I can download a thousand ROMs of Mr. Sue-A-Lot's games but the second I even L O O K at pc games my computer starts coughing up battery acid. I'm going to my grave never touching torrents.
Okay, so like, my issue with the Natlan character designs was always the racism and colorism at play; in a vacuum the designs are fine (not Mualani, not Mauvika, Chasca sneak). Two of my favorite characters are Razor and Bennett who dress BAD. They dress BAD. But it's part of the character's story, shows personality, and is cohesive. I actually like Emilie's design and never understood the amount of actual disdain people had for her just for not being purple. Don't get me wrong, the leprechaun green does her a huge disservice, but the design itself is good.
Now that fuckin escargot girl? Actually genuinely bad, in a generic way too. I don't get how people are gushing over her. Google 'random anime' and you'll find 20 girls in the first 5 seconds that look exactly like her. People are comparing her to Navia when Navia oozed personality day 1. People have the audacity to compare her to Furina, fucking Furina, my GNC tgirl goat! FURINA! Delusional.
Wait I just remembered Skirk's ugly ass. E-coughier girl is second worst Genshin design. Skirk has the disadvantage of being painted a certain way before her official appearance, which unfortunately goes against her design. Imagine we finally see Varka and he's a short boy that dresses like Ayato. Skirk really should have had Beidou/Arlecchino type aura about her but all that goes away the second you see a teenager in a swimsuit.
The Genshin VA Situation is gonna make me Crash Out.
It’s making me more and more frustrated at the entire thing. I’m Pro Union because workers deserve better. I’m Pro Human Rights by default even if the humans in question are annoying as all hell. I primarily side against AI because of consent, but… man. Long story short; the audio company that Genshin originally signed English voice actors to, Formosa, is struck by the SAG AFTRA union, but some of the striking English voice actors also seem to have some other unachievable agenda. Let’s ignore the fact that this whole thing is an American problem and only affects American workers and companies. Period. Skip to the Keep Reading Cut if you fully comprehend what the terms “Strike”, “Scab”, and “Union” mean.
If you play English voiced live service games, like League of Legends or Genshin Impact, you may have noticed a few voices missing over the last… what? 6, 7 months? That’s most likely because the voice actors that play those roles are on strike. I’ve seen a lot of people not understand what a strike is and act as though the actors are being selfish for not working when it’s quite the opposite. Primarily, a strike is a group effort to withhold something they normally offer, i.e. services or patronage, until x y z is guaranteed to them; sometimes it’s fairer wages, sometimes it’s better safety standards, sometimes it’s not supporting genocide. In our current case, it’s for better intellectual protection. You strike because it’s the only power you truly have and it only works if enough people join in.
In America, this is how we got 8 hour work shifts as standard instead of 23 and get paid overtime. This is why we stopped sending toddlers into shoddy coal mines 20 hours a day for 7 pennies a week. This is why we can sue our employers into the ground for needlessly exposing us to any and every type of poison and radiation imaginable. We respect strikes round here! When you scoff at your coworkers and don’t join the strike, or worse take the job of a striker, you are a scab undermining human rights and you spit in the face of your coworkers and every person that came before you that sacrificed what you won’t for the benefits you enjoy. You reap but you won’t sow? It doesn’t matter who you are or how uninformed you claim to be, your coworkers won’t forget and neither will the industry.
Now, a labor union might sound like some big imposing dangerous thing, but it’s ultimately just an organized group of people who’s main objective is taking care of each other. Home Owner Associations are unions; clubs are unions; friend groups should be unions; discord chat rooms can be unions. You can form a union yourself whenever you want but it only works if there is collaboration between members. The SAG AFTRA union is just a mega union made up of smaller unions for American performers; namely the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, hence SAG - AFTRA.
Got it? Good. Here’s the situation; Most generative AI, which is a whole other can of worms, are proven to have been trained on stolen work. SAG AFTRA has been on strike for better compensation, but also to ensure companies don’t use AI to steal their livelihood. “The terms and conditions involving rights to digitally simulate a performer to create new performances must be bargained with the union”, said straight from the SAG AFTRA website.
