Alright guys so there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the English voice actors for Hoyoverse games such as Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero. For those of you who have been living under a rock lately well allow me to explain this briefly: The video game industry is in utter chaos because on the day of July 26th 2024 everyone in the industry went on strike. The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists or SAG-AFTRA for short are the ones leading the charge of this entire strike to improve protections from AI after negotiations failed to meet their expectations. Now I know you guys are probably wondering: "But what the Hell does this have to do with the Hoyoverse and their games?" Well you see in many recent events the English versions of Genshin, Star Rail, and ZZZ many of their characters have been completely muted. This was all because the English voice actors decided to not work to support the strike and at first glance their reasonings behind it all seemed pretty justified. With AI getting as advanced as it is it has the potential to put the VA jobs at risk as companies will use AI to copy the VA voices without their consent and as a result they lose their job so naturally the VAs went on strike because their jobs are at risk. Sounds understandable. However as time goes on and as more information is revealed it is very clear that there is something a lot more sinister behind all of this which lead to a lot of drama. Which is why for today's discussion I'm going to be sharing my thoughts on this whole situation. I will also be ranting because this whole drama makes me so fucking mad and it honestly makes me realize how much idiotic some of these VAs are. So without further ado let's get started.
Before we start I feel I need to address how I even learned about SAG-AFTRA's existence in the first place. It pretty much started back in 2023 I was scrolling around the Internet just relaxing until I encountered an Instagram Story Reel made by Cherami Leigh. (She's the English voice of Lucy Heartfilia, Sarada Uchiha, Makoto Niijima, etc) in that story reel Cherami posted saying she supports the strike. Now obviously I had no idea what she was talking about so being the curious detective I am decided to do some research and that's when I learned about SAG-AFTRA and learned that Hollywood has gone on strike for the same reasons the video game industry is on strike. When I learned more on YouTube from the likes of Ryan RK Outpost, ENDYMIONtv, and a few others and learned there are two sides to every story. On one hand people within Hollywood are furious about this entire strike because they don't let to be replaced by AI but on the other hand according to YouTubers because of what Hollywood has done in recent years with their woke and liberal agenda shoved down in people's throats in an attempt to indoctrinate normal people, most people don't really feel bad about the people who are on strike (except for those who aren't problematic. After learning about this I decided to not get involved and just move on with my day because I don't care for SAG-AFTRA and the strike. But little did I know there was much more than meets the eye.
Now that we've established how I found out about SAG-AFTRA let's get into the meat of this whole situation. This whole situation started when many updates in late 2024 to early 2025 many characters have been completely muted which severely upset fans for obvious reasons and this was obviously due to the strike. You see most of the VAs in the game are union and according to what I and many others have found union actors are not allowed to work on non union games because said games from companies haven't signed Interim Agreements which essentially allows for AI protections and considering Hoyoverse is non union that would mean that any va that's union can't work on their games. So far so good however this is where the problem comes in. If Hoyoverse were to go union this actually presents a lot of risks for anyone who isn't union and I have
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