@mobiancruxtruder

I actually looked a bit into the overseer project stuff. The current iteration is not the original one. It's a fan preservation effort with bugfixes added onto it. [2] The story goes that the project a week after it announced V3 would separate itself from being related to Homestuck, that Whatpumpkin went and issued a Cease and Desist to Overseer V2 out of the blue, they also weren't able to get in contact with What Pumpkin despite sending them multiple emails and got a lawyer to try and find out if the C&D was real or not[1]. Apparently someone from WP said that the C&D is fake after this news came out [3], It's all admittedly very hard to follow since i can't find much on this due to how long ago this was, like for example, how was the email sent from an official WhatPumpkin email address, since the writings note that it wasn't a spoofed email. So i can't give anything solid since this was nearly a decade ago and I'm mainly relying on reddit comments saying things with no source and a archive of the post in a reddit comment for this information. Which according to a reddit comment has been said to be "mostly false" by James Roach (Which i can't confirm properly, so i guess I'll just have to trust a reddit comment and hope that fella wasn't lied to on discord 8 years ago. I really wish there was a proper write-up for this stuff for me to reference.) (Adding to this after the fact, i hope you have more information on this Margot, i admittedly wasn't in the fandom at the time, at most i read a fanfic or two. So you probably know more details on this stuff where im relying on a single reddit post and hearsay.)

To be honest I'm not sure about the Scalemate plushie thing being representative of Hussie's beliefs today, mainly because we haven't them do anything like that afterward and also because the whole logic behind it is silly. (The idea of the guide needing to be taken down because SOMEONE ELSE could use that guide to make Scalemates to sell to others is very funny) [4]

I'll just drop the Home-Strife stuff blog link here if anyone wants to read it, don't really have anything else to add that the post or Devin don't already say. https://web.archive.org/web/20150914042747/http://homestrifegame.com/blog/?p=197

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/5umrak/what_pumpkin_calls_for_cease_and_desist_of_the/ddv6l9s/ (Thank you random redditor! Without you this would be lost as the web archive doesn't have it and the tumblr blog this is on requires a password to enter now.)

[2]:
Also this message and the reboot discord is on the self-described unofficial discord since it lacks any official ties to the original project (as far as i know, i basically just joined that discord to play Overseer a 2 years back, it was pretty fun beating up Imps with Yo-yo's, though the grind is unreal!).

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/5umrak/what_pumpkin_calls_for_cease_and_desist_of_the/ddvh7wa/ (This is the best i could find on this being fake? Sadly i can't find anything else on this because I'm not joining and digging through a discord server for 8 year old message logs, assuming if those logs even exist anymore. Man i hate it how so many people use discord as a forum. Makes it hard to find things like this. It looks like the top comments on the reddit post were deleted at some point, which look to have been the ones to explain the situation. :/ )

[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/oidml/scalemate_plushie_tutorial_learn_to_sew_by_making/c3hqat3/ (actually look at the whole reddit thread here. There's like two imgur links from 2012 with people showing off their scalemates. It's pretty neat those images are still around!)

(Just tacking this on at the end here)

@lyrichartwell, If the game Gio's talking about is Befriendus then Gio's account of events states Hussie legally threatened a fangame due to his involvement in the project... which i find rather concerning to say the least. (Though i personally doubt it's about Befriendus, the way Gio describes it. It sounds like an original project. Though it could still be about Befriendus since some details sorta match up (Befriendus is technically Gio's first game according to their portfolio.), Gio is probably being vague to avoid throwing his friends under the bus.)

Sidenote: I can't really comment much on Gio's journalistic integrity in relation to the Hiveswap articles since i read them a few years ago and haven't re-read them since. (I do mean to get around to doing that though) All i can say is that i don't remember anything in them sending people to harass WP staff or other people related the Homestuck in them nor does anything like that show up saying so when i skim the original articles. To clarify, I'm not denying that people were harassed when the articles came out, it definitely happened as some people just like the idea of having a "reason" (excuse) to harass people. (Especially if it's someone they already don't like for whatever reason, like for example if you wrote something they didn't like, or y'know they just hate women, or anything considered progressive.) (Like I've read too many people be happy when someone is revealed to have done something wrong because now they have a reason to hate them outside of just not liking them and/or their work in general.) To state it again, Gio writing articles about the Hiveswap fiasco doesn't make him responsible if someone uses those articles to harass WP staff. It's like holding the creator of that Scalemate plushie creation guide personally responsible if someone else decides to use that guide to sell unofficial scalemate plushies. I dunno, maybe I'm extending too much good faith on Gio here but i don't think the articles were meant to lead to people being harassed. I've always had the impression they were meant to shine a light on what the hell was going on with Hiveswap. Like people did pay for it (Technically they paid for a Homestuck Adventure Game + a bunch of merch, so much merch in fact that it cut heavily into the Kickstarter funds if memory serves me right but still, they paid for a game.) and WP at the time was very silent about what was going on behind the scenes.

Sidenote 2: Spent way too long writing this. Good thing i did though. I made some very silly mistakes while writing this which i had to go back and correct, and then correct those mistakes i made. Like seriously, if i posted my first draft of this, i would've gotten info on the overseer situation wrong (Did you know undertale fans can't read?) while somehow not explaining the overseer situation at the same time. (There's a reason why a High School teacher i had recommended i take AP classes instead of AICE classes) I'm not particularly good at writing research heavy works like this so i have to make up for it by spending more time checking over my work to catch blindspots and silly mistakes like that.

(Spent well over an hour after this final image catching minor grammar mistakes (I think i have to fix my grammar checker, i think i have typos in there messing with things, or this text box is just broken.) and catching places where i don't get my point across properly. There are probably mistakes here and there but it was never going to be perfect tbh.)