HICU has rebranded to Furthest Ring Studios

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.

re; quienunsburb

I AGREE WITH YOu BIG TIME. IT WAS NICE WHEN IT WHEN HOMESTuCK, EPILOuGES, BEYOND CANON. BuT WITH THE NEW NAME CHANGE IT FEELS LIKE IT CuTS OFF BC AND THE EPILOuGES FROM HOMESTuCK A TAD MORE AND MAKES THEM FEEL MORE LIKE A FAN PROJECT THAN AN OFFICIAL THING :( I FEEL LIKE THAT FACT WILL DISSuADE ALOT OF HOMESTuCK FANS FROM READING HSBC EVEN MORE! OF COuRSE I AM BIASED BECAuSE I REALLY REALLLLLYYY LOVE HSBC BuT YKNOW. STILL uNFORTuNATE NONETHEKESS.

ALSO A QuESTION TO EVERYONE THAT DOESNT EXACTLY RELATE TO THE PARAGRAPH ABOVE, WHAT *EXACTLY* DO YOu WANT THEM TO CLARIFY? FROM WHAT I GATHER HSCu/FRS HAS BEEN A GROuP OF PEOPLE PASSIONATE ABOuT MAKING A SEQuEL TO THE EPILOuGES WITH ANDREW HuSSIES GuIDANCE ON PLOY POINT, ECT. BuT EVERYTHING ELSE IS MOSTLY uP TO THEM. DOES THIS NOT MAKE THEM A uNION?? I AM LOST. IM SAYING THIS uNDER THE ASSuMPTION THAT THIS FORuM IS A 'NO STuPID QuESTIONS' PLACE THAT TREATS STuPID PEOPLE LIKE I NICELY.

ah Grasshopper Manufacture. Some permutation of them made one of my fav ds games Contact I super recommend! it is cut of a similar cloth to Undertale/Deltarune and other games that play around with the split between Player (you) and Player Character (not you)...

Anyway, the news post that is linked in the OP (which, i may point out, never mentions reddit and what happens there whatsoever), is imo pretty straight forward and transparent. But I will sparknotes it here: HICU was made as a group of artists who wanted to revive HS^2. Many of those artists have also -and continue to- contribute to more official HS works which caused people to be confused because it has "Homestuck" in the name ((I guess the "Independent" was ignored, which is similar to how people got tripped up over what an "Official Unofficial" continuation means.)) a problem that only got worse as og HS ramped up in activity again. It is still the same people, Miles and Kim are and have been co-directors for a little bit now so I have no idea why Who Owns/Runs This Group keeps being argued about. The team is willing and exited about doing More beyond uh Beyond Canon.

I continue to not see how discussing what people are yelling about on reddit is worth the time or is like. Relevant at all (and yet.. here I am... wasting many a word). Its just people making a big stink about things which is like. Why are we talking about what other people are saying/speculating about the news moreso than the Actual News.

Contact rocks and was in fact directed by a staff member on Moon which was one of the games that inspired Undertale :^)

Some of Grasshopper's other games play around with that idea from a different and more obtuse direction too... really recommend them to people who like complicated bizarre stories that develop their own specific visual and structural languages (i.e. homestuck fans)

Yeah, there's this narrative going on like Andrew Hussie is Bob frickin' Iger or something: a bloated plutocratic businessperson squatting atop a billion-dollar IP franchise, running it with merciless attention to the bottom line and punishing any infringement with a battalion of lawyers. They're a WEBCOMIC ARTIST. Most webcomics artists can barely run their own merch store.(ahem<Achewood>ahem) Plus, from very early on, Hussie has been gleefully blurring the lines between official and unofficial Homestuck. Hardly surprising that the business side of Homestuck is informal, fluid and occasionally shambolic.

i agree with autumn here for the most part. and i think there's a bit of an issue with devil's advocates feeling a strong need to hash through anything the reddit spits up for posterity or whatever.

but the reality of the situation is: this isn't the subreddit. many of us are here because we find the subreddit toxic and unpleasant to be around. i can wax poetic about how i don't think the redditor's are arguing or theorising in good faith, but ultimately i do feel the issue here is just that if we wanted to debate the reddit theories, we'd all be on the subreddit.

and honestly it would be kind of nice to have a single official news thread that doesn't end up getting derailed with this stuff. like, at the very least, we could afford to simply make a new thread if anyone really wants to rehash things-- and i'm not saying discussing this stuff is inherently bad or shouldn't be allowed-- but it kind of sucks that the first announcement thread on the topic has been 2 pages of almost exclusively discussing how redditors feel about it.

it's like if nasa made a post about upcoming space programs and the discussion was entirely made up of people arguing about moon landing conspiracy theories.

apologies for being a "devil's advocate" if I was ^_^ not to brag, but I've never been on the subreddit. or really given my opinion of this until now.

the only comments I've seen on the topic are people who haven't read the source spreading misinfo about it. which leads to more people who haven't read them, telling taller tales about the allegations from both sides. helping nobody. and Ren is so right, it's probably a mix of personal and legal stuff that has little to do with anyone being Evil. or is worth an entire sub's Reddit of discussion. I'll drop the topic on this forum, just engaging in the established conversation is all.

struggling to stay on topic:

3. does the glint in the ring make you think of Psycholonials diamonds or the Save glint more...