Homestuck Community Issues

All views expressed in this article are the opinions of its writers.

The following report represents an extensive research effort by over a dozen members of the Homestuck team in response to events and claims regarding the history and intentions of official Homestuck staff. The public conversation surrounding Homestuck has in recent years been warped by inaccurate, misunderstood, and misrepresented narratives; we lay out in detail who the main drivers of this toxic culture are, and what impact this behavior has had on the team.

The views expressed here are solely the opinions of the article's authors. However, this article will put forth substantial evidence to back up its claims.

Please note that the following content contains a significant volume of documentation of slurs and death threats, as well as mentions of suicide, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and other material that may be upsetting to some readers.

We must make it unequivocally clear that we neither desire nor condone harassment of any individual included in this report in any capacity.

Do not attempt to initiate unwanted contact with anyone included in this document for any reason.

Homestuck Community Issues

Why now?

The Unofficial Homestuck Discord and Makin

Discord Community Guideline Violations

UHSD's Moderation Team

Appropriation of Homestuck Branding

Homestuck.net and Other Creative Rights Issues

Self-Serving Patterns

Davekat-Sucks

What legal action did Andrew take against DKS?

GiovanH, Hiveswap, and the UHC

Hiveswap and The Odd Gentlemen

Act 7 Animation

The Schedule

The Kickstarter Funds and "Lack of Transparency"

What is the UHC, and what happened?

Was the UHC struck down, or "destroyed," through a DMCA?

Why was Gio's version of the UHC issued a takedown?

Gio's UHC Article, NDA Violations, and False Statements

Why did Andrew attempt to negotiate with Gio at all?

Gio's Motivations and Hostility/Entitlement to Homestuck

Psycholonials Reproduction

The Lamppost

Gio's Connections to Stalkers

Gio's Accusations of Harassment Against the Homestuck Team

Reversal

Accusations of "Litigious Action"

Pesterchum Client (2013)

Homestrife (2014)

Read MSPA (2013)

Scalemate Sewing Tutorial and Other Minor Incidents Circa 2011

The Overseer Project (2012-2013/2023?)

Other Fake C&D Claims

Vast Error/Redbubble

Deceptive Framing of Legal Actions

Conclusion

Why now?

Because the public narrative surrounding Homestuck has become incredibly distorted, representing our side has required a significant, coordinated effort and substantial emotional toll.

The culture of negativity that has dominated the Homestuck fandom has encouraged and enabled harassment that extends beyond negative online comments. Andrew Hussie recently wrote about just a few of their personal experiences with stalking, and many other members of Homestuck teams can share similar stories. Fans have regularly spread false or speculative claims about team members' personal relationships, and have tracked down the social media pages of team family members to share private personal information about weddings, divorces, children, major medical procedures, mental health diagnoses, gender identity, relationship status, and family deaths.

Often, the harassment is gendered or sexual. Many female members of the team have encountered fans publicly speculating that they only have their jobs because of a sexual relationship with a male team member. Personal information, including addresses ("dox"), of several team members has been posted to right-wing-aligned harassment forums such as Kiwifarms, and fans frequently use this information to track and surveil team members in real life, sharing surreptitiously taken photographs to mock their appearances or share "sightings." Team members who are trans or nonbinary are routinely accused of "faking," while those who are cisgender, closeted, or prefer to keep their identities private are subject to ceaseless "transvestigation." One team member who some have concluded is an "egg" (a transgender person who is closeted or has not yet realized they are trans) deals with an individual who tracks places they go in real life to repeatedly leave vials of HRT hormones for them to find. Fans have circulated revenge porn and publicly shared adult material of team members with a history of sex work. Several team members have also been the subject of graphic pornographic fanfiction and drawings, and then been directly sent this material without their consent. This invasive behavior extends to team family members as well: one team member was sent a screenshot of their home on street view with a threat to rape their partner.

This behavior occurs in real life as well as online. Fans have attempted to physically touch and even kiss staff without consent in public appearances. To provide one particularly egregious example, a fan once presented themselves at a signing with an actively bleeding wound from a symbol from the comic they had cut into their chest with a knife.

Several team members deal with protracted ongoing stalking by individuals experiencing psychosis or other mental health struggles, who send hundreds and hundreds of threatening messages to these team members, their friends/family, and their workplaces, continuing even long after some of these team members ceased any association with Homestuck; there are former team members who left Homestuck over 5 years ago who continue to experience persistent tracking, documentation on stalker websites, recurrent "callout posts," and contact with associates meant to frustrate their ability to find employment elsewhere.

By 2020, harassment and stalking became so ubiquitous that normal operations became difficult to maintain; all projects experienced major disruptions. Homestuck^2 was cancelled in February 2021 due to harassment of the team, and conditions worsened further following subsequent events of that year. Much of the team members across projects have departed, either in response to harassment or fear of one day becoming a target of it. Production on all Homestuck projects completely ceased in late 2021 for a period of about two years after a staff member attempted suicide in response to this abuse.

The teams frequently held discussions about whether to issue responses to various controversies, but the likelihood that a public statement would trigger additional harassment against vulnerable individuals made it difficult to determine when the benefits of responding justified the potential costs. Past attempts by the team to correct misinformation were usually dismissed out of hand and taken as a pretext for new waves of controversy and attacks, so team members came to feel that there didn't seem to be much benefit to attempting to clarify anything. Engaging at all required significant time and energy from a small team that was already overwhelmed. Over time, this cycle -- sensational claims followed by silence from a team too demoralized to respond -- resulted in profound lasting damage to Homestuck and its creators.

This harassment has been enabled by a culture that believes these attacks against us are justified, in large part due to a small group of individuals who have deliberately circulated defamatory accusations that are either completely fabricated or manipulatively framed in order to provoke hostility against us.

More than a dozen members of the Homestuck team have contributed a substantial investment of time researching, drafting, and reviewing the details of this article to ensure accuracy and avoid violating legal agreements; conversely, the key figures in spreading misinformation about Homestuck have engaged in a firehose tactic of escalation with no apparent regard for legality or truthfulness, using any opportunity to throw unsubstantiated rumors at the wall so that they can run with whatever sticks. When we've attempted to handle this privately, they have weaponized those efforts against us; they have inoculated themselves against legal action with continuous false accusations of "litigiousness" that, despite the fact that Andrew has never actually initiated legal action seeking damages for criticism, defamation, or copyright infringement against any party, have successfully stoked debilitating stochastic harassment against the team.

The Unofficial Homestuck Discord and Makin

The Unofficial Homestuck Discord server (UHSD) was established in February 2016 by a user named "Makin." By February 2026, it had amassed nearly 50,000 members. Although it began as a fan-driven space for community engagement around Homestuck, it deteriorated into a forum characterized by bullying, harassment, death threats, stalking, doxing, misinformation, and pervasive hostility, thanks in part to deliberate encouragement of these elements by Makin and his moderation team. User behavior demonstrated a consistent pattern of content that violated several of Discord’s Community Guidelines, including:

Bullying, Harassment, and Threats Policy: Users on the server actively promoted and engaged in harassment, including calls for self-harm, coordinated off-platform harassment, targeted humiliation, and both direct and indirect threats of violence.
Doxxing Policy: Users shared or threatened to share personally identifiable information without consent.
Hateful Conduct Policy: Users posted content that degraded, dehumanized, or targeted individuals based on protected characteristics.
Misinformation Policy: Users circulated false or misleading information that created potential for broader harm.
Unauthorized Copyright Access Policy: UHSD leadership regularly hosted community events to stream pirated movies and television programs.

Although the UHSD was a partnered server, and thus ostensibly held to a higher standard of conduct, these behaviors occurred persistently and systematically. Rather than curtail these violations, several members of the UHSD moderation team participated in them openly.

Many members of the community, including Homestuck team members, reported the UHSD to Discord for these TOS violations. In February 2026, Discord terminated the UHSD.

Discord Community Guideline Violations

Below we will share screenshots submitted to us by Homestuck team and community members as just a small sample of the many thousands of inappropriate messages that were allowed to stand on the UHSD server. We have redacted names of regular users for privacy in green. Users who were moderators of the server have been redacted in blue.

UHSD's Moderation Team

The UHSD moderation team participated in much of this behavior. One of the Discord's moderators, Kaliwete, frequently expressed sentiments aligned with neo-nazi ideology.

Several members of the UHSD community and the UHSD moderation team itself had reported Kaliwete's concerning neo-nazi-aligned statements, but were rebuffed by Makin.

Following the termination of the UHSD for Discord TOS violations in February 2026, Makin created a new "refuge server." On February 18th, UHSD moderator Drew Linky published a blog post about the termination and Makin's new server.

"In the meantime, the Refuge has grown somewhat. It hasn’t been such a huge influx as it was yesterday, but there’s more people and the activity is bonkers for such a small group of people. Today was literally three or four times as active as the HSD was on average with one quarter of one percent of the total number of users. Obviously that will fall off over time, but a few people have used the term “the cream of the crop,” and I can’t say I’m displeased with the current userbase.

"In order to regiment things slightly more, I disabled all existing invites because people were using the original to invite friends I had no awareness of like Bruhmeister. Instead, I created another thread from #general called “Newcomer Council” where people are encouraged to nominate people and we can introduce more regulars in a somewhat orderly fashion. This has the unfortunate effect of rendering the server a fully gated splinter, but this is ideally a temporary situation and won’t matter in another week at most."

Then, Drew published a list of refuge server members. This "cream of the crop" included Kaliwete.

Kaliwete's continued presence on the unofficial server again became a topic of community discussion. On April 20th, 2026, a community member reported to us a public discussion that had just taken place on Makin's new unofficial community server:

Above, another moderator of the terminated UHSD insists that Makin was well aware of Kaliwete's neo-nazi ideology, because he himself had reported it repeatedly. Makin says that he was under the impression that Kaliwete was just joking.

A former moderator of the UHSD had this to say about the UHSD's culture, Makin's moderation policies, and his claim to ignorance about Kaliwete's neo-nazi ideology:

"In 9 months, I was not able to bring about a single positive change. The admins and other mods said NO to every reform I proposed, let it be a large one or a tiny one, let it be a progressive one or an organisational one. Every tool I brought from my 22 years of experience in moderation, they refused. It didn't matter how polite, formal, conciliatory or adamant I was, everything was systematically refused. The mod team even stopped me from banning the R-word, repeatedly."

[...]

"MAKIN PERFECTLY KNEW THAT KALIWETE WAS A NAZI.

He already knew in early 2024. I reported Kaliwete/Kaliborn over and over, both in PM and in modchat. Makin didn't care.

Bolas also reported Kaliwete over and over. Makin didn't care.

Finally Makin got pressured enough to directly ask Kaliwete if he was a nazi, but he didn't take any action against Kaliwete, and Kaliwete left UHSD of his own volition.

Makin and his team later allowed Kaliwete to join their post-UHSD shelter server."

