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Answerman - What Can We Do to Help English Voice Actors?

That scenario doesn't hold weight though. A cook saying "I'll stop spitting in the food if you give me a raise" is not only unprofessional and juvenile but a quick way to get fired and lose general sympathy towards you cause from customers who learn it was happening. It makes one look entitled and selfish. But a chef who works hard and is rewarded with a pay raise or promotion is a lot more logical and admirable.

If a voice actor genuinely did admit to doing poor performances on purpose and said they will continue to do so until they get better pay, then that sounds like a very good excuse to let them go and find someone else and I'm sure most fans would support replacing someone sandbagging on purpose.

Especially since a lot of dub actors barely get paid anything. Like...150 for the Jujutsu Kaisen movie? That's nothing. This idea that you have to take on a ton of extra responsibility in order to be paid fairly is incredibly toxic. For dub acting, what does "working better" even mean? You expect people to somehow put in Shakespearean level performances? There are amateur fan productions that pay people more than that and those performances tend to be really rocky because of a lack of good direction, but it's excused because it's amateur. So why is a big professional company given a pass for grossly underpaying people like this?

That scenario doesn't hold weight though. A cook saying "I'll stop spitting in the food if you give me a raise" is not only unprofessional and juvenile but a quick way to get fired and lose general sympathy towards you cause from customers who learn it was happening. It makes one look entitled and selfish. But a chef who works hard and is rewarded with a pay raise or promotion is a lot more logical and admirable.

If a voice actor genuinely did admit to doing poor performances on purpose and said they will continue to do so until they get better pay, then that sounds like a very good excuse to let them go and find someone else and I'm sure most fans would support replacing someone sandbagging on purpose.

That scenario doesn't hold weight though. A cook saying "I'll stop spitting in the food if you give me a raise" is not only unprofessional and juvenile but a quick way to get fired and lose general sympathy towards you cause from customers who learn it was happening. It makes one look entitled and selfish. But a chef who works hard and is rewarded with a pay raise or promotion is a lot more logical and admirable.

That said, the person doing the directing of the dub is under their own pressures. With something like dubbing, it can be done well or it can be done fast, not both. For the last few years there has been tremendous pressure to provide a dub with in a week if not within days of the Japanese release. If there has been any degradation of the quality of dubs, it is most likely the result of this emphasis on speed.

Alan45 wrote:

That said, the person doing the directing of the dub is under their own pressures. With something like dubbing, it can be done well or it can be done fast, not both. For the last few years there has been tremendous pressure to provide a dub with in a week if not within days of the Japanese release. If there has been any degradation of the quality of dubs, it is most likely the result of this emphasis on speed.

I wonder if simuldubs might be part of the reason Crunchyroll is so against unionization. Unions mean caps on recording time which means more days and time required for every episode.

But this scenario doesn't hold any weight either? No voice actors have admitted to doing poor performances in order to get a raise. I don't see how the chef spitting in food analogy fits here since voice actors aren't doing that.

In our two most recent examples Kyle McCarley simply refused to reprise his role but he didn't actively sabotage it, and Hellena Taylor is a can of worms but she also didn't try to affect the actual performance since she wasn't the one doing it (though she had many other issues)

Has ANN ever covered how voice actors in Japan came to be paid decently?

The real problem here, as it is with so many other situations, is that I don't know how to explain to people that you should care about other people. ... if somebody has reached the point where they're old enough to post on the internet and their attitude is still, "I don't care what happens to anybody else as long as I get my anime," how do you convince them that they're supposed to have empathy for other human beings? Because you need to at least establish that before anything else.

I personally feel one of the biggest hinderances to this issue is that dubs are not involved in the creative process of anime. Unlike western cartoons where the voice actors are their original voice, dubs are optional and generally seen as a privilege not a right.

Exactly. Fair pay and acceptable working conditions may be complex topics with multiple viewpoints and various underlying, interrelated factors, but as with so many other controversial issues in life this one fundamentally boils down to empathy vs. apathy.