ok, so, big day. i’ve been at work all day with my phone blowing up but i just got home so now i can make a post about this UHC situation.
to be clear, this isn’t the “Homestuck Official Response” or whatever, but there’s stuff i clearly want to address now, because this story has taken on a life of its own and i’d like to keep things considerate and maybe give my own side of the story here before any “Homestuck Official Response” happens.
if this is something you have strong opinions on (which i completely understand), i'd really encourage you to give this a read with an open mind.
a few early tl;drs but i’m getting into all of this in more detail below, so... this post is a highly suggested read if you’d like to begin to hear a different side of this story:
A: no, the UHC is not gone forever, there is a fork up right now. the Homestuck site itself is still being worked on and improved and andrew has no intentions of turning Homestuck into “lost media”, that’s not going to happen. Homestuck is not going away or in any danger of disappearing, i promise.
Aa: here is the fork: https://homestuck.github.io/
B: no, FRAF and the HICU are not andrews evil goons commanded by a shadowy puppet-master.
C: i’ve already begun getting threats over this, and also seen all kinds of accusations slung at me, the HICU, FRAF, even james, so i’d like people to hear me out here and not attack people over this. gio, to his credit, has also emphasized this, which i appreciate, and i'll also emphasize that i do NOT want people harassing gio over this. i have no interest in starting a flame war.
D: a more organized and “receipt”-y account of this whole thing from Homestuck's perspective may be coming in the coming days, though certainly not tonight. i am not just talking out my ass, here, but i also didn’t exactly have presumably months to spend perfecting a gigantic article that positions me as the epic folk hero and the other parties as the nefarious pawns of a shadow cabal, so sit tight for some other stuff. i don’t really know that i am going to have much (or any?) part in writing that if it happens, besides offering any screenshots of my own.
E: i'm of the opinion that gio's article was pretty transparently not written out of a benevolent desire to protect homestuck fans' access to the comic.
F: i anticipate that this post is gonna be treated as something to refute, but it's a Post. this is not like, My Counter-Article, like i said i'm not the guy writing one. i'm getting my perspective out because i think everyone has a right to hear it.
okay, let me get into it. some context.
the thing i need to start this off with is as follows: 2 years ago, before HS:BC was even coming out (and, i’ll note, WELL before i was ever a co-director) andrew asked me if i’d be comfortable acting as a liaison/go-between between him and bambosh+gio regarding offering a license to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection and bringing it into the fold, allowing them to monetize and publish a bunch of behind the scenes goodies like more book notes, other future collabs, and sneak peaks etc. it would have been a cool one-stop shop for homestuck shit, and i was new to the HS:BC team and incredibly eager to get involved in not just writing HS:BC but anything else. the reason andrew asked me to be a liaison is because, as i’m sure is pretty obvious to anyone by now, there was no love lost between andrew and gio over the previous round of homestuck PR clusterfuckery that happened 4-5ish years ago, and andrew thought this all might go over better if i was between andrew and gio to like, make nice, try to offer the olive branch in a less intimidating way, etc. maybe also because shit like this “exposé” has a tendency to keep happening when gio is around, which is a riddle i’d invite us all to contemplate.
i wanna pause and emphasize something here, because it’s one of the most important things i want to get across. i was acting as a Liaison for andrew, as a MESSENGER, FOR andrew, not as like, a Lawyer or and Advisor or a “coconspirator” or the guy who authored the decisions that actually got made here. i did not and do not tell andrew what to do about anything, certainly not about how to handle the Homestuck IP or any moves he wants to make legally. i gave some advice on how to communicate and actually Did The Communicating, but during all of this i wasn’t even the director on HS:BC, i was literally just a writer who thought he was stepping into a short, sweet process to get a cool collaboration going between the UHC and Homestuck as an IP.