Shown below is personal testimony taken 8/16/2025 from then-active UHSD members and ex moderators about how mods do not care, do not enforce the rules, that Makin does not care, and that his "only role" is external politics:

Appropriation of Homestuck Branding

Although the UHSD was an independently operated community space with no affiliation with the Homestuck team, UHSD leadership's exploitation of Homestuck branding led to confusion among the community. The server’s participation in the Discord Partnership Program alongside its description as “the biggest live Homestuck community” reinforced this misconception. Association with the above detailed activities has significantly damaged Homestuck's reputation.

Commenters on social media frequently refer to it as "The Homestuck Discord":

This false association often appeared intentional on the part of UHSD leadership, as they seemed keen to lay claim to creative rights over Homestuck. Below, Makin, numerous mods, and other users on UHSD discussed initiating a frivolous lawsuit to obtain an archive of Homestuck:

Homestuck.net and Other Creative Rights Issues

Makin himself has a long history of misappropriating Homestuck branding and redistributing other artists' creative works without consent from the creators. His website, Homestuck.net, makes direct use of the primary mark of Homestuck, and centers entirely around rehosting and archiving both works created by Andrew and other fans. Makin does not seek permission from the creators of these works to host them in his archive.

Makin mirrored Andrew's adventures "Jester Quest" and "Circus Break" without permission. They were hosted exclusively on the official Homestuck Discord as active fan events, with plans to host them on the main website after the community building events were over (Jester Quest has since been uploaded to Homestuck.com). Makin also went out of his way to edit the original text of these adventures remove any of the links to our official server that were included within the comic itself.

In 2019-2020, Homestuck.net and the UHSD were prominent sources for content pirated from the official Homestuck Patreon. Though the Homestuck.net archive has not updated in some time, it still contains paywall restricted content.

Despite having no right to a large swathe of material hosted on his site, Makin ran a Patreon in order to profit from his activities. At one point, he offered a tier that allowed users to buy moderation privileges on the UHSD:

Makin has made various claims about what he uses this money for. The text of his Patreon circa 2019, claiming none of it will be used for "copyright-leeching purposes":

In 2021, not long after production on all Homestuck projects had ceased due to intensification of team harassment, Makin made this post on his Patreon:

While it would be within Homestuck Inc.'s right to strike this and other infringements, Andrew has not yet taken action against Makin for these activities. Makin has expressed that he believes that Andrew's past comments indicating they did not intend to issue a copyright takedown to Homestuck.net have permanently vacated Andrew and Homestuck Inc.'s rights to the content he hosts and attempts to profit from.

Self-Serving Patterns

In the past, Andrew has contacted the UHSD's ownership in an attempt to address its toxic culture and reduce harm. In 2020, at Andrew's urging, Makin stepped down and transferred control to a new moderator, Drew Linky. While this change initially improved conditions, it lasted only briefly. Soon after Makin stepped down, the new moderator transferred ownership back to Makin.

Makin has since indicated an intentional strategy to rotate ownership and moderation among associates in order to avoid enforcement actions.

Makin repeatedly accuses the Homestuck team of attempting to consolidate control over fandom spaces, yet his own actions suggest this is precisely his own goal. Here are several examples:

Around the release of Psycholonials, Andrew's team created the r/Psycholonials subreddit in hopes of using it as a semi-official space. Makin contacted Reddit administration and argued that the subreddit's moderators were inactive, and to hand control of the subreddit over to him. They did. Makin now owns the Psycholonials subreddit, having effectively stolen it from the official team.
After the MSPFA server was destroyed by hackers in 2023, Makin joined the chat and urged users to abandon MSPFA in favor of his own server, attempting to siphon as many members into UHSD as possible.

The Reddit community page, while presented as a general resource hub for the Homestuck fandom, continues to direct new users primarily toward UHC as the preferred or only way to read the work, and describes the official site as broken. A screenshot from March, at least six months after the official website returned, shows that most linked resources direct users toward projects Makin controls, aside from the Homestuck YouTube channel and the SBaHJ page.

In his 4/13/26 post, Makin accused the Homestuck Official Discord moderators of mass-reporting UHSD. Then, he independently took down his Homestuck.net archive, redirecting it to his callout post on Reddit. He added a warning badge to the Reddit that alleged Andrew and the team had attempted a "hostile takeover," then restricted posting to moderator approval only. He banned and removed any comments offering neutral or supportive responses toward the official teams, including Homestuck Official Discord moderators who attempted to engage in the discussion.
Five days later, he restored the website behind a password prompt that required users to enter the name of the Homestuck community manager to proceed, deliberately attempting to incite targeted harassment against this team member. Neither Andrew nor any member of the Homestuck team had taken any action against his Homestuck.net archive; he took these childish measures to limit access to his site on his own.

As a result, we have no reasonable basis to expect that Makin -- or any successor selected by Makin -- will implement or maintain adequate moderation of any of the community spaces over which he maintains control.

Davekat-Sucks

Davekat-Sucks (DKS) is a blogger noted for a sustained pattern of aggressive stalking, doxing, and harassment of the Homestuck team, as well as outspoken transphobia and racism. In early 2026, Andrew was granted an emergency restraining order against DKS barring her from engaging in any further harassment or defamation of any individual associated with Homestuck projects. Here is just some of the material that led to DKS being recognized by a court of law as an immediate risk to the safety of Andrew and Homestuck's creatives. Identifying information and specific defamatory accusations have been redacted for privacy.

DKS engaged in much of this behavior due to racism, homophobia, and intense bigotry towards transgender members of the team, as well as anger that recent Homestuck stories contained what she perceived as excessively progressive or pro-transgender material.

DKS often opportunistically levied false accusations of grooming against our transgender members of staff, but trivialized pedophilia on her personal accounts. She frequently shared memes and jokes about molesting children, and linked to online stores selling shirts with this imagery.

Though DKS had engaged in this kind of behavior extensively over a period of nearly 7 years, her activity on tumblr exploded in 2025, jumping up from 1,000 to nearly 7,500 original posts in a single year.

This made her posts much more difficult to ignore. Her account had become effectively a hub for right-wing reactionaries and stalkers to submit hateful screeds and personal information about the Homestuck teams, which DKS would then publish for her followers. The urgent physical threat this concentration of information and incitement to harassment had created for Andrew and other members of the Homestuck team made legal action unavoidable.

What legal action did Andrew take against DKS?

Andrew was granted a restraining order against DKS for a documented pattern of stalking, harassment, and defamation of Andrew and other members of the Homestuck team.

A restraining order is difficult to obtain and requires extensive documentation of wrongdoing. However, Andrew was able to present ample evidence of doxing, attempted unauthorized access, harassment, and related conduct, and a court granted a temporary restraining order (TRO). A TRO functions as an interim measure pending a formal hearing, but violations of a TRO are a criminal offense. In the jurisdiction in which DKS resides, a law enforcement officer with the local police department must deliver the TRO documents in person.

Upon receiving notice that the TRO had been granted, the community manager of the Homestuck team informed the Discord moderation team, as parties affected by the TRO, that the first service attempt would occur that evening.

Over the following days, the Homestuck team learned that DKS had not yet been served despite repeated attempts to make contact at the listed address. Andrew’s lawyer advised that members of DKS’s household might hesitate to engage with law enforcement due to concerns about racial harassment. The lawyer noted that while the restraining order should not place them at risk of deportation, the broader political climate could contribute to delays.

Team members held internal discussions and agreed that they wanted DKS’s behavior to stop, but did not intend to cause distress to uninvolved family members. However, it was not possible to stop the service process at that stage, and abandoning any effort to protect them from this individual's ongoing stalking and harassment was out of the question.

During this period, DKS continued to post about the team, despite confirmation that officers had attempted service multiple times over nearly a week. In response to questions from the moderation team, the community manager relayed that these political factors might explain the delay in service. Homestuck team members were only informed that some of DKS's family members might have concerns due to their immigration background after several service attempts had already occurred. While some team members expressed concern that DKS's uninvolved family members might be at risk of immigration action due to these proceedings, our current understanding based on clarification from our legal representative is that DKS and her immediate family members are in fact US citizens.

After several more days, officials confirmed that they had successfully served DKS. The affected parties attended a hearing, and a judge upheld the restraining order with a date set for a trial.

Because of the potential impact that criminal charges could have upon DKS's family members in the current political climate, Andrew chose not to pursue further legal action against DKS, and instead negotiated an out-of-court settlement. The details of this settlement are confidential.

You may read the Discord mod team's official response to this matter here.

GiovanH, Hiveswap, and the UHC

GiovanH ("Gio") is an online commentator and programmer who became known within the Homestuck fandom for a series of blog posts published in 2020–2021 concerning the development of Hiveswap and the broader management of Homestuck-related projects. These articles, which relied heavily on anonymous sources and unverified claims, were later amplified by a set of widely circulated YouTube videos by Sarah Z, bringing Gio's framing of events to a much larger audience. Later, he would become a prominent figure involved in the development of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an offline archive of Andrew Hussie's complete body of work.

Hiveswap and The Odd Gentlemen

Before covering events surrounding Gio's involvement with the Unofficial Homestuck Collection (UHC), it is important to provide the context of his misleading coverage of Hiveswap's history. Gio's false reporting on Hiveswap has not only dramatically misinformed common perceptions the public has about this game, but also led to the circumstances which caused licensing negotiations with the UHC to become exceedingly complicated.

The history of Hiveswap is one that has been so thoroughly misrepresented that unpacking all of the claims that Gio is responsible for spreading is a significant undertaking that exceeds the scope of this article. That being said, Andrew is interested in setting the record straight about what actually happened. We are currently preparing a more comprehensive document that will address this matter in full. For now, we will focus on a few key points.

Please note that all information shared in this section is in compliance with the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that Homestuck signed with The Odd Gentlemen (TOG) as a condition of their 2015 settlement. The NDA expressly provides an exception that permits disclosure of information pertaining to Hiveswap's development and the settlement with TOG in private communication with individual backers to the 2012 Homestuck Kickstarter campaign. That is the manner in which this information was shared with the author of this section of this article, who is a Kickstarter backer not party to the settlement or its associated NDA.

The Homestuck team has shared information through these same channels once in the past. We maintain that the information shared at this time is a correct and accurate accounting of events. However, several years later, Gio began an initiative to "dig into" this history. His primary source, beyond his own baseless conjecture, was an anonymous former employee of What Pumpkin (WP), whom we have since identified. This individual was the one who arranged the connection between WP and TOG while spearheading plans for the Kickstarter, and thus felt motivated to retaliate against Andrew for sharing an accurate account of TOG's malfeasance. This former employee had been dismissed from WP for incompetence long before the relevant events, and had no first-hand knowledge of any of the matters they described to Gio. What they shared was purely their personal speculations and gossip.

Below we will share a select sample of emails and transcripts for the purpose of illustrating how many of Gio's original claims about Hiveswap and the TOG settlement are false, misleading, or completely fabricated. With that understanding, we offer these clarifications and limited excerpts of evidence in good faith, with the expectation that we will provide a more comprehensive account in due course.

Act 7 Animation

In his 2021 blog, Gio alleged that Homestuck misappropriated Kickstarter funds to develop the Act 7 animation, that the Act 7 animation interfered with Hiveswap production, and that we deliberately concealed TOG's involvement in the Act 7 animation to cover up this misconduct. All of these allegations are untrue.

