regardless of your feelings on the actual situation, we just have to acknowledge that that second article about the HICU is bullshit, right?
(https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/08/08/the-homestuck-union-was-always-fake/)
gio takes the idea that in order to get a license from the guy who made homestuck you have to negotiate with the guy who made homestuck, and then extrapolates that into "hussie has personal control over everything and is the puppeteer behind HICU", which is just insane? like call me crazy but i think it's totally normal to screen people before letting them associate with something you made in an official capacity.
the line "I was working with the HICU right up until the moment it turned out I was working with Andrew the whole time" is especially bonkers, because he was not working with HICU. the whole conflict they had was because he was not working with HICU, instead he was negotiating working with HICU, and they specifically broke off contact because those negotiations were going nowhere and no collab was happening.
one of the reason i have trouble with all of this is that so much of gio's words seem to be extrapolations, guesses and assumptions. he says he has proof of stuff happening, that he saw all of it himself, and then you look at the evidence he himself cites and it goes "i don't actually know what happened". it's pretty obvious that nobody involved is perfect or even particularly good, but seeing this guy weave these conspiracy theories based on guesses and unsupported deductions really hurts his credibility, especially since so much of the logs of the first article are missing/cut up, i just don't know how much of what he says in that article is something that he actually saw happen, or is just another assumptions or guess he's going off of.
his criticisms towards FRAF as "hussie has full control over who gets to be affiliated" is especially wild to me, because, like, yes? the guy giving out the license has the power to not give out the license if they don't want to. not giving out official endorsements to just anyone seems like the most logical precaution to keep out of trouble, ultimately homestuck fanfiction will exist regardless of whether hussie personally uplifts it or not, and if you really hate the terms hussie gives for official licensing, just don't fucking do it?
the second article especially reads like gio just being butthurt and having beef with hussie, so he just makes up a web of conspiracy in order to fearmonger about evil hussie trying to control fandom. what makes me believe this is deliberately dishonest is that he's not just raising concerns or asking questions, he's going off of incomplete evidence and vague stories of events to make definitive statements, and mixing in "trust me bro" bullshit. like, if he just went "due to NDAs i cannot give out the full evidence" i would be way more charitable, but it's the fact that whenever evidence is brought up it just never proves any of the definitive statements he makes.
