we need some kind of official response from the people invovled here

i'm sure they're working on deliberate and specific messaging, it will probably take more than one day. i wouldn't be surprised if it takes a few. it most definitely will not be within a few hours.

its been less than a day. the people responsible are probably drafting something up, which will then probably need fact checking and then edited etc.

Yeah, with something this large I think the best we can hope for same-day is a recognition of it, not a fully thought out response.

It’s most likely going to take a bit. Let’s be patient.

I'd love to see their responses. No need to rush anything, a lengthy response is the best possible outcome

also not to mention that since they all work under an "officially licensed homestuck" thing theyre more than likely under similar ndas and agreements, and knowing how hussie treated other whistleblowers like gio it could get messy pretty quick

i think obviously times like this are stressful as fans (and as a loosely adjacent but not really mod team...!) because no one wants to be wrong and everyone wants to be on the right side of things and advocate for what they think is right.

but i think patience is really key in all respect. because the more people post, the more reactionary things get, and the more reactionary things get, the more misinformation is spread. the other side of the story will come, but until then, take a breath. not everything has to be instantaneous. i would argue giving them the space to work out a response will make that response a lot better in the long run. no one works well under pressure.

not to mention, respectfully, responding directly and quickly to things like this are exactly the mechanism by which inciting points like this tend to succeed.

recognize the patterns at play, and recognize whether or not the people who are already out for blood would accept any response short of total surrender.

the best option here is to wait and cover one's bases - instead of trying to barricade the front door and now have everyone asking why they felt the need to barricade their front door, so to speak, the best they can do is let people simmer, to allow the thought behind everything to shift from a reactionary response to one that can be spoken to.

accept that there will always be some who will never change their minds, who were perhaps already looking for some excuse, and respond completely, decisively, and cleanly, rather than piecemeal as a hasty reaction.

I obviously can't speak for anyone other than myself, and I can't speak to anything that I don't know about (which is like, most of it), but I can speak on what I do know:

Even though the section on FRAF was honestly fairly neutral/positive leaning, I can say they did pick and choose from the things I said to twist it into fitting into their narrative, even if there wasn't much to twist. Some notable points that I did explicitly clarify but they excluded are that the list of works are not run by Andrew for approval, and we don't consult the HICU on the list out of any kind of requirement or social pressure. We were literally not ever even asked to, we asked for their input because we value their input. Additionally, he was very clearly trying to lead our conversation into anti-HICU sentiment and was (mid-conversation) trying to spin things I was saying towards being anti-HICU. He very clearly had a goal in our conversation and new what he wanted to get out of it, and wasn't particularly interested in anything that might conflict with it.

While again this was pretty small and our conversation was short, I do feel from my experience here that it lends credence to things I've seen about Gio intentionally manipulating and spinning information to fit his narrative. I am also aware of things in this that are just objectively false and I will be seeing about correcting soon.

the UHC stuff is out of my department. i'll let the proper people handle that, but the claims about the HICU demanding changes to works within FRAF in order to join are untrue. i'm going to tell a story that is seemingly unrelated, but it helps to demonstrate how exactly things like this happen. stick with me, i promise you'll understand. what's one more long, meandering essay today?

when i was in my early to mid-teens, i really liked game grumps. classic time to like game grumps, being a young teenager with undiscerning taste. in 2011, i think, jontron left game grumps. the reason jon gave was that he wanted to work on his own self-titled show. but it happened abruptly, and changed the way people interacted with game grumps. devoted fans were only given "i want to go work on my self-titled show" as reason. what followed was a golden age for jontron until he decided to cite a bunch of bunk race science on a podcast. (not that he wasn't racist before, but rose-colored glasses, stupid teenager, you know how it is.)

but in practice, what happened was that arin, the other host, and jon didn't really interact for a few years afterwards. sure, there may have been beef there, but they were two people trying to make the best art they could. that seems unbelievable given it was fucking game grumps, but i don't know what we get rhetorically by pretending that people who have the drive to make art aren't trying to make the best art they can.