TOG personally suggested and pitched their in-house animators to help with Act 7. What Pumpkin paid for the animation using separate operating funds, with animators who were uninvolved with the Hiveswap production. TOG was fully compensated for all work and assets they provided on this project.

After WP's relationship with TOG broke down, WP finished the project in-house.

WP did not deliberately exclude TOG's credits from Act 7. WP reached out to TOG and asked if and how they would like to be credited for their work on Act 7. They requested to be excluded from crediting, likely because Andrew had already informed backers of TOG's malfeasance at this time.

The Schedule

In his blog, Gio claimed that his anonymous source informed him that Andrew had given TOG an "impossible" schedule. This is untrue.

Andrew made all efforts to get Hiveswap's development on track. Beginning to sense urgency with TOG's slow rate of progress, Andrew made plans to move to LA to work with TOG in person and get the project under control. Andrew had already initiated the "gigapause" in late 2013, primarily to allocate time to work with TOG on the game. Here is an email from 5/12/14:

This was the date Andrew made it clear they were available to work in person. Andrew also states here that the game design docs were mostly complete, which was Andrew's responsibility, and kept up with the schedule they all agreed to. It was up to TOG to demonstrate progress, such as by submitting an updated prototype.

Cindy from WP on 7/3/14 tries to establish in person meeting while traveling to LA for a convention:

Following the response to this on 7/9/14 there is no invitation to the TOG office. They cited renovation work in prior emails, and instead meet somewhere near the convention. Here the lead suggests a time:

Note that Wayward Manor is cited as a source of preoccupation. This directly contradicts Gio's account, which claims TOG had already shifted focus to King's Quest, limiting their availability for Hiveswap. The record instead indicates that Wayward Manor constrained their capacity to develop Hiveswap, and that only after did their focus shift toward King's Quest. It seems they had been draining Homestuck Kickstarter funds while focusing primarily on other projects this entire period.

The probable origin of this accusation of schedule dysfunction is likely this: it was discovered much later during arbitration that the Kickstarter project lead responsible for providing the agreed and finalized schedule to TOG's lawyers did not submit a signed, finalized schedule. While this had no practical impact on the timeline of the development itself, due to the fact this project lead (who is now understood to be Gio's discredited source) did not properly submit the schedule, TOG was not technically bound to adhering to it financially. They exploited this in arbitration to dramatically reduce the amount of money they offered to return. Below are pasted excerpts from email exchanges pertaining to this schedule:

10/22/13 [TOG project lead] submits their proposal for Hiveswap dev schedule, after delays on their end over 2013. WP needs to sign it to be legally binding. [WP project lead] is instructed by Andrew to send the schedule to their lawyer for signing.

[TOG project lead]:
"Attached is the initial proposed schedule for Hive Swap. I've added a basis for pre-production and then moving into production. For this type of game, pre-production is key as we'll want to figure out basically everything up front so we can then move through the necessary asset and tool creation. Also, we can start to test and visualize all the gameplay through interaction docs similar to what [TOG dev] assembled and then break those into further asset lists. I've included some notes in the attached schedule for context. Also, i've started part of an asset list as it relates to the interaction document."

[WP project lead]:

"Yeah this schedule is good, we really gotta try and make this hit. Having the KS be as late as November is rough enough. [...]"

The studio was already very late in even delivering this schedule for review. There was no chance of delivering a game in late 2014, so the target dates would need to be revised. Later Andrew and TOG would agree to adjust them in a mutually agreeable way. But for now, the schedule would need to be signed for it to even matter.

Andrew, in response to [WP project lead]:

"Ok, why don't you reply to that effect, then get [lawyer] looped in and we can try [to] firm this up in the contract asap."

This was an instruction by Andrew to have [WP project lead] get the contract signed, which unbeknownst to Andrew at the time, never happened. This was the origin of this interaction later with [the WP lawyer], when Andrew was trying to negotiate project termination with TOG later that year:

The Kickstarter Funds and "Lack of Transparency"

WP established the NYC studio immediately after severing ties with TOG in the interest of getting Hiveswap into the hands of fans as soon as possible. Andrew was feeling immense pressure from the fandom's unrest at this time, as well as dealing with the loss of their father, who had just passed away from cancer, while still actively working on Homestuck. Their priority was just trying to get this project on stable ground.

Andrew expected that, while TOG was unlikely to return the full amount initially paid to them for the development of Hiveswap, it would be a number sufficient to reasonably fund the What Pumpkin New York City (WPNYC) studio long enough to complete production of Hiveswap: Act 1. Andrew had seen the small amount of work TOG had actually completed at that stage, and did not anticipate that they would attempt to justify keeping the vast majority of what had been paid.

However, on 5/1/15, after months of stalling, TOG's lawyer finally set a date for arbitration. TOG then informed WP that they would only return $100,000 of the $800,000 upfront payment. Assuming this was an unserious lowball offer, WP's team pushed back repeatedly. The arbitration call continued for 8 hours until TOG's lawyer finally disclosed that returning a higher sum would not be possible, because the rest of the money had already been spent.

This put WPNYC into immediate crisis. It was not possible to sustain operations with a shortfall of over half a million dollars, and the budget -- as well as the schedule, design, and scope of Hiveswap: Acts 1 through 4 -- had been designed under the assumption that at least a reasonable portion of that payment would return. The main reason that the WPNYC studio had to lay off staff, and eventually close, was due to this severe budget shortfall caused by TOG's failure to return funds.

Gio's source also falsely claimed, with no direct knowledge of these events, that Andrew was the one who insisted on an NDA to cover up mismanagement. This is precisely the opposite of what happened. In a highly unfavorable settlement, TOG's lawyers insisted upon an NDA as a condition of returning any money at all. Andrew understood that any further delays were not going to make the fandom happy, and that they had little recourse in extracting additional concessions from TOG. Andrew managed to secure a carve-out in the NDA that allowed for sharing information with Kickstarter backers, which they did shortly after reaching final settlement.

It is completely false that Act 1 was already done and Act 2 was close to done at the time of WPNYC's closure, which was another false claim from Gio's source. Act 1 was nowhere near ready to ship at that time. Without that money, it was no longer possible to complete Acts 1 through 4 as they had been planned. It became necessary to substantially redesign the game in order to accommodate a dramatically reduced budget.

WP and Andrew were and remain committed to continuing Hiveswap development despite this enormous setback. WP explored numerous avenues to make up for the massive shortfall. WP brought on board a financial consultant who assured the team that they could secure additional funding, but was not successful in raising funds. This failed funding effort eventually led to the deal with VIZ media, a last resort measure to get Hiveswap's development back on track.

Below we will share excerpts of extremely frustrated and strongly worded emails sent by Andrew to The Odd Gentlemen after arbitrated negotiations, where they discovered that they would not be receiving the majority of the paid Kickstarter funds back from TOG.

Andrew engaged multiple game development professionals to review the demo provided by TOG, which signified the only tangible work delivered by them to WP. They compiled a presentation to demonstrate that the work did not justify the valuation claimed, including any substantial portion of the roughly $800,000 down payment.

Below are excerpts of details stated in this review:

TOG ghosted Andrew's emails, and ignored every attempt to reach out. Eventually, their lawyer requested that Andrew cease contact. More remarks from Andrew's emails to TOG here:

Below: Andrew, frustrated, says in another email:

"It's[..] a rough draft of the information I think the backers are owed as a matter of transparency, finally."

They emphasized that, despite TOG's lack of progress during development, Andrew had refrained from making public statements in order to maintain a professional working relationship. However, now that they had learned the funds would not be returned, those who contributed significant amounts to the Kickstarter deserved a clear explanation of what had occurred.

Andrew recently commented on this situation, quoted below:

"So [my father] died in 2014, which also coincided with the early difficulties of trying to produce Hiveswap. I was doing a ton of work on Hiveswap planning throughout the gigapause during the final months of his life, [...] The dev at the time was not keeping pace with anything I was doing, and the only evidence I got they were working on it at all was one prototype of the engine [...] that looked so insanely bad, I knew I couldn't show it to the rowdy, increasingly impatient Homestuck fandom, because I thought it would incite a mutiny against the dev. So I waited and waited for more progress from them, my dad died, I was finally free from tending to him, I quickly moved out to California to be near the dev to help them get the project moving, waited and waited some more, asked if I could come to the office, they said it was under construction so don't come… I waited some more… the fandom kept breathing down my neck for progress…"

[...]

"So I realized this partnership wasn't going to work, because I felt like the fandom was about to explode from the lack of demonstrable progress. So I dropped the dev, and the severance of that deal was actually amicable at the time (9 months later during arbitration to settle return of funds to us was a different story, because they spent most of those funds on other stuff, leaving almost no budget left to make the game), and I quickly got to work establishing a new studio basically overnight to reassure the fans the project wasn't dead, and we were still on it despite a setback from a dev who turned out to be too busy for the job, although I did not say anything like this at the time so as to stay professional and considerate to those at the old studio who were not at fault for whatever was going on there. I didn't want to turn this fandom on those people. However, in 2021, an especially pernicious lie was spread that I was actually the one who exploited this dev, and I was the one who was unable to keep up with the schedule. This was wrong of course, I and a co-writer were producing a ton of material, staying heavily engaged with the project, I tried MOVING out there to get the dev team fired up for the project, they shut me out of the office, were slow to answer emails… they were a disaster in 2014, and they knew it. [...] Everything was fine. Then their lawyer got involved, forced arbitration, and created a half-million dollar shortfall in the NYC studio budget, closing that studio a few months later."

This clip (0:20) originally appeared in a 4/21/2015 Polygon article, but was later removed. In this video a developer talks about a mysterious unnamed project that TOG was working on (realistically the only project this could be was Hiveswap), but that they excitedly decided to pivot to King's Quest instead, saying:

"When [Producer] came to me, she actually gave me a choice. We had another project going on, and she was like 'you want this or you want king's quest?' King's Quest no doubt, give it to me, I can't wait, I can't wait to get started."

All of this demonstrates that Gio's central criticism of Hiveswap's development -- that Andrew or What Pumpkin acted negligently in its partnership with The Odd Gentlemen -- rests on inaccurate reporting. There is an overwhelming volume of evidence demonstrating that Andrew made consistent efforts to collaborate with TOG and adhere to the schedule both studios had agreed upon.

We can and will address much more about Hiveswap in time. These key points represent only a small portion of Gio's highly sensationalized and misleading account of Hiveswap, which has significantly shaped prevailing narratives about its history. His broader body of work contains extensive inaccuracies and reflects a clear pattern of hostility towards Andrew and other Homestuck creators.

We will present additional evidence challenging these inaccurate reports in a separate release.

What is the UHC, and what happened?

The "Unofficial Homestuck Collection," hereafter referred to as the UHC, is an unofficial, initially unauthorized reproduction of Andrew's complete body of creative work.

