Rant Time: The SAG-AFTRA Strike and L.A. Weekly's Hideous Coverage · 1:06am Oct 27th, 2016
This is me ranting about something I have strong personal feelings about. If you're an animation and video game fan, you should have strong personal feelings about this too.
Fair warning: This blog post is going to consist primarily of angry venting and bitching.
I mentioned in a blog post last week that SAG-AFTRA is striking against several large video game developers, such as EA, primarily to get residuals, which they are currently not receiving. Representatives of those companies have told the voice actors to their face that "nobody cares about the voices" in video games. Hence the strike.
Today, L.A. Weekly reporter (and I use that term VERY loosely) Dennis Romero wrote an article about the strike which is full of inaccuracies, poorly researched, heavily biased against actors, and generally one of the worst pieces of reporting I've ever seen.
The striking actors and their supporters took to Twitter to voice their displeasure with this article. It's still ongoing. This was published several hours ago and the furor has yet to die down. I've been among the many vocal opponents of this article, LA Weekly, and Dennis Romero.
I am now, incidentally, blocked by Dennis Romero on Twitter. I'm far from the only one.
After discovering he'd blocked me, I used a private Firefox window to look at his Twitter feed, where I came upon these two hilariously hypocritical tweets:
THIS, folks, is a "serious journalist" who thinks voice artists are overpaid and greedy.
Twitter is blowing up over the article. I'm trying like hell to get the above image retweeted because this guy's hypocrisy needs to be exposed in order to shame and discredit LA Weekly. This is disgraceful and disgusting. It's obscene.
Incidentally, here's a partial list of voice talents, writers, and directors this idiot has managed to piss off:
Jennifer Hale
Imari Williams
Steve Blum
Stephanie Sheh
Swampy Marsh
Sumalee Montano
Those are just the ones in my Twitter feed who have weighed in while I was paying attention to Tweeten. There are dozens of others and hundreds of supporters who saw this and are outraged.
I'm not here to ask you to join some unholy Twitter crusade against an asshole journalist and his asinine publication. I'm just here to vent and show you what kind of bullshit your favorite VO artists have to put up with.
And if you're wondering how this relates to you, me, MLP, or anything relevant? Don't forget that Tara Strong is a video game VO artist, heavily involved in this strike, and is THE voice artist who was told, to her face, that nobody cares about the voices.
(Remember to show your support for SAG-AFTRA on Twitter with #performancematters!)
I don't have a Twitter, so I'm going to say it here. Screw this idiot. I've a much more angry reaction inside, I admit. But really, screw this idiot is a perfect picture, I feel. And even moreso? Screw this nonsense that VA's don't deserve better pay and conditions.
#Performancematters
What an a-hole, no wonder people have so little faith in the press these days.
Wow, that's Douchequake level of stupid right there. You don't say to the woman whose voice defined my childhood (or ANY VA for that matter!) that no one give a shit about the voices.
I do not often say this about anyone, but FUCK Dennis Dumbshit Romero.
Edit: Almost forgot - #performancematters
See, game companies don't care about VA's, but consumers definitely do.
And this is the result.
And thus the future of Kingdom Hearts remains more uncertain...
It's the people who are striking now who've made video games better. Sure you got a game with beautiful graphics and excellent gameplay but it's all about story with a lot of people and I believe the acting is the part that sells it.
Of course I've played plenty of great games with no voice acting but I'm PRETTY SURE I wouldn't enjoy a series like Mass Effect without the great acting.
Oh and before I forget: FUCK THAT ASSHOLE!
Why would anybody even care if voice actor's get paid as much as they do? This reporter is the type of guy that would take jokes non ironically and actually be offended, what a faggot!
What a scumbag. Lots of people in entertainment make a lot of money "per day" because they are only able to find work a few days a month. Romero knows that, so he doesn't publish the average annual income, just lists the dailies of when people actually get paid, then cites the "average entertainer salary" of $117K (which I presume includes the salaries of A-list actors, directors and producers) to make the audience think that's what VAs are making.
Based on his twitter feed it looks like he thinks the union in question isn't diverse enough, so he's trying to punish them with misleading articles.
4272824
In other words, "not Hispanic enough", which is patently BS; I'm following no fewer than four Hispanic VAs on Twitter and that's a relatively small sample.
4272844 The dude seems pretty sure about his statistics, and knowing exactly what percentage Hispanic everything in the LA area is seems to be his entire focus as a writer, so I suspect he's correct. But the fact that he's attacking one union while being a member of another one at the same time (as he mentions in his feed) hardly makes him the champion of working-class Angelenos he pretends to be in all his other works. If the Koch brothers happened to stumble upon this article, I'm sure they'd giggle and send him a generous "grant for entrepreneurial freedom" or something like that.
