I'm honestly so shocked to see how many people are writing off Gio's claims and acting like Hussie can do no wrong, or if they do, it's justified. I think it is in part easy to write off because of the title of Gio's article - in my opinion, this story is not particularly about the UHC being taken down (and when framed that way, the assertion is made, rightly, that it's still accessible and also Gio sucks, end of story).
This is a story of Andrew Hussie's entitlement toward the creative work of others, stretching all the way back to the early days. This is a story of how Andrew Hussie behaves when not able to control the behavior of others. This is a story among far too many of Andrew Hussie's continual weaponization of legal maneuvers to manipulate people. And in fact, it sure sounds to me like part of Gio's assertions of Hussie's shady behavior has already been confirmed in Miles' statement, where he said:
"gio was Not trying everything he could to make this work, because by his own admission in the article he refused to sign a license to continue to publish the Entirety Of A Body Of Work That Didn’t Belong To Him, and i also strongly suspect did everything in his power to dissuade bambosh from licensing when it was bambosh andrew was doing the initial negotiating with, Precisely Because We Were Worried About Situations Like This. at the time i actually thought that was TOO paranoid, believe it or not, but holy shit was i wrong about that, lol."
From Gio's article - In the messages from Miles during the early communication, Miles says that after giving Bambosh the NDA and a private conversation between them and Andrew, Gio would also receive an NDA and have a similar conversation, sort of an interview before the negotiations began. If it is true that no NDA was presented to Gio and Gio was not stalling, this was just an excuse to get Bambosh alone and not have to deal with Gio. Sure sounds like it tracks, at least to me. They cornered Bambosh, tried to only work with him and cut Gio out of the deal while weaponizing legal documents to do so. The NDA/non-NDA dynamic between Bambosh and Gio meant that they could not discuss the negotiations between them, and Bambosh then left the project.
Please don't think that just because Gio's article is dramatic, that it's not credible. To be honest, if I had been jerked around that much for that long I'd be pretty uncharitable too. The most credible part to me is how familiar it sounds. I know people are discrediting Gio and calling them biased...well, everyone has bias - I think it'd be worse had Gio pretended to not feel the way they feel about things at this point. The idea that language used with regards to abusive relationships is overblown - divide and conquer and DARVO are very real tactics people use to have power over others in many situations, like in cases of medical or financial abuse. Domestic violence is not the only arena in which these things happen.
Finally, I personally am not only interested in how Andrew Hussie treats their friends. I'm far more interested in how they treat people they don't respect. And the answer is...extraordinarily poorly and unprofessionally.
If your article was ONLY things that could be proven with FULL transcripts of ALL communications that they had with Bambosh and Miles and Hussie then I would be willing to agree that the evidence presented would have to be considered seriously. But since you clearly know nothing about the law I'll let you in on a secret: both the defense and prosecution get FULL records of communications, and if things are cut out, then it's thrown out! Because even the shittiest lawyer knows that cherry-picked communications, are if anything, MORE suspect than none! Because what exactly are you dancing around? What did you DELIBERATELY AVOID showing to make yourself look better, to paint the picture you wanted? Get a clue.
still not over 'listen, hussie is overstepping his bounds by using legal commands to intimidate gio, but also Hussie should have sued gio' Like there's no winning lmfao
squiddo: threats and actual legal moves are different. I have far more of an issue with Hussie saying 'we have no problem with you but we'll sue if you don't do this how we like' than if they just sent the DMCA takedown. it's the back and forth, not the actual takedown. Gio says early on in his article that Hussie is well within his rights to demand the asset pack come down, that is not something he contests.
Exactly, so you'd literally be complaining regardless. Stop pretending you'd be fine if Hussie was MORE litigious, like. Genuinely what is your point?
using the threat of a dmca to insist the articles be taken down and then following up with a libel suit anyway after the copyrighted material was removed is more litigious than just making a copyright claim and leaving it there.
tara and raven superfan
schrodingers hussie is both too litigious and not litigious enough depending on circumstance.
Hussie has definitely had issues mistreating programmers in the past and it is shitty of them. Regardless of anything, Gio did a lot of work and it would be shitty to cut him out entirely. But we only saw them trying that move at the end after things had gone totally and completely sideways, and we actually have no idea what the initial plan was. Like, they could have still been planning to work with Gio indirectly but through Bambosh as the primary. They certainly seemed to insinuate both of them would get paid. Is that still just as bad, even if Gio gets compensated? I can't really judge what happened in the 7 months or whatever negotiations with Bambosh were completely stalled. It's kind of pointless to speculate about, but more to the point, Gio seemed completely unwilling to compromise on things that Hussie's side viewed as dealbreakers, and vice versa. So genuinely, I don't know what the expectations were here.