By 2023, the Homestuck website became largely nonfunctional due to deprecation of Flash, evolving web standards, and lack of ongoing maintenance; the codebase had degraded to a point that necessitated a full ground-up rebuild of the site, but as VIZ Media retained control of Homestuck.com's infrastructure, Homestuck Inc. needed to negotiate a return of rights before initiating such a project. In the meantime, the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, a fan-led initiative, provided an alternative platform that allowed audiences to access Andrew's work in a manner consistent with its original presentation. Under the impression that it was solely the work of its only credited developer at the time (2021), Bambosh, Andrew shared and boosted the UHC publicly.

However, after securing public support from Homestuck's original author, the UHC revealed that there was in fact a second undisclosed co-author of the UHC: GiovanH, a figure who had been involved in extensive conflict with the Homestuck team in the past.

The Homestuck team secured the return of rights from VIZ Media in 2023, and initiated efforts to restore and modernize the official website. As part of this project, the team reached out to Bambosh to explore the possibility of issuing a license to the existing popular collection so that it could be distributed fully legally. Extending such a license, only to Bambosh alone first, was meant as a gesture of good will toward Bambosh, who was recognized as the UHC's original author. However, Gio's previously undisclosed involvement as the project's "lead programmer" led to an extremely high level of complexity with the ensuing discussions with Bambosh, and later, Gio himself.

Due to this complexity, and the fraught circumstances surrounding the UHC and Gio's controversial relationship with Homestuck, Bambosh declined the license offer, and removed his version of the UHC from his site. At this point, about eight months after the initial outreach to Bambosh, Homestuck made a similar offer to Gio, and both parties entered a mutually binding non-disclosure agreement (NDA) covering this negotiation, which is still in effect.

We cannot disclose specific terms or details of the negotiations that followed with Gio due to the mutual NDA. However, negotiations ultimately concluded without agreement in December 2024. Following this outcome, Gio was served a formal takedown notice. Prior to issuing this takedown, the Homestuck team created a fork of the UHC's open source codebase to ensure continued availability of the collection. At no point during this process was the UHC, which is an open source collection of works entirely owned by Andrew and Homestuck Inc., unavailable to the public. You can find it here: https://homestuck.github.io/

On August 8th, 2025, Gio released a blog post detailing his version of the licensing negotiations and the events leading up to his removal of a version of the collection hosted on his personal site, which contained many inaccuracies, and was in substantial violation of the mutual NDA between himself and Homestuck. Despite this, Homestuck's legal counsel has advised us that the NDA remains in effect and binding on our end, so no one from the Homestuck teams is at liberty to comment on any matters that may constitute a violation of this NDA; the only restitution available to us is to seek enforcement of the penalties prescribed by the NDA.

It is our opinion that, despite repeated accusations that Andrew and Homestuck Inc. are "litigious," Gio proceeded with this violation because he is confident we will not seek enforcement due to the negative reputational consequences and heavy personal toll on individual team members such an action would bring about. Despite his accusations to the contrary, we believe Gio is in fact aware that neither Andrew nor Homestuck as an entity has ever before initiated punitive legal action against any party for criticism, defamation, or copyright infringement damages.

In a public capacity, we are limited to providing background information to contextualize why the Homestuck team believes that Gio is a fundamentally malicious actor whose goal is and has always been to disrupt official Homestuck operations, appropriate the rights to Homestuck as a creative work, and to cause maximal personal pain and suffering to Andrew and the Homestuck team through a sustained pattern of stalking, intimidation, and deliberate incitement of stochastic harassment.

Was the UHC struck down, or "destroyed," through a DMCA?

No. In December 2024, Homestuck issued a DMCA takedown to Gio's personal copy of the UHC. However, the UHC is an open source application the authors freely invited others to copy, so Homestuck representatives forked it to an official Homestuck Github. https://homestuck.github.io/

The site run by Bambosh, the original creator, explicitly allowed this. As stated on Bambosh’s original site:

For nearly a year prior to Gio's 8/8/25 post, Andrew had been hosting and publicly promoting an official forked version of the UHC specifically to preserve it after worries arose that Gio would take down his copy of it in order to frame Homestuck for its deletion.

Left: how Andrew’s Linktree appeared from December 2024 to September 2025.

Right: the current version following the pilot’s release, though the UHC link still remains.

The Linktree also includes other archival projects, such as fan-made web and mobile mirrors of Homestuck. Andrew has generally been supportive of projects like these.

Why was Gio's version of the UHC issued a takedown?

The UHC contained a full unauthorized reproduction of Andrew's complete body of work. Andrew and the Homestuck Team nevertheless decided to approach negotiations with the team behind the UHC in good faith, hoping to land on a mutually beneficial arrangement that recognized the work that went into this fan project while remaining respectful of the original creator's rights. After a period of discussion, Bambosh declined to proceed, and removed his copy of the UHC voluntarily. Gio then put up his own personal copy and signed a separate mutual NDA to further discuss a license, but the involved parties were unable to reach a satisfactory agreement.

The details of those discussions still remain confidential. However, on August 8, 2025, Gio ultimately removed his version of the UHC in response to a DMCA takedown from Homestuck representatives. Homestuck issued a takedown for Gio's copy of the UHC because it is an unauthorized reproduction of creative work wholly owned by Andrew and Homestuck Inc., and in absence of a formal licensing agreement, Gio does not have the right to host or distribute this material.

Gio's UHC Article, NDA Violations, and False Statements

Also on August 8, 2025, Gio published a lengthy post containing numerous false and inflammatory claims, chief among them that the UHC was now gone and completely inaccessible. He stated:

The above image contains a comparison from the Wayback Machine showing the original text of Gio's post. Gio wrote: “[Hussie] would rather destroy the project than let it exist, and I am finally forced to let that happen.” This claim is false, and he was aware of this; the Homestuck team forked the UHC specifically to avoid this eventuality, as during negotiations Gio himself had suggested it as a tactic available to him. We can share the full text of this comment because he himself chose to publish this statement in his article, in violation of his mutual NDA.

He wrote: "like, if I were a provocatour, the quick win would be to let andrew C&D the collection, go 'oh! oh! andrew broke your toy!' and get a bunch of clicks on my web site or whatever it is that clout is"

After doing precisely this, and publicizing it to the best of his ability, Homestuck team members faced significant harassment from fans convinced that this represented Andrew's desire to eliminate the project entirely. Gio's misleading framing of the situation trended on Twitter, amplified extensively by Makin (owner of the Homestuck.net Twitter account pictured below).

In the five day period following the release of Gio's article, users on Makin's Unofficial Homestuck Discord server posted messages containing the words "kill" and "Hussie" 1054 times.

That is one death threat every six minutes for five days. This serves as both a demonstration of Makin's malicious moderation policies in the UHSD, as well as the manner in which Gio deliberately reverses victim and offender, inciting "stochastic abuse" against Andrew by presenting himself as the target of exactly the behavior in which he is engaging.

After the damage had already been done, Gio quietly edited this claim out of his article.

There are substantial differences between the original post and the article that is currently available. He removed these lines, along with several others, after receiving criticism for presenting false claims and manipulatively framing his account of the negotiations.

Other removed remarks include calling Andrew's representative a "wife-beater" guilty of "love bombing," and one instance where he named a header of his article "The Gio-ish Question," apparently comparing his plight (being unable to reach an agreeable settlement for a free license to host Andrew's complete body of work) to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

You can read Miles's response to Gio's article here.

Why did Andrew attempt to negotiate with Gio at all?

Andrew did not object to the concept of the UHC itself. They have been supportive of fan-run archives and preservation efforts, as reflected in their public promotion of similar projects. However, the situation with the UHC was more complex due to its specific history and circumstances.

When the UHC first launched, it appeared to have a single developer: its original creator, Bambosh. This is consistent with how the site appeared in early captures, such as those preserved by the Wayback Machine in 2021. This initial understanding shaped how Andrew approached the project at the time.

As a result, Andrew viewed the UHC as a cool, well-intentioned fan effort led by Bambosh. They shared it publicly, retweeted it, and added it to their Linktree.

About a year later, however, the project’s presentation had changed. A subsequent capture from the Wayback Machine shows that the UHC website now credited two co-equal contributors:

Around this time, Gio began publicly discussing his involvement with the UHC. This came after Andrew had already boosted the project under the impression that it was solely Bambosh’s work. With Gio now openly attached, the situation became more complicated. Andrew was extremely uncomfortable continuing to promote a project associated with Gio, given prior harassment he had incited towards the team, but there was little clear action they could take to disassociate from the project that would not provoke additional negative backlash against themselves and the rest of the Homestuck team.

It’s also important to note that Gio was already involved with the project at that time, but was not publicly credited. Bambosh confirmed that Gio became the main programmer of the UHC in November 2020.

But despite this description as the project's "main programmer" since 2020, he was not included in the credits of the site for well over a year after this point. This gap suggests there was intent to conceal his involvement, perhaps for the express purpose of placing Andrew -- who had historically been supportive of similar fan projects -- into an untenable position. Makin once suggested he believed that Andrew's past comments about not intending to copyright strike HSNet meant that he was permanently safe from any legal action in the future:

Maybe a similar line of thinking was in play here, enticing Andrew's support under false pretenses with inaccurate accreditation so that later that prior support could be used as a basis to oppose Andrew's efforts to reassert rights over their own work. This is only speculation.

However, unlike a fanwork such as fanfiction or a fan adventure, the UHC is not primarily transformative. The UHC is an unauthorized reproduction of the entire body of work of a single creator. Andrew offered their support of the UHC while not only under the impression that Bambosh was the sole author, but also during a period where the primary method to read Homestuck, the Homestuck.com website, had fallen into a state of disrepair due to the deprecation of Flash and lapses in maintenance by its previous maintainer (a situation the Homestuck team was not able to immediately remedy without negotiating return of control over the website). It was always apparent that, in the event that Homestuck.com was to be restored, continued distribution of the UHC would necessitate some sort of agreeable settlement with Andrew and Homestuck Inc., the rightsholders of the content in the collection.

Some time later, after regaining control of Homestuck and Homestuck.com from VIZ Media, Andrew began to explore their options for restoring full access to Homestuck and its website. One obvious avenue was to offer a license to the team behind the popular UHC project, who had already produced a working mirror of the comic so widely circulated among the fandom that it had become the de facto primary method to read Homestuck during this period.

Gio's involvement in the project posed a considerable complication, but Andrew and the Homestuck team ultimately concluded that at least approaching Bambosh first, who was the original author and the apparent executive of the project (given that it was hosted on his website), was an appropriate first step in offering the project an olive branch, and repairing the tense situation which had spent years brewing through Gio's concealed involvement.

As we have stated, we are bound by a non-disclosure agreement that restricts us from freely sharing details of these negotiations, and thus we cannot explain in specific terms how or why these discussions ultimately deteriorated. NDAs are a standard procedure meant to protect both parties of a negotiation or settlement. If one party breaches a NDA, specific penalties are prescribed by the agreement; the other party does not automatically gain the right to disregard their own obligations. To quote an earlier section of this article, "we are limited to providing background information to contextualize why the Homestuck team believes that Gio is a fundamentally malicious actor whose goal is and has always been to disrupt official Homestuck operations, appropriate the rights to Homestuck as a creative work, and to cause maximal personal pain and suffering to Andrew and the Homestuck team through a sustained pattern of stalking, intimidation, and deliberate incitement of stochastic harassment."