the people who didn't accept "he went to go work on his show" as a reason were given this ammunition - arin and jon weren't interacting, ergo, something must have happened. the conclusion people came to was somehow that jon had done domestic abuse to arin's wife. there was never any reasonable evidence of this, but the people were hungry for any answer, and that's explosive, that's dramatic. and when you want to see something, it becomes easier to see it. and when you have trained yourself to see it, and others can't, it seems like it must be covered up, right? there must be something in the way that's stopping everyone from talking about it. people believed that jon had hit arin's wife, arin fired jon and they signed an NDA to never talk about it. that just doesn't make any fucking sense, but it's what people believed.

they had chosen to ignore the given reason, deciding it wasn't fun to play with, and let their imagination run free. what's that deltarune line? "i'm what you see when there's nothing there to see" or something like that. it's been a couple months since i played deltarune but you know what i mean. imagination and desire to see what you wanted to see instead of what really is.

over the following years, this community of people who were certain that jon jafari physically beat arin hanson's wife would grow more and more insular, more and more vitriolic. people were BEGGING for arin to acknowledge jon, in any way. it got bad enough that they would spam online games they knew they were recording. they even got caught editing out references that appeared in those online games. they were getting so close, arin HAD to acknowledge jon eventually, right?

and then, a couple years later, arin showed up on that weird as hell star wars miniseries. this was after i stopped caring, because i had a more developed sense of taste. but they were evidently friends. and it was like shit caught fire. people who had seen malice and vitriol and unresolved trauma and non-disclosure agreements saw them working together on a project and being friends and hanging out. all of their theories on what really happened were thrown out the window. it was obviously all bunk. a strong display of the truth of the matter and things being good again was all it took.

in the second article, the one titled "the homestuck union is not real", there's a bit where gio asserts that austin stepped down from vast error not long after getting the homestuck license. this is true, technically. austin did stop working on vast error to work on disenfranchised. disenfranchised fucking rules, and austin's been working on vast error for close to 15 years, and in doing so is beholden to decisions made as far back as when they were 13 years old. that's over twice as long as homestuck ran on mspa. i would get tired too. this is a normal thing to feel.

but since the case that needs to be made is "FRAF is a bad idea because they're putting control of their projects under HICU control", something untrue, the facts of the matter are ignored. "austin was told to step down by hussie" would be easily disprovable, because it's horseshit. it's seeing what you want to see, instead of what is actually there. because it's actually a piece for their actual hobbyhorse, "someone was taken off of a project that later wound up under the FRAF label", all the important parts can be abstracted away. the truth itself becomes a malleable thing that can be manipulated through omission and reframing.

this is the way this kind of conspiracy-brained nonsense works. there is nothing, i can fill it with something, listen to me instead. be mad with me instead. and the best way to fight this is, unfortunately, not with harassment and vitriol in return, but with that strong display of truth. i can promise this: the HICU has not asked anyone to make changes to their work or their team to be involved in FRAF, and i would not be okay with this if they did. it's antithetical to the whole thing.

i've been saying this all day in various discords but i am begging, pleading with people to read this article with a Critical Eye instead of just reacting to the emotionally charged language. theres something incredibly Not Right about actively comparing hussie to a domestic abuser through the entirety of an article where the crux of the issue is "hussie does not like me and tried to use legal pressure to get their way" (still shitty, but, like, also, hussie is entirely in their legal right to enact copyright on something that actively breaks it)

I've not got much to contribute aside from seconding Victoria, but putting my only two cents worth having in: Speaking as someone who literally lives with Austin, no, he did not move onto other projects because he was pressured to by Hussie lmao. The idea of it is, at best, fanfiction.

this really happened

Thank you for the response Victoria!

I'll be honest... a lot of the "drama" of today has been a whole lot of nothing. Vague personal attacks and baseless accusations. No discussions of the actual claims in the article, but a lot of shit stirring.

I think a lot of people just don't understand how copyright works. Hussie is legally entitled to go full Anne Rice if they want, as is their legal right. Fanwork is a legal grey area and the fact that FRAF/HICU exists at all is not a common scenario!

okay, the situation seems pretty nuanced and ive only read gios blog post personally i think this needs a bit more time to marinate (is that the right word?) to reach a more... well informed conclusion, if we get the privilege of that happening. gio themself said they might make a more in depth post looking into the documents so theres that.

very sad the homestuck collection is gone :(

re: dayvox

the collection is not gone. it is still available to download. https://homestuck.github.io/