I don't really get the general vitriol for Hussie

Coming back to this post to say that if Sarah Z fails to address the anti-semitism "joke" Gio put in his post before deleting the evidence then I will be more disappointed and mistrusting of her journalism capabilities. I feel like that's evidence that Gio's perspective is skewed in some sort of way

yea pretty much everyone seems on the same page with like they do and say some pretty shitty asshole stuff, especially the further back you go. I have noticed, and i think its pretty easy to catch as you read homestuck even, that Hussie at least tries to unlearn toxic things and get better. How successful theyve been at this we could debate until the cows come home but like the evidence is there throughout their body of work, thats more than you can say about a lot of web artists yaknow. But as a web artist people always just grab a mental snapshot of you at your worst and just keep that the entire time. And like doing better doesnt immediately mean people hurt have to forgive you either. Which i guess means to say like. Yeah man Hussie is just A Person and people are imperfect. You cant learn without mistakes. But people seem very resistant to see Hussie as a person instead of like this Figure. Which most ppl in this thread are also on the same page about so really idk where im going with this

hmm

a lil anecdote:

it means nothing in the grand scheme of things but I have met face-to-face with hussie twice for autograph sessions back in The Day. was surprisingly quiet and almost like humble? compared to their online persona. I doubt they are like that still its been many years and a bit of gender exploration since then but I do think about it sometimes. Maybe thats why i'm so reluctant to hop on any hate train, especially without more info. Ive seen them laugh and put dorito scented stickers on my friend's rubber horse mask. and notarize my other friend's sketchbook dedicated to equius. its kinda hard not to see someone as a person, who is flawed and can be a real ass sometimes, but still a person after stuff like that yaknow.

The amount of parasocial obsession and harassment of Hussie going on since now literally 16 years is just surreal.

I don't know how they manage to survive all that hatred, honestly.

Even if they were Hannibal Lecter (and they aren't), they wouldn't deserve this shit.

And personally when people defend the toxic culture endlessly targeting Hussie, and justify such attitudes, I see it as a massive red flag.

(Could my first post get deleted whenever a moderator visits this thread? There's a typo, so I reposted it without the typo.)

I feel like the parasocial hatred of Hussie is only going to increase now, because he just made a deal with another one of the internets most hated media creators atm, Vivienne MedranVivienne Medrano

Oh it will absolutely increase, but also people hate Vivziepop for largely no reason as far as I'm aware. Like. What has she actually done aside from make a show that some people dont like?

So many famous people have fallen dramatically from grace this decade, everybody is prepped to assume the worst.

The Vivzie hate I've heard feels remarkably similar to how it was back in the days when All True Star Wars Fans viewed George Lucas as slightly more despicable than Heinrich Himmler. Only, nobody grew up watching Vivzie's shows, so she cannot be accused of ruining anyone's childhood. You can entirely ignore her stuff with incredible ease. She can stand up for herself, but you're not going to get into a fight with her unless you actively go looking for one. I don't get it.

a lot of stuff I know/have heard about vivzie goes way way back to the deviantart days with petty things like “stole my oc design“ and such and less petty more questionable things like “drawing her webcomic characters naked in a tub of snakes” and “having a whole thing in the webcomic about the kids teacher wanting to rape her” which was a lot less alarming in like 2009 than it is now that’s just kind of how Everything Was unfortunately but I can understand lingering weariness especially with how often rumors of poor working conditions float around or has some kind of immature fit on Twitter/Bsky over benign criticism such as “hey maybe not joke about racist slurs“. but there hasnt really been too much since working with Amazon.

I guess it boils down to how much stock you put into any one of those things.

I guess it’s pretty obvious I’ve never been a fan but also just kind of always seen her as like annoying at best? I don’t go out of my way to go all “bluuuh hazbin suuucks bwaaah” any time someone mentions enjoying it unlike how others have treated me with homestuck but that’s more of a personal approach to things.

but uh yeah

has about as long and as controversial of a history as Hussie or like. any other internet popular person from around that time

All of these sound genuinely like similar controversies to things homestuck was hit with so like. Idk. Feels like you can't be hating on vivziepop then turn around and defend the comic that has Damara in it.

I'm an older fan from 2010. (This will be my first post on this forum, but I hope that doesn't taint what I have to say here.) and I left the HS fandom aroound 2015 as the fandom seemed to be dying and I was just aching to jump ship. Several years later I peeked back in to find the once very open minded, kind, and welcoming fandom I had known become so incredibly hostile and full of vitriol. It has, in my view, changed in ways that match the attitudes of several other fandoms right now, in that it has ultimately become full of people, young and old, who are very reactionary and puritan in their beliefs, with little to no critical thinking skills or media literacy. It was something I never expected to see in the homestuck fandom in particular because having media literacy is so important to enjoying and understanding all the layers of storytelling that make Homestuck such a work of art. why everyone seems so eager to crucify another person, let alone the person who made one of their favorite works of art, as someone awful, when there is little to no evidence to support the claims people like sarah Z and Gio have made when characterizing hussie as some horribly abusive person.

I thought taking such words with a grain of salt when Sarah made no effort to reach out to people who were actually on the creative team, or respond to the team members that reached out to her, would've been a given. but it wasn't. And thats whats so shocking.

I'm all for people looking out for people, especially if the situation happens in real life. Lets say to help someone out of a potentially dangerous situation. But this practice of immediately taking every bad thing you hear about someone else *online* at face value, without any due dilligence, and then unfollowing or blocking-- often when these people are your friends-- Its absurd. Its inhumane. Its cruel. Why is it so much to ask oneself, "Is this person lying to me? How do I know if what I'm being told is true or not?" If you dont have the means or energy or skill to verify information for yourself, is it that hard to simply think, "I'm not sure, I dont know if this is true or not," and hold off on making any big decisions about it? It is, apparantly. Because people do not care about people, and they do not care about the truth. They care about looking good, and being treated well by the in-group. And right now, accomplishing that means, apparantly, not valueing how we treat other people when it comes to communication or spreading rumors.

the point im trying to get at here is that there has been a serious culture shift in fandoms all around, not just homestuck, and it is honestly really devastating and it makes me really upset.

