Throughout July, "Dust White Forbidden Zone" was at the center of the whirlpool of public opinion. Some people love this game and applaud her, and some people hate this game and want her to go out of business as soon as possible. Any event that is caught up in this vortex will turn into a battlefield, and the latest battlefield has reached the dubbing circle.
On July 17, the production team of "Dusty White Forbidden Zone" issued an announcement on Weibo, saying that it would replace the voice actors (hereinafter referred to as CVs) of 13 characters.
The reason given in the announcement for the substitution is: "Because the future development direction of the game is contrary to the career development direction of dubbing directors and some dubbing teachers. Finally, he deliberately added: "In order to ensure the sense of substitution, the production team will not disclose the corresponding CV list on any platform inside and outside the game in the future." ”
For two-dimensional players, CV is an important part of character building. Mass voice actor changes often turn into an operational mishap, leading to bad reviews and quitting. However, when the incident broke out in the "two-dimensional Sarajevo" of "Dust White Forbidden Zone", the rhythm immediately changed from changing CV to "it is a matter of the survival of the spicy game".
After all, all the controversies about dusty white will turn to the spicy game as soon as possible. (There is still a lot of controversy about the definition of spicy games/ML, and this article uses ML to refer to male-oriented games in general.) ）
What exactly are players arguing about?
Before the official announcement, there was already a foreshadowing of the change of CV. Some players recalled that when the game anniversary event was celebrated some time ago, CV Yanning, who belonged to the strange world, did not participate in the event, and its character voice was synthesized by the existing dubbing.
Although Yan Ning later responded to the player's inquiry in the live broadcast, saying that the contract had expired before the anniversary, and not participating in the dubbing was a normal termination of cooperation. But the white players feel that this is just a PR rhetoric.
Subsequently, some players found a trumpet on Zhihu that was suspected to be one of the founders of Qixiang Tianwai, Peng Bo, who said that the dubbing content of "Dust White Forbidden Zone" stepped on the edge of the red line, which may affect CV's career development.
Then another player found more speeches that the Strange Outer Executives had to say. Although these statements were not named, the attitude towards the marginal content was generally resistant.
Based on this, some people feel that the dusty CVs have been under some kind of pressure, so they are "forced" to quit dubbing work.
Soon, Strange Sounds became the main target of the Dust White player. Because Qixiang Tianwai cooperated with miHoYo in the early years, it can be said that it was developed to a large extent with the support of miHoYo. And this incident started from the fact that the CV of Qixiang Tianwai took the lead in not participating in the dubbing.
In the Dusty Community, the final version of the incident became: miHoYo relied on his influence on Qixiang Tianwai and let Qixiang Tianwai take the lead in boycotting the dubbing of "Dusty White Forbidden Zone", resulting in the game being forced to change a large number of CVs and dubbing directors.
The incident was characterized in the dusty white community as "another attempt by external forces to bring down dusty". In the eyes of the players, Dusty White is a victim of business warfare, while the methods of competitors are despicable. Voices in the community that are dissatisfied with the CV change are also suppressed, and expressing dissatisfaction will be labeled as anti-string and hostile forces.
The above is a combing of the events that happened within the dusty community. Outside the circle, however, the situation is different. For changing CVs, some people don't care, some people watch the excitement, and some people find evidence to refute it. For example, some people in a forum have statistics that most of the CVs who withdrew from dubbing this time belong to the Beijing area, not the "Shanghai circle" as the white players say.
Some people also pointed out that among the CVs who withdrew from dubbing this time, only Yan Ning belonged to the strange world.
Therefore, some people feel that it is untenable for dusty players to package the CV change event as "someone suppressed". Another version of the matter may be: "Dusty Forbidden Zone" added work content outside the contract to the CV in order to establish the character of the ML game; Or the official CV is just to save costs.
Of course, these are just inferences from netizens, but they are not traceless. Some people seized the last paragraph of the official announcement "There will be no follow-up CV list" as the basis, saying that the official non-public list is to prepare for finding cheap CVs and preparing for the production of more marginal content.
In the eyes of dusty players, external remarks are all suppression and smearing of games, and it is proof that opponents "can't see ML games well and want ML games to die". For them, not releasing the CV means that Dusty wants to give more benefits to players. At the same time, this is also the "unhealthy trend" of Chenbai using practical actions to resist the idolization of CV and the fandom, and let CV return to the original intention of dubbing.
In the course of the incident, most of the external CV's statements were relatively neutral, mainly "not believing or spreading rumors". The strange sound of the sky is held up in the tuyere, largely because of its relationship with miHoYo. Seeing that the strange sound was caught up in the rhythm, many anti-rice groups quickly joined the rhythm, taking the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with "Genshin Impact" and other rice-oriented games.