The first wave of these strikes started early May of 2023 with the Writers Guild of America fighting against the use of ChatGPT, which was built on their own work without consent. July of the same year, the screenwriters were joined by SAG AFTRA. This was historical, the first time since the 1960s that both the Writers and Actors were on strike, halting Hollywood to a complete standstill. The end of that strike resulted in healthcare and residual pay for workers in the movie and TV industry. The 2023 Writers Guild strike ended 2 months after it started and the SAG AFTRA strike ended 2 months after that, both with amicable contracts signed by a number of big production studios in America, which sets a good precedent for AI protections in any future contracts; see how that works?
Now, throughout all of that, the Writers Guild and SAG AFTRA were very professional and forthright with information to the public. We knew WHY they were striking, we knew WHO they were striking against, and we knew WHAT could end the strike. Plain and simple. The same cannot be said about the current video game strike. SAG AFTRA as an organization has essentially gone mute and refuse to address the public the way they did with the screen actor strike. They’re just letting the voice actors fend for themselves and continually put their foot in their mouth. Surely it’s not just voice actors being more immature than screen actors. It’s almost as if the video game performers were an after thought to SAG AFTRA, striking a full year later; let alone that the placeholder interim agreement and the Taft Hartley simply do not work for live service games.
I suppose another part of the difficulty is who, exactly, are they striking against. Here’s where I finally start yelling about the Genshin VA situation. After SAG AFTRA announced a video game strike, Formosa, a third party company for post production audio, allegedly went behind SAG AFTRA’s back to provide non-union voice actors for League of Legends. So, SAG AFTRA is now disallowing their members from working with Formosa or League of Legends until further notice. This is important info for us because Formosa was also the production company handling Genshin Impact’s English voice recordings since it’s launch. If you remember, around December 2022, Formosa stopped paying Corrina, Paimon’s voice actor, and hadn’t paid them for over half a year by the time they publicly mentioned it. Y’know, Paimon, Genshin’s lovable mascot that doesn’t shut up? Her voice actor wasn’t being compensated for months on end. Because of Formosa’s breach of contract, Hoyoverse was able to move Corrina to a different recording studio and last I remember were in the process of moving the rest of the English cast over.
But that was over a year ago, before SAG AFTRA ever even went on strike or had beef with Formosa, so what gives?! The confusion caused by the English VAs have only complicated the situation to an ungodly degree, but I guess it’s better than the radio silence we were getting? The only actors that seem to know what they’re talking about are Alejandro Saab, Khoi Dao, and Joe Zieja. It’s like the rest don’t understand what’s going on either, just doing what they’re told like sheep but instead of just admitting it, they speak confidently wrong and end up contradicting each other repeatedly. It’s infuriating. I’m nosy, I wanna know what’s going on!
Based on everything said and done, I believe it ultimately still has to do with Formosa Interactive. The VAs, despite refusing to say it for some reason, are specifically striking against Formosa, which is the middleman between most of the Genshin English cast and Hoyoverse. But they’re all still stuck in a contract with Formosa that they can’t just break and run to another studio for one reason or another. Corrina was able to break their contract because Formosa broke it first. Contracts of that nature typically last per project or annually for ongoing projects like TV shows. Honkai Star Rail goes through Rocket Sound and Zenless Zone Zero goes through Cadence Studios and neither of them seem to be going through what Genshin is going through despite sharing voice actors. Again, this is mostly speculation based on all the info I have, which isn’t a lot because everyone involved is so cagey for no reason and yet when they do talk it’s like they themselves are missing just as much information as us, if not more. Like, I still don’t know, for sure, what production company Corrina was moved to.
The only thing I have left to say is that, if my guess is correct then, this is officially between SAG AFTRA and Formosa, not necessarily the voice actors and Hoyoverse. This might be why a lot of the newer characters, signed after the strike started and most likely not with Formosa, are voiced. Lastly, Joe Zieja’s video about the situation basically says that most of the voice actors he spoke to on strike are doing so of their own accord in an attempt to flip Genshin union despite it not being an American game nor having a true American branch, or to force Mihoyo to sign agreements that are already met by Chinese and Singapore law so..., Iunno. Piss poor communication and SAG AFTRA only giving a fuck about screen actors? At this point I don’t trust the English voice actors to understand anything.
