@yourfemperor I have to imagine that the process of fixing the website is some sort of insanely herculean task or else they wouldn't have spent over a year negotiating with a project run by someone who has grade A beef with the head of the company. If they had the capacity to repair homestuck.com faster than licensing the UHC, presumably they would have just done it and saved themselves the trouble.

Gio framed this whole debacle as "they were trying to get creative control of my project", right? Whether that's true or not, it feels like the implication is that they wanted to present it as official homestuck content, no? That would explain why he felt like control was being taken away from him, and why they were willing to spend so long negotiating with someone who was causing them so many difficulties- they needed the UHC to replace the website. Makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than homestuck randomly deciding to try and seize control of one particular fan project just out of... spite or malice or whatever.

As for not simply fixing the website in the meantime... if this were nintendo or some other megacorp, i'm sure they'd have some shitty replacement up and functional (at a very basic level) in a matter of months. I have to assume homestuck simply lacks the 300 interns necessary to work overtime on porting mario egbert to the nintendo switch and felt it would be a much better use of their time and money to try and negotiate. I'm not a programmer or anything, i'm not going to pretend i can tell exactly how bad viz broke the website, but it sure looks dire. That could be months or years of paying multiple coders to try and replace everything, especially all the flash games. I can only imagine how many assets got lost and have to get recreated from scratch.