Ah, since you've brought up Toby Fox, it's Internet lore time! Reference: https://drewlinky.com/Drew/SPAT/relatedmaterials/appendC.html#musicteam https://drewl

Ah, since you've brought up Toby Fox, it's Internet lore time! Reference: https://drewlinky.com/Drew/SPAT/relatedmaterials/appendC.html#musicteam https://drewlinky.com/Drew/SPAT/relatedmaterials/appendC.htm... Toby Fox was actually quite heavily involved in the production of Homestuck, he was in the Music Team from the early days. The Music Team was a ragtag group of people on the Internet who volunteered to make some background music for Homestuck Flash animations - basically the team members would upload whatever work they've done on a single netdrive and Hussie would pick and choose some files to use in his next Flash animation. Basically your work can potentially end up on Homestuck if it's good, but it's not guaranteed and totally at Hussie's whims. This disorganized way of creating art obviously has its problems - the first thing that happened was the whole Bill Bolin drama, which basically had one artist throw a tantrum when Hussie used some of his work that was unfinished and not intended to reveal to the public. Later on, Toby's music work became more and more respected by Hussie until he became head of the Music Team. (Toby's an incredibly talented and gifted composer - he didn't even knew how to use a DAW when he first came in the team, and half a decade later he's considered as one of the greatest video game composers!) But the problem was that Hussie was starting to give too much priority to Toby over the remaining Music Team members - Toby's work would frequently show up but others wouldn't. There was also barely any communication with the team at all, but in contrast to this Toby was really close to Hussie at this point. (One obscure fact: Toby created the first sections of Undertale inside Hussie's basement.) Anyways, this basically created a huge rift among the team. The other Music Team members thought that they were being ignored/neglected by Hussie, and this eventually resulted in some Internet callout drama that resulted in Hussie explicitly kicking out some of the team members. This drama is also conflated with the fact that the community was kinda split between people who came in before and after Act 5 has started: the old-school fans in the (now gone) MSPA forums vs. the new fans from Tumblr. These two had incredibly different views on how they saw Homestuck: the former mostly revolved around appreciating the intricate worldbuilding and its convoluted plot, and the latter mostly focused on its characters (Act 5 introduced the troll species, which resulted in a Cambrian explosion of shipping and all sorts of weird headcanons). The Music Team strongly associated with the old MSPA forums, but Toby was clearly much more active in the latter group, which might have resulted in a cultural detachment between him and the rest of the team. Toby was already a superstar inside the Tumblr portion of the Homestuck fandom - everyone knew his name, and his initial fanbase would help in kickstarting Toby's first game project (Undertale). You've said that Toby was really good at managing the release of his games and all that professional project management jazz, but you have to understand that Toby probably learned a lot from this incident. Toby wasn't always the quiet, reserved Internet creator that everyone seems to assume. (Try watching "The Baby is You" on Youtube and you'll know what I mean.) Though Toby really doesn't really seem to be at fault for this whole drama, in my opinion Hussie's more in the wrong here for not communicating clearly with his former contributors about their roles. If Hussie was intending to switch to a more closed-style development, he should have explicitly disbanded the team, instead of meandering until frustration and resentment builds enough to reach a critical point. What's interesting about this is: the whole 'in-group close to Hussie' vs 'out-group neglected by Hussie' dynamic now seems to repeat in a much grander scale if you see how the drama at What Pumpkin NYC turned out. Sarah Z. didn't disclose the full emails from Hussie so there are a lot of details that are missing, but the basic picture could be roughly drawn: there was a in-group close to Hussie and anybody not inside that group basically felt they were neglected and ignored. Eventually some of the latter try to start a coup inside the company and it ends in total disaster. A lot of the conflicts related to Homestuck's production seems to be fueled by a pattern of jealousy, resentment, and cultish behavior, and this gets further repeated in Homestuck^2. (Though that's for another day, this post is getting way out of hand.)