QnA update! Part 4 is out. As far as I’m concerned the big points were; all things HSL is null and void, they’ve been working on UL since 2016, and they’ve been working on one minigame for at least the past like 5 months.
Season 1, High School Life, whatever you wanna call it, is confirmed to be completely finished. All future events are for UL only and the Hooray Boutique was a one time event, apparently. They hinted at spin-offs being a possibility but I’ll be honest, I don’t think they meant for HSL. I also just want to point out that they stated they started work on UL in 2016. I think everyone’s in agreement when I say that’s when HSL’s writing went from kinda bad to objectively worst especially with Armin and Kentin’s ‘arcs’ bleeding together like they did, and the underwhelming ending. If that’s what we have to look forward to, I don’t know if I can deal.
Maybe I'm just biased towards tanks and healers because I hate dying more than I like doing big damage. This is all coming from someone who mained Qiqi the second I got her but benched Xiao a week after I got him because he kept dying in his burst.
After playing around with her, Kokomi is a weird character and I see why people cant see her potential but also... she's literally no where near as bad as people keep saying she is. They're just mad they have to actually think instead of focusing on crit like they do for every other character. The same people whine about every character that dont do 500k damage when they throw on attack and crit. Never forget the way everyone absolutely hated Kazuha as if he isn't one of the best supports and THE best grouper in the game, fuck Venti.
That aside, Kokomi does have issues with her kit and its needlessly complicated. Something that bugs the mess of me is that her burst ONLY takes into account her hp stat (and also healing bonus but thats beside the point). What one would assume is that her burst simply buffs her normal attack, similar to other berserkers like Xiao or Razor, by adding a percentage of her hp stat to the overall damage. But it DOESNT. It REPLACES her normal attack damage with that percentage of hp. So now instead of working in tandem, her normal and burst attacks are at odds with each other. Do you want to focus on her normal attack? Fine, but now her burst is useless. Oh so you want to focus on her burst like the gods intended? Great, you get 10 seconds of decent damage AND subpar heals! Okay back to the bench for 8 days she goes. Its sabatoge is what it is!
Anyways, I like her design and personality so I'm gonna main her regardless but she still needs some adjustments. Maybe just uping her burst's hp scaling would work.
More characters scaling off non attack stats is an absolute positive for the overall game though. It makes the artifact rng less malicious and makes stats that aren't attack or crit actually useful. As annoying as the "Big Numbers Only" crowd is, I can't say the game doesn't favor fast heavy hitters more than anything else which is why characters like Kokomi or Qiqi or Noelle are hated so universally. Shifting away from Crit Crit Atk Crit Atk is a GOOD thing, a HEALTHY thing for a game like Genshin Impact.
After playing around with her, Kokomi is a weird character and I see why people cant see her potential but also... she's literally no where near as bad as people keep saying she is. They're just mad they have to actually think instead of focusing on crit like they do for every other character. The same people whine about every character that dont do 500k damage when they throw on attack and crit. Never forget the way everyone absolutely hated Kazuha as if he isn't one of the best supports and THE best grouper in the game, fuck Venti.
That aside, Kokomi does have issues with her kit and its needlessly complicated. Something that bugs the mess of me is that her burst ONLY takes into account her hp stat (and also healing bonus but thats beside the point). What one would assume is that her burst simply buffs her normal attack, similar to other berserkers like Xiao or Razor, by adding a percentage of her hp stat to the overall damage. But it DOESNT. It REPLACES her normal attack damage with that percentage of hp. So now instead of working in tandem, her normal and burst attacks are at odds with each other. Do you want to focus on her normal attack? Fine, but now her burst is useless. Oh so you want to focus on her burst like the gods intended? Great, you get 10 seconds of decent damage AND subpar heals! Okay back to the bench for 8 days she goes. Its sabatoge is what it is!