i was also NOT acting as a representative of ANY aims of the HICU. you can ask literally anyone on the team if this was on our docket, the answer is no. again, i was acting as a liaison for andrew to try and keep communications more productive so that we could start expanding the Homestuck<—>Fan network and do cool shit. i’m hardly an accredited PR guy, but for what it’s worth, i tried.
i obviously mentioned the HICU to gio and bambosh, and it was still taking form as an entity back then so i was super loose with the term and the role it actually played in the issue of the UHC (which is to say, Literally None.) in a way that in retrospect i Obviously Should Not Have Been. that said, i need to make this abundantly clear, now, because the team and i are already starting to get threats over this: the HICU is not “secretly controlled by andrew” (nor is the patreon money split with Andrew, by the way.). we hold a license for Homestuck, his property, and obviously consult with him on merch, 4/13 events and the like that we participate in, but he doesn’t control the team, and he certainly doesn’t control HS:BC. the same needs to be said now for FRAF as well; cami and others have already gone into this and i expect this conversation is going to continue to play out for a while, but FRAF is not “controlled by andrew” either. like the HICU, FRAF holds a license with andrew to work with and monetize Homestuck fanworks, because at the end of the day, Homestuck is andrew’s story.
the number of people who actively talk to andrew between FRAF and the HICU can probably be counted on one hand, and of those people, the number of those who have had more individual conversations with andrew than you can count on one hand is even less.
all this is to say, no, the HS:BC team/HICU are not all “andrew’s goons”, no, the FRAF team are not andrew’s goons, and no, the HICU and FRAF themselves, as projects, are not andrew’s. neither am i. we are licensees with homestuck to get legal permission to do what we do, and earn the right to be compensated for that license (for which i’m extremely grateful, by the way) but i am not a Homestuck Inc./What Pumpkin Employee, and neither are they. any work any of us do for Homestuck or about Homestuck we do because we love it and the fandom, and the role that i played in this UHC scenario was because i thought i was going to be stepping in to mediate a quick situation that would help reconcile gio and andrew and give something cool to the fans at the same time, not because i was trying to, what, get involved in a messy situation for no reason other than to hurt people and punish the fans? why would i do that? or, for that matter, why would andrew?
anyway, i’ve WAY over-emphasized this point, but it just matters to me, A: because i don’t want the HICU *or* the FRAF team to be getting this kind of smear campaign slung at them while they’re trying to do something cool and B: because for trying to help mediate a sticky situation, i’ve been lambasted as a manipulative detriment to the fandom to probably tens of thousands of people???
MOVING ON.
basically, i spent like a solid year on and off as a go-between, trying to mediate between andrew and gio+bambosh (bambosh, notably, seemed really excited to work with us initially until talks deteriorated), from like september 2023 until i think like december 2024 or january of this year or whatever the hell. you can go read the precise dates in gio’s article, i’m positive they’re somewhere in there. after a certain point, it became clear to andrew and to me that my role as a liaison, messenger, whatever was just not working out and i haven’t touched this shit since.
obviously, That Year Of Trying Did Not Work Out, Lol.
actually, for what its worth, i want to emphasize here that i have no grievance whatsoever with bambosh, at all, and for whatever stress i contributed to their life during this saga i am sincerely, actually sorry. they were legit a pleasure to talk to and i was really, really looking forward to seeing what they’d be able to cook up with Homestuck’s backing and resources. i hope you're well, bambosh.
anyway. this is my personal read on the situation (as Miles, The Guy Who Was Actually Here For All This), and i want to try not to sling personal accusations as much as i can despite being dragged through the mud along with my entire team, but my observation throughout this whole process was Not that gio was standing up as a stalwart defender of the rights of the fans to access homestuck, because andrew Wanted to work with him, and bambosh Wanted to work with us, and andrew doesn’t “hate homestuck and want it to go away” (the whole reason i’m allowed to make HS:BC with the HICU is because andrew wants the fandom to keep thriving!). gio was Not trying everything he could to make this work, because by his own admission in the article he refused to sign a license to continue to publish the Entirety Of A Body Of Work That Didn’t Belong To Him, and i also strongly suspect did everything in his power to dissuade bambosh from licensing when it was bambosh andrew was doing the initial negotiating with, Precisely Because We Were Worried About Situations Like This. at the time i actually thought that was TOO paranoid, believe it or not, but holy shit was i wrong about that, lol.
