Hostile takeover of a fan project

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection was the definitive way to read Homestuck. It was a fan-born fan project released by necessity at a time when Flash was unsupported and the official website was offline indefinitely. After it was released it got the full endorsement of the official Homestuck team, including Andrew.¹ Despite some negative experiences I’d already had, the collection was an archive, not an argument, and was only ever a celebration of Homestuck and its related works.

Homestuck Official reached out to us, the project maintainers, saying they appreciated our work and wanted to work together in some kind of collaboration, although they didn’t explain any details. HSO made a number of specific guarantees to work with us in a positive, good-faith relationship; they insisted they didn’t want the collection taken down and agreed, upfront, that any existing bad blood over past criticisms would never enter in to this. We were told we’d be working with James Roach and a new team that didn’t include Andrew, which gave us reason for optimism. When I brought up Andrew’s past comments that he’d “never speak to me”, Andrew’s representative dismissed the concern as silly.²

Over the following year they systematically broke these commitments,³ threatening disproportionately harsh legal action⁴ unless we complied with a series of demands including:

• Signing over the rights to our creative work not as part of a project, but as a precondition to engaging in dialogue at all⁵
• Signing and agreeing to a “license” without allowing us to both read the document⁶
• Cutting off our personal friendships with past Homestuck critics and publicly denouncing them as Andrew saw fit⁸
• Rewriting past essays about Homestuck to reflect more favorably on Andrew⁷
• Legally isolating ourselves from each other and communicating only through Andrew, with harsh legal penalties for outside contact⁹
• Granting administrative access to the project files to a Homestuck employee and removing ourselves as maintainers entirely¹⁰
• For me personally, publicly apologizing for harassment Homestuck employees committed against me, acknowledging I was at fault for implicitly prompting them to do it by being an available target.¹¹

In the end it was a just a hostile takeover briefly disguised as collaboration. Andrew wanted the program, they claimed it, and they were going to keep escalating until it was theirs.

Not only did Andrew pressure us to sell out and repeatedly threaten us when we wouldn’t act against the interests of the community, he made it clear he was willing to escalate in an attempt to bankrupt the maintainers with legal fees.¹⁶ I finally bailed when I was able to confirm Andrew was simply going to make unilateral demands, but getting that far still cost me four figures out of my pocket. The conduct included legal threats, outright lying, document forgery,¹² and deliberate destruction of evidence.¹³

I know it’s easy to look at a messy conflict and attribute the conflict to fault on both sides. That’s often a fair assumption, but it was not the case here. We met Homestuck Official at their level when they reached out to us, offered to give them free promotion and use of our creative work, and played completely straight when they made it look like they wanted to negotiate. We were met with nothing but abuse.

I knew Andrew had a fixation on me as a critic. They’d already framed me to some people as the source of all their problems, either as a conscious lie or a post-hoc “nothing’s ever my fault” rationalization. I did not think they were crazy enough to call a fake détente in order to get my personal information so they could to sue me if I didn’t give them my work.¹⁴ But that’s what they did; as soon as they felt I had been sufficiently entrapped they made these increasingly outrageous demands.

There are a lot of details it’s easy to get lost in — he-said-she-said in conversations, tone policing, IP rights, whether this was a labor dispute or not, etc. But the most important part of what happened was this: Andrew said they knew the UHC was an independent project, they knew I was attached, and they insisted up-front that they were fine with all of that. This was the lie; the intentional fraud that made every attempt to try to assimilate us and police me which came after categorically unacceptable. By their own admission¹⁵, everything they did was in service of a goal to violate these foundational promises.

I think Andrew does these things because he believes he’s playing this elaborate mastermind game to maintain control over “their” fandom. But when you lie directly to people and knowingly put false promises in writing as part of a transaction, that’s not being some kind of puppetmaster like Andrew loves to write about, it’s just committing fraud.

