Hussie vs UHC - Is this, like... actually true?

^^^^^^^^

re:kevin

The reason Hussie hasn't gone after Friendsim 2 is because they have nothing to gain from it's existence or nonexistence.

at the end of the day you have to think about things in terms of actions. andrew hussie and their team have:

-been producing and releasing homestuck for free for over a decade

-paid their collaborators (me being one of them, i was paid for animating br8k)

-been working to repair the homestuck site for at least a year now after it was left in disrepair by viz media after the discontinuation of flash

-given us fraf and this forum

on the other hand, what tangible things have the people spreading the rumors given us? u have to understand homestuck attracts a certain type of grifter, someone who isnt willing to make art but will spin any story to take credit for, well, homestuck basically. since 2011 i’ve seen this pattern repeat.

i also wanna remind people that when the unofficial collection came out andrew hussie RECOMMENDED it to fans. so you just have to be discerning and try to understand what changed from then to now? i think all andrew hussie has shown to want through their actions is for their work to remain accessible to readers and for fans and collaborators to be encouraged to make new things through homestuck.

If all Hussie wanted is for Homestuck to remain accessible, why bother with the legal threats at all? The Homestuck team was acting in bad faith, or Gio was acting in bad faith, either way it's a wash - just let it go back to how it was. There is no scenario in which sending legal threats to the person archiving your work to make it actually accessible how it was meant to be seen is indicative of someone who just wants things to be accessible. The only result that can come of this is it being less accessible. You say this is a 'grifter' spreading 'rumours', but it's someone who apparently cared more about keeping Homestuck accessible than the official owners ever did, considering two guys did it for free quicker and with more care than a paid team can.

To side-step the entire ordeal about whether the NDA terms/DMCA notice/... is real or a fabrication by Gio (about which there hasn't been a statement yet), or argue about personalities/petty grievances/emotions/'is X the right thing to do in context Y'/..., I think it is more productive to have a look at material, noticeable things happening in the background.

I have been recommending Homestuck to friends and acquaintances throughout the years (though with a sizeable gap between 2016 and 2022), which (as both MSPA and homestuck.com don't really host the comic anymore) meant regularly pointing people towards the UHC. During those recommendations, I did notice changes in the website, e.g. screenshots/previews disappearing, the Asset Pack suddenly being hosted elsewhere and at one point not even being linked to directly anymore. This sometimes went to such an extent that I had to edit old posts of mine so they wouldn't fall prey to link rot (e.g. the UHC online viewer disappearing, project ownership moving from Bambosh to Gio, and so on). At one point the HICU (well, the Homestuck Github organization) made a fork, but only to add a single version bump (from 2.5.6 to 2.5.7) which changed some "About" texts and project URLs ( https://github.com/GiovanH/unofficial-homestuck-collection/compare/main...homestuck:unofficial-homestuck-collection:main ), and then let it languish, while the "official" (Gio's) repository kept receiving updates and bugfixes all the way to version 2.7.1. Meanwhile, last year, the change of SAHCon's leadership (which Gio alleges is because of similar tactics) is similarly publicly documented.

I remember the Homestuck Made This World podcast talking about how, when Hussie needed help with e.g. a soundtrack or specific visual asset for a Flash in Homestuck proper, they'd describe what they wanted to whoever was helping out, but giving zero context. This is probably fine for one-off things (especially to prevent any details from leaking), for a comic which is for a sizeable part improvised, published right after having finished drawing it, and based on some sort of 'dialogue' (in a very wide sense of the word) with the fandom. But such a work style feels incredibly detrimental to larger-scale projects where 'real teamwork' is needed. So initially, when the "2021 Hiveswap drama" was happening (I wasn't active in the fandom at all at that point, so I only heard about it relatively late), my takeaway of it was "Hussie's personal working style being incompatible with teamwork, so of course it ended up in total chaos (while more solo projects, e.g. Psycholonials, seem to have gone better)", with the 'allegations against Hussie etc.' probably being grounded in some form of truth, while being very much exaggerated and amplified into other stuff by both sides.

As Gio's explanation of the course of events seem to match the observed things while giving a single explanation for all of these, I must say I'm inclined to believe that there is at least some truth to these accusations, though the exact extent of these things might be exaggerated (considering how there are a number of petty interpersonal issues mixed in). If a rebuttal is to be published, it will have to address this, rather than purely countering wording and what could have been "the right thing to do".