what it felt to me that gio was doing was stalling any progress andrew tried to make with the UHC because licensing it meant he wouldn’t get to control access to andrews work, or have the, i don’t know, “clout” (???) of managing it without any oversight, and almost certainly because working with andrew would have meant he couldn’t just go around talking shit on andrew and Homestuck as a company anymore whenever he pleased (and, clearly, he pleases). also i guess because he was asked to help recontextualize events that transpired during a saga of misery that resulted in multiple members of the old team being bullied off the internet and the complete halt of Homestuck Anything for like three years.
i am trying not to be uncharitable here but like, really look at the article. it is super inflammatory. there are legitimate critiques to be made about the way Homestuck as a business has handled things in the past, and even some ways i would obviously have suggested this situation be handled differently MYSELF if given another go at it, but this is not a measured critique, this is shouting “FIRE!!!!!!!!” in a crowded theater, presented as an attempt to save the fans from a Datapocalypse that isn’t even going to happen. this isn’t the action of someone who “loves homestuck and wants to protect it” because it accomplishes literally nothing but making everyone who actually likes homestuck fucking miserable. who does that help?
this is conjectural and speculative, but frankly after an entire article painting me as a manipulative liar who hates every homestuck fan after i spent a year trying to mediate a delicate situation so that gio could work WITH HOMESTUCK, when i and my team have lost sleep and poured our whole hearts into trying to make the fandom a cool place to be for all the incredible people who love this comic for two years, i think i’m allowed my own take, and that’s this:
this article isn’t about you, the reader, as a fan and your threatened right to have continuous access to Homestuck, because that’s not in danger. i promise. i have worked on HS:BC for two awesome years now and i have never felt in danger of Homestuck Disappearing, and i wouldn’t BE working on HS:BC if i felt there was some attempt to destroy Homestuck (because, again, why??? would i do that???). this isn’t about copyright law or protecting fan projects, because fan projects are being actively endorsed by andrew and Homestuck/WP and allowed to monetize, thrive, etc. this is about gio. andrew asked to bring gio on to work With Homestuck under a license, and gio refused. i delivered andrew’s messages and was the face of this series of exchanges, and gio spent an entire article painting me as both a villain and a victim in front of thousands of people. the HICU and FRAF and andrew have all been trying in their own ways to make homestuck fans happy with comics, merch, fanworks, and more, and it’s been working, so gio decided to shit on that parade because he screwed himself out of being a part of it.
this has all turned out to be a headache more enormous than i could possibly have imagined, and if i played any part at all in bungling this or making it worse by not being a good enough communicator or a bad liaison then i sincerely apologize for that. i’m here first and foremost to try and make homestuck fun for everyone, and today was obviously the opposite of fun. that said, i also am not gonna just sit here and let a bunch of innocent members of multiple teams, andrew, and myself get thrown under the bus by staying quiet while people take potshots at us.
i anticipate there will probably be some kind of official counter-argument or whatever from Homestuck (not the HICU, not FRAF) in the coming days with more Capital D Documentation, so if you’re looking for a more Annotated Account, that’s probably where you’re gonna get it, not here. i don’t think i’m gonna stick around answering questions in this thread or anything, either, i’d just like people to think on what i have to say, and to reiterate one last time that i’d like everybody to treat all the team members of various teams with grace, because they are literally Not Involved With This.
and also, once more for the record, i do not want people harassing gio over this. i'm zero percent interested in trying to start a flame war.
jesus christ that was long. sorry if i got at all personal, here, and for everyone who stuck around to read the whole thing, i am sincerely grateful.
... as the ancient hawaiians used to say.