As part of the hostile takeover process, while I was waiting for Andrew to respond to me, the HICU made a copy of the project they started hosting at homestuck.github.io.¹⁸ (The reference to HICU ownership of the fork was later scrubbed as part of the shell game.) There are now common misconceptions that the HSO’s copy is the official¹⁷ home of the project, or that the availability somehow disproves the issues the takedown raised. None of this is true. Their page claims the fork is a successor to the collection and control moved from the fan project to their official control, which is incorrect. Homestuck’s copy only serves to confuse people about the nature of the project. Since Andrew acknowledged our application was non-infringing and only sent takedown demands for the assets and the website, the up-to-date version of the reader program is still available from the original repository. Compared to the actual release, homestuck.github.io is an older version with bugs that were since fixed. At the time I thought this was obvious pettiness, but it seems to have succeeded in misleading people.

While the fork is ethically treacherous I’m not making any claim that it’s theft or a legal issue. The UHC is designed to stay as widely available as possible even if it’s thrown into legal limbo, which is what happened. It’s “fail-open” by design; when something goes wrong it’s built so that there are 2 copies, not 0. I believe that’s exactly how a community-focused project like the UHC needs to be.

Ultimately I stopped trying to work with Homestuck after they threatened to bankrupt me with a phony lawsuit, accusing the project’s homepage of copyright infringement after all copyrighted material had been scrubbed from the site.¹⁶ Homestuck’s behavior constituted multiple types of fraud, but importantly it reveals abusive tendencies and a viciousness that endangers any person in the vicinity of the IP.

All of this came at a turning point for the Homestuck brand as a whole. This started in 2023, while Andrew had formally discontinued his involvement in the Homestuck brand.¹⁹ In the wake of the publicity about Andrew’s previous misconduct, Homestuck and the Beyond Canon project made definitive statements asserting Andrew would not be involved going forward. After our talks with HSO started, the “Homestuck Independent Creative Union” was announced to manage the continuation of Beyond Canon. It called itself a real independent union doing fresh new work with the Homestuck license without oversight from Andrew.²⁰

This was false. The Union wasn’t a union, it was run by Andrew, who remained secretly in charge and managing everything. Once The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake was published demonstrating this, Andrew began making public authorial appearances again as if nothing had happened.²¹ The “independent union” subsequently rebranded as “Furthest Ring Studios,”²² further obscuring the original deception.

This pattern of disguised hostility is hard to swallow because it sounds so farfetched. It makes you feel insane for knowing it. The idea that there’s all this plotting and trickery and anger driving the franchise seems so absurd that it must be an obvious lie. Even the fan communities who believed and understood it went “wow! what an outrageous event!” and then kept to the same routines. It’s hard to fight momentum. I still struggle to internalize it, and I lived it.

This is all an extra stab in the gut to me, because it’s coming from someone I once idolized. Even after discovering the Hiveswap misappropriation²³ and watching the vitriol thrown at Sarah Z,²⁴ I still fundamentally respected Andrew at some level. The MacGuffin of this whole story was The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, a monument to their work I crafted over the course of years. Andrew has a job that people would kill for. My friends trying to get into the creative industry talk about getting 4-5 likes, or getting a single comment on their art. Andrew has been incredibly fortunate. They’ve found an incredible amount of success as an online creator and they’re just squandering it by obsessing over clout and empire-building.

Covering up the story

That covers the events in the original writing. But the reaction to these articles has become its own significant part of the story.

There has been a campaign to bury the articles themselves in allegations and after-the-fact justifications that serve to keep people away from the topic. Any negative buzz you may have heard about the collection or these articles from the fandom today almost certainly comes from this. Some were workshopped by Homestuck Official, some of them were crowdsourced by fans. The instinct to exonerate someone you admire is natural. Especially among fans, people understandably don’t want to believe Andrew is a villain. But instinctive rationalization has prompted a slew of bad faith arguments, like:

• There wasn’t really a takedown (there was),
• My role as the project maintainer was somehow illegitimate or hidden (no),
• This was driven by reasonable copyright concerns (it wasn’t — I show this in detail),
• I didn’t respect Andrew’s stated pronouns (I did),
• Maybe I forged all the conversation history (obviously not; that would be the easiest thing in the world to disprove),
• Having something negative to say proves it’s a bad-faith rant lacking substance (no),
• I’m claiming Andrew “hates Homestuck” and was trying to deny people access to the comic (I argued the opposite of this)
• I’m some kind of transphobe with a history of going after women (the one woman I was falsely accused of harassing away actually came back, unprompted, just to tell people it wasn’t true)
• It’s a significant problem that I removed accidentally insensitive language as soon as someone flagged it (no, that’s how sensitivity works),

These are thought-terminating clichés. They’re individually ridiculous given the facts, but plausible enough on their surface to give people an excuse not to engage with the actual allegations.