Gio's Motivations and Hostility/Entitlement to Homestuck

From a very early stage, Gio displayed a consistent attitude of hostility towards Andrew and Homestuck as a property. He appeared to take a position that VIZ Media's lapse in the maintenance of the website diminished Andrew's moral or even legal right to Homestuck as a creative work. There are numerous examples we can cite to support this interpretation, including early (now-deleted) posts in which Gio alluded to plans to replatform Homestuck in response to dissatisfaction with its official site:

Even taken in jest, this framing does not reflect respect for creative ownership or consent; it appears to anticipate or even welcome the disapproval of the rightsholders in an openly admitted act of spite. Many of his posts from this period have a strangely threatening tone.

In one instance, he even suggested that he hoped to impede further production of Homestuck books:

In late 2020, the Homestuck team made a curiouscat to answer fan questions. When asked who was answering the questions, the team answered that the account included numerous creators working on the various HS projects. The team had decided not to share specific credits of what team members participated in the account due to personal stalking and harassment. Gio and others belittle their concerns, mockingly demanding access to the account themselves:

This pattern of posting boastful statements expressing entitlement/ownership over Homestuck IP works predated even the UHC.

After Gio publicly revealed his involvement in the UHC, his entitled rhetoric intensified; he appeared to genuinely believe that his work on the UHC should position him as a significant stakeholder in the Homestuck property, and that his rights were being violated by Andrew's refusal to acknowledge him as such.

Here is another statement he made following 8/8/25, in response to the announcement that the official Homestuck website would be restored alongside a community event to re-release the comic.

Gio's public statements do not appear concerned with whether the fandom can access Homestuck. Instead, his concerns seem to center on his own personal control of the platform through which the work is accessed. He consistently demonstrates a belief that Andrew, the actual creator, is less deserving of control of their own work than he is.

Contrast this with Bambosh's original stated intentions on his website:

Bambosh wanted us to know his work on the UHC wasn't about "sticking it to the man" (which we may assume also includes the original author of the collected content), and that he didn't wish to cause financial harm by releasing exclusive book content from VIZ Media. However, the above cited screenshot of his site dates to 2021, and by Bambosh's admission, Gio was the "main programmer" as early as November 2020. If the project was already collaborative at that stage, this wording did not reflect the structure of authorship at the time. It's hard to square the line "I'm really not about harming these guys financially" with the co-author and main programmer of the UHC suggesting he would like to impede further publications of Homestuck books.

To be clear, we have no reason to believe that Bambosh himself engaged in any deceptive behavior in making the above statements. While this is purely our speculative opinion, based on Gio's pattern of behavior, we suspect that Gio was likely misrepresenting his motivations for contributing to the UHC. As Miles stated in his FRAF post about the UHC situation:

"bambosh, notably, seemed really excited to work with us initially until talks deteriorated"

[...]

"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."

[...]

"i want to emphasize here that i have no grievance whatsoever with bambosh, at all, and for whatever stress i contributed to their life during this saga i am sincerely, actually sorry. they were legit a pleasure to talk to and i was really, really looking forward to seeing what they’d be able to cook up with Homestuck’s backing and resources. i hope you're well, bambosh."

This pattern of expressing desire to disrupt official Homestuck activity indicated to us that Gio's involvement in the UHC was not limited to preservation.

The totality of his behavior toward Andrew and Homestuck, and the repeated pattern of deceptive blogging about Hiveswap in 2021, followed by his involvement with the UHC and refusal to cooperate with creator requests, began to resemble a five-year long, maximum-pressure campaign to dramatically diminish Andrew as the primary custodian of their own work, and slide himself into that position. For several years, he proudly displayed the boast "saved Homestuck" on his social media profiles.

Psycholonials Reproduction

Gio's desire to appropriate Andrew's work did not stop with Homestuck. Gio hosted this full reproduction of Andrew's visual novel Psycholonials on https://mspfa.com/:

While Psycholonials is currently available to play for free, at the time Gio created this mirror, it was not. Gio did not ask for permission to publicly distribute this full mirror of Andrew's paid work. Although Andrew allowed fans to do LPs ("let's plays") of Psycholonials, Gio admitted that his primary motivation in rehosting this work was not to provide commentary.

"I will admit my driving motivation was not to give commentary[...]"

It appears that Gio included commentary for the sole purpose of satisfying some minimal standard of "transformational" material. However, Gio did take the opportunity to use the commentary pages of this Psycholonials mirror to spread baseless rumors about Andrew's personal background and financial assets.

These claims are completely fabricated, based on nothing besides the existence of a pair of patents credited to Andrew and Andrew's father. Andrew addressed some of this misinformation in a recent article about their work on the HVC Color Composer.

Andrew had this to say about their financial background:

"If you aren't picking up the subtext here, I grew up dirt poor. We were moving constantly, getting utilities turned off, cars repossessed, in and out of my grandmother's home which is where my dad crashed permanently after he and my mom divorced when I was 10 or so."

[...]

"[T]here are two patents to my name, also related to this story, filed in 2004 and 2005. My dad, who had the same name as me, wanted these filed under my name in association with the business he started. I had no particular interest in either filing or holding these patents, but I did anyway to humor him, which is a pretty good way of describing my entire involvement with this business."

[...]

"I was pretty much done with this racket by the mid-2000s, and transitioned to something I liked better, which was making comics. Actually I was already making comics before this was over, the HVC Color Composer was released in 2004, which was also the year I posted my first webcomic. I think by that year the whole operation just seemed too tacky for me, and it was easy to make the leap to do something I actually enjoyed, even though there was no theoretical promise of "riches". I preferred to stay broke and just start making weird shit than continue chasing my dad's absurd dreams of color fame and fortune."

[...]

"It's worth noting for later purposes that neither of these patents ever made a dime, or were ever licensed or exploited in any way, except through my one Photoshop plug-in which didn't sell for shit. There's a rumor that because these patents exist, it must point to some great legacy fortune I came from, through the work of my father. If you've heard these rumors, perhaps now you can see how laughable this idea is.

"My dad was broke his whole life, and died broke, but for the final two or three years of his life which intersected with the period where Homestuck finally started making some actual money, I supported him for a while, paying his rent and pretty much everything else. Then he died."

[...]
"As I said, I grew up very poor, and stayed pretty broke until I was 30. This was 2010, a year and a half deep into making Homestuck, so the work I was doing was finally becoming legitimately profitable. But that doesn't mean I got rich. There are a lot of reasons for this, which creep too much into the territory of retelling Homestuck's history, but the most basic reasons for this were: constantly reinvesting revenue into building the company and making new projects, running heavy operations with lots of staff and big payrolls for long periods of time, wanting to avoid the depressing levels of profiteering slop that my dad's grifter buddy used to ruin his company, passing up on some key opportunities for commercial exploitation in the early years in favor of staying true to some sort of vision that felt like it valued creativity, and a bunch of other reasons. Remember that the only reason I got into comics in the first place was because I was tired of being involved with chasing riches through my dad's weird color racket. Making Homestuck was always supposed to be about a genuine expression of creativity, and making something that actually mattered to people.

"So the bottom line there is, I never got rich off Homestuck at all, and I definitely wasn't rich before I started it."

Andrew's "rich family" was not public knowledge, or even private knowledge: Gio knows nothing about Andrew's life, and neither does anyone else, because they are a private person by choice. This did not stop Gio from brazenly spreading his assumption as a fact for years:

But there is no need to simply speculate about Gio's motivations for this and other activities. There is evidence hardcoded into the UHC itself that suggests Gio fully understands how his actions appear, and that it is in fact his intention to personally torment Andrew and the Homestuck team.

The Lamppost

One of the more illuminating examples of Gio's consistent pattern of sustained antagonism involves an easter egg hardcoded into the UHC itself. It’s not a part of the asset pack, and it is not optional. It has been present in the application since before he was publicly credited.

To find this easter egg, you can either paste this line into the UHC url bar:

/page/c=%3F%3F%3F/m=assets%3A%2F%2Fp8%2Fwalkabout.html/

Or mouse over the CODE MACHINE from Problem Sleuth's unlock page and press ctrl+T, which is how you're intended to find it.

Through this easter egg you get to talk to Gio himself, as MSPA Reader (a character that appears in several Andrew works, meant to serve as a humorous stand-in for the reader) walks around the world and complains about Homestuck's post canon work and the epilogues. You’ll know that you’ve completed this section when you give Gio a Faygo and "The Lamppost" appears.

This is the last thing to do in this easter egg, which seems innocuous, and a bit weird. You would think that this special easter egg where you get to talk to one of the developers would maybe include a devlog, or commentary about the app or special content, but instead you walk around the level and read complaints about the work of the artist, and then it ends like this. However, this is only confusing if you haven't played a game released 10 years ago called "The Beginners Guide," a game Gio himself recommends on his blog:

What could this reference mean? If you've already played The Beginner's Guide (TBG), you might have a strong reaction to the gesture of seeing a lamppost hardcoded into every copy of the UHC. If you haven't played it, here's a quick plot synopsis:

In The Beginner's Guide, the player is guided through a series of unfinished games by a narrator who is a video game fan that imposes his own interpretation onto another game developer's work. Over time, it becomes clear that the fan's "helpful" framing is actually a lot darker, and that his actions of curating, modifying, and distributing someone else's work without consent fundamentally reshapes the original intent of the developer he is obsessed with.

The fan's obsession crosses into parasocial stalking as he collects the developer's games without consent, edits them to fit his narrative, and ultimately releases them publicly against the developer's wishes. He interprets every strange, incomplete level as a window into the dev's supposed loneliness, depression, and creative burnout. In every game, the fan makes interjections to show how he has personally adjusted the dev's work to make it "playable." This devastates the developer, who explicitly asks the fan to stop contacting him and leave his creations alone. The experience drives the developer away from game-making entirely, overwhelmed by the fan's invasive "understanding."

In each of these redistributions of the developer's work, the fan inserts a lamppost (pictured above) as a signature. Critics often interpret this as a reflection of the fan's need to impose meaning and coherence onto another creator's work, driven by his own insecurity as a creator. Within this reading of The Beginner's Guide, the lamppost becomes a recurring symbol of that imposed interpretation, as the fan repeatedly forces the incongruous lamppost into spaces where it does not belong.

As the narrative progresses, players come to see the fan's edits and commentary on the developer's intentions less as harmless interpretations and more as an act of projection: the fan interprets the developer's work through his own emotional needs, rather than engaging with it on its own terms. The result is a growing tension between authorship, authorial intent, and interpretation.

The game ultimately reveals that the fan's assumptions about the developer's emotional state are unreliable, and that his continued intrusion into the dev's creative space has had serious personal consequences, as the once private and passionate developer is left violated and exhausted after having his art turned into a spectacle by a stalker.

Later in the game, you come across a space with text all over the walls, left as a hidden message from the dev to the fan. Some of the blurbs are questions, while some are pleas for peace and distance. The fan grapples with the fact that his behavior is the reason the developer has stopped making games.