This is largely Not My Business and i would be content to stay out of it if it weren't keeping my wife up at night. I don't have a ton to say that hasn't already been said (thanks miles for talking about this like an adult, etc) and i don't want to get caught up in the morality debate on who's responsible for the complete breakdown of the situation- again, unfortunate for everyone involved, but not my business. Some of the other replies got me thinking about a related issue, though.
A lot of people's emotional stake in this largely seems to be derived from the fact that homestuck dot com currently Sucks Ass, as it were. And that's understandable. I saw a few people (i'm not trying to be vague, i am literally just too lazy to go back through the thread looking for your names to @ you, sorry) asking why they have taken so long to do anything about it, and i feel like there's a pretty obvious answer here.
> basically, i spent like a solid year on and off as a go-between, trying to mediate between andrew and gio+bambosh (bambosh, notably, seemed really excited to work with us initially until talks deteriorated), from like september 2023 until i think like december 2024 or january of this year or whatever the hell.
They were negotiating to license the UHC for over a year. Basically ever since they got the license back from viz, up until this january, the plan was to license the UHC. Why would they fix up the website while they are licensing a fan project that's meant to replace it? Wasn't that the entire idea? They license the UHC, it becomes the Official Homestuck Collection or whatever the fuck, they put it up on the official website, bam, everything works, everything's nice and pretty, and they don't have to spend weeks or months of employees' time trying to replicate what other people already did. Not only would fixing the site at this point require a lot of time and effort, but like. That's work, they'd have to pay someone for that, and i don't think homestuck is exactly flush with cash at this point. Wouldn't be surprised if they didn't want to spend that much money just to have a backup in case the deal falls through. You could call that a bad management decision for sure- obviously they DID need a backup- but, you know, 20/20 hindsight and all that.
Why is it not done yet? I don't know, but it sure is a really long comic on an extremely broken website. Recreating all the flash games is probably a ton of work. It would be very nice if we had some kind of official news on what's being done and how far along they are, but i'm not surprised it's not ready yet, given the circumstances.
tldr: I believe work on fixing the website probably began no earlier than january of this year, because they had no reason to do it if the UHC licensing happened. Perhaps i'm making too many assumptions and leaps of logic? Sanity check me here. It feels very obvious to me that the purpose of licensing a collection of the original work would be to use it as the de facto way to read the work.
@timeisrestored i just disagree entirely that saying "this person is acting like x" is in any way equivalent to "this person is x". people can do things reminiscent of much worse behavior and that can be pointed out without it needing to be a statement of equivalence. if even HALF of the way gio alleges that they and bambosh were treated during the negotiation process, i would consider using a simile like that to be pretty mild if i were in their shoes. in any case, the framing is secondary to the real issues which are the slimeball tactics demonstrated, and i only bring up the framing here because there's not a whole lot else to the response. playing good cop/bad cop throughout the whole negotiation, forcing one person off the project via divide-and-conquer tactics, insisting the delay lies at gio's feet when there appeared to be a misunderstanding on the (as far as i can see) clearly explained way that UHC handles decisions, escalating to legal threats while pulling the old "it would be a shame if something happened to this" card, all of it looks pretty bad. even just the most basic part of "your project is so cool, we would love to work with you, past unpleasantness will in no way affect this process, actually it will be a MAJOR roadblock that a lot of people are clearly still turbo pissed about" looks at minimum immature and unprofessional. this doesn't read to me like a response interested in taking any of that that seriously!
wish i had read the response from @crowbarsrcool before posting, i think they nailed it.
@coratorium I don't follow the logic where they wouldn't want both the collection and a website. Like, why not? Having a (functioning) website would be the easiest way to get new eyes on the subject and allows for ads, while the collection remains an integral archive for the work.
Magic is FAKE AS SHIT/FUCKING REAL
He was thrust into insane drama he had no part in n took the fall for all of it... now thousands of ppl think he's a manipulative puppet w no agency...