All of these arguments are, at their core, hoaxes. Even when they’re loosely connected to the text, they came from people who assumed I was ontologically evil and set off with the goal of discrediting me with whatever justifications they could scrape together. I remember watching, live, as people kept trying to brainstorm these and seeing what could stick. Of course there are moments in my life where I’ve failed to be charming, and certain internet obsessives collect screenshots of that to salivate over, but that’s true of everyone and irrevelant to the danger I’ve described.²⁵ These gotchas are crafted to seem plausible on social media and fill out a callout post, but they’re nonsense arguments no one would arrive at from a good-faith reading of the article.

Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit

are the emperor's clothes real? i don't have direct information one way or the other. but i like to judge ideas by their fruits, and i can't help but notice that a lot of the voices on the "no" side are coming from whiny losers rotting in the emperor's dungeon

Sun Dec 07 10:02:03 +0000 2025

Weaponizing influence to blacklist

This is all an expected result of the dynamics I’ve grown to understand after working with Homestuck.

Andrew brandishes slander and social harm as a weapon. I’d seen this before and have now experienced it first-hand. Behind everything Andrew does is an implicit threat to ruin you, in a plausibly-deniable way, if you don’t keep them happy. People have described it as a god complex, and I agree. This behavior is very recognizable as a dominance game. The UHC conflict wasn’t about copyright or money or even reputation, it was about winning, dominating, and subordinating a victim. Since the UHC story first came out I’ve gotten multiple confirmations that Andrew admits this and brags about it in private. Andrew heard our boundaries, pretended to agree to them, then went thermonuclear when we required them to be respected.

Not only were threats made explicit during these talks, when the articles were published the social attack was immediately executed.

People got direct instructions from Andrew to blacklist people for associating with me. Official Homestuck representatives secretly messaged project leads for fandom projects to demand people “fire” me over behavior they refused to describe. (The full LibsOfTiktok thing, but with no offensive posts, just false claims made by officials.) Official Homestuck employees began deflecting and seeding rumors, and influencers who had been granted access to Andrew began badmouthing the UHC project. Further violence escalated to doxxing attempts and direct threats of violence against me and my family, using an old address I gave as a shipping destination for official merch orders.

Very deliberately, none of these hoax accusations have been made on the record by anyone with any responsibility. If they did, they’d be lying, and their refusal to do it tells me they know that.²⁶ But what they can do curate the vibe they want and make sure the hate and slander spreads. I later learned this was a tactic called “triangulation”, a strategy where the abuser (or their friend) spreads rumors about one of their victims to convince other people to pile on. This lets the dirty work spread while the aggressor maintains plausible deniability.

I wondered why in Sarah’s video Andrew was so fixated on “poisoning the narrative”. In retrospect, this was projection. A big part of their strategy is isolating people by cutting them off from community and support networks. I’ve had friends show me screenshots where big name fans messaged them privately to “warn” them of how “problematic” I was, but then weren’t able to explain why, because it was bullshit they’d been told to repeat. It’s funny when it fails, but well-meaning people frequently buy in to this. They believe the victim is evil and they’re heroes for doing the dirty work of harassment the aggressor doesn’t want to be responsible for.

I have reason to believe this dynamic of social blackmail been the case for a very long time, but this incident has given me both first-hand knowledge and a paper trail. The legal threats were always documented, but there had also always been rumors and second-hand accounts about people willing to contradict the official narrative experiencing significant online harassment as a result. Now there’s documentation of this too.