Anyways, I like her design and personality so I'm gonna main her regardless but she still needs some adjustments. Maybe just uping her burst's hp scaling would work.
the ao3 argument at this point is one side going “ao3 should have basic content moderation and rules against hate speech and pedophilia, as is standard practice across most online platforms” while the other side goes “no that’s impossible, we can’t have basic content moderation because christian fundamentalists took over livejournal in 2007 and clearly having any standards at all is a slippery slope to censoring all lgbt content!″ it’s so profoundly stupid like holy shit could you IMAGINE using another online platform without basic fucking standards? hello?
remember the ao3 census that found that the site’s userbase is 78% white? gee i wonder why! could it be that having no content standards whatsoever has created a hostile environment for people of color???
people have said this before but just. to reiterate. ‘representation matters’ is the antithesis of ‘fiction doesnt affect reality’. you can’t claim both.
if you agree that positive representation (for example, well written, humanized gay characters) can normalize and help gay teenagers, then you inherently have to also accept that negative representation (for example, accepted and sympathetic pedophile characters) can normalize pedophilia to people. this is the same vein of the same critical thought. you can’t claim that representation matters if you also believe that someone writing ‘non con’ adult / child porn is fine since its fictional.
My last pokemon vent post is that the brown/black characters and the fat characters in the swsh deserve just way better that what they got. And i just WISH people just could realize some of their jokes that got exclusively and ONLY to specific characters DO HAVE bad connotations such as racism or fatphobia.
a.k.a. “Wah, wah, the brown girl is oppressing me because she dares talk about a serious issue that she noticed when she was 7″
This is going to be an entire breakdown of every racist piece of shit thing going on in botw and believe me, there’s a lot of it. In fact, my brain feels like it’s going to herniate through the base of my skull from how oblivious people are to this. Then again, what do I expect from a fandom that’s continually been exotifying the Gerudo and calling it “empowerment” for the last 2 years? This is the same fandom that jumped on Jim Sterling for giving botw a good score but not a good enough score, so apparently it’s littered with people who can’t stand anyone criticizing their favorite video game.
Note, that the Gerudo have both “Middle Eastern/South Asian” and black coding, so the stereotypes for those two things will overlap in this analysis. (I am not black, so I won’t go too much into the anti-blackness here)
Also, I’m aware the creators of this game are Japanese, for those of you who come crying to me about how “they’re not white! they’re Japanese! they can’t be racist!!! *sad boner*” and if you honestly think that I’m as uneducated as you that I wouldn’t know the goddamn creators of the franchise I’ve been playing since I was seven, and you really think that Japanese people can’t be racist well…this conversation is entirely too advanced for you.
And lastly, note that this is supposed to be a concise criticism (and it’s still so long, oops) so I will cover every topic, but I won’t go into every detail (ie. going into every line of dialogue from every NPC).
It would probably be helpful to read this first, and perhaps go through my Gerudo tag.
‘anti culture’ was born from the experiences of abuse, and of damaging media online experienced by people whose experience of safeguarding online when theyre were younger was utterly inadequate. they were told not to share their names and addresses, not to meet anyone physically alone, but aside from that often got given very little advice, and so were utterly unaware of more subtle forms of grooming. these people entered spaces with unparalleled and unmoderated interaction between adults and children, which naturally sometimes took place with bad intentions on the parts of the adults. because of that experience young adults are well aware of the dangers of online spaces and wan to change things for the children/teens online now. it is also, funnily enough, not surprising that what is essentially a crowd of often traumatised teens/young adults have not found a flawless solution to this massive problem, especially considering ‘anti culture‘ is maybe around 5 years old now, at most.
i think one thing i see less of which i would like is stuff thats just guides to what to look out for as potential signs of grooming in fandom, and also id like to see attempts to put in place an unofficial code of conduct on the part of adults. that in particular would be useful in that when adults did not follow the code of conduct, it would be a good warning sign. both these things can be partially based on warnings and codes of conduct that already exist offline.
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