@ignoblepalm i understand that perspective. for what it's worth, the reasons i don't see it that way are:

- there is no reason for the negotiations to have gone on for nearly that long if that was hussie's only goal. even if the 'bait and switch' of only bringing up the articles a decent way in was part of some master plan in boiling the frog, talks still went on a long time after that. why continue once it was clear that wasn't happening? why would the letter talking about gio deleting the articles still mention a 'working relationship'?

- a lot of the discussion around the negotiation is (duh) being lead by gio's framing of the situation. since his framing has ranged from biased (such as p blatantly pushing cami to say what he wanted to hear in their brief 'interview',) to just kind of wildly speculating (ie: vast error, saying that hussie's using NDA's to abuse people systemically when he has no evidence of that), i consider every conclusion he makes to require an absolute heaping of salt before being seriously considered. if he was leading/wrong then, why would i unquestioningly trust him here?

- also, gio's call to action at the end to make sure people stop giving their money to hs:bc + fraf (when i don't believe he had anywhere CLOSE to enough evidence to suggest hussie got enough money from the HICU or FRAF to justify endangering small creator's income like that) makes his read on the situation even shakier, because now his intentions for writing this piece directly motivate him to describe everything as negatively and dramatically as possible (such as referring to the scorpion + frog parable multiple times, insisting hussie has an obsession with 'dominating' him, likening so much of the conversation to abuse).

ive said this before, but if gio was just saying hussie was a dick/unprofessional in negotiations, i feel like very few people would contest that. but using that to extend all the way to 'hussie is the cancer at the core of homestuck that we need to cut out by starving them of any and all money + goodwill' is... extremely questionable.