The cult environment

This behavior is orchestrated harassment. In a cycle that keeps repeating, “inner circle” spaces become pressure cookers of hate that turn Andrew’s personal enemies into mythologized villains for community leaders. They’re reality distortion environments, and I’ve watched them temporarily radicalize good people. First a false grievance against a scapegoat becomes part of an internal mythology.²⁷ A siege mentality is reinforced to pressure people into being hyper-vigilant, and convince people some villain figure is an existential threat.

I may be the person in that slot right now but I’ve watched it rotate over the years. There is always a boogyman, and it’s always someone who offended Andrew by doing something short of complete agreement with their preferred narrative. Homestuck has no mythological enemies, it’s all just Andrew’s choices and their predictable outcomes.

Andrew creates an environment so focused on manipulative scheming that everything anyone does is assumed to be a plot. This is always communicated as an emotional issue and a general feeling of “harm”. There are never any meaningful details.²⁸ Any time anything bad happens (and it’s often self-inflicted), the event is spun as an outsider “endangering the team”. It’s projection, but everyone is whipped into legitimately feeling gangstalked. It is obsessive, scary, stalker stuff.

The people at the center of this are community influencers: organizers, moderators, PR people, respected contributors. The attitudes flow outward from them. Some people will wholeheartedly believe this and amplifying it as a moral crusade.²⁹ People act out in ways that might be justified if the rumors they were hearing were true, but they aren’t, and no one is allowed to verify any of it. People act in ways that might be justified if the rumors were true — but the rumors aren’t true, and no one is permitted to verify them.

Something I didn’t fully understand at the time is that Andrew’s demand I “show remorse” and admit fault wasn’t only about my humiliation satisfying Andrew personally, it was chumming the waters. Trying to get me to show “remorse” was an attempt to legitimize the hostility that had already been cultivated, and to justify the scale of hate he generates.

“Cult” is a strong word, but a significant amount of the most vicious harassment I’ve faced has been done by self-described “jubilities”, followers of the fictional religion Andrew invented. In the fictional story, Jubilism is based on a clown-themed cult leader manipulating online communities with a blend of “socialist demagoguery”, a “unique flavor of showmanship”, and an “ability to manipulate discourse and controversy to your benefit”. Her cult preaches religious-political principles like there is no tactic whatsoever that should be off the table. She wisely maintains a list of everyone she considers a hater, a list she later uses to heroically execute them in the street.³⁰ This has deeply resonated with some people, and Andrew now has adopted that same profile³¹, like Qanon for a certain kind of fan. This Trumpyness is a running theme; Andrew hides behind clownish absurdism which makes the serious seem un-serious. It’s all designed to be goofy and plausibly deniable, but the harm it does is real.

This is not speculation. I’ve watched the war rooms myself and the attacks manifest in very visible ways. I’ve personally seen evidence that Andrew and company build profiles on people by compiling internal dox and tracking social media activity, then host war room meetings to organize campaigns against them.³² This is characterized by disproportionate reactions and an instinct to “destroy” an enemy. There is seemingly no limit on how far they’re willing to go against people for even the smallest perceived slight.

Andrew uses public pressure to suppress coverage of these incidents: raising concerns about documented misconduct gets re-framed as invasive personal attacks. Andrew also uses the vulnerable people around him as insulation, with employees absorbing public criticism that should reach him directly, and taking the fall when he wants to do something that could invite pushback.³⁴

The UHC takedown and failed takeover was a medium-sized incident in a history of much worse abuse. But it may have been the first time the dynamic had been captured in definitive paper records and wasn’t just hearsay. I absolutely don’t fault other victims for trying to protect themselves by publicly downplaying the extent of the harm, but I am glad I had a chance to warn people about the danger they’re in.

It’s rough on me, personally, because a lot of slander is spread by well-meaning people who are trying to combat negativity. There are good people I admire who don’t feel comfortable about me because of this, and I mourn that. They’re trying to defend against something they trust was bad, not knowing they’re downstream from deliberately crafted misinformation.

I know there are a some nasty “fans” who have harassed Homestuck’s large population of vulnerable people, which makes people defensive and suspicious. I obviously don’t condone anyone who crosses those lines; I’ve got no sympathy for the “life-ruining” crowds or the trolls and spammers,³⁵ and online drama never justifies putting someone in physical danger. I don’t even think it’s tasteful to broadcast information about Andrew’s personal life. Obviously, right? Since I did write about Homestuck conflicts but didn’t write about any biographical drama.

