I wanted to speak a bit on the VA situation with TADC, and I guess about Glitch too. I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about this, so bear with me while I try to organize them. I was in the industry for a huge chunk of my adult life and like 5 years of my childhood--20 years total--at first as an online voice actor, and then mostly as a voice director and sometimes in casting, with a few personal or commercial projects in between as a writer or director. I have bounced around a number of creative roles. The traditional entertainment industry is structurally, incurably racist and misogynistic. I have first-hand experience with the personal compromises and sacrifices good people have had to make in the past to make a show within the traditional television system. I have been actively made fun of for refusing to tolerate the n word. I have been bullied out of groups. I have genuinely lost count of the amount of times someone has sat me down and said something to the effect of "I'm sorry, but you're making the people in [group full of creators] feel really uncomfortable with this. I pride myself on cultivating a comfortable space for creators and I don't agree with restricting the creativity of anyone here" because I objected to people saying whole ass slurs and making racist or misogynistic jokes. I fought this. I pushed for inclusive casting, advocated for the work-life balance of others (but never myself, lol), etc. You learn to put up with it in order to make the thing you want to make, and hope that the putting the thing out in the world does more good than compromising yourself felt bad. After a while, you do become a bit dead to it. In a way, I think the entertainment industry is incompatible with genuine growth. Not even (just) because the environment is toxic and you're rewarded for being an asshole, but because growth requires your brain to cycle out of being miserable and stressed, and you can't until you're between projects, but that's when you're not making money, so you're stressed about that instead. This is all a bit of a tangent, but what I mean to say is that this is a big part of why it seems like none of these people ever change at all. Personal growth is both discouraged and impossible. It's especially bad if you have deeply-embedded shame, because you feel bad about bad things and bad about good things and both of them are 10 times too strong and don't really feel different. It feels really reassuring and safe when your boss and coworkers are not limiting you, and are in fact encouraging you to stop feeling that shame. This is a trap that many fall into, and it can take many wasted years to realize that it won't actually solve your problems.
I'm out of entertainment now, and I don't really feel like I was able to make a difference, but I hoped someone would. I left when the online creator market was fairly young. When YouTube became a way that people could actually make money, I was really excited. The whole promise of all this was supposed to be that people could make things without having to make those kinds of compromises. That's why this kind of stuff disappoints me so much. Hearing how Glitch treats animators and other team members and what the internal culture is like is very much deja vu, and I find that a miserable waste. You created an entirely new system just to what, copy the old one exactly but with yourself at the top? That's pathetic.
While I'm here, I want to make something else very clear while I'm here as a natural consequence of what I said above: every non black voice actor says the n word for fun. it would be easier to list exceptions. It is critical that you do not interpret "non-black" as "white" in this context because it would be a mistake to think that brown voice actors do it even fractionally less. This is an issue embedded deep in the cultural foundations of voice over as an industry and creative field. I have met voice actors, plural, who say the n word at the beginning of every session as a way to break the initial tension in a booth and remove mental restrictions on the performance, so they say, because it's taboo. It's essential that they feel absolutely NO restriction on their performance, you see, and the n word taboo is the GREATEST restriction on casual speech in our society. Ridiculous. If you have to say slurs to get out of your own head, that's a flaw in your acting process and you need to get better at your job. But genuinely, that's how casual it is. So whenever I hear that SoAndSoVA said a slur somewhere, I'm not particularly surprised, and I'm not really sure what to do either. This is something that I've watched Black actors put up with. Reasons vary. It can be as simple as not wanting to negatively impact their career, or often genuinely not wanting to risk cutting off income for other marginalized actors "just" over this (because let's be honest, Black queers show up for White queers in a way that never really happens in reverse). Or sometimes they just seem to really think it's funny. I don't know how to show up for them, but I try to do the best that I can. I ask.
It just... persists. It all persists. No matter how many times things change hands, how many companies "revolutionize" indie, it's always the same. I'm so disappointed.