Hiveswap is bleeding out. it did somewhat poorly with act 1, and act 2 flopped incredibly hard. they can promise act 3 is coming, and maybe it will, but it won't be this decade.

WP was an incredible horror-show dumpster fire. enough said.

VIZ was genuinely one of the worst things that could've ever happened to homestuck, minus what's happening now. which is being officially unavailable for 6 months.

the HICU is both simultaneously terrible and good. it's allowed for the forum to come back, although somewhat poorly (i'll get to this). letting fan projects earn money is spectacular as well. apparently BC is going great, but i won't speak on it because I have 0 interest in touching anything connected to HS^2.

on the other side of the coin, they've been as transparent as a glass of milk. the homestuck website being relegated to "it's coming back soon!" for half a year is ridiculous. minus a complete and utter melting of every webserver, the comic should've been back up after 2 months at the maximum. even if it's a bandaid fix, it's still better to have SOMETHING up while you work on a more permanent solution.

something that also irks me is the whole hussie in the room so to speak. hussie sold homestuck to VIZ because at the minimum he wanted nothing to do with it. fair. bridges with the community were burned both willingly and unwillingly. but, having him just reappear with the HICU and being the owner of the brand again without any real explanation or word from him is weird.

i also really dislike how FRAF was dropped. they did an entire countdown sequence for 8r8k, but gave an incredibly vague months notice and a "hey look" without warning. why?

the final thing i'll touch on is SAHcon. i'm sorry, having the HICU involved at all completely goes against the whole philosophy of the con. it was a for fans by fans convention. but now with the official licensing, it's probably just going to turn into a Homestuck Direct so to speak.

FRAF. i'll be very blunt and to the point here. most of the merch is simply not good, the forum is missing major features, and certain parts of the site are busted. it's rough. but, it has soul. it has a lot of potential to be a genuinely good thing. with the right amount of community outreach and balls to the wall development, i can see FRAF being a major revival of the MSPA community. i hope that the managers of this project do it the justice it deserves.

my post is reeeeeeeeaaaaaaaally long, soooooooorry about that. that just means it's more correct or something.