sorry in case this information catches you at a bad time, but michael guy bowman participated in a podcast talking about his time during homestuck. i havent had the chance to listen to it yet, but some reddit people discussed it and its essentially another source confirming andrew hussie has always been like this to everyone
https://old.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/1twq2zo/frap_live_with_michael_guy_bowman_bowman_bites/
Clickable link and the link to the podcast
Thank you so much for sending this to me! I'll be real — I saw this was for the Fruity Rumpus Asshole Podcast and I hadn't heard about it before (even though istg I looked up Homestuck podcasts to listen to back in like 2020??) so I was afraid this was that official FRAF forum thing or whatever. Which wouldn't make sense. But you know. lol
I'll be real I won't be able to watch/listen myself (also being very nicey nice about a podcast that only exists on youtube and seems to be very visual (< podcast snob /silly)). But I won't be able to do it because having to sit and watch/listen to stuff that is kind of stressful makes the whole thing on million more times stressful. I'm hoping there is a transcript out there, or I might see if I can download the file and upload it to a transcript service. Definitely appreciate the summary and timestamps in the reddit post, though!
I'm also just going to send it to my roommate (who is VERY into MGB) and get some more takes from her.
I guess some of my takeaways from the takeaways? lmao And the discussion in the post, if there's anything new. (Also I'm not going over absolutely everything, so still check out the link for those of you who haven't!
Albums prior to Vol. 6 had a 50/50 revenue split between the musicians and Hussie, but for the Vol. 6 album Hussie inexplicably offered a lump sum that was allegedly going to cover a hypothetical year of revenue. When the comic was rapidly growing in popularity. Bowman recognized that was a shit deal and asked the music team not to sign it. Toby Fox was basically the only person who didn't join the walkout on this shitty deal, apparently because he didn't think they should treat Homestuck music like it was a job. (He was also 19, which is my best defense for this behavior.)
This is SO Hussie and such a sign of things to come. Also yeah I agree that Toby being 19 (I forget he was so young then!) really explains his take on this.
Toby Fox's appointment as the music team manager absolutely dried up the rate at which Homestuck albums were being produced. Bowman seems to blame this on being unable to directly communicate with Hussie anymore due to Toby's status as a proxy (sounds... familiar...) and thus making usable communications substantially more difficult.
Listen I get Hussie taking a step back from interacting with the fandom. Parts of the fandom were fucking weird and terrible to them, as fandoms can be. But you absolutely need to be more accessible to the people you work with! Or who work for you! Hussie is not some CEO of a crazy big company, and even then, they would have secretaries or other people delegated to respond about important shit!
James Roach was apparently extremely hostile to the entire music team except for Hussie and Toby, which is apparently independently verified by one of the FRAP hosts? Bowman's only in-person conversation with Roach was about the upcoming Hiveswap Act 1 soundtrack, and allegedly Roach claimed he got the job because "nobody else applied" which is a fascinating claim to say to a guy who had explicitly talked to Hussie about wanting to be involved with Hussie's upcoming game project like four years ago.
Apparently the reason Roach gave for why they were struggling to make the vinyl is that they couldn't get in contact with all the musicians, name-dropping Malcolm Brown. Turns out Malcolm was not actually hard to get in touch with at all, given his Showtime is in the fucking Pilot, but that's not remotely the most pressing complication regarding these matters. Bowman has to find Hussie's email on some fucking merch to get in contact, and Roach gets passive-aggressive about how he was totally going to contact Hussie but Bowman just found a way first. Roach also tries to confront Bowman with a single screenshot that would later feature in The Email.
Okay I don't know what The Email is referring to sooo I might have to dig into that unless someone has a link or reminds me that I do absolutely know what this is referring to lol
But! Yeah I mean I try not to talk about him too much but James Roach has just like Been kind of an asshole. I haven't been his biggest fan since 2019, when I first really started engaging more with the fandom and WP started to as well (ah, Twitter). But after he became another proxy between Hussie and the fandom and the shit we saw in Gio's UHC takedown blog posts, and hearing that he just left HICU for uhhh I forget like his health or something? I am Drawing Some Conclusions and even if I still think he's Kind Of An Asshole, and absolutely did some shitty things, the Conclusions disincline me to want to drag him up more than strictly necessary.
That is to say, yeah it's not surprising he was also an asshole about this shit.
Okay I found the email stuff so I will read through that and reblog with thoughts later. My work laptop has finally finished updating and seems to be working, and so must I! (In theory lol)
