(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* Nothing happened while I was in a BG3 shaped hole, right? Very little time has passed?

* I am currently listening to an interview with Astarion's VA who worked on the character for 4 years, which was just how Larian did their process. Man, they went hard in so many ways. It's kinda funny how Josh Strife Hayes was so excited to be at the 7 hour reveal event of the game a few months ago and I didn't even care enough to realize it was D&D related and now, yeah, kinda into it. Writers, VAs and directors all worked together for years to nail things down, just insane.

* Debating whether to make a follow up post to TransMediaClub because not much to post about except for how careful they were with language at times. I did spend some time running down details about a minor character who is a drag queen. Some gamer bros don't get that there isn't a difference between a drag queen and a trans person, so I'd heard that game had a trans character. So, I did a long quest line involving dark rituals under a city to find all the pieces of a murdered clown to get all her dialogue. And also I looked up the VA who is also a drag queen and who also refers to the character as a drag queen. Yeah, 0 sign that this character is trans. I put extra hours into the game to check on a lot of things, but not sure if that is enough for a post.

Astarion's VA said they worked with trans people on staff to refine things about the custom character to sure that all felt good for various gender expression and I'd *like* to run down all the Tav VAs and see if any of them are NB, but not even IMDB has a full list of al the Tav voices so unless something gets mentioned in a interview I happen to catch, I don't know it I can run this down.

* Also, Astarion's VA is a gift in this essay I will...

* In non-BG3 related life updates I.... (file not found)

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

It's absolutely wild how much effort went into this game!

Tracking down full voice casts for games seems a lot more difficult than it should be! Even for games that have what should be a fairly manageable cast list, there are a lot of places with incomplete credits.

[olivermoss]

It really shouldn't be this hard. When I tried googling most of my results were other people also asking for a list of Tav voices

[mistressofmuses]

It shouldn't be! And ugh, that is the *worst*, when you have a question, and all you can find instead of an answer is other people also asking.

"Comprehensive credits for voice actors" seems like the sort of thing that should "obviously" be easy to find, and something you'd sort of expect a good resource for, but wiki and imdb are very incomplete. There is a voice actor database that sometimes comes up when I've searched for a specific character, but I don't know that it's always accurate or complete.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's weird how obtuse it is considering how important - and controversial - crediting has been in video games.

[mistressofmuses]

There's that, too. There has been a lot of controversy over credits, and so many LOST credits from ye olde game days... it seems like there'd be better standards now.

(It seems like it shouldn't fall to individual fans combing through the game credits to find the vocal credits, and hoping those were complete and readable and easy to parse, AND then sharing that information somewhere.
I mean, for some inexplicable reason Nier: Replicant had all of the credits (not just VAs, but all credits for every part of the game) in a single list alphabetical by the person's first name, which made it hard to find a specific credit. Other games have a general "voice actors" section, but with no information about which characters were voiced by which person.)

[olivermoss]

I know someone did a great video essay on how a lot of iconic video game music that gets remixed a lot was all by forgotten female musicians. I didn't even get around to that one, but it's one of many reasons why crediting is important. There has been a lot of problems with work on video games going uncredited and, like.... *gestures to HBumberGuy's 2 hour Oof video* work theft is so lucrative

[mistressofmuses]

The two hour Oof video is great. And defunctland's one about the Disney sound. (Not video game, but still, something regarding lost credit.)

I don't know that I've seen the video you're talking about re: uncredited female musicians and composers, but I remember SOMETHING about that, and how a lot of older games with really iconic scores were made by people who never get credit for the originals. Later remixes and rerecording artists wind up with credit for the originals due to misconceptions or just because they COULD take credit, because no one would be able to check them.

There is so much work that goes utterly uncredited... in the "modern day" when we both know that history, AND are supposed to have every bit of possible information available with a click... it seems surprising in the worst ways that so much info is so difficult to find.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, history on a lot of art is being lost all the time unless people are, well, are like the people behind those channels. So many things we talk about come back to stolen credit

[mistressofmuses]

I appreciate the people who can do that sort of deep dive into sourcing credit! But it's outrageous how *many* things go uncredited, or misattributed to the wrong people. How many things are misattributed without us even knowing it? Whether deliberately as an attempt to take credit, or by mistake because no one realized otherwise?

It twists my brain.