Pitting members of different unions with predominantly different ethnicities against each other to keep the average wages from being raised is a trick that's a century old. Notice how he doesn't comment on the ethnicity of the management of the gaming companies, even though he loves to write many other articles pointing out that this or that section of the Hollywood elite is overwhelmingly white?
Maybe don't pay attention to the guy would be a better idea? I mean, sure, the guy is being assinine (not a typo), but remember what they say: "There's no bad publicity." He's just calling for attention.
The same thing happened when the People's magazine putted Felix Kjellberg (AKA, PewDiePie) in their cover, only that it was relatively smaller than the rest of the cover and was scratched out by a big "X." It was disrespectful and antagonistic, for the simple sake of disrespecting and antagonizing gamers in general. Gamers, like Voice Actors, are a job demographic that is getting a lot of recognition in the geek comunnity. A comunnity that people in the Show Bussiness aren't part of, thus, don't see the same way. Dare I even say that they don't care at all.
After the People's incident, Jimmy Kimmer went and attacked gamers too in YouTube, in a video that got around MILLIONS of views, from people that went to argue against him. Arguments that he completely disregarded right after. He only did it for the views.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't vouch for voice talents. But stop paying attention to this dumbass, because that's when he wins. He's just a huge troll.
You're doing good work spreading the word here, Moth. And howard, it's excellent to see that you, unlike Romero, get both elementary solidarity and the foibles of the entertainment industry! Warm regards from the New York side of things. I'd join you, but I'm not on Twitter; you'll be hearing from us very soon, though
4272861 Honestly when he started attacking white people for being white I stopped caring what he has to say.
As an aspiring voice actor, there's only one word to describe what I feel right now. What was it?
Oh. Yeah.
Sadly, I don't have a Twitter account (I know, really) so I can't protest that way.
As for Romero here (I'd make a Daikatana joke, but I actually like Daikatana (It's not that bad when properly patched)), take your self-agrandizing, holier-than-thou crap you've been spewing and choke on it.
4273017 Contact Jill King and ask how to get involved, or sign up on line. I guarantee that whatever options you're given will be more productive than any conceivable Twitter beef. If you're an "aspiring" VA I doubt you have your card yet, but it shouldn't actually matter. An injury to one is an injury to all.
Riffing on this, I will be very disappointed in this community if there isn't art of Twilight Sparkle (alongside either Strong's other roles or other ponies*) on a picket line at some point during the next few weeks. I'd make it, but it would look like an unpleasant purple blob.
* ACTRA, to which the Canadian MLP VAs belong, has put out a statement in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA.
Wow... That reporter just doesn't get it, does he?
Great. Another highly-paid internet troll.
Gotta love how he made it all about money. Because, you know, screw vocal stress, stunt coordinators, transparency, it all about money and nothing else.
So.....nobody cares about the voices....which means nobody cares about the characters, the story, the aspects of a game that supports graphics and gameplay.....nobody cares about it. Just go make multiplayer only games you pricks.
The really sad part is that the guy's resorting to the old "white people problems" shtick. Does he really think every VA out there is white, and that only white people care about this? And his ignorance towards what this is even about is...sickening.
There's only one thing that I disagree with, not everyone in LA Weekly is anti- SAG-AFTRA.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-sag-aftra-video-dispute-20161019-snap-story.html
This author actually bothers to gather some info and look at both sides of the coin instead of giving a biased report filled with their own opinions. What one guy does doesn't always apply to the majority, though a news site shouldn't let someone as unprofessional as that keep a job/position with them.
Edit: Scratch that, I'm losing my mind.
I love how half the stuff on his Twitter is retweets of him being called out on his bullshit. It's almost as if he's acknowledging the fact the article was written purely to generate bullshit controversy and watch as people get justifiably pissed off.
... In other words, fuck that guy.
4273017 What a coincidence. I'm currently playing Daikatana with patches.
Made me threw up in my mouth a little looking at his tweets.
#PerformanceMatters
4273275
So your proof of this is an article from the LA Times, which is a credible source of news--and one the guy who wrote the offending article got fired from at some point in the past?
4273351 I think I'm going blind.
I love voice actors, but I don't have a twitter (I hate twitter). Is there another way I can I show my support for the strike?
4273716 Contact the union and ask how to get involved! If you want to be really proactive, you can email this address or call this hotline, or you can just sign up to receive alerts.
As for things you can do yourself, let your friends and family know that there's a strike on, and what games from what companies are struck. If you've preordered any of these games, consider canceling that preorder, and refusing to pay any penalties associated with preorder cancellations (I'm assuming these exist; I've never bothered preordering games). Call the companies up, or write them a letter, saying you'll be staying away from their products until they agree to treat VAs (and other employees too!) fairly.
This is why we need unions. Hang the capitalist pigdogs with their own ropes, the steets shall be filled with the blood of the exploiters and their propagandists!
...Or, like, post stuff on the Internet to get slightly improved working conditions and higher wages, that's okay too.