#I've seen a lot of complaints about the casting but very little suggestions for who SHOULD have been cast beyond the donghua voice cast

[hunxi-after-hours]

hi hunxi, just wondering if you have thoughts on the weibo blowup over the tgcf audio drama? from what i've read, people are upset about the following:

there's negativity surrounding both lead voice actors, but the majority consensus seems to be that 双儿's voice isn't suitable for xie lian. there's also a screenshot circulating of a comment in an anonymous discussion forum posted in march 2022, which accuses the production company of 内选 and of using the ip as a “捧人的垫脚石”. aside from the very loaded language, the predictions in the comment seem mostly to have come true (which has led some people to speculate that it was actually released by someone within the company itself, either as a "whistleblower" situation or to test out reactions beforehand).

fans of the book dislike the way that mentions of mxtx + new tgcf content were apparently dragged into the behind-the-scenes video to ... quell public outrage? i personally don't see a problem, but weibo posters put a lot of emphasis on the fact that 新修 chapters were underway BEFORE the audio drama and therefore not "exclusive" audio content or written for the express purpose of the audio drama's production.

there's a whole lot more that won't include here (hot search/rankings allegedly being bought, voice actor fans shading book fans, etc), but i really hope this isn't an insensitive or overly negative ask. i'm just surprised that chinese vs international fandoms are having such wildly different reactions.

hi anon! honestly, looks like you've summed it up pretty well — I came to the TGCF audiodrama to have a good time and was surprised by how much negativity there was in CN fan circles about it?

(post got long, throwing it under a cut)

I assume there's probably some history/drama surrounding these supposedly contentious aspects of the TGCF AD production, so I suppose qualifiers are in order: I've got legitimately no idea where the anti-729 sentiment is coming from (?? they do good work???), or about the history of nepotism/favoritism in voice actor circles (?????). truly, everything I know begins and ends with 《我是特优声》 and my misadventures on 猫耳, so I'm doubtlessly missing out on any drama from like, before 2021

that being said, I can't say I understand the anti-casting sentiment because, well... 苏尚勤 is a legitimately experienced and lauded voice actor who's familiar with MXTX's work, and while 陈张太康 is a somewhat newer face, anyone who's watched 《我是特优声》 or listened to his audiodramas knows that he's got an extremely impressive range that I personally think is very suited to the dynamic aspects of Hua Cheng's character. from the very little I've spotted on weibo/the 猫耳 评论区, it seems like people are taking issue with... how young 苏尚勤 sounds? which is like. fam. you know what voice actors do for a living, right? change their voices to embody different characters? you truly cannot judge how well a voice actor performs in an AD based on a five minute trailer alone. give it a few episodes/a season since they're apparently giving out the entire season for free for two months, and then we'll talk

I think a lot of the “声音不贴角色” complaints come from, well, fans of the book expecting these few lines we've heard so far to truly embody the breathtaking complexity of these characters all at once, which is rather impossible. the thing about Xie Lian and Hua Cheng is that they are young, and old, and tired, and passionate, and faithful, and trusting, and cruel, kind, but all at different times. so Xie Lian sounds young now? give the voice actor a chance to show how exhausted and jaded and tired he becomes later, in the flashback arcs. so Hua Cheng doesn't sound like the badass ghost king we know him for? that actually 100% makes sense, he's in San Lang mode right now, and if you watched 陈张太康's rendition of 《灵笼》, you KNOW he can do arrogant, vicious royalty when it comes to it

also, looking across the cast list for the AD, this doesn't seem to be 内选 unless it's like... 内选 within the 京圈 voice acting circle?? which to be fair is like. maybe 200 people total asldkfjadlsf (look if you want to diversify your voice acting cast then let's see some 沪圈 rep huh?? #give毛毛老师anotherbitroleagain). the voice actors in the TGCF AD cast come from a vast assortment of different voice acting studios, from 729 to 边工 to 翼之声 to 光合积木 to unaffiliated with professional studios at all, so I'm??? confused??? at allegations of unfairness in casting??