It's not lost on me that nobody disagreeing with what I've said has a shred of evidence that Hussie doesn't engage in the behavior Gio and many others in the past have alleged that they have. I hear lots of talk about how i'm ridiculous and whiny, that's not particularly compelling.
RE: @possumpattern, and all Redditors who have joined us.
I’ve read the articles (yes, both of them) in their entirety twice, and have consistently referred back to sections of it when in discussions about it. I also went to school for history and one of the first things we learn is how to identify a source that cannot be trusted. And this might blow your mind, but no, it is not simply a matter of what it presents, or how it backs it up (which if you're wondering, no, Gio doesn't do a good job of that either).
When analyzing the source for a claim, it is important, fundamental even, to be aware of the writer's biases, as well as your own as a reader/researcher. We do not do that becuz, as people like to say when they wish for their absence of an opinion to sound smart, "the truth lies somewhere in the middle". That, you see, is a cop-out, as it looks to claim objectivity that cannot be proved by sources. To look at conflicting data and to claim that the real truth is a combination of both sides instead of analyzing which side corroborates its data better is how you get a low grade and a very disappointed teacher.
It is not done for the sake of neutrality either, as there is simply no such thing, and you'll never see any serious academic (or so-called journalist, for that matter) claim so. In fact, to claim an unbiased view, I've been taught by many professors, is seen as a sign of a faulty source in it of itself. To claim yourself as an unbiased observer of anything is to lie. And you shouldn't reference liars.
So, while Gio's so called evidence is already nothing to write home (or a blog) about, as one must accept the pretense Andrew Hussie hates their fans and this is why any of the actions against Mr. Journalism were taken, even the things that ring true -- i.e., the Hiveswap kickstarter being, indeed, a mess, or the hilariously true fact that Hussie does not like Gio for reasons we can only speculate on (and I loathe speculation) -- are not to be trusted due to the writer's history and, yes, the way he says things.
Gio's language is inflammatory and engineered to cause panic among impressionable people. He is a very good writer, in the sense that he'll very carefully word things to imply Hussie is taking down the UHC, when it is fact, still up, just not through Gio, who is not the creator of the UHC to begin with. That is, of course, not to mention the fact that Gio's fork of it was still up for a full day after the article was posted, but I digress.
He then proceeds to bring up "the brutal assault of Aysha U. Farah", previous writer of Homestuck, against him. By which he means, a woman sharing his article in her personal Discord server, while clearly panicked, calling him a stalker for using a source cited by multiple members of What Pumpkin as someone who made people feel legitimately unsafe, as well as digging around personal stuff that is really not his or my place to discuss, and saying "go get his ass". Becuz she was mad. The irony that Gio responded to the accusation of stalking by somehow getting access to Farah's personal vent and then proceeding to air that out for his audience is somehow lost on him.
He also goes after another writer who has since all but begged not to be cited even by those who wish to defend her, and while it makes the job of explaining why Gio should not be trusted harder, I shall respect that wish. Becuz I actually care more about making trans women comfortable than I care about owning sycophants without profile pictures. So, I'll simply say that Gio is very keen on weaponizing the fact people are, in general, more prone to believe anyone but trans women. You can see that fact perfectly illustrated on how many Gio defenders will take his claims about trans women as inherently valid, but forever bark “do you got proof” when we bring up his transmisogyny.
As a side point: to ask for proof that a trans women got harassed on the internet is, academically speaking, very funny. To claim a transfem identity has no bearing on the amount of harassment they receive when something negative is said about them is twice as funny. To then accuse people of derailing the thread for bringing it up is at least eight times as funny. Some would be a little more subtle about the fact they aren’t close to any transfems.
Let's then look at how Gio treats anything that Hussie does as a personal attack against him. Such as how they, hilariously, spend a chunk of the article claiming Hussie has formed a fictional cult where killing your critics is acceptable behavior. By which he means, Hussie wrote Pyscholonials, a visual novel I did not particularly enjoy. Among the reasons I did not enjoy it, however, I can't say that "I actually think clowns will come to my house and murder me if I send Hussie a mean tweet" is one of them.
