this is gonna be long, and tbh i don't know how to say this any nicer, so i'm genuinely sorry if this bothers anyone, but like.
my biggest issue with hdg isn't the affini (especially because there are valid complaints, but a lot tend to involve assumptions propped up by motivated reasoning and strawmanning)
It's that the Terran Accord logistically makes no goddamn sense.
Let me preface this all with a disclaimer: You are still "allowed" to be interested in and enjoy using the Accord for drama. I'm not your boss or your mom. From a meta perspective, I understand the utility of it, and that it's meant to reflect current fears and anxieties.
Anyway. I also don't even mean this in the sense of "I don't understand why they would be so cruel". I do.
I also don't mean it in some over-optimistic and hard-to-prove sense of "there's no way people would put up with it for so long!".
Part of what I DO mean is that i have no idea how it wouldn't just collapse by itself.
ethics aside, it's just historically the case that fascism is not known for its efficiency or stability. Its goal is to prey on fear and insecurity to consolidate power. This is flat out always in direct conflict with stability.
Even if we expand our definitions and go with the frequent lefty argument of "the USA is fascist right now and just won't admit it", this still doesn't feel like disproof of my point. Because it still required a number of worker and minority concessions to last this long, by extension implying that there is a practical limit on how dystopian a dystopia really can believably get for more than a relatively short time period or relatively localized area, as a whole.
so making such a state of affairs somehow viable enough to remain so broadly and sweepingly intact for over 400 years, and then require outside intervention to be dissolved, kinda just feels like accidentally giving unabashedly fascist hypercapitalism a ton of undeserved and unsubstantiated credit.
because the most obvious argument you could make to defend its logic from an in-universe standpoint is "technology and unprecedented wealth inequality will make it easier than it used to be to control us"
But I honestly find that an insufficient excuse, and not only that, one that sometimes gets bad enough to strike me as worryingly reactionary and outright counterproductive.
I can of course agree that extreme wealth inequality is terrible, but a fascist regime tends to be anti-intellectual and techphobic in many areas. So at a certain point, unchecked handwringing and pessimism about technology convergently stumbles upon the same logic that can be used to restrict technology and research for the purpose of oppression.
What technology also does is introduce more points of failure, more maintenance, and an increase in different areas of expertise to worry about and have to train people for.
Reliable space travel, especially interstellar travel, would inflate and accelerate this trend to an obscene degree.
And even without it, already, we can see evidence that our economy is often based on a bunch of hype, grifts, corner-cutting, delayed promises, and overall shoddy, unstable, rushed work that isn't as impressive as the marketing makes it sound.
All of which would be disastrous, its issues likely compounding abruptly, the moment you try to marry it to even a modest space economy beyond like, Earth's orbit.
And that's another thing:
How, under such conditions, do you make offworld economics profitable and not something based almost purely on hype and speculation?
Even with FTL, this doesn't magically become a trivial task.
Most likely, the staggeringly complex and expensive entry barriers of space industry would nigh-immediately lead to monopolies, which then leads to a mix of price gouging and little to no incentive to innovate, as grifts and financial tricks are easier.
This sounds insanely unsustainable, as expansion would be endlessly plagued by the fact that your system of expansion is hilariously inefficient from the ground up, and economically often based on a bunch of rich bastards fudging numbers and straight up lying to each other.
Even just on Earth, this was historically one of the big killers of empires: Inefficient overextension.
This is all made more glaring by how often the meta-motives of authors end up further solidifying a sense that the Accord is ridiculously ossified to the point of being immersion-breaking:
As an author often wants to extrapolate their present anxieties and struggles, the Accord life of their characters is often just a transplanting of modernity, with a few tweaks.
This could, arguably, be the "secret sauce", of a sort: An argument that extreme conservatism and minimal change has a pacifying effect on society at large, creating just enough of a sense of stability, and reducing the required logistical complexity of society just enough to keep things running.
It's just too bad that this is weak for really similar reasons to why "technology would make us easier to control" is weak.
The fundamental underlying gross inefficiency is still there, as well as the constant incentive to exploit fear on purpose, generating a sense of endless anxiety, insecurity, and precarity that directly works against the desired goal of forcing artifical stability.
And again, this is not meant to shame anyone, as meta-wise, I am perfectly aware that this setting mainly exists as a pornworld anyway.
"Why even bring it up, then? What's your actual motive? You still sound like you're just trying to guilt people into doing things a certain way."
Mainly because I feel like out of well-meaning respect to the original creator and perhaps some "big name fans" (none of who I have anything against), this has all become "baked in" to a degree beyond what's necessary.
Still, I don't like the feeling of calling this something like a "course correction" or treating it as an objective necessity, as part of the "point" of any given story is its emotional utility to the author. (IMO)
Up to and including the potential for the Accord to, in some cases, be kept ridiculously illogical and impossible on purpose, as a way of essentially being how the author wants to vent and express a mix of misanthropy and a sort of extrapolated representation of how unfair, ridiculous, confusing, and unlikely their own life and trauma has felt to them.
(Kind of similar to how a lot of HDG stories I come across kind of read as " revenge fantasy against capitalism" on top of just the typical wish fulfillment, which is a valid way to feel)
So if the typical version of the Accord has greater utility to someone in an emotional regard, even if that utility might seem odd or frivolous to someone from an outside perspective, I have no intention of trying to take that away from people.
I just would also be interested in this not being the only game in town, so to speak.
