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Undertale creator and Homestuck composer Toby Fox did a track for Pokémon Sword and Shield and, upon listening to it, we’ve realized it sounds like it’s pulling a melody from a notorious Homestuck-related track: “The Baby is You.”
The original track was made before Fox did official work for Homestuck, in response to a rule on the MS Paint Adventures forums that banned users from posting art of the characters being pregnant. (MS Paint Adventures was the website that hosted Homestuck, along with creator Andrew Hussie’s other works.) As the characters were 13 in the webcomic at the time, the forum didn’t want any shenanigans.
Fox’s response was to make a short album about how Dave Strider, a character from the comic, is pregnant and the baby is main character John Egbert. If you think this doesn’t make sense, you’re right. It wasn’t really supposed to.
The last part of the rock opera is what ended up getting used in the Sword and Shield track. You can hear it in a comparison video below.
Fox is known for re-using melodies in his iconic songs. His extremely popular track, “Megalovania,” was originally used in a EarthBound hack mod, then used in Homestuck, and then used as Sans’ theme from Undertale. While fans of Fox know this, nobody quite expected him to use a melody from his most shitpost-y track ever made — especially not for Sword and Shield. Of course, we don’t know if this is an intentional call-back to “The Baby is You,” or if it’s just similar in its melody.
You can check out an animated video for the original “The Baby is You” track below, if you want to fall down that rabbit hole.
With “Megalovania” making it into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and “The Baby is You” making it into Pokémon Sword and Shield, it’s been a big year for Toby Fox and Homestuck fans.
Update: A previous version of this article said that Toby Fox was banned from the MS Paint Adventures forum for posting this song, but Marcy Nabors, a sound effect artist for the Homestuck game Hiveswap said Fox was not banned for posting the song, and that Fox went on to use a private board on the forums, eventually leading to him working on Homestuck’s music. This post has been corrected to reflect this.
