The reception and love this post has gotten is beyond anything I ever conceived of. To my aspec friends, to those sharing love in the notes, and to everyone out there for whom this post hit close to home: you are appreciated and you are loved in your own unique way.
STOP HAVING WHITE VOICE ACTORS PLAYING NON-WHITE ROLES
stop depriving non-white actors opportunities to act and get recognized!
Voice actors often don’t know who they’re reading for or what franchise they’re in (that’s what the strike was recently about, so they’d know whether they were in a small first time game or the 4th installment of a major franchise, if they were replacing a beloved voice actor, etc.) so please don’t harass the actors, until recently they legally didn’t have the right to know who they were reading for and were usually not told until months or even years later.
Definitely go after casting, directors, and studios executives. Those are the people making the decisions.
They still don’t have the right to know. They got fucking nothing out of that strike. They can know the code name (which might be a serial number or whatever) and if it’s a sequel. That’s it. That’s the extent of the “transparency” they won from the strike.
As a perfect example of this controversy, if you haven’t looked up interviews surrounding Laura Bailey as Nadine Ross, it’s worth it.
Laura Bailey herself explained that when she auditioned for the role, she was given no information about what the character looked like. It was only after she was hired and arrived for recording that she was shown concept art and discovered the character was a WOC. She was uncomfortable about the situation.
Meanwhile, Neil Druckmann revealedthat they were already working on concept art of the character when they hired Laura Bailey. They finalized the character’s design as a WOC after they’d hired a white voice actress, so that was a conscious decision. He was also very flippant about the situation as a whole.
Like people above have said: Yes, whitewashed casting is a legitimate and real issue. But unlike actors in film and stage, voice actors are often totally blind to what they’re auditioning for. They get fucked by NDAs and legal red tape bullshit. Go after the casting directors and execs and high-position game devs that knowingly make these decisions.
This reminds me of a time I got shunned on Tumblr for complaining that Shao Jun wasn’t voiced by an Asian VA. That was around 2013ish, so I’m glad people are being more vocal about this issue now.
ALT