The lines above read:

Dev: "Dear Davey, Thank you for your interest in my games. I need to ask you not to speak to me anymore."

Fan: "I'm the reason that you stopped making games, aren't I?"

Dev: "I wonder at times whether you think I am making these games for you."

Fan: "I don't think I ever told you this, but when I took your work and I was showing it to people, it actually felt... It felt as though I were responsible for something important and valuable."

Dev: "You've so infected my personal space that it's possible I did begin to plant 'solutions' in my work somewhere, hidden between games."

Dev: "If there was an answer, a meaning, would it make you any happier?"

Darker corners contain messages expressing the dev's anger, and what he thinks of the fan.

Some messages also include:

"Would you stop taking my games and showing them to people against my wishes?"

"Giving them something that is not yours to give? Violating the one boundary that keeps me safe?"

"Would you stop changing my games? Stop adding lampposts to them?"

When you reach the end of the dev’s messages to the fan, the fan has a breakdown. His response begins with, "That's why I'm releasing this collection of your work."

Andrew had this to say about The Beginner's Guide:

"I resonate with the developer's struggle in that game. My own experiences with certain fans have been eerily similar. I've entertained the same kind of thoughts about quitting creating anything due to these types of personal boundary violations. I've shared thoughts about this with others before, that the lack of interest in writing anything new had little to do with creative burnout, and more in response to exhaustion from these exact types of sustained stalking efforts."

Gio's inclusion of this lamppost easter egg and apparent self-identification with the invasive stalking fan in The Beginner's Guide certainly calls into question his claims that his actions are solely for the sake of "journalism," or that he has any legitimate investment in the preservation of Homestuck or Andrew's other creative works; it instead suggests that not only does Gio fully understand how his actions appear, the emotionally devastating impact his actions have had upon his targets is in fact the intentional result.

This easter egg further contextualizes his associations with individuals engaged in much more blatant acts of stalking and direct harassment of Andrew and the Homestuck team.

Gio's Connections to Stalkers

Gio has maintained a veneer of credibility through insistence that his work constitutes "investigative journalism," and claims that he is motivated primarily by a desire for truth and transparency. However, many of his claims can be traced to completely unsubstantiated rumors, either fabricated by himself or sourced from stalkers -- such as when he chose to "jokingly" reference the theory that Andrew and Chuck Tingle are the same person, a claim originated by Kiwifarms:

On multiple occasions Gio has made continuous direct contact with individuals openly engaging in direct targeted abuse of Andrew and the Homestuck team.

One of the most prominent stalkers that Gio chose to follow is Davekat-Sucks (DKS), an outspokenly racist transphobe who spent a period of over seven years making many thousands of posts doxing, harassing, and threatening virtually every individual involved in the Homestuck creative teams. Andrew was granted an emergency restraining order against DKS by a court of law due to the extreme atmosphere of intimidation and fear this individual's activities had created for the entire Homestuck team. (For more information about this individual's activities, please reference the earlier section of this report above.)

There is no conceivable reason for anyone to follow DKS except to stay informed about the personal information she was constantly revealing through her invasive posts.

Around the period of the UHC negotiations, team members discovered that Gio was following DKS on Twitter and even her more obscure account on Bluesky:

Here is one example of a Homestuck team member making note of this at the time. Note that this is a passing remark made privately, unrelated to the UHC negotiations, and is not confidential.

When it became public knowledge that Andrew had been granted a temporary restraining order against DKS, Gio publicly defended her after some weak disclaimers, characterizing Andrew's attempts to protect themselves, their team, and friends from a racist, transphobic stalker as vindictive retaliation solely for "spreading gossip that embarrassed Andrew."

From Gio's blog, about DKS:

No representative of the Homestuck team has ever made contact with ICE for any reason; DKS was served a restraining order for stalking in accordance with established practices in the jurisdiction in which she resides. For more details about this situation, please reference the earlier section of this report regarding DKS.

It is also worth noting that DKS deactivated all of her known accounts following the restraining order, so it is unclear how Gio could have possibly reached DKS to verify her whereabouts unless he was in private contact with her. This does not in any way suggest Gio disapproved of DKS's conduct as strongly as he claims above. Instead, it seems he was eagerly consuming her disturbing, bigoted, and personally invasive content, because he was following her accounts, and was even among a tiny handful of her followers on Bluesky.

Other individuals who wished to antagonize team members frequently exploited Gio's articles to justify attacks against Homestuck creators using the personal information distributed on DKS's blog. Below is a post where someone doxxes a staff member, while calling upon Andrew to address Gio's UHC allegations. To the right, that exact same dox report is shown originally on DKS's blog.

An hour later, Gio leapt on the incident in a series of subtweets, placing the blame not on the individuals responsible for posting and sharing this team member's personal information, but on Andrew for including "vulnerable or marginalized" people on their creative teams.

It's curious for Gio to pretend to care about marginalized creators on the team, given his persistent associations with stalker and troll accounts notorious for targeting team members for their identity characteristics, such as DKS. Another of these antagonistic users he was known to follow was "f anon," an account mostly dedicated to the harassment of marginalized Homestuck fans and team members. This account's criticism was often racist or transphobic, and openly mocked creators' anxieties in response to active harassment.

It's especially strange given the stance he took in his Psycholonials commentary, citing a Homestuck team member's tweets in support of the 2020 protests against police brutality (though Gio appears to attribute these posts to Andrew personally, the Homestuck accounts pictured below were run at this time by a person of color on the team) as apparent proof that Psycholonials was in fact written to endorse the kind of murderous violence its central character engaged in.

The teams behind the Homestuck projects are overwhelmingly made up of marginalized people. Team members in prominent positions tend to be marginalized precisely because the vast majority of us are queer and neurodivergent, and many of us are women, trans, disabled, and/or people of color. Gio's position seems to imply that the right way for Andrew to run Homestuck would be to exclude marginalized creators from positions of prominence. He doesn't appear to consider that it might in fact be the people shooting the "bullets" that are the problem, nor that many of the bullets in question have been supplied by him personally. He doesn't call the OP out as wrong for trying to dox a team member, or even disavow the stalking DKS instigated -- his remarks downplay and whitewash her behavior, attempting to characterize DKS's persistent stalking as merely "spreading gossip."

Instead, he capitalizes on this outrage to place the blame for this team member's harassment at Andrew's feet.

Another prominent troll user Gio chose to associate with is an individual who went by the name Phoebe. Phoebe had also developed a reputation for spreading false rumors and personal information about team members. Gio was not just a passive follower of this account, but frequently engaged with her in public. She and her followers delighted in sharing private information about team members, as well as mocking Andrew and their friends and family members.

A user suggests that Phoebe and Gio “should consider working together,” and she replies “that would cause a lot of trouble for everyone. i’m in.”

Phoebe frequently engaged in leaking private images and information, spreading rumors/lies, targeting Andrew's family members, and posting images of Andrew that were taken from private family Facebook images:

In addition to casually sharing photographs and private information about Andrew's family, she also orchestrated a more complex campaign aimed at provoking a public feud between Makin, the administrator of the UHSD, and a member of Homestuck's team at the time. Phoebe initially presented herself as a friend to several team members and other prominent community figures, embedding herself in each community to gather information in order to pit both sides (Homestuck teams vs. Makin and his community faction) against each other. She took a more direct approach with Makin, repeatedly approaching him with accusations that his server was unsafe for minors and harbored predatory behavior.

Below is an example of Phoebe repeatedly messaging Makin in a one-sided DM exchange, which she later screenshotted and shared publicly on a Twitter account she used jointly with others.

As usual, Gio can be found in the midst of Phoebe and Makin's feud, gathering scandalous information:

By 2020, Phoebe had gone fully "mask off," openly bragging about the chaos she had successfully created. Gio continued to openly follow and interact with Phoebe and her drama account. Drew Linky's own summary of the conflict acknowledges that Phoebe instigated the 2020 conflict with the UHSD intentionally by sharing disinformation with both parties:

Below, Phoebe claiming that the team member and Makin should "take each other out." The damage and chaos she was creating was critical in her view to build her profile and promote her work.

“The rift between the homestuck crew and HSD widens”
“Both their collective groups are at each other's throats even more than before now”

Gio seems eager to praise Phoebe for these behaviors in 2021, well after all of this had become public knowledge.

While Makin and Gio had shared interests, Gio in fact frequently aligned himself in opposition to Makin, mocking and criticizing him in public.

Despite this apparent interpersonal friction, Gio and Makin often became allies of convenience. They shared a long history of animosity towards the Homestuck team, and a track record for blatantly lying to support their own narratives; even when one was frustrated with the other's attitude, they recognized that they presented each other ample opportunity to launder their own bad reputations.

Gio partnered with Makin to host and distribute the HS^2 Patreon content after official accounts did not respond to his direct messages. He characterized that lack of response as confirmation that the project had been "abandoned," and that archiving its paywalled content was therefore acceptable.

In December of 2024, when Gio temporarily removed the UHC from publication, Makin initiated contact with Gio to alert him to the fact that the UHC was down.

Makin then asked the Homestuck team about why Gio’s version was down amidst licensing discussions, and was given a brief statement from a member. “[Hussie] doesn’t really want to overload the initial announcement [...] which fundamentally is just about letting folks know where the UHC can be found right now so those who are looking for it still have access”

Makin then reached out to Gio, and this was the result:

Gio cried foul about the announcement that there was a rehosted version still available for fans to use, and Makin decided not to post anything about it. Given that UHC negotiations with Gio were still confidential, Homestuck didn't directly publicize the new location of the UHC, and continued to wait for the legal discussion to run its course.

However, Makin did not, in fact, "stay out of this whole UHC thing until Andrew and Gio were publicly happy with things." He entered the fray when Gio made an incendiary post on 8/8/25 that Makin could then exploit. Despite his irritated posture in the above exchange, he immediately leapt to amplify Gio's deceptive posts once again, and contributed other false stories to Gio's misleading narrative about Andrew and their team. Here is Makin's pinned post about the UHC the day Gio posted his blog, calling the negotiations "psychological abuse from hussie and worse":

Two days after Gio's article, Makin made a post announcing the cancellation of his fan game. Neither Andrew nor any Homestuck representative had ever contacted him regarding this fan game, and it was never under any threat of action. But Makin suggested so anyway solely to instigate more outrage.

Another lie Makin told soon after Gio's post.

This was in reference to the fan project "Friendsim 2" pulling out of FRAF soon after Gio's post. Friendsim 2 was run by a producer on Hiveswap who was also one of the directors of SAHCon, a fan-run online Homestuck convention which ran its last event in 2025.

