@mobiancruxtruder i won't disagree that on the whole it sucks when a Creator or Brand™ (or whatever hussie's homestuck classifies as these days) uses the law to control someone else's interactions with their thing. i think a lot of people on this thread would lean towards sailing the seven seas over letting mickey mouse be sacred iconography forever, if you get what i mean.

however, i also think you're flattening the nuance of the situation a bit too much. firstly, hussie has always stated that the hiveswap articles are based on bad information spread by a malicious source (gio also acknowledges this accusation in several of the articles). so the problem is not that gio criticised homestuck or hussie, the problem is that gio has spread what hussie contends is misinfo. this may not be a meaningful difference to you (i acknowledge that 'only use our approved sources' can easily scan as 'don't say anything that makes us look bad'), but the fact that in a whole sea of people talking shit on hussie, hiveswap, what pumpkin etc. these articles are the only ones to get this reaction is very relevant, imo. and i think when what was on the table was gio/the UHC getting a homestuck official seal of approval, it becomes obvious why those articles would come up. if they stayed unaltered, that's homestuck basically going 'yeah these are reliable'. which is an obvious problem considering (at minimum, from hussie's pov) they're not.

also... the UHC still exists, and is/can still be worked on, because (i might have the terminology wrong here, i don't know shit about github) it's been open source and available to be forked p much since it was created. if im understanding what the takedown notices covered, the only thing that's changed is ppl who aren't homestuck can't host the asset pack anymore, and you can still find that asset pack very easily like, everywhere? including through the official homestuck.github.io url. gio + bambosh are also credited on said site. there's even a whole copyright spiel at the bottom talking about how anyone can modify the app however they want as long as they don't claim homestuck the comic comprised of anything that it didn't, originally. so like miles said in one of the discord logs, the UHC is now in a less legally complicated position than it was before the negotiation. this could be me underplaying the severity of the situation since im admittedly biased against gio, but i think if hussie had the motives/mindset gio says she does, she would've nuked the thing from orbit. she didn't, she just took it out of gio's hands, specifically. we still have it, and can still do virtually whatever we want with it.

UHC is also not the only mirror of homestuck. if hussie swung the legal hammer on EVERY attempt to archive the site like this, esp while the main site is lost at sea, yes absolutely that would be insane bully behaviour. but i think it's pretty clear that gio's past actions, and the way they handled themselves with this negotiation, is the reason it shook out the way it did.

and theres a fuckton of people on this forum with licenses + monetisation rights, and (according to them anyway) they didn't require hussie's personal approval to get that position. gio makes a lot of rhetorical arguments about how this shows hussie can + will wipe fanfics or fangames that she doesn't like from existence. but she didn't wipe fanfic, or anything transformative for that matter. she wiped an asset pack of her work. and nothing else.

what im saying is, there are a lot of ways this negotiation could've gone better. but since gio was + is clear about the terms they wouldn't agree to, it's like... i don't understand what's supposed to be shocking about the outcome. they did not and do not have the 'right' to an archive of hussie's work. they said as much themselves. and since trust completely broke down between both sides (assuming it wasn't already broken in 2020), gio then couldn't be 'trusted' to have ownership over a hugely popular way to access all of hussie's shit. if you don't want to sign a contract with the museum, you don't get to keep responsibility over where all the paintings go. if that makes any sense?