In my opinion this shift is not hussies fault alone, but rather the fault of various factors at play, many of the political. But I won't go into that here.

I'm not of the mind that hussie is a god or an infallible god king that has a giant control complex-- I'm sure they have as many problems or character flaws as any other human being.-- But I think people who make this assertion are projecting their own faults onto them, as opposed to anything else. When there isn't immediate danger or consequential, physical threat of harm, I think it's always a good idea to question the motivations of anyone who paints someone in a negative light without any real evidence behind them. And if such evidence cannot be provided, especially with claims as heavy as "They manipulate and abuse everyone they work with into silence" and "everyone" is a mystery number that could be as tiny as 5 and as large as 100, then that seems, at least to me, excessive and unrealistic. In fact it borders on magical. It is not easy to abuse large swaths of people as a singular invidividual, especially if youve no direct blood tiesto them. And if they ARE being abused, surely there is someone other than Gio who can bring fourth evidence or account for this abuse? Some ex-employees who might vouch for it? There are plenty of ways of protesting work misconduct in a company without breaching an NDA. But its like no one is thining about this.

I think ultimately, many fans already did not like hussie over arbitrary, inconsequential, and ultimately meaningless creative decisions they didn't like within homestuck and jump at any excuse to have that dislike validated with uunevidenced smear campaigns. Because this behavior happens so often in fandoms outside of Homestuck too. While I was away from homestuck in other fandoms, this was all I saw. This is still, mostly, with painfully little exception, all that I see.

Its refreshing seeing posters like you. It gives me hope. I would like to, one day, return to a fandom culture that doesn't lob serious accusations of abuse at creatives and fans alike over failed-vibe-checks, and things like shipping or creative differences.

bcos

she

a hussy

;p

(the compulsion of anger makes a more frequent appearance online than does benevolent acceptance, because acceptance by itself does not spur action or internet defense. average brains simply don't obsess that way, and an obsessive fandom will have poor emotional regulation by design.)

I didn't miss anything, I'm just not sure why people are so quick to pile on Hussie when given what is obviously a biased account of events by a guy who has on 3 separate occasions done smear campaigns on the Homestuck team and also has self admitted he exists in this fandom to do shit like this?

@squiddo I've heard about the smear campaigns and seen HS team members say he seemed like he had an agenda/misrepresented them in his writing, but I've been out of the fandom for years now and only recently saw people panicking and claiming the comic had become lost media (very easily verified as untrue) and that led me to becoming aware of the existence of Gio. I've never been a particularly big fan of Hussie myself (was never really into the self-insert portion of things) but from what I've read from people who have been active in the fandom, or at least kept up on it, I haven't been getting a great impression of Gio, either.

When did he admit he was in the fandom for... whatever 'shit like this' entails?

Gio's went off on multiple screeds about how he's dedicating the rest of his existence to 'ruining hussie' (particularly during the last smear campaign where he released a bigass google doc that was similarly deceptively edited)

Ahh I see

Thank you for more information

Hi first post on the forums, long time fan of the series and long time lurker of Hussie as a creative.

In this day and age, new age fandoms have become heavily reactionary and prone to holding grudges over things that happened forever ago. Back in the day there were a shit ton of controversies over hussie's writing decisions, and those that were particularly upsetting were changed ( Trickster mode Peachy situation, for example.) Those situations, and the use of slurs throughout the entire series, some edgy jokes, it all just tallies up for new fandom spaces to want to rip them apart.

They don't care that Hussie has changed, they just want to pick them apart and take out their anger on them because it's easy. It puts them on a purity pedestal where they can go ' Ugh look at this MONSTER what an AWFUL person, but i'm not like that because i'm SO MUCH BETTER and PURE.'

Puritanical bullshit yada yada...

I've also noticed it allows for them to hype up the idea of making a 'Better less awful' version of homestuck. They want the media, they wanna scrub it squeaky clean, and then act like they're some hero who's saved the oh so poor readers from such an awful creator who's only real proven crimes here are Edgy jokes and being a little unprofessional.

Hussie isn't an amazing god ( Something they kind of touch on narratively in Psycholonials ) they're just a person who just like many people, acts like a fucking person. Which means having flaws and growing to be better over time.

Also i've seen conflicting posts, are Hussie's pronouns they/them or she/her? I used they them for this post to be safe.

she uses any pronouns

I appreciate your persepctive Lagomorph and agree entirely lmao.

Thank you squiddo for posting this. I'll be honest, I'm not like, a huge fan of Hussie as a person? They've never really properly addressed or apologized for the racism and ableism in Homestuck and I feel like that would go a long way towards changing my opinion of them. But also, they made a hugely important story that I love, they seem to have genuinely been putting in the work to help out fancreators, and I can't deny that I respect them a lot as an artist. The insane level of vitriol and slander towards her is kind of crazy and really disproportionate to his actual actions :V

Noted, thank you Penny! :)

And @Blueberry, that's a totally reasonable way to feel. Especially since I think there was really only one time that Hussie apologized to the fandom about a Racist joke in the comic ( Specifically the Trickster Joke.) However I worry that if Hussie made an apology at this point, most people would turn it around on her and say it was fake and didn't matter. :(

That's not to say I don't hope for one regardless, i'm sure it would make a good amount of fans happy.