Articles

With the core story and its aftermath covered, the detailed accounts are available for those who want them.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection Takedown documents our interactions with Andrew and his proxies over the collection — the manipulation, the broken commitments, and the legal threats.

There is also an extended conclusion: Homestuck is Radioactive. Andrew is willing to be extraordinarily hostile toward people, and anyone considering working with him should be aware that standard procedural safeguards have not been sufficient to protect people in the past.

Homestuck — as a corporate brand — needs to end. This is not what happened; more people have signed on to work with Andrew since this incident (not realizing they’re playing Calvinball) and Homestuck is pushing its marketable brand on children harder than ever.

The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake is an overview of the (at the time) Union, and how its structure was an elaborate deception. This also gets into the history of Homestuck’s relationships with fan projects, and how the recent attempts at revitalizing the brand hinged on a weird ploy.

Fandom and The Freedom Motif is an elaboration of my thesis from all of this, which is that it’s crucial for fandom to be structurally independent of corporate control, and how “official recognition” is a trap. It’s important that fandom spaces not need to be officially endorsed to exist. Officialization of some spaces creates a basis to shut others down. It provides exactly the kind of control people like Andrew want, and which people like them have to be kept away from.

Again, this has gone bad in the way I predicted. Ever since Homestuck Official launched its own Discord server and FRAF began encouraging official enclosure of fan projects, competing social spaces and unaffiliated projects have started going dark. Even some fan projects that at first embraced official licensing seem to have been embraced and extinguished.

There’s also the old Hiveswap landing page and the blog tag, Posts tagged #homestuck. God, I hope there are no more of those. I have drafts — good drafts — for essays about Homestuck as a literary work, about its cultural position, etc. Those aren’t happening now.

Recovery and non-recovery

The trouble is the ones who walk away from Omelas… walk away from Omelas. Fans get exhausted, or disgusted, or abused, or burned out, and so they leave fan spaces. Normally fan spaces have a healthy mixture of attitudes. But when disloyalty is punished so severely, those people leave. And only toxic positivity³⁶ is left. As the people who push back are filtered out, the spaces sustain themselves on a steady intake of new, excited people who don’t yet know the history. That energy gets exploited, many of those people eventually get damaged, and the cycle continues.

Most fans don’t experience the inner circle toxicity personally, but everyone sees the symptoms: game development failing to happen, comics getting canceled and rebooted because their leads left, game developers being denied credit, books going out of print, spec work being solicited, merch failing to fulfill, MSPA getting blacklisted by publishing companies, etc. And these symptoms echo down to fan spaces: canceled projects, burn out in community spaces, hypervigilant canceling on social media, and general toxicity. Normal things that could plausibly happen, but happening with implausible frequency. Continually destroying historical records and focusing on a hype cycle hides this, as does the normal turnover of new fans.

Inner circle people do break free of this. Everyone has boundaries, and in an environment where boundaries aren’t respected, someone eventually stomps you. You either leave or let it chew through you and burn you out. I’ve had many conversations with ex-Homestucks who start very embarrassed from their participating in the vicious parts of this, but I want to say they’re being too hard on themselves. People are being flooded with stress and false information and they’re mostly doing their best to work from that bad foundation. It’s a whole high-control environment, and it takes time to recover from that. There’s the looming threat that leaving breaks your social circles, but at some point you have to bite the bullet and start recovering. And I want to give people who want to heal all the credit in the world.

I obviously don’t know how to “fix” this since the best move I came up with was to write a blog. But I do believe that speaking out against exploitation and unsafe situations is very, very important. Stop the spread of misinformation, push back when someone says something you know is wrong. One of the reasons I wrote the piece at all is that showing the public what goes on behind these closed doors is material support to every past victim, including the people who can’t speak out. I have gotten many touching messages thanking me for my work, and that needs to be more important than the attempts to drum up hate about it.

Still with love,
- Gio