Contrary to Makin's suggestions that it was due to predatory licensing terms, the director of Friendsim 2 explained her actual reasons for withdrawing:

"This is something I'm choosing to do completely on my own, not prompted by anyone working with FRAF, for a couple reasons:

I wasn't planning on monetizing or merchandising Friendsim 2 in any way, and didn't really benefit from ongoing promotion in FRAF since Friendsim 2 has been done for some time. I have been additionally assured that leaving FRAF won't result in any legal issues with our work.
I have concerns that the omnibus license FRAF uses might come into conflict with the licenses I have with my own artists, of whom there are many. While the Homestuck/Hiveswap designs are Andrew Hussie's IP to do with as they wish, all of the original work done for this game is the IP of a number of different creatives, myself included, collectively licensed under the CC 4.0 non-commercial attribution license on release. I'm unclear on exactly what the implications would be of effectively sub-licensing their work under a new agreement if I ever tried to leverage that license for any reason. Since this is an inactive, completed project and I don't have the resources, time, or inclination to explore the legal complexities here, I would prefer to withdraw our association with the FRAF website and associated license.

My primary concern has always been with the fair treatment of the many talented, creative individuals that worked on this project. While FRAF seemed like an interesting idea that would help promote their work, after some thought on this my concerns about potential conflicts of licensing outweigh the benefits of involvement with FRAF.

Nothing is planned to change with the availability of this game - we're still on Steam and Itch, and we're still as non-canon as always!

I wish all other projects still included in the FRAF the best of luck."

Even without formal affiliation, Gio and Makin have mutually benefited from each other's activities. Gio's articles provide Makin pretext to stoke hatred and harassment against Andrew and the Homestuck team, and Makin provides Gio's articles with extensive exposure.

Gio denies engaging in stalking behavior and attempts to rhetorically distance himself from individuals who employ such methods. However, his record shows repeated interaction and coordination with individuals known for that conduct, suggesting a pattern of tacit support for these activities.

The Homestuck team has long been aware of Gio’s interactions with individuals such as DKS, Phoebe, Makin, and others associated with similar conduct. They view these associations as an extension of his broader pattern of malicious behavior towards our team members. This context informed their assessment of his reporting on Hiveswap and its Kickstarter campaign, as well as his actions during the discussions about UHC licensing.

While, in retrospect, initiating such discussions may have carried inherent risks, the outreach nonetheless provided Gio with an opportunity to reestablish a more constructive relationship with the Homestuck team. He chose instead to violate his mutual NDA, and weaponize the private communications to instigate further harassment towards team members.

Gio's Accusations of Harassment Against the Homestuck Team

Gio's inflammatory blog posts about Hiveswap contributed to a surge in harassment, including doxxing, threats, and targeted abuse against members of the Homestuck team. Gio later on updated his Twitter bio to include the phrase “killed Homestuck”:

Gio’s poorly sourced reporting was later amplified by a widely circulated video by Sarah Z, a YouTuber who did not reach out to anyone on the official team for comment. Gio and others replied to mock a team member dismayed by this lack of contact, suggesting that because Homestuck did not provide an official response to his blog, it was reasonable for the YouTuber to conclude there was no point in seeking official comment.

After publicly antagonizing her on twitter, Gio then pays for access to this team member's small personal server to search for screenshots to use against her:

Within minutes, Gio leaks the team member's panicked messages, using this as proof of why no one should have reached out to the team for comment. Makin then boosts this controversy throughout the social media platforms he controls.

The team member made an impulsive and poorly phrased response in a small private space amidst a tidal wave of vicious, relentless harassment, something she has since acknowledged and apologized for. Given the intensity of the moment, the comment reflected panic and frustration, but it was also easily taken out of context -- particularly by someone already provoking strong reactions. Importantly, the same screenshot shows that she viewed Gio as a stalker, a concern that was dismissed by his allies at the time as an attempt to avoid accountability.

A team member had an emotional outburst in what she thought was a safe private space in response to intense harassment. But despite Gio and his faction extensively exploiting this incident, Gio himself acknowledged that no harassment actually resulted from the team member linking his post in her small personal server.

This is a recurring type of statement from Gio. He makes claims of receiving "stochastic abuse" from Homestuck, then later makes statements such as this, either denying the abuse happened, or greatly undercutting the severity of the abuse.

The actual harassment against Homestuck team members, however, redoubled.

The resulting narrative from Gio's blog spread quickly, and intensified following the release of the YouTube videos that used his reporting as their primary source. But some of Gio's commentary at that period suggested a rather lackadaisical approach to fact checking: just start saying stuff, and find out what's true later.

It appears not even Gio believed some of the rumors he was printing were likely to be true. It looks like he was viewing much of his reporting as a certain kind of "trial balloon." Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't. If it was, great, he gets to claim journalistic merit and use that correct guess to claim that the rest of his unfounded assumptions are true. If it wasn't, that's also great, because he gets to watch his targets suffer as people accept his claims at face value anyway.

Gio frequently spread rumors backed up only by his own conjecture. Gio claims that a team member departed due to "stress and abuse from WP directed at him." Below is a screenshot of these comments, as well as a redacted email between Andrew and said team member contradicting this claim:

Our records indicate no abuse. Instead, they point to a single instance in which Andrew checked in on the well-being of a team member, who explained that there had been a minor interpersonal conflict with other team members that had already been resolved amicably.

Repeated false claims of this kind have significantly distorted public perception of Andrew, Homestuck, and the creatives involved. They have caused significant personal harm to individual team members, as we detailed in an earlier section of this article. To reiterate:

"By 2020, harassment and stalking became so ubiquitous that normal operations became difficult to maintain; all projects experienced major disruptions. Homestuck^2 was cancelled in February 2021 due to harassment of the team, and conditions worsened further following subsequent events of that year. Much of the team members across projects have departed, either in response to harassment or fear of one day becoming a target of it. Production on all Homestuck projects completely ceased in late 2021 for a period of about two years after a staff member attempted suicide in response to this abuse.

"The teams frequently held discussions about whether to issue responses to various controversies, but the likelihood that a public statement would trigger additional harassment against vulnerable individuals made it difficult to determine when the benefits of responding justified the potential costs. Past attempts by the team to correct misinformation were usually dismissed out of hand and taken as a pretext for new waves of controversy and attacks, so team members came to feel that there didn't seem to be much benefit to attempting to clarify anything. Engaging at all required significant time and energy from a small team that was already overwhelmed. Over time, this cycle -- sensational claims followed by silence from a team too demoralized to respond -- resulted in profound lasting damage to Homestuck and its creators."

Given all of this, it becomes difficult to extend the benefit of the doubt that things like Gio adding "killed Homestuck" to his bio in 2022 were just jokes.

These factors are what made the team feel it was so important for Gio to demonstrate that he was willing to treat the official teams with respect before building a productive partnership with the UHC. As a general rule, it is not unreasonable for any team to expect that a potential licensed collaborator be willing to correct false, defamatory statements that had led to damage of this magnitude before entering into such a partnership.

The language Gio, Makin, and their associates use to describe their own actions reveals their intent. They repeatedly promote claims such as "Homestuck is dead" and "killed Homestuck" in their profiles, spread fear that the fandom faces attacks from its own creators, and assert -- in a self-fulfilling prophecy -- that the space is unsafe for creative work. Through these tactics, they aim to instill a sense of helplessness and despair in the broader fan community, mirroring the impact they have had on the Homestuck team itself. This approach functions as a final assertion of control: they declare the work finished, and discourage others from continuing it by fostering a toxic environment. When they anticipate even minimal accountability, they quickly redirect attention toward fans and amplify fears that anyone could become the next target. This obscures the reality that they built this culture of negativity and fear with their own hands.

Reversal

Gio has continued to protect himself from criticism by reversing these claims of harassment against Andrew and the Homestuck team, endlessly accusing Andrew of being "litigious."

But the Homestuck team has expressly avoided publicly addressing Gio, aside from a single direct response by Miles following the publication of Gio's 8/8/25 article. The team has made all effort to avoid directing retaliation towards Gio or any other critic, especially in wake of the aforementioned incident involving our team member. But Gio seizes on any opportunity to characterize what limited blowback he has received as harassment incited by us.

As more members of his public audience have begun to independently identify problems with Gio's reporting, and the critical tide has begun to turn against his invasive tactics, Gio has retreated into a position of hyperbolic self-victimization.

While the Tweet he is responding to above is certainly rude, and no doubt unenjoyable for him to read, this is a minuscule fraction of the kind of abuse members of the Homestuck team have faced as a direct result of Gio's six year long campaign of maliciously false reporting and relentless incitement.

Gio has openly admitted his entire style of online engagement revolves around this exact type of toxic, excessive critique to which he now objects.

Accusations of "Litigious Action"

Some discussions have incorrectly treated routine copyright enforcement actions, such as issuing Cease and Desist ("C&D") notices or even informal emails requesting compliance, as equivalent to filing a lawsuit. This conflation creates confusion about what a C&D actually does and what it does not do.

A C&D is not a legal action seeking damages or a court ruling; it is a preliminary step that asks a party to stop specific conduct and resolve the issue without litigation. Clarifying this distinction helps set accurate expectations about the seriousness, purpose, and legal implications of each. A C&D claim serves as a formal demand that a party stop specific conduct without immediately initiating litigation. Unlike filing a lawsuit, which asks a court to determine liability and potentially award damages or other remedies, a C&D letter typically aims to resolve the issue quickly by requesting compliance. While it may outline potential legal consequences if the conduct continues, it does not itself seek damages or create a court proceeding; instead, it functions as an opportunity to address the dispute before either side escalates to formal legal action. Even this is a typically unnecessary step; we have historically issued very few C&D actions, since most routine concerns can be resolved through a polite exchange of emails.

Despite perpetual claims by Makin, Gio and others that Andrew is "litigious," neither Homestuck Inc., What Pumpkin, nor Andrew as a private individual have ever before sued an organization or individual for criticism, defamation, or damages related to copyright violations.

To be clear, Andrew retains the right to protect their creative works and control who is able to profit from Homestuck and its associated marks and elements. If Andrew were to pursue a policy limiting fans' ability to freely derive financial profit from Homestuck fan works, this would be both legally and morally within their right. However, especially in recent years, Andrew has taken a generous position towards allowing fans to monetize their work, actively offering free licenses to fan groups so that they may do so without needing to operate in any legal "gray area" (a term often used to describe the UHC by its authors). Nevertheless, there is a pervasive narrative that Andrew or Homestuck as an entity has taken exceptional action to stifle fan works. This is not true.

To follow is, according to our records and the best memory of the team currently involved in Homestuck management, an accounting of several alleged or true copyright actions taken by Homestuck, Inc. against specific fan works commonly cited (claims often disseminated by Gio via manipulative framing) as proof that Homestuck is excessively punitive towards fan works.

Pesterchum Client (2013)

In 2013, a fan project to create a Pesterchum Client attempted to crowdfund via Kickstarter. What Pumpkin representatives did not issue a takedown or legal threat to this project, but contacted the developer to request that the project not use Homestuck trademarks to seek funding in this manner. The developer amicably complied:

The dev posted this the same day it was cancelled on their Tumblr:

No action was ever taken to shut down development of this fan project.

Homestrife (2014)

In his 8/8/25 article, Gio originally made the claim that the fan project Homestrife was subject to legal action by Homestuck. However, the article Gio himself linked says that they did not receive a C&D.

