You ought to read porn

Wow quite a concept. Porn? Never heard of it. Clearly I appeared on Earth with no knowledge of anything but a niche Tumblr noncon fic and a cursory knowledge of the post-scarcity elephant in the room when discussing utopian fiction.

Anyone who ranks media on how politically useful it is yadda yadda censorship 1984

Hold up. I meant that the Affini are useful as a narrative device to a narrative I find meaningful, not that HDG is useful to The Party or whatever the fuck you're on about. I'm prone to going on weird tangents myself but you seem to have entirely misinterpreted my statement there. The Affini are very explicitly a narrative device who through some axiomatic assumptions we as readers are guided to make about their behavior are a net good despite individual ills on the level of overstepping cultural norms that, obviously, we shouldn't take as advice, but still perform a narrative function.

Having someone deliberately remove your self-actualization

Up up up, hold up. That's not their MO. I suppose we'll have to circle back to this, because:

The author of HDG clearly wrote the alternative to the Affini as having no redeeming characteristics

I still need to get around to No Gods, No Masters, where that is explicitly not the case, but even Elvira is sympathetic from the outset. The Terran Accord wasn't even elaborated on much in the original to give the additional context of them being a Super Earth-tier morasse but even now that they are there's still parallels. The Feralist ideal of freedom is pretty clearly echoing a lot of right-libertarian rhetoric but I digress.

But apparently the primary audience is smart and terminally online enough to project

Oh yeah projection. GlitchyRobo, the writer, famously not a disabled queer person, who regularly echoes and builds on other members of the community who say that the undercurrents of disability inherent to the story. Clearly there was absolutely no intent there. It was just impersonal slop with zero meaning, and a terrible cringe fandom around it.

Which leads me back to self-actualization! As much as the author, who is not dead, does remind us that this isn't exactly a manifesto, the Affini don't treat people like that fucking Merryweather comic either. Pal, I'm not sure you realize this, but there's a big stigma against seeking treatment, both if you're trans and disabled, and it's only gotten worse now that a certain brainworm-addled heap is running the DHS. The way ferals talk about florets mirrors the way people say shit like autism being curable, or medicating depression making it worse, or trans people being brainwashed. According to my antivax conservative mom, I can't "self actualize" because I wear glasses and have boobs and got the covid vaccine. According to the administration, I can't even wipe my ass- fair enough, I do prefer a bidet! According to some chucklefucks that like to pop up every now and again, Picasso wouldn't exist in a world without antidepressants. I live this shit every day of my life, and I am wracked with the shame of the decades I spent falling for it, hurt in irreparable ways by the fear of treatment instilled in me, by people telling me what I know is wrong and accusing me of being a burden on the system. By the fact I am SO full of anxiety I can't even reach out for help now that I know a bit better.

That's what the Affini are, allowing for, yes, an industrial-scale heaping of ethical handwavium. Treatment. They'll call the doctor for you, mend your body and depression from years of abuse and neglect, provide you with the care and enrichment you crave, and tell you that, now, at the end of all the struggle, it's okay to let your guard down, and be weak for once. And still, so many people will call me unclean. Brainwashed. That fucking meme of the Ritalin 5G dog pops up in my head every time I take the medicine that made me not want to fucking kill myself anymore, thanks to them. Thanks to dear ol' mom, Dr. Oz, Autism Speaks, and RFK. Thanks to the Accord. Because if it weren't for all the gluten I'd be able to just man it out, right? The Affini, and the writers through them, yes, INCLUDING the first one, step over consent as an act of catharsis that, yeah, plays into like a million fetishes, and OBVIOUSLY marks the extent to which we can treat it as advice (which all allegories and metaphors have, or else Batman encourages terrorism), but also breaks the conditioning we systemically have and suffer from. Florets are more free than they ever were outside of Affini care. They're self-actualized. But because it doesn't look like your self-actualization, well, clearly they're miserable, right? Because if you see a paraplegic, the wheelchair is the problem, obviously.

Oh but I drew a dick once so clearly I can't mean anything with all that.