Idk I can think of a few examples of corporate ownership stuff being weird and unsaid to the public in similar ways. I won't tell you a big story about Grasshopper Manufacture but it's really weird. Probably it doesn't strike most people as weird because it's a small Japanese company and people don't really expect it to communicate those behind-the-scenes details in the first place, but if you look into it, the history is indeed weird. Not "suspicious" or "something the public needs to know", but clearly there are some stories there, and some of them are not unlike Homestuck - repeated restructures, half the staff incorporating as a new company with the exact same name while the old one changes its name with zero announcement as to what this means, getting bought by megacorporations but then later having tenuous half-relationships to them that can only barely be verified to still exist. The CEO just says anything in interviews. Honestly it's probably messier and less communicative than Homestuck in some ways? But I don't have reason to think there's a single untoward thing going on on their part. There's just a lot of messy and stupid legal stuff we don't know.

Homestuck is weird because it was true indie, like, in the way the Internet used to be, where you just make stuff and sometimes your friends and fans help you too and they get credit for it but there's not a lot of legal thought put in because it's nice to think we can be above all that corporate garbage as much as possible. But in some ways that's unsustainable if you're selling multi-contributor albums or, like, commissioning a dev studio to make a game using the fans' kickstarter money. I think most people working on HS stuff to this day are still mostly just friends with eachother (and Andrew) who are in it for the love of HS. But they also want to avoid those kind of legal v. personal pitfalls so they setup these legal situations ahead of time. Is it still a mix of personal and legal stuff? Probably. Is that a bad thing? Well, I would prefer it if they didn't have to do any of that stuff at all and it could just be a personal thing, and nobody would have to speak words like "IP" or "Homestuck Official" in their announcement posts ever again. But obviously this is in some senses the way it has to be.

As for the HICU, it was a union of artists. If that was inaccurately suggestive of it being a labor union specifically, well, they literally changed the name to not suggest that. Which is the topic of the thread.