This is another instance of Gio posting a false claim that he then quietly edits from his article. There is no Wayback archive of the original version of the article with this claim, but there is the original markdown file hosted on the website:

Here is what the original linked website says:

"Due to various reasons(one of which was not being shutdown/C&D’d)"

Again, What Pumpkin representatives did not issue a takedown to this project. They contacted the developer to ask them not to pursue funding on crowdfunding platforms for projects using Homestuck trademarks.

The developer placed Homestrife on hiatus, saying "please do not harass What Pumpkin about this" and "thanks to What Pumpkin for being so supportive of fanworks. (your decision was understandable and there are no hard feelings)". The comment reiterates that there was no mention of legal threats, only a policy of requesting fan projects not crowdfund in the year following the Hiveswap Kickstarter.

Read MSPA (2013)

Gio links to a broken article while making his claim that Homestuck initiated punitive action against this fan project.

This link has been dead since 2022, but Gio included this version anyways. Here is an excerpt from the actual backed up site:

There was no legal threat. The offline version of this collection was only ever accessible by directly contacting the developer. They even noted that their packaging and distribution of the work was in fact probably illegal, but that "so long as the offline archive does good rather than harm" there was a tacit policy of tolerance.

The MSPA forums are now offline, but the above article includes a quote from a Homestuck representative that would presumably have been made around 2013:
"We can turn a blind eye to very minor distribution of such an archive, since in cases like this it's really more like advertising, but any sort of publicly available downloadable archive would definitely fall outside of fair use laws"

The inclusion of the "Read MSPA" project by Gio in his list is extremely confusing, and uses a poorly sourced link that leads to nothing, and when reading the actual post, reveals that we told this fan that the way they were currently distributing their project was OK.

Scalemate Sewing Tutorial and Other Minor Incidents Circa 2011

Another frequently cited issue is a takedown issued to a scalemate sewing tutorial in 2011.

We asked Andrew about this issue. Andrew said that they did not in fact contact this artist directly, and had not asked anyone to take it down. What Pumpkin did not issue a C&D. To the best of their recollection, a staff member emailed the artist to request that it be removed while What Pumpkin was planning for the release of the official Scalemate plushies. The artist complied. When asked if there was any documentation of this incident, Andrew said they were not copied on any email chain about it. They had this to say:

"I had no interest in removing this item or similar works, but during this early stage of What Pumpkin's development, there were one or two staff members who either overreached with policy enforcement, or just misinterpreted my intentions. There were a few situations like this that ended up more heavy-handed than anything I'd wanted to happen."

Andrew was working around the clock on Homestuck in 2011, updating every single day, and usually wasn't copied on email chains about issues like this. In the absence of vigilant oversight on policy, some staff responsible for rights enforcement adopted practices that might have been standard operating procedure at other traditional media companies, rather than adhering to the more permissive and community-focused approach Andrew had wished to maintain. Some measures not in the spirit of their intended policy stuck, such as discouragement of Homestuck content in convention artist alleys. Andrew has attempted to be much more clear about their policies towards fan work in recent years.

The Overseer Project (2012-2013/2023?)

Another frequently cited issue is the Overseer Project. However, we have no record that What Pumpkin ever took action against this fan work. Instead, we believe that the developer was the target of a false C&D via email spoofing. Here is an archive of someone who posted about the Project update to Reddit, and the best indicator at the time that they believed the C&Ds were fake, but were acting with caution:

Here and here are links to the old Reddit threads.

There isn't much info on this project upon initial research, but following an investigation, a FRAF forums member had this to say:

“The only thing i have to add information-wise is that i looked a bit into The Overseer Project and i found more info as to what happened. (Realized i can just look at T.O.P. Unofficial Discord to see if anyone talked about it and i struck gold.)

The Overseer Project has been revived, though it's downtime before 2023 was because of no one hosting the servers for it (Explained in Tangent 1) and not the fake C&D. I did look into the C&D a bit on the discord (Can't believe this never came to mind before now.) and there's an explanation from Thell (Y'know the person who wrote the tumblr post which we can't access anymore, Who as you can see also deleted their discord account at some point? It's definitely them since they were thanked for writing this response on discord. Again, explained in more detail in Tangent 1). Screenshots below:

We couldn't find any screenshot of the email in question, but we have no record of initiating action, and no current team member who was present at the company at that time has any recollection of action being taken against this project. Contemporaneous comments from former team members support the conclusion that this was a fake C&D.

Here's an email exchange between a What Pumpkin team member and a fan seeking permission for fan apps, which included reference to the Overseer Project. Our team member granted an official authorization letter to their project.

This was standard procedure at this time period, so we currently have no reason to believe any other former team member initiated action against this project.

Other Fake C&D Claims

Overseer was not the only time someone received a fake C&D claim intended to spread false narratives that WP legally prosecutes fan projects. See this email from 2021, NOT sent by an official WP email address. It's just a gmail account.

Cases like this, even though obviously fake, still get lumped into the collection of rumors that paint a picture of Homestuck as excessively punitive towards fan works.

Vast Error/Redbubble

Vast Error is an officially licensed FRAF partner with full permission from Homestuck Inc. to monetize. Even before licensing, Homestuck did not deliberately interfere with this fan work's monetization. The Deconrecon Patreon indicates that they were selling merch with Homestuck elements as far back as 2021. Their FAQs even state that they had been profiting regardless of copyright concerns:

We are aware of some issues with Redbubble in 2021 that impacted Vast Error and other fan artists. When VIZ Media ended its partnership with Redbubble, Redbubble initiated an action to terminate all items tagged with "Homestuck," including both official and fan works. Homestuck itself did not request this.

This was another issue that could not be resolved until Andrew negotiated a return of rights from VIZ Media. Once Andrew had regained full control of merchandising rights in 2023, Andrew began an initiative to distribute free licenses to other fan creators to eliminate some of the "gray area" that had led to this and other incidents.

In his 8/8/25 blog, Gio included a baseless speculation that the co-creator of Vast Error, Austinado, may have stepped back from the project due to threats or unfavorable licensing terms. Austinado made a statement denying this:

Gio has been baselessly stoking speculation that VE would be subject to legal action since 2020.

Deceptive Framing of Legal Actions

Part of the circulation of false claims about C&D actions stems from a pattern in which certain parties escalate harassment and engage in unlawful behavior, then attempt to frame any resulting consequences as an unjust campaign against fandom itself rather than as reasonable measures taken to mitigate harm toward individuals and collaborators. These narratives often rely on the misuse or selective framing of NDAs, as well as on breaches of trust by individuals who have no established collaborative relationship with the parties involved. This dynamic exploits the reality that formal agreements necessarily hold official teams to higher standards of confidentiality and accountability.

C&D notices serve multiple legitimate purposes, ranging from initial warnings to formal attempts to establish communication when prior efforts have failed. We have documented several instances in which false claims about C&Ds have been used to obscure the existence of other disputes or to misrepresent private matters involving fan works. NDAs function in a similarly standard capacity across creative industries. They establish expectations that participants will not disclose sensitive information, including financial, legal, or narrative details, as well as unreleased content or spoilers. These agreements enable collaboration between parties who may not yet have established interpersonal trust by providing a formal structure of mutual obligation.

Within the Homestuck fandom, however, certain factions portray NDAs and other legal agreements not as standard professional tools but as mechanisms inherently designed to harm fans. This framing contributes to a broader effort to obscure legal understanding within creative communities and to foster anxiety around creation, financial success, and artistic sustainability.

As we've stated, previous licensing complications involving platforms such as Redbubble reflected the terms of VIZ Media's partnership with that service, which contributed to the importance of Andrew reclaiming full merchandising rights for Homestuck. The FRAF initiative was created in part to counteract these concerns by allowing creators to monetize fan works with greater confidence. Outside of FRAF, creators have also continued to produce and, in many cases, profit from fan work.

Historically, Homestuck has maintained an unusually permissive stance toward fan creation and monetization compared to most properties with formal publishing arrangements, due in part to deliberate licensing decisions intended to support a sustainable fan ecosystem. We have always considered people that love Homestuck, and have made work out of that love, to be a vital part of the Homestuck fandom.

A recurring rhetorical pattern mirrors a catch-22 in how legal action and public statements are interpreted. Makin, Gio, and other critics argue that if no legal action occurs, the Homestuck team lacks credibility or authority, while if legal action does occur, they characterize it as excessive or punitive. Similarly, when individuals respond to or dispute claims made by Makin or Gio, critics often dismiss those responses as paid or influenced by Andrew -- but simultaneously interpret silence as implicit agreement.

This framing is evident in Gio's "interview" with Cami, the head of FRAF, in which he repeatedly attempts to twist her words against her clear intentions. When she ultimately rejects his framing, critics like Makin characterize her as financially controlled by Andrew (later editing the phrasing to a metaphorical payroll), thereby undermining her credibility.

Under this narrative structure, individuals who express support for Homestuck projects or who are perceived as having an interest in their continuation are frequently dismissed as compromised. This approach positions critics like Makin and Gio as the sole arbiters of credibility in disputes over truth.

Conclusion

In light of this history, we have chosen to speak now not to prolong conflict, but to establish a clear and documented explanation for our position and conduct after years of distortion, harassment, and sustained disruption to both our work and the lives of the people behind it. Repeated efforts to de-escalate or address matters privately allowed misinformation to proliferate and created conditions in which hostility escalated with little accountability.

There remain certain matters we cannot address in detail. Although the scale and risk of ongoing rumors make silence impossible, we must remain respectful of our legal obligations, which include the non-disclosure agreements we have signed over the years. We must prioritize maintaining the trust that allows others to collaborate with us above releasing restricted information to rebut every allegation every time.

We have faced a steep learning curve in responding to sustained, targeted harassment, with varying degrees of success. We've made plenty of mistakes. We approach this work as artists, not as PR professionals trained to endure prolonged torment with flawless composure. What we ask for is the same grace, understanding, and basic compassion you would afford any other human being.

Despite all these challenges, we have retained focus on what is and has always been the goal: to keep working on Homestuck projects. Our efforts are meant to ensure that our team members do not need to fear that working on these projects will come at an immense personal toll.

We have, in recent months, observed significant growth and improvement within the Homestuck community. The new official server, FRAF, the forums, and recent community events have given us hope that we are not alone in wishing for a better, brighter fan space. We owe it as much to the fans as we owe it to ourselves to fight for it.

The pattern outlined throughout this document -- from the unchecked environment fostered within the Unofficial Homestuck Discord to the coordinated spread of misinformation and harassment by specific actors -- demonstrates that these issues did not arise in isolation, but as part of an ongoing ecosystem that incentivizes escalation and harm. By presenting this record, we aim to set a firm boundary moving forward: we will no longer absorb these impacts without response, and we will pursue appropriate measures, including legal action where necessary, to protect our team, our work, and the broader community, so that this cycle can finally come to a definitive close.

We call for an end to a wider culture of harassment and abuse. Repairing these conditions requires forward-looking change, not retaliation that turns those who have targeted others into targets themselves. To reiterate:

We must make it unequivocally clear that we neither desire nor condone harassment of any individual included in this report in any capacity.

Do not attempt to initiate unwanted contact with anyone included in this document for any reason.

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