Ultimately these exposés proved to be the hill that both Gio and Homestuck were willing to let the officialization of the UHC die on. Neither is being wholly truthful about doing "everything they could to make this work", because if that were true, someone would have let go of the stupid fucking things.

The reason that I lean toward Gio despite not liking him is because I can't both-sides this. I believe some amount of stuff in his articles is true, maybe not all, but enough that if someone is thinking about working for Hussie, they deserve to know what went down. I care about that a lot more than Hussie being comfy with the ordeal and maybe having their image challenged less, which as far as I can tell is the only benefit taking them down would have. Even then, those effects would only occur a while later, because the takedown would be news on its own. I mean come on, you don't think Makin would write his own speculative Reddit post about that?

That's what made me so mad that I briefly removed all presence Homestuck had on my socials when i first read the article. What the fuck was so important about the articles to these people?

Gio has no reservations here; The articles are a public good exposing an abusive company whose work is still ongoing, thus the abuses may be as well. If he fully believes that, of course he'd value that over the UHC. It's exactly as I said above, if this is a real trend in how they operate, which to some extent I think it almost-undeniably was (and maybe still is), people should know about it.

Homestuck's situation is less-certain; If they believe the articles are misinformed and caused some damage, that sucks, but not making him trash them doesn't cause more damage. Only new articles or spreading them around does that, and I think "don't shittalk us publicly" is at least normal in a contract. Having Gio onboard at all would give them (read: people who defend them online) an excuse to present the exposés as dated. Like, "maybe some of that was true, but things changed! The writer WORKS for Hussie!".

I just don't know why not being able to burn these things was the end of the world. It's not like people were actively throwing them around all the time, mostly people just wanted to be reassured that Hiveswap act 3 is still coming out, even on Reddit.

Oh yeah, we're getting that reassurance in October. God, Fall is going to be so fucking weird for this franchise.