Okay I wanna preface this by saying that I actually don't think this or any other thread should become "the Gio gossip hub". Not only do I think that doesn't help, I think we should be better than our biggest critics on this subject. I already felt bad bringing up Gio and the UHC in the discord announcement thread, I don't think anything good is going to come of it. Miles said not to harass Gio in his response, and that was probably the best part of that response. I have seen some people doing it anyway, and I want that to not be the case.

THAT BEING SAID, Yeah I don't have any way to agree with Gio on this. I think he was treated wrong, I think Bambosh was collateral damage, I think the Hiveswap articles contain some-amount of truth, and I think it's reasonable to be worried for future Homestuck collaborations because of that truth (I really hope Spindleroo is keeping Hussie on a leash and that whole project isn't going to blow up in their faces). But I don't have any defense here, he's just wrong.

I'm trying to decipher the exact mindset behind his words. The reason scabbing is wrong, primarily, is because a significant portion of a workforce is in a state of demanding better conditions from their employers by denying them labor, and workers who choose to do that labor anyway are harming the chances of better conditions being achieved.

This situation is a bit different. Gio did refuse to work for Hussie without certain conditions (namely, the terms of his contract being changed, which I think is fair), but he's only one person, and not indispensable to Homestuck, however bad their treatment may have been. This comes across as more akin to a film director having a big fight with their lead actor, said actor leaving, and then being replaced all before they'd even started shooting. It's sort of like saying any worker who replaces another that left over something unfair is a scab.

Margot hits the nail on the head here; My mind went to Strife, the old FPS proto-RPG. That game was released right between Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, sold like shit because of it, and died for years, only to be reverse-engineered by a Doom source-port developer in the 2010s. But then, not long after, you get NightDive and an official release of Strife, scooped up from rights hell. This is actually the exact sort of thing copyright exists to protect, the opportunity for a rights-holder to reclaim their distribution of work they own over unofficial distribution during a lapse in production.

Where I disagree is in the veracity of all this. I'm a copyright anarchist, I believe in pirating and profiting off fanworks and using other people's work as your canvas, and I think it's fair of Gio to characterize Hussie as a capitalist in all this. Hussie themself describes WP as a corporation, and what we see from Homestuck in the Gio debacle is Homestuck acting like a corporation, just with really unprofessional rhetoric. I think the unspoken idea behind criticizing FRAF, the HICU and their handling of the UHC, is that all of the people involved should be able to monetize their work regardless of what the official side thinks or does. Homestuck is a fan-driven property, and Gio says elsewhere that a solution to this would be releasing Homestuck under something like a creative commons license, which protects the original property but allows the public to do what they want with it (my only misgiving is that I feel it could be cannibalized by larger corporations in this with fan creators losing a lot of visibility, but I'm not a copyright lawyer so I dunno if that's how that could go down), and I don't think that's necessarily unreasonable. It also dispels the unspoken fear that a fan project who doesn't or couldn't go through FRAF (for whatever reason) would be unprotected, not to mention unable to monetize itself.

That being said, I don't know how much I believe the fandom control stuff. In any fandom, something is going to be the thing that eventually takes a dominant position as the big hub where that thing is discussed. It's fair for Gio to not like that or to not like it to be something that Hussie could control and/or theoretically use to squash criticism and/or dissent, but he's also still palling around with Makin, who clearly wanted something similar given the whole MSPFA and "Official" Homestuck discord debacle, or the business with the stuff Homestuck.net was rehosting. So is it about not wanting centralization, or is it about wanting centralization through someone else?

I used to post on the official SEGA forums before I joined SSMB and Retro. I didn't like that they wouldn't let me swear, but I wasn't feeling any more pressured or controlled there than when I moved to Sonic forums where the userbase was actual, rational adults. I'm here, on an official Homestuck forum, right now, still sympathetic to a lot of stuff Gio says. I'm not in any danger with the moderators and none of them have ever given me the impression that they had any action to take against me. I'm not even sure if the dudes who were transparently just here to shit on others were banned. I haven't seen discussion of Gio or his stuff being deleted or edited, Miles even linked to Gio's writeup in his response. This, discord, reddit, they're all just places where people type words on a screen and other people read them, nobody here is the arbiter of what Homestuck or Hussie do, and neither are the places Hussie doesn't like so much, or even the forums dedicated to outright harassment and doxxing of the team members. Exactly what kind of fandom control is it that Makin and Gio are so afraid of?

Last note: Gio knew that the site revival was already happening in the background while his dealings with the UHC and Homestuck were ongoing. He had lots of nice things to say about Kohi. Is he now accusing Kohi of being a scab worker for continuing to do their job instead of, I guess, quitting or threatening to quit alongside this one other guy they don't really know that well? And if so, why did it only become scabbing once Homestuck officially announced this?