This leads us to how Gio presents himself as the eternal victim, and hero, and martyr. As his BlueSky bio says, he has "saved Homestuck" (presumably to his computer). He is like "Atlas, holding up the world". He conjures up the image of a domestic abuse victim, and equates Hussie's dislike of him as being negated the right to exist (doing so, additionally, in the footnote where he equates himself to the Jews in their prosecution by the Nazis). All of these things, in turn, are made to equate Hussie to a Nazi clown-cultist wife-beater abusive boss, if you're following.
It is, to quote insufferable people online, deeply unserious. What it is, however, is effective. It gets teens who don't know any better, who don't know Gio's shtick, scared to be sued for writing fanfiction, and they then spread that concern around, which gets people taking that concern as something that is actually happening, which then in turn leads people to Gio's "reports" with an already sour opinion of Hussie, who has in the past, observably, not handled things the best way possible. It’s a pretty good con, I must admit.
TL;DR
We don't trust Gio becuz he is a liar. He is not a journalist, as becoming one would require an amount of scrutiny to his reporting which he would be thoroughly incapable of enduring. Which is why, if you’re wondering, the most notable works in his blog’s portfolio is the blog itself (lol) and some work on Befriendus, which is, yes, now associated with FRAF (lmao)
He is bitter becuz Homestuck, after years of silence that was itself partially a consequence of his own behavior, has come back better than ever, offering an unrivaled support to its fanworks.
And we do not want him around.
-- The Butch
re: chthonikix
just a minor correction gio's fork of the UHC is actually *still* not down, and can be accessed quite easily by going to the embarassing tokyo ghoul twitter icon change ass updated site and scrolling down to the button that says "releases" then clicking it. Takes you right to release 2.7.0
i think its really funny he never took down his fork. dude was just lying for clicks
check me out at acetyzias.tumblr.com and acelad.crockercorp.com on bsky
i didnt plan on commenting in this but im getting kinda irritated bc ive seen this comment so often now
"hussie hasnt proven that they didnt do it"
does the "Burden of Proof" mean anything to you?
innocent until proven guilty?
hussie does not have to prove anything here bc the accuser carries the burden of proof
and before it is said that gio has proven that stuff
no they have not. they dont even have the actual screenshots (not that screenshots cant be doctored)
and they certainly havent given the full correspondence as @alexis has helpfully pointed out
chthonikix my GOAT. i actually went and counted how many replies fit in a page to make sure I wouldn't push this to a new one because this should be pinned fucking everywhere, damn. perfect summary of this bullshit!!
if gio had any actual legal standing against hussie he could have sued him back but he would also never actually do that because then he can't blog about it
That's not a great argument, regardless of your position. Lawsuits cost money. I don't know anything about Gio's personal financial situation but it wouldn't shock me if Hussie has deeper pockets than he does.
https://youtube.com/@DeepDiveDevin
okay i was being facetious but in all honesty if hussie didn't have a possible winning suit on his hand he wouldn't have pursued it. if gio wasn't also a gigantic ass he wouldn't have pursued it. i think gio's blog post tries to paint hussie as someone who will go legally apeshit regardless of who tries to do something for homestuck, but when reading just the screenshots without all his extraneous commentary, it reads more like someone who has a contingency measure against someone with a record of being a catalyst to waves of harm toward anyone who works on homestuck in any official way regardless of their involvement with any of the actual conflict. maybe hussie should have given him the benefit of the doubt but also he doesn't have to? i think gio/hs reddit like to paint hussie as someone who hates all his fans but all i've seen is him hate the few people in particular known to orchestrate these campaigns and harass other fans in spaces they control.
also @chthonikix totally love the way you wrote and framed everything but also i'd like to add that gio makes quiet redactions to the blog posts when evidence does present itself to demonstrate that things he's painted aren't true. the most notable of which is when he speculated that austin stepped down from vast error because of pressure from hussie and austin refuted it directly
https://x.com/avstinado/status/1953948887640932581
if you search both posts now for that tangent. it's mysteriously gone without any correction being noted anywhere.
quiet redactions like this are particularly unjournalistic and restoke drama when anything happens in the fandom because now you have people who read the post first hand before the changes noticing the incongruities seemingly contradicting people who are reading it maybe even years after.
