#kindlejim

sir... this is a wendy's

The only person in Begotten who was in more than just Begotten was Adolfo Vargas who was featured in a show called American Playhouse which also featured Cynthia Nixon who costarred on Sex And The City with Sarah Jessica Parker who played Kurt's boss Isabelle on Glee!

I see how that makes sense, but I’d feel dishonest about that. I don’t want to be that person who sneaks around to criticize people. I want to be able to do that publicly, to point out the racial issues without being harassed. Doing it otherwise feels like I’m taking an actual issue and turning it into a flamewar. The problem isn’t really my own art being attached to my comments, but the reaction that comes from discussing race. It being attached to my art would definitely make it harder for me as a freelance artist, but it isn’t the only issue.. and I’d hate for the people who draw exclusively white nonhuman characters to have a way to dismiss me as “just a hater”. 

HAPPY TO

Okay, kiddies, so years ago I used to be a department head at an anime con. (A little one. Knowing me will not get you preferred treatment at Otakon or anything.) And this story begins with Spike Spencer, who is a genuinely good guy, saving our asses. See, we were supposed to have a husband-and-wife pair of VAs as guests, and literally four days before the con we got this phone call: we’re so sorry, we have an unexpected funeral the day of the con.

This is not a con with a lot of money. This is a con that haggles over whether lanyards should be $3 or $5 because that two dollars actually matters to our budget (and money we spent out of pocket had to be accounted for down to the dime, because we-the-staff were also broke as shit). And we have four days to replace two of our three guests.

So the wife goes into her Rolodex, and she calls Spike, and goes “look, do me a solid, would you?” And Spike goes “sure!”

. . . and only after he agrees does he find out that although our other guest has upped his panels from two to four (including an 18+ panel, which is quite the feat for a 4Kids VA), Spike has to fill like five panels. Again, I will repeat: in four days. Con staff are doing all we can to help him out since he is so heavily helping us out, but our venue that year was a FEMA-level disaster (a whole other story unto itself), and so 95% of our time is occupied with “jesus wept blood, how do we get this place at least temporarily habitable in under a week?” and there’s not a whole lot of free time. Our con chair got together with him and said she’d bring a panel she’d previously run at Tekkoshocon, but that still left him four panels and we had nobody, literally nobody, available to review and approve a last-minute emergency panel from an attendee--we were getting to the hotel at 6am every day and leaving at 11pm, with people stepping out only to go to classes and run to McDonald’s. (When I said disaster, I meant disaster. The building was condemned about six months later, which should tell you a lot.)

So one of the panels he brought us was a voice acting panel, slated for 60 minutes. Because it was replacing a tag-team 90-minute panel, he padded it out with some stories, and because it was our last panel of the night and also 18+, he brought a bottle of wine with him. And let me begin by saying the man damn well earned that bottle of wine--already that day he’d had a Q&A panel together with our other guest, done a signing, hung out in the hotel lobby just kind of chilling with the cosplayers, and it seems to me he’d also already run a 14+ panel (basically: “We refuse to guarantee he isn’t going to swear like a sailor, but there’s no sex stuff”) right before dinner. You can imagine that as the panel went on and the wine bottle got emptier, the stories got funnier and way less appropriate.

And so we got to the Shinji story. In which we found out that until he actually voiced End of Evangelion, he had not seen End of Evangelion. As in, he was watching it for the very first time ever live, in the booth, while recording. And I will never forget this exchange as long as I live, because I genuinely think it didn’t occur to him that he put these statements in conjunction with each other and yet this is the kind of thing good con stories are made of. According to him, it went like this:

“So I saw, you know, the scene. You guys know the scene. You [indicates girl in the audience who’s shaking her head] don’t know the scene? Quick, everybody tell your neighbor what the scene is, because this is gross. [He paused long enough for all of us to get initiated. It took about 60 seconds, because nobody wanted to dwell on this.] And I got on the mic to my director Christine and said ‘Christine?’ [he was imitating a woman for her lines, but not particularly well, and in fact someone told me he kind of sounded like Shinji, which is fucking hilarious.] ‘Yes?’ ‘Is . . . he . . . . ?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And she’s . . . . ?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And we’re dubbing this part?’ ‘Yes, Spike.’ [Spike Spencer also makes some amazing faces, and unfortunately I have no picture of the NOPE face that should go here.] ‘Oooooookay.’“

So it’s already funny, because we’re trying to imagine all this going down. But then. Spike, who did I mention spent his entire day working his ass off like a mofo to help us out, is tired and tipsy and probably really just wants this to be over so he can go to bed, because it’s 11pm and his plane got in at 11am (which was actually 8am in his own timezone) and he has been working ever since. Spike takes a big gulp of wine and then a big gulp of water, probably because he did this entire conversation like he was actually recording and that can really take a toll on your throat.

And then he says:

“Another important thing to know if you’re planning to be a voice actor is that sometimes, to get a truer sound, you’ll need to mimic the action onscreen in the booth.”

I DON’T KNOW HOW WE AVOIDED A RIOT

He went on to talk about doing voice work in some sports anime (I think--I was only half paying attention because I was mouthing at the other staff did he actually just say that oh my god), and how your voice changes when you throw a baseball, but it was too late. The damage was done.