that your Guardian, Akash Nele, Third Bloom, has stipulated. ☐ 7. It is unbecoming for wards to swear. You must limit your language as such. ☐ 8. You are disallowed any secrets not specifically allowed by your Guardian. You are disallowed to hide any part of your body from your Guardian. ☐

I think it's quite reasonable to call this arrangement slavery! The contract literally says "You are her property"!

I think reading that contract (and the scene it appears in, it's even more horrifying in context!) might give you an idea of what people who say HDG can really easily be read as a horror setting mean by that!

You can suggest that Elvira is an exceptional case and most of the humans in the Compact (and even most florets) get much less coercive treatment, but that still leaves the Compact as a society with some amount of what I think can be fairly described as formally legally institutionalized slavery, which is, uh, not good. Also, the impression I get is that a floret having almost no rights against their owner(!) is the normal Affini legal and social practice, and the system mostly relies on the Affini biological predisposition to benevolence to prevent the horrific consequences this would have if the owners were more psychologically human-like; I think it's defensible to call that slavery, though you can reasonably argue that doing so is using a misleadingly emotionally loaded term.

Like, yeah, HDG is super-easy to read as a horror setting if you don't buy the line that the Affini are genuinely benevolent and/or you don't think the problems with imperialism, slavery, and racial hierarchy all go away if the people doing the imperialism and enslaving and at the top of the hierarchy are personally nice. Personally, if I ever wrote anything in this setting, I'd be inclined to roll with a relatively noblebright take on Affini, but also to pay attention to how the problems with imperialism and slavery don't all go away if the imperialists and enslavers are nice people (like, Affini are still going to mess up sometimes cause they're not omniscient, and they might have difficulty empathizing with and understanding a lot of human motivations, and their arrogance might lead them into errors), and give the Affini some relatively noblebright opposition, and take some inspiration from how Peter Watts portrayed the Thing for writing Affini.

I think my primary objection to your broader argument would be that being conquered by the Affini is an end of history. The Affini have been spacefaring for 100,000 years and as far as I can tell their culture has had basically its present character more-or-less that entire time. The answer to "what does human society look like 100,000 years after the conquest?" is "probably a lot like it does 10 years after the conquest."

This isn't an argument about "potential" or anything like that, it's more specific and concrete: the Affini have had a society with imperialism, slavery, and a racialized hierarchy for 100,000 years, and all signs point to their society will continue to have those features for another 100,000 years, possibly much longer. As somebody who doesn't like imperialism, slavery, or racialized hierarchies, I find that highly objectionable.

Sure, the society of the Compact is plausibly a big net improvement over the society of twenty-first century Earth or the Accord. Sure, capitalism sucks (at least if you count down from plausible better societies instead of counting up from the millennia of even worse poverty and oppression under feudalism that preceded it). But capitalism isn't 100,000 years old. It's quite plausible that capitalism won't last one millennium, let alone 100 of them. Human societies can and often do change a lot in small fractions of the length of the history of Affini civilization, and that change is often for the better. Our world is pretty utopian compared to the world of 1850, and that's less than 180 years, less than .2% of the time Affini have had an interstellar civilization.

And, like, the ways the Compact is obviously dramatically better than the Accord are fundamentally downstream of the Compact having better technology cause the Affini lucked into getting a big head start on us. Left to their own devices, humans would invent matter compilers sooner or later (or, y'know, the Affini could have just given us the knowledge of how to build them without conquering us, if they'd been so inclined). I think if you left the Accord alone for, say, 20,000 years, it's pretty plausible they'd eventually develop a functionally post-scarcity society that doesn't have slavery and imperialism and racial hierarchy.

If I had to pick between being a human independent in the Compact and an average citizen in the Accord, I think I'd take the Compact. But if I lived in the HDG universe and I could somehow arrange for the Accord to be protected from conquest, I think I'd do that. Because the Accord might get better, but I'm less optimistic that the Affini will, because the Affini have spent the last 100,000 years not doing that.

This is another example of how I think if you want HDG with a relatively noblebright tone it'd work a lot better if you scaled back the size and age of the Compact a lot. If the Compact was "only" a thousand years old it'd look much more plausible that it might eventually become better than it is now.

Aside: I think the best bet for getting the Affini to change for the better might be them encountering a non-Affini civilization they can't conquer. As far as I can tell, they've so far never had that experience; they got a big head start over every other civilization they've encountered so far, so they've just subjugated every other sapient species they've ever met. If they met another civilization with technology and resources comparable to their own and had to sit with the knowledge that these beings rejected their domination and there was nothing they could do about that, I think they might improve a lot.

HDG and "Horror"

So I've seen several people talk about the horrors of Human Domestication Guide and how it's really effective cosmic horror if you look past the kink part of it, but I don't really see that? At least, I don't think I've seen any points levied towards that point that don't already just exist in day-to-day life but far worse.

The main one I see a lot is the idea of this incomprehensible cosmic force that we can't fight completely subsuming our culture and freedoms, but like, is that not already just a grander version of living under capitalism? That shit invades every single aspect of our lives but unlike the affini it's perfectly content with killing us at a moment's notice, and in so many cases actively wants us dead for the crime of existing.

Like, oh they're an imperialist empire and don't give you a choice about living under them? Yeah man that would sure suck I cant imagine what that would be like

I saw a post on r/196 calling the Affini slavers which is really fucking funny to me because you can just tell whoever made that post has never actually read the fucking thing

I dunno, at the end of the day i honestly cannot fathom what makes the Affini terrifying when I'm at least *allowed* to live under them. Where basic survival isn't something I have to earn by tearing my own body apart every single day, where I'm actually loved and cared for by the people running shit. There's nothing bad about them that isn't already so much worse in the present day, and the whining I've seen in places like Reddit about "never being allowed to reach our fullest potential" is as much wish fullfilment scifi as the HDG setting as a whole is, so it's kind of a moot point

#Human Domestication Guide

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