my reaction as a bystander

Alas, it is what our fandom knows best. Even then, I'm happy the discussion here has been less vitriolic than most places I've been lurking. The positivity thread and Vriska Day celebrations have especially been today's silver lining for me <3

I shudder to know what sorts of arguments are going on in xitter (pronounced shitter) and reddit. My only exposure to the drama is here.

I saw the positivity thread, its nice to know that was a silver lining for you ^___^

it’s pretty annoying in there. the forums are a better place to be right now. i’m obviously biased because i work here but we have allowed people to have discussions about this so long as they don’t break rules and kill each other and it’s been nicer than a social media feed of just one overwhelming opinion or the other.

Everyone's just resorting to name-calling and petty slapfights. None of us are even involved lol who are we fighting for T_T I had someone call me dense on reddit earlier because I disagreed with them about this and told them it ain't as simple as they think. Everyone's acting like there's some weird team we all gotta choose or whatever. If you hate Hussie then you must think Gio is a saint, and if you hate Gio you must be some brainwashed Hussie cult member who defends his honor at all costs.

I think everyone should go to bed and stop talking about it for a day at least T_T

And we ain't even gonna know everything until the other side ACTUALLY says something. Right now it's just one guy who's not that reliable, and one unofficial response from a staffer here disproving only a few of the things the first guy said. Nobody has any answers to anything.

I think a bit of fighting is healthy it's the internet thats whats fun abt it

Honestly, as a new fan, I know Hussie's far from a perfect person (Hiveswap, however much of the Sarah Z video was true cause now I don't know, nearly everything involving race in the comic), but I don't trust what the fandom thinks of them. I kept waiting through act 6 and even the meat epilogue (haven't read candy) for the spite everyone told me about, for the signs that they hated their fanbase and/or the story, and it just. Wasn't. There. They were cruel to some of their characters but it was usually to serve the story or follow character arcs or explore new ideas. Like, did most of the fandom just decide they were doing it on purpose to hurt fans every time Hussie did something they didn't like or expect? Maybe I'm wrong and candy is just the spawn of satan, but that's what it looks like, and I didn't even like meat that much!

I don't want to be that guy who acts like they're better than all the other fans but if I worked my ass off to an unhealthy degree for years on end on a free story, then hundreds of thousands of people treated me like a huge asshole who hated them whenever I did something new with my own characters and a bunch of them sent me and my friends death threats every now and then, I'd have a chip on my shoulder too. I mean, the general response on the reddit to the Homestuck^2 team getting death threats seems to have been "death threats are bad but they kinda had it coming" which is insane logic to me.

It's relevant cause every scandal they've been involved in since gets seen through that warped "they hurt me with Homestuck" lens, and the response becomes an attempt to justify those feelings instead of people looking at the scandal on its own merits.

Bringing this post back i sense another explosion EVERYONE STOP! FIGHTING!!!