Honestly, as a new fan, I know Hussie's far from a perfect person (Hiveswap, however much of the Sarah Z video was true cause now I don't know, nearly everything involving race in the comic), but I don't trust what the fandom thinks of them. I kept waiting through act 6 and even the meat epilogue (haven't read candy) for the spite everyone told me about, for the signs that they hated their fanbase and/or the story, and it just. Wasn't. There. They were cruel to some of their characters but it was usually to serve the story or follow character arcs or explore new ideas. Like, did most of the fandom just decide they were doing it on purpose to hurt fans every time Hussie did something they didn't like or expect? Maybe I'm wrong and candy is just the spawn of satan, but that's what it looks like, and I didn't even like meat that much!

I don't want to be that guy who acts like they're better than all the other fans but if I worked my ass off to an unhealthy degree for years on end on a free story, then hundreds of thousands of people treated me like a huge asshole who hated them whenever I did something new with my own characters and a bunch of them sent me and my friends death threats every now and then, I'd have a chip on my shoulder too. I mean, the general response on the reddit to the Homestuck^2 team getting death threats seems to have been "death threats are bad but they kinda had it coming" which is insane logic to me.

It's relevant cause every scandal they've been involved in since gets seen through that warped "they hurt me with Homestuck" lens, and the response becomes an attempt to justify those feelings instead of people looking at the scandal on its own merits.