HDG works great as a commentary on how bad things are outside of the fantasy in the real world for disabled people, so much so that a lot of us would take being made a human pet by aliens in a heartbeat if it meant some semblance of security.
In the real world, bureaucracy kills us. In HDG, bureaucracy dictates our loving owner.
It's why HDG not being real specifically seems to affect people more than other media being fictitious. For example, with me it's like "no one's coming to save me".
I'm in a very fucked situation because of what are essentially work or die laws and the institutions who provide disability coverage keeping my applications in limbo before inevitably denying them with the reasoning I'm "not disabled enough".
So yeah I welcome the idea of being some fat alien plant lady's lap human. I don't wanna die on the street someday in the foreseeable future, so I dissociate and daydream scenarios where someone *is* coming to save me.
This is very well put. The world is so cruel to the disabled, and HDG is part of how I've coped with that, by imagining a world where no one slips through the cracks, and everyone is cared for
It's always strange to me when people describe HDG (the setting) as dystopian, because that represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of what HDG is about. It's not about "this is bad and that's hot"†, it's about imagining a world in which the ways I was mistreated and harmed as a disabled child are 'reflected' into something compassionate and caring instead
Thank you for sharing your thoughts 💜 I hope things improve for you soon, and for all of us
† nothing wrong with that kinda story ofc, it's just not what HDG is!
