Once the Affini Compact becomes aware of a civilization, their domestication is inevitable. Generally speaking, while there are no civilizations more advanced than the Compact, even such precursor cultures would be unable to resist the Affini indefinitely.
This is not to say that the affini don't have limits, or that nothing bad can ever happen.
Affini, as individuals, are flawed and capable of making mistakes. Systemic mistakes, on the other hand, are vanishingly rare, and become even less common when they would result in fatalities, injuries, and injustice. The more affini eyes are on a situation, the less likely things are to go wrong. Even when mistakes occur, and even when they occur on the scale of a ship, a planet, or even a solar system, the Affini will stop at nothing to correct them, using every resource at their disposal to do so — and their resources are functionally limitless.
The Affini want to help you, and they will do everything in their power to do so. The Affini will gaslight you, drug you, mind-control you, violate your boundaries, ignore your consent, and do a bunch of things that are, in the context of a real-life human relationship, not generally desirable. They'll tell you it's for your own good.
If you give the Affini a surface-level examination, they look pretty awful, but when an abusive human says "it's for your own good," it's an excuse. It's a deflection. It's a way to justify what they're doing to you. When the Affini say it,
it's true. They make it true, sometimes through bizarre and even unethical means (by human standards), but you
will be better off when they're done. The Affini value other
sophonts so highly that they have built their entire culture, an entire multiple-galaxy-spanning empire, not just around helping the ones they co-evolved with, but helping every sophont, everywhere. Affini will (and frequently do!) risk their lives to protect sophonts that are trying to kill them.
Not every affini will use methods like these. Some affini are, in fact, quite gentle. Some sophonts don't need (from the Affini perspective) such strong influence to bend them to their will. The degree to which affini do questionable things (from the human perspective) to their florets will vary from author to author (largely based on what they find hot/want to write about), but regardless of the affini's behavior, their ultimate goal is always,
always, to help the sophont in question, to leave them in a better place than the affini found them, and to make them happy. While this means a floret can get a lot of mileage out of pleading in an adorable manner, it doesn't mean that the affini will do literally anything a floret asks of them. Sometimes pets don't know what's good for them, after all.
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