I also saw some of those 弹幕 complaining about how they kept bringing up the MDZS production in the 制作谈 and I'm spectacularly baffled as to why that's a problem considering that much of the production staff had worked on the MDZS AD and it's. by. the same. author. and anyway, much of their discussion of the MDZS AD in the TGCF 制作谈 was specifically about shortcomings in the MDZS AD that they were learning from and seeking to improve this time around, which feels relevant and not particularly 刷好感 to me

tl;dr I think the TGCF AD production team worked very hard on this and are genuinely trying their best, and that all judgment should be reserved until after the season airs. there really is no point in trying to offer a holistic critique based on five-minute trailer alone, and like, I don't know how many morality points one would get from boycotting an AD but tbh it seems kind of. negligible. so let's all just kick back and enjoy this absolutely stacked production while it's being generously offered for free, shall we?

#to be totally honest all the negativity I'm seeing seems like 黑粉/水军活动 so I'm inclined to discount their validity #but also knowing that people are apparently still trying to cancel 边江 in 2022?? presumably over wishing 肖战 a happy birthday in 2020?? #反正有些在网上活动的人是不带脑子的 #I've seen a lot of complaints about the casting but very little suggestions for who SHOULD have been cast beyond the donghua voice cast #which I respect! having different voice casts between the donghua and the AD can be jarring! #but like...... different production teams have different interpretations of text and characters and that's just fine? #idk I'll believe that 苏尚勤 is a bad choice when someone offers me a better alternative who isn't 姜sir #I've said it before and I'll say it again: I WILL 为太康老师打call if I have to #I feel pretty neutral about 苏尚勤's casting but I feel STRONGLY POSITIVE about 太康 #我这个人是离不开《特优声》的坑

[mermaidsirennikita]

Yeah but weren't the rumors that she was walking off from set in response to his behaviour? Plus at this point we've had cast members talking about not great experiences on set and several talking about being uncomfortable with the sex scenes and nudity.

Some rumors said she was responding to his behavior. Some said she was walking off set because she disagreed with the writing for Kat. Either way--you literally can't walk off a job and not expect repercussions. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.

Personally, I'm kind of over a lot of allegations about Sam Levinson being levied with very little concrete evidence that he's done anything abnormal, beyond being the type of guy who probably wears a beret and talks about his vision and is generally insufferable and dumb (remember when people on TikTok were saying that he clearly sees Sydney as a stand in for his mom, who he wants to fuck, because they're both busty blondes? Okay then). I've seen extras complain about being on set for 8-12 hours and only having shitty craft food... Welcome to being an extra on a TV set. I don't see why anyone thinks those hours are especially wild, when television shows have been filming with them from the dawn of time. You have Zendaya, who to be frank is known for being a professional above anything else, not only praising him but repeatedly choosing to work with him. Hunter Schafer had tons of praise when she worked with him on her solo episode. As much as people like to cite Sydney Sweeney, what she said was actually? Not damning at all? She was presented with more nudity than she wanted. She requested less nudity. He gave her less nudity.

I don't think he's an angel by any means. In fact, I think he's an annoying navel gazer who sometimes strikes brilliance but most of that is due to hiring the right people, both in front of and behind the camera (which, I suppose, is in itself a talent). I never liked how Kat was written. (I actually had a ton of complaints about season 1--it was a ritual for me to log on after each episode aired and bitch about it in the DMs with a friend of mine.) I'm sure he and Barbie had disagreements about that, which led to friction.

