Also another couple reminders to all the emotionally invested spergs here:
1. All Vic wants out of Toye, Rial, and Marchi is a retraction and to stop defaming him. If he loses the TCPA on all counts except defamation, that's still a win. They don't have the deep pockets required to make him whole from the damage they've done to him. Hell, if he loses at TCPA outright and people stop believing the defendants on social media, that's still a win. Complain about moving goalposts all you want, but surprisingly middle-class folks are really hard to get judgements out of - you can't make them sell their house and you can't garnish their wages, so the most you'd get out of them is a piddling five-figure sum at best.
2. On the other hand, Funimation does have the deep pockets among all the defendants. Like, the ideal case for Vic is that Rial etc get treated as agents of Funimation, and Funimation winds up liable for their bullshittery. If that happens, dismissing the case against the individual defendants personally is a non-issue; Vic still gets a hearing in a court of law over the truth of the accusations against him, and can get a sizable payout therein.
I might be reading into things too much, but Chupp might be trying to strike a balance between preserving the first amendment rights of the individual defendants with the rights of the plaintiff to seek redress for defamation and TI. One compromise that fills that is dismissing a lot of stuff against the individuals being sued, but letting the case against that behavior go forward against Funimation.