I'm just gonna get my stance off my chest.

As a relatively new fan, I'm only vaguely aware of Hussie's history of clashing with the fanbase (and even more so in terms of specific incidents). However, given what behaviors I've heard mentioned passingly in fan discussions, I do believe Gio's post. I'm not riding or dying for it, I'm just saying that it sounds believable to me and nothing immediately disproves it, so why should I not believe it? I am not condoning the extremely heated and manipulative rhetoric present in the post, but multiple things can be true at once. Hussie can repeatedly deceive and bully the people behind a free fan work, and the person telling that story can have a biased narrative. Both parties here should be met with skepticism. I'm not going to immediately wholeheartedly believe a response from the HS team unless it contains a Phoenix Wright-level smoking gun discrediting everything Gio said, but again, I'm not trusting every word Gio said, either.

Honestly, with how other fan work creators are coming out saying they didn't have to deal with any of this behind-closed-doors BS, I'm honestly leaning into the implication in the that this is just Hussie beefing with Gio. I know nothing about Gio's previous posts or the Sarah Z drama or how Hussie reacted to it, and I honestly don't really care about fandom drama between two people I don't know. And, yes, I do have a bit of an eyebrow raised at the post's framing of "He's trying to take ME down for spreading the TRUTH!" But, again, given what scraps I've heard about Sarah Z and other fandom clashes, I don't think a vendetta is out of the equation. If anyone says Hussie isn't petty, we are talking about an individual who write thousands of words for a strawman character just to "own the SJWs" in 2012.

And, yeah, I'm gonna say it, trying to take down / take control over the collection is a dick move. But that's not really the topic at hand. My IRL friends and I were really excited to see what an official collection would look like. Oh well.