(Personally, for example, I find these NDAs to be very weird and wouldn't sign a single one of them. But also, I'm an academic, which means I might be dealing with some very export-restricted hardware from a big CPU manufacturer while still not signing any NDAs, to such an extent that I'm allowed to have my avatar be a photo of one such chip. The restrictions on these chips are a bit silly anyway as all the documentation, together with working implementations that do the fancy new thing, are already publicly available online. Oh well.)

Yeah. I would also point out that even if Homestuck doesn't cost money to read, it's definitely not true that they don't make money on the brand. And if they wanted money, there are numerous ways they could have leveraged said brand that would have gotten them boatloads of said money, but they chose to alienate fans instead.

So it's not like, picking on the independent artist here. Homestuck is not a struggling webcomic that never got its fair shot. Ultimately this is Hussie's organization and Hussie's extremely poor, erratic, and hostile decision making has defined Homestuck's decline, and even assuming Gio is an asshole (which I have not seen evidence for), shooting the messenger is a much dumber and more destructive way of handling things than just being transparent with the audience for the first time ever, or admitting fault in a way that isn't grumbling and backhanded.

And I mean, fuck. I'd be mad if I was working under Hussie. I would say, you go right out there and you talk to those people and tell them you're sorry and tell them that you're not gonna burn down a community made preservation project.

re: There is no scenario in which sending legal threats to the person archiving your work to make it actually accessible how it was meant to be seen is indicative of someone who just wants things to be accessible.

gio is not the original creator of the unofficial homestuck collection

He was one of the co-owners and did plenty of work on it. After the Homestuck team allegedly browbeat the other co-owner off the team, Gio is the only one remaining. I guess it would've been more correct to say a person rather than the person, but it does not fundamentally change what I'm saying. Sending legal threats to those archiving your works is not an effective archival strategy.

This whole situation is very confusing... I'm trying to let it boil over until I make an actual opinion on this, to make sure that I don't accidentally get roped up in some chronically online argument. No offense to anyone here, I just have very limited time at the moment.

My current takeaway from this situation with my limited knowledge and only really secondary sources is that Gio's word can't exactly be taken as truth (especially with some pretty bigoted comments and behaviour), and there's a probably lot of fighting over the preservation of Homestuck. I do know that both the Gio and HICU versions of the collection are still avaliable at the time. I did make an archive both on my computer and the Wayback Machine a bit ago, so it isn't the original version of the article, in case it goes down for whatever reason. Hopefully this situation calms down soon enough so that everyone's heads aren't being exploded at the same time.

Plug time. Since the URLs of this damn software and asset pack keep getting changed and deleted I've gone ahead and made my own mirror, which should remain where it is for quite a while.

Asset pack is still uploading but should be done in the next 30 mins or so. Can someone post this to the subreddit?

>> https://cdn.mindfang.com/mirror/uhc.html <<

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.

Im confused. You said Gio took down his github fork, but his UHC reader fork is still up. It's only his asset pack that is only accessible on that one site owned by the HICU. In fact, Gio only says in his article that his websites relating to the UHC have been taken down.

Also, you say that Gio was the one who took down his github fork (i think u mean website but whatever) and not the DMCA, and you seem to imply that this is some sort of dark, hidden truth, but that's just how DMCAs work. The DMCA notifies someone that they're committing copyright infringement, and that person has to take down the content themselves.

Am I misunderstanding something?

(The rest of this is just my opinion no more questions)

If Gio is lying about this, it would be very, very stupid, because that would actually be libel and Hussie has proven that he's not afraid to take legal action. I don't think Gio would take that risk. Frankly, if he was lying, I would've expected his article to be taken down already given the fallout this situation has already caused in the fandom space.

For posterity's sake, since Gio's github page for the UHC now redirects to the blog post, this is what Gio's page for the Unofficial Collection looked like after this article was uploaded

wow lol that's so unnecessarily dramatic given that the first option that comes up when just searching "Homestuck Unofficial Collection" still works

IT REALLY IS. Like it's the equivalent of making your twitter profile pic that one tokyo ghoul panel and having your bio say "im done." or something like that. Super petty and childish. Downright high schooler behavior. It's likely he made this page redirect to the article because he either realized how childish he was being there (unlikely) or because it was turning people away from his side.