I've often seem people earnestly debating some ex cathedra remark of Hussie's which all but had a laugh track playing over it. Dude liked playing around back in the day - if you got an answer to your question, there was like a 66% chance it was either a joke or misdirection.

Spitefulness in the actual comic - A lot of people across all sorts of fandoms have a very strange idea about how authors think. In this view, if something happens in the story, that's something the author approves of. If anything bad happens to the fan's favourite character, that's because the author hates the character, and by extension, hates the fan too. It is VERY HARD to write an actual story with real drama in it that tiptoes around this belief. The writers of so many sequels have found this out to their cost. And Hussie.... typically responded to this kind of fan outrage by teasing them, leading to some of his most edgelordly pronouncements.

(Meanwhile in the fanfic world, you get other fans who love to pile unceasing torment upon their favourite characters....)