Thats THE BOSS FROM MGS3!! Miles' constant allusions to metal gear truly coming back in a twisted irony rn
miles you are so so so strong for holding in "guys we're literally doing the homestuck anime. tomorrow." with so much of gio's arguments being them trying to hurt the fandom LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOO
@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.
regarding the site being "in progress", if it's so hard it seems a little weird that there are at least 2 fully functional mirrors that i know of which are up and running flawlessly right now. one of them even has a built-in flash emulator! i am sure that doing it in an official corporate-sponsored capacity would involve some more legal hurdles, possibly getting a license for ruffle, etc. but in the absence of a more detailed reason it seems odd that it's simultaneously some herculean task AND something that multiple different hobbyists with way fewer resources were able to spin up in a fraction of the time.
@reyguns
i mean the thing is is that a majority of the people currently working for/under homestuck/what pumpkin in an official capacity are doing it in their spare time. i doubt the earnings from the patreon split like, 5-6 ways (however many team members there are) is enough to support anyone substantially over time, especially considering how fluctuating things like that can be. so its a matter of like. repairing the website will already take time, PLUS on top of that, whatever time they dedicate to repairing the website has to be done between shifts in another job (if they have one, i have no doubt that some of the current members dont), and then that time spent repairing the website could be used for doing cool stuff like fraf, or hs:bc's entire site setup, or ect ect ect.
OBVIOUSLY i dont have a real view into the internal affairs of the HICU or WPs so i'm just kind of going off of conjecture here. and like, i think honestly there should've been some small efforts to put the website back up at the same time negotiations were going on, maybe. but i get why they wouldnt want to prioritize that with such a small team.
RE: reyguns
As someone who got a glimpse into the Homestuck.com situation, I will say that the infrastructure that Viz left behind was fucked to begin with and fixing it isn't nearly as easy as you'd think. I am genuinely astounded that the site stayed functional for as long as it did and I have nothing but respect for the warriors in the mines fixing it, they are much stronger than I. They've actually made some crazy good progress pretty recently and I expect it to be back up and running in the very near future based on what I've seen.
@bigchalupa @cami
fair enough! to be clear unlike some others i think what happened to the website was simple negligence, nothing but big ups and shouts out to anyone who is finally putting rubber to the road on it. i was surprised because from my perspective, the work has been essentially done at least twice by what i would assume to be even smaller teams who also were doing it in their spare time! not trying to imply that there's anything untoward going on, which to be fair may be surprising from the tone of my other posts. just a genuine technical curiosity that is probably outside the scope of this thread. some sort of devblog from the people involved in fixing it that goes into how badly the infrastructure was broken and what goes into a full rebuild vs. just mirroring the pre-viz site (and why the former is preferable, which i figure is probably the case but couldn't tell you why) would be really interesting.
@dilettantecinephiliac
> Gio very clearly goes on about how his "heart is pure and cause is righteous", says Hussie and Miles repeatedly lied and were nasty to him, but goes on about how he's "going to be as amenable as anyone possibly could be, and if they turned nasty again, it’d be them turning nasty again.".
to be fair gio did not simply say that this happened, gio showed evidence of it that does not seem to have yet been refuted as false, doctored, or even taken significantly out of context. at this point in the blog there are multiple documented instances of the negotiations vacillating from positive to pretty nasty.
>Furthermore, saying "I decided to play it out. If they were going to attack us I wouldn’t be able to stop them, but I determined the project wouldn’t collapse because I didn’t want to do the legwork." tries to make himself look like he's knowingly putting himself into a negative situation to be a hero. That's very clearly him trying to paint a picture of himself as good and Andrew AND Miles as the villains.
i do not agree that is clear. i felt that gio directly explained that he's knowingly putting himself in a negative situation because the UHC is a passion project that he feels very strongly about, which is backed up by all the free labor he was doing for the project before these negotiations ever started. if pointing that out makes him seem like a hero to andrew's villain (which is not my interpretation of events or what i think the article implies) then to me that says more about homestuck's behavior during the process.