@jackx
"if hussie didn't have a possible winning suit on his hand he wouldn't have pursued it"
UM. I don't know that that's true at all. I'm not a lawyer but I don't think it's impossible at all that Hussie would completely bomb a lawsuit like this. I have no idea why you think they couldn't, it'd be one more irresponsible fiduciary decision on top of the pile. Even if you think Gio's full of shit, we've seen the trouble Hussie has managing a franchise firsthand. The collection's frontpage almost-assuredly falls under fair use, and we already know the collection itself isn't violating anything. Gio and Andrew are both Americans, and suits like this are extremely hard to win in the US (though it depends on the state). I'm not a lawyer, but in my experience they'd basically need to prove that Gio's information is false, that Gio knew it was false, that Gio disseminated that information intentionally to cause damage to Hussie or WP, and that said damage verifiably happened and had a visual effect, with evidence to match. Not only do I not know that a lot of what's in the Hiveswap articles is even false to begin with, it doesn't even need to be true as long as Gio fully believed it. The article fully states as well that this is all ultimately his opinion, and that's almost-assuredly there to protect from a lawsuit.
I'm not a particular fan of Gio, but this would definitely qualify as a SLAPP suit if they don't have overwhelmingly larger amounts of dirt on him than anyone knows, and I don't think they do. It's got nothing to do with my opinion on either party, this is just how the reality of the situation looks to me. The most other guess I could offer is that they're hunting for a settlement or to just bury him in legal fees, neither of which makes them look very good.
I just want all of this stupid bullshit to be over.
https://youtube.com/@DeepDiveDevin
Not a lawyer either, nor am I responding directly to / trying to refute @mobiancruxtruder above, just made to think of something while reading that I feel like speaking into the void about. I've noticed people tend to give Gio wayyy more leniency than Hussie on the whole legal strategy side of things.
One of the immediate defenses I saw when this broke out was that, if Gio's claims were wrong, he wouldn't make them because that'd undermine his entire article. Why would he make easily falsifiable claims if he's trying to share the truth? Hussie, on the other hand, could totally initiate spurious and unjustified legal maneuvers. He's a flawed person who could totally act irrationally.
(those examples were exaggerated obviously but even in more moderate takes there's a persistent reluctance to consider anything in gio's article an outright lie. my own takes included in that, im still hesitant to go that far even though i am of the opinion that he's full of shit)
But like... Gio is also a person, who can also act irrationally. This man is not an infallible journalist, even if he tries to portray himself that way; even those who fully believe his claims should be able to admit that he's still just A Guy. It is an entirely possible outcome of this situation that Gio, upset and defensive over allegedly spurious libel lawsuit threats, just responded by cooking up the most open-and-shut libel case this side of the Mississippi. If no one ever did shit like that, we wouldn't have laws against libel! Everyone would just make verifiable and justified claims and we'd live in a world of peace and harmony and unclogged legal systems.
So again, not responding to anyone in particular at the moment. Just saying that, while I agree that Hussie might've chased a losing lawsuit because she can act irrationally or for ulterior motives, the opposite statement that Gio might've made brazenly defamatory accusations because he can act irrationally or for ulterior motives is something I think we oughta acknowledge more.
100% right about the US legal system though lmao even if Hussie has a great case I doubt it's gonna go anywhere legally any time soon. Especially since they definitely qualify as a public figure.
My problem with this is that Gio and Hussie/WhatPumpkin/The HICU(?) simply don't disagree as much as they should to invalidate a lot of what Gio says, and people are very quick to let their opinion of Gio's moral character determine what they think he's done, rather than vice-versa.
And I'm not saying "if Gio is lying, why doesn't Homestuck just correct him". While I think that's a valid argument, I also understand that there may be some reason they can't that I'm not privy to. No, my problem is that, at least for recent events, Gio and Miles rarely seem to be at-odds with the facts of what actually happened, they just use diametrically-opposed framing. It's one thing to say something's false and then not provide the truth, it's another to not even say a thing is false to begin with. What exactly are they supposed to be suing over here?
Answer: hopefully nothing. They should've just ignored Gio's articles and Sarah Z's video from day 1. I don't think any good has come from their attempts to fight them, even if every single word Gio has ever written was a complete fabrication. A lawsuit would just take even more away from Homestuck for no benefit, all while Hussie's allegedly still got the website fix, a cartoon show and 1-and-a-half video games he's supposed to be making.
https://youtube.com/@DeepDiveDevin