But here's the thing: I've been watching this show since the night the pilot aired. Most people were cool and groovy with Euphoria when season 1 was new--then season 2 blew the fuck up due to a lot of people watching season 1 during the pandemic, and everyone suddenly acted like Euphoria was a walking hate crime against literally everyone known to man, including white guys. And then, as with the above conspiracy theory TikToks, the rhetoric became weirdly more personal and more... fucked. Almost like nobody cared about being socially correct and fair, and it was actually just typical fandom bullshit masquerading as activismy concern We'll talk about how Jules being confused about what the fuck she wants (as a teenage girl) is homophobic, apparently... But we won't talk about how for a minute there a chunk of Twitter was suggesting that Sam Levinson, a Jewish man, must be secretly powering the IDF with a show adapted from an Israeli television series? And how that's an incredibly anti-Semitic thought process? You're gonna worry about the depiction of drug use on the show while calling a recovering drug addict a crackhead on Twitter, and blaming his uneven writing on his brain being "fried by meth"?

Like, I honestly can't believe I'm defending Sam Levinson on main, but I don't have to like you to be fair, and I do try to be fair. There's speculation and picking apart quotes, and there is KNOWING WHAT HAPPENED. And when you don't know what happened, you tend to start spinning out into some pretty wild shit; something I've been guilty of myself, and I'm trying to get away from that.

As for discomfort with sex and nudity... There's a difference between being uncomfortable with something because it's new and being pressured to do something you don't want to do. I have seen nothing about people being pressured to do something they don't want to do--the opposite, in fact. As I stated above, Sydney said the nudity got toned down because she asked for that. Personally, I think a lot of people just don't like the plot lines for season 2 and are looking for a political reason to validate their feelings so that they can win an argument. You can't like season 2 if everyone was being pressured into going nude! Ignore

Who knows? Maybe it'll all come out that the show was an incredibly abusive environment. But thus far... I'm not seeing the actors who've worked on the set saying that.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok I need to do Opus: Echo of Starsong now instead of taking more time to think about it because in only like 24 hours it's already started slipping out of my brain, and I'm already not going to be able to say as much as I wanted.

I grabbed it in the first place because someone who seems to have similar taste to mine compared it favorably to 13 Sentinels, which had probably my favorite story out of everything I played last year. I think overall I definitely liked 13 Sentinels more, but the stuff this did well it did rather well at too. In particular everything from the climax through to the end was excellent, compared to the ending of 13 Sentinels which was the only part of it that wasn't excellent (it was mostly fine, but it definitely wasn't on the same level as the first 95% of the story, which was amazing).

My biggest complaint about Starsong is that the second half kind of drags a bit until you get toward the climax. It probably didn't help that I did some non-essential stuff in the hope of getting a bit more information about the world and characters, but even without that the pacing felt a little off compared to the first half and the ending, and going around the map doing stuff started to get more tedious. Never so much that I even considered stopping playing or taking a break, but I definitely didn't expect it to pick up again at the end to the degree it did.

Aside from that I mostly liked most stuff about it though. The characters and story are interesting, but I didn't get super invested in them right away. They kind of grew on me as they got developed more and I got to see more interactions between them and when I started picking up on more parallels with other things in the story. I kind of wish certain aspects of the history/mythology were revealed a little earlier so I could've been thinking about it more of the way through, but maybe I just didn't pick up on some of it until a bit later.

I like that a lot of stuff is hinted at or strongly suggested without always being fully explained or explicitly stated, and it left me with more to think about at the end than I did during some parts of the main story itself. That includes the relationships between a lot of the characters, which tend to be a little messy. That's kind of to be expected when the main cast is three people with abandonment/neglect issues stuck on a spaceship together with nowhere else for their trauma to go.

I think overall the story is one of the better ones I've seen so far this year, but overall as a game I'd have to knock it down a bit further for the actual game parts of it getting a bit tedious at times. But if you're looking for a story-focused adventure game about Space Feng Shui you've come to the right place.

Oh also because I forgot to fit it in somewhere earlier I'm kind of annoyed that the voice acting defaulted to Japanese, because I didn't realize at first that it's from Taiwan and I could've been playing in Mandarin all along instead of not until the very end. I might replay it at some point with it set to that right from the beginning, since it would be interesting to see how it plays out knowing everything I know about the story that I do now.

#opus: echo of starsong #opus series #mentioned: #13 sentinels: aegis rim