>taking his evidence to the court of law
timeless responded to this very well, this is a non-starter for many reasons. regardless of what one thinks of the tone or framing, there is a very reasonable argument that publishing this was gio's most practical recourse
@coratorium I think a couple of things openly acknowledged in Gio's article go against this assumption.
For one, beyond both containing a readable copy of the comic, a working site and an offline collection both have very different cons and advantages: having the whole comic up there on the web provides the accessibility that everyone seems to be talking about nowadays and can also double as a frontpage for keeping the fandom updated on what's going on - both super essential things to have for the longevity of the brand; but the offline collection is both offline and a collection - it has all those extra bits and deluxe material for the more dedicated reader, which Gio insinuates was Hussie's exact intention by offering the missing commentary as a collection-exclusive feature.
Roach was also talking about the site being actively worked on at least as far back as January of 2024 (https://beyondcanon.com/news/newspost-1704167374) when this deal with the UHC was still in the process of being discussed, which Gio also mentions in the blog post.
I can certainly see how getting the UHC deal done was probably a priority so that people had a way to read homestuck in the meantime, while the site continued to be finished... but that's already how people were using the collection, anyway? It was the most widely used stopgap while we waited for the site to come back online, and Hussie was happy to refer to it when asked how to find the comic. So even if we were to take everything Gio says in the article on its face as truth, I don't see how your theory makes sense as an explanation why things happened the way they did
>eats somewhere other than olive garden once
>fucking dies
asking if the mods could remove my post from august 9th on this topic, I'd like to repost an edited version with a note talking about it being edited but if that's not allowed I'd rather the post just be removed altogether as one of the people alluded to in it has asked not to dragged into this even if to defend her.
@jakemorph
I quickly made an account to explain why specifically having UHC licensed would be fixing the website. In 2023, Gio made an online port of UHC. (here's a link of Gio explaining it https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2023/10/01/is-homestuckgiovanhcom-official/) So that means giving UHC a license would mean Homestuck Inc. would just have to make some small reworks of the already existing online version of UHC to have homestuck.com working better than ever. This was taken down by the Homestuck Inc. DMCA alongside the Assetpack(It's around the start of the "DMCA Nov/Dec 2024" section in the Gio article https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/08/08/uhc-end/)
@perigator
(request to trash your previous post from August 9th) will do
reach out on discord @cytosol for moderation-related help!
This reply was originally posted August 9th, 2025, but I have edited it to remove mention of one of the women the blog post mentions because she has requested to not be dragged into this even if to defend her.
I'm honestly kind of baffled at how many people just ate up gio's post as gospel. The html "recreations" of chat logs already don't make him look good and don't sell the story he tells, when he decides to start talking about concrete demands made he suddenly isn't willing to "dignify" them with more chatlog recreations and the tone shifts from this pseudo-objective professionalism to that of a reddit callout post as he acts as if being asked to try even a little to remedy bad blood is an untenable ultimatum, then it shifts back into this "I'm not touching you" behavior where he's insisting if people hate homestuck workers after seeing his posts its only because they deserve it for being evil (while denying that harassment campaigns perpetuate themselves by using any negative reaction as justification for further harassment). Then it finally (80% of the way in or so) gets into the legal proceedings. And all throughout this he's using language that's as sexually charged as possible, taking every opportunity to talk about how clearly hussie just wants to dominate him and be serviced by him. Using language about domestic abuse and sexual violence over this doesn't sit right with me.
The story it tells all by itself is a team that is rightfully wary of him if the blog post existing how it's written is anything to go by but is still willing to put aside that past (and according to his own speculation offer him a job maintaining the homestuck website?) if he is willing to do the same.
I really just find it hard to come away buying a narrative that isn't supported by the chat logs he did provide and kind of just relies on a circular logic of "if this interpretation of the events is correct then it is true" that also requires you to ignore all the other issues with tone and comparing himself to holocaust victims and openly admitting that he wants another writer's career destroyed.
