#watcher.rtf

So, if you're keeping yourself abreast of the events happening in this fandom, you probably know that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to experience Homestuck it was meant to be experienced, is currently being struck down. This coincidentally more-or-less lines up, temporally, with the opening of Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory, a new hub for the fandom and a way for certain select fancreators to officially license their work, seemingly a semi-inheritance from Homestuck Independent Creative Union as a way for fans to take the reins of the beast.

This pressures me to ask the question:

What does it mean to give power to the fans?

I wouldn't say that creators and fans are necessarily in inevitable opposition. Fans only exist because of creators making something for them to obsess over, and their adoration for the creator's work pushes them to create fanwork - fanart, fanfiction, fanmusic, cosplays, all for the cultural enrichment of everyone involved. But there are certain legal hurdles to be demarcated: everyone knows that Nintendo sends ninjas after clamps down on everyone who uses its IP in a way they dislike, and Anne Rice has been an outspoken critic of fanfiction of her work: therefore, some modes of fancreation exist in opposition to the original creator's wishes.

It is impossible to please everyone, and one shouldn't have to cater to their audience.

But the difference is that while the fans which dislike the original can just move elsewhere, the original creator has a legal cudgel of IP to prevent or otherwise impede the creation of things they dislike. Legally speaking, fanfiction is illegal: fair use, as a concept, is a defence mode that argues that your violation of IP wasn't bad or damaging enough to be worth persecution. (This is why OTW bans financial activity on Ao3 - your work being non-profit helps their lawyers to assure the court that you're not competing with the original creator and therefore the IP violation shouldn't financially impede the IP owner.) But some people do want to make money off their fanwork. I don't think it's bad by itself, unless a fandom regresses to a money pump, not like I know of such cases.

Homestuck has a very rich fanculture - lyricstucks and character panels, sprawling fanfics and countless swaths of fanart, several splendid fanalbums of music, tons of fanadventures. A lot of people who worked on Homestuck (as artists who drew stills or musicians who made music), or even made fanwork, in some way are now renowned creatives. Undertale is the work of someone who made music for Homestuck. Homestuck also has a history of letting fans make money off itself. Welovefine/Forfansbyfans have always allowed fancreators to submit their work to be sold as merch or part of it!

So what if we took things a step further? What if we allowed the fans to have control of the comic itself?

What if we allowed some fans to touch the steering wheel?

The obvious problem arises when you think for half a second about it. Would you, personally, allow a random /hsg/ anon to write anything but the Caliborn sections? Sure, if that anon is someone like xamag, but an average person isn't them.

If you want to give the power to the fans, you need to vet the fans who are given the power.

Next, what does it mean to give power to the fans? Do you just tell everyone "hey, you can do whatever" and slap a public domain or a permissive enough CC license on your work to let everyone to make their own work/continuation? You can do that, or you can invite some hand-picked fans to do the official continuation, because each project has an upper limit of people beyond which it's impossible to not spoil the soup.

Hence, this becomes the matter of handpicking some specific people to let them steer the ship instead of you. But do the fans control the situation, or do you let them do that until they start doing the things you dislike? What is the difference?

Hussie has never taken their hands off the steering wheel. Sure, the team is independent, but anything they do can be vetoed by Hussie because he owns the IP and can therefore decide whether they are allowed to do that or not. They're little more than employees.

Now, what could be done? I don't know. Perhaps releasing Homestuck into the commons would serve the goal of letting the fans actually control the situation, although there's an obvious danger of the Big Mouse or its equivalents taking the comic and stripping it of everything we love from it.

Now, I do need to point out that Gio spent quite a while doing things that upset Hussie (and some of his past employees) personally, and this can be construed as retaliation. But Bambosh quite literally did nothing to harm them! The continued existence of UHC benefited everyone, and the only rationales Hussie had for taking it down were petty revenge and a desire to control as much as possible, and IMO it's up to you to decide what's worse.

I do have to bring up that FRAF is, effectively, the next wave of HICU. I do not think that it's like, bad, that people are getting official endorsement, but if Hussie's favour ends up being more fickle than everyone would prefer, they could be more uniquely in danger than people otherwise unaccounted for.

So, when will the fans actually stand equal to the creator as the HICU/FRAF effective mission statement proclaims?