the UHC stuff is out of my department. i'll let the proper people handle that, but the claims about the HICU demanding changes to works within FRAF in order to join are untrue. i'm going to tell a story that is seemingly unrelated, but it helps to demonstrate how exactly things like this happen. stick with me, i promise you'll understand. what's one more long, meandering essay today?

when i was in my early to mid-teens, i really liked game grumps. classic time to like game grumps, being a young teenager with undiscerning taste. in 2011, i think, jontron left game grumps. the reason jon gave was that he wanted to work on his own self-titled show. but it happened abruptly, and changed the way people interacted with game grumps. devoted fans were only given "i want to go work on my self-titled show" as reason. what followed was a golden age for jontron until he decided to cite a bunch of bunk race science on a podcast. (not that he wasn't racist before, but rose-colored glasses, stupid teenager, you know how it is.)

but in practice, what happened was that arin, the other host, and jon didn't really interact for a few years afterwards. sure, there may have been beef there, but they were two people trying to make the best art they could. that seems unbelievable given it was fucking game grumps, but i don't know what we get rhetorically by pretending that people who have the drive to make art aren't trying to make the best art they can.

the people who didn't accept "he went to go work on his show" as a reason were given this ammunition - arin and jon weren't interacting, ergo, something must have happened. the conclusion people came to was somehow that jon had done domestic abuse to arin's wife. there was never any reasonable evidence of this, but the people were hungry for any answer, and that's explosive, that's dramatic. and when you want to see something, it becomes easier to see it. and when you have trained yourself to see it, and others can't, it seems like it must be covered up, right? there must be something in the way that's stopping everyone from talking about it. people believed that jon had hit arin's wife, arin fired jon and they signed an NDA to never talk about it. that just doesn't make any fucking sense, but it's what people believed.

they had chosen to ignore the given reason, deciding it wasn't fun to play with, and let their imagination run free. what's that deltarune line? "i'm what you see when there's nothing there to see" or something like that. it's been a couple months since i played deltarune but you know what i mean. imagination and desire to see what you wanted to see instead of what really is.

over the following years, this community of people who were certain that jon jafari physically beat arin hanson's wife would grow more and more insular, more and more vitriolic. people were BEGGING for arin to acknowledge jon, in any way. it got bad enough that they would spam online games they knew they were recording. they even got caught editing out references that appeared in those online games. they were getting so close, arin HAD to acknowledge jon eventually, right?

and then, a couple years later, arin showed up on that weird as hell star wars miniseries. this was after i stopped caring, because i had a more developed sense of taste. but they were evidently friends. and it was like shit caught fire. people who had seen malice and vitriol and unresolved trauma and non-disclosure agreements saw them working together on a project and being friends and hanging out. all of their theories on what really happened were thrown out the window. it was obviously all bunk. a strong display of the truth of the matter and things being good again was all it took.

in the second article, the one titled "the homestuck union is not real", there's a bit where gio asserts that austin stepped down from vast error not long after getting the homestuck license. this is true, technically. austin did stop working on vast error to work on disenfranchised. disenfranchised fucking rules, and austin's been working on vast error for close to 15 years, and in doing so is beholden to decisions made as far back as when they were 13 years old. that's over twice as long as homestuck ran on mspa. i would get tired too. this is a normal thing to feel.

but since the case that needs to be made is "FRAF is a bad idea because they're putting control of their projects under HICU control", something untrue, the facts of the matter are ignored. "austin was told to step down by hussie" would be easily disprovable, because it's horseshit. it's seeing what you want to see, instead of what is actually there. because it's actually a piece for their actual hobbyhorse, "someone was taken off of a project that later wound up under the FRAF label", all the important parts can be abstracted away. the truth itself becomes a malleable thing that can be manipulated through omission and reframing.

this is the way this kind of conspiracy-brained nonsense works. there is nothing, i can fill it with something, listen to me instead. be mad with me instead. and the best way to fight this is, unfortunately, not with harassment and vitriol in return, but with that strong display of truth. i can promise this: the HICU has not asked anyone to make changes to their work or their team to be involved in FRAF, and i would not be okay with this if they did. it's antithetical to the whole thing.