Gio's own blog post took me from being unsure what to think of him to sure that I do not trust him, and short of any smoking guns (because they certainly weren't in that blog post) I imagine it will remain that way.
There's a lot of angles in which this sucks from, and all I can really say further on it is that I wish bambosh, the HICU, and FRAF the best. I hope your response can help this blow over and it becomes possible to well and truly let the ugliness of the past be the past.
Hey, you. Scrolling this thread right now, looking for answers. Yeah, you. I know it's confusing and scary, but look. Look at me. I'm gonna break this down for you in the simplest possible terms. I'm gonna tell you what's important.
This response from Miles is incredibly disappointing.
This is because it obfuscates, distracts from and fails to address the problem: Andrew Hussie used the law to bully someone. And it's not the first time.
In order to make the UHC official, the owner was asked to sign an agreement making him compromise his former documentation of Homestuck's bad behavior, and publicly disavow a video quoting it. When he refused and called this out for being unreasonable and insulting, Hussie used the law to shut down the whole fan project. Andrew not only shouldn't have done this, he shouldn't be able to do this. To...anyone, really.
This is what is important. In order to put out a good response, this is what Miles needed to disprove, and he didn't do that.
* The readability of Homestuck is a solvable problem and may be solved soon.
* Gio being a drama queen doesn't change that the experience described above clearly happened.
* "Official" or not, Miles chose to make a statement, and the statement clearly does not contradict the experience described above.
* Other FRAF or HICU people may not struggle with Hussie, but the experience described above shouldn't be able to happen to them either way.
Andrew Hussie uses the law to bully people, and he shouldn't be able to. I don't care how much they say they don't view it that way, that's what it is.
We got that? We clear on that?
Okay, good. Go back to shitposting about Tails voicing Rose or whatever. I'm gonna keep Homestuck at arms' length from now on. I really thought everything was going the right way for a while. I apologize for my naivete on that subject.
https://youtube.com/@DeepDiveDevin
I think if you think that is the takeaway here you are falling for a narrative spun by who as far as I can tell has been a bad-faith actor for at least 5 years if not more.
A guy who-
-openly admits in his blog post to wanting the careers of people he's mentioning destroyed
-talks about people attempting to work with him in (cautious) good faith as "love bombing" and comparing them to domestic abusers
-denies all responsibility for posting stuff as inflammatory as this by finishing it off with a "teehee don't harass anyone wink wink"
-had to be asked multiple times not to make an antisemitic joke in the post or repeatedly call hussie a man while exclusively he/him-ing em and only made the minor changes of dropping the "ish" off the end of the still antisemitic joke and find/replacing all instances of calling hussie a man and he/him-ing her with "person" and "they/them"
-made a separate article attempting to convince his audience that you basically couldn't trust anyone with a license to make homestuck content unless they started agreeing with him
-insists in his big post about how the evil abusive sexually dominating man homestuck creator is bullying homestuck fans that the actual terms of what hussie and/or the HICU wanted him to do are irrelevant and the reader doesn't need to know them
is just maybe not a reliable narrator, and if any parts of his blog are to be trusted on this it would be the html transcripts that while dubiously authentic don't seem to be disputed yet, and don't even come close to supporting the "hussie is taking down homestuck fanworks and he's coming for YOURS next" story being spun. Maybe in the coming days evidence will come out that what happened here really was bullying using legal action against gio's version of the uhc, but at the moment that is very much not a clear conclusion, and it just kind of reads like a deal falling through and legal action being taken because one party wasn't willing to play ball.
The issue poeple are taking with the tone of his blog post is not that gio is a "drama queen", the issue they are taking is gio having a clear agenda of driving more people he dislikes off of homestuck by pushing this story and trying to poison people's view of a new fanworks collective and forum for discussion right as they're starting up by convincing them he is the only trustworthy source on homestuck and is speaking truth to power.