Like all the previous rhythms that happened to "Dusty Forbidden Zone", the CV change event eventually became a battlefield between the ML party and the anti-ML party, and between rice fans and anti-rice people. After the quarrel, many comments argued not about the truth, but about the position.
Astringent Pandora's box
When players with different positions in the second dimension are playing against each other at a high level, there is another discussion going on outside the community. It involves whether CVs have the freedom to choose dubbed content, and behind it is still the question of how the entire two-dimensional culture is cut from soft pornography.
As far as "Dusty Forbidden Zone" is concerned, the concerns of some CV practitioners are not groundless. ML games will involve more or less edge welfare content, how to grasp the degree of this, so as to satisfy players without touching the red line, which is a test of the level of the production team.
Although the current "Dust White Forbidden Zone" is still in the formal range, she is now at the forefront of testing the bottom line of the policy. Many gameplay designs that once "disappeared" in the second game have now been recovered. For example, physical touch interaction, in the early years, many second tours were done, but later everyone didn't do it because of the iron fist. The same goes for the marriage system.
The second game does not do certain content, not because of lack of technology, nor because it "ignores the needs of ML players", but because of various restrictions or out of risk avoidance considerations.
Now "Dusty Forbidden Zone" is willing to risk touching the red line to do some design, and its courage is commendable. The "invisible hand" of the market has also given a huge return to this game project that almost died with huge traffic. Even if the service is suspended tomorrow, there is a high probability that the dust will return to the capital, and this wave of gambling will not be lost.
But the victory of a game in "Dust White Forbidden Zone" does not mean that the whole two-dimensional is good.
For the entire two-dimensional, "Dusty Forbidden Zone" actually reopens that Pandora's box. It's no wonder that some people say that it took seven or eight years for the domestic two-dimensional to get rid of the soft label, and "Dusty White Forbidden Zone" pulled it back on its own. Now that nothing has happened to the game, it is that Huoshu Yinhua is thriving, but as a product standing on the edge of the red line, no one knows whether Dusty White will overturn one day and become a "typical case" in the news channel.
Once the iron fist comes, users may only lose the game suspension, resource failure, and at most recharge and waste, but for the staff involved, it is a real professional black spot. And if CV directly outputs astringent content, it may be imprisoned.
Looking back, there have been such cases. In the well-known "beautiful Chinese audio novel" case more than ten years ago, Ye Qiantong (pseudonym), known as "the first voice actor in China", became "the first suspect in the case of online production and dissemination of obscene audio in China".
According to media reports at the time, she was not even a formal employee of the company involved, but only worked part-time remotely, and eventually became one of the defendants. Today, the content of her voice acting is still circulating, but it will not bring her any financial benefit and will not help her in her career development.
At that time, this case and related reports also put a very negative label on the term "voice actor". Because the two-dimensional content imported from Japan in the early years originally contained a large number of restricted-level audio content, and there were always people selling cross-line resources in the name of two-dimensional, resulting in the dubbing circle related to two-dimensional being demonized and stigmatized for a time, and being rectified many times.
This stereotype was not gradually broken until the rise of domestic two-dimensional games. ACG CV finally has a broader career development path, instead of just entertaining itself in a small circle. Many CVs and studios cherish the current environment, so it is understandable for practitioners to have concerns when facing an uncertain project like "Dusty Forbidden Zone". As long as both parties act according to the contract, it is understandable for CV to withdraw voluntarily.
In addition to policy risks, from a purely business perspective, female CV practitioners also face an additional pressure: that is, astringent content does have an impact on personal career development.
This can be seen in Japan. The Japan voice actor industry has been mature for decades, but even so, there is still an invisible career dividing line between restricted and all-age voice actors. Many restricted-level games, when adapted into all-age animations, will be replaced with more well-known first-line voice actors, and the original restricted-level voice actors can only give way.
I remember talking about it in some interviews, and at the time of the most involution, not all new voice actors in Japan voluntarily dubbed restricted content, and many times job opportunities were scarce, so they could only receive jobs with restricted content. Newcomers who become famous tend to gradually break away from the inner world, and even then their career development will be limited.
Most of the well-known voice actors will change their vests when they restrict the content, and they will focus on an ostrich strategy of "even if they are heard, as long as they don't admit it, they will treat it as nothing". This kind of behavior of not having three hundred taels of silver here is because there is a clear boundary between the inner realm and the outer realm. Like Yu Asakawa who generously uses his real name dubbing to limit the content and enjoy himself, it is a case after all.
With the arrival of the wave of voice actor idolization in recent years, the binding of voice actors and roles has become more powerful, and the career dividing line between the outside and the inside has become more stringent. The new generation of idol voice actors will actively avoid bad content from the rookie stage in order to create a personality. The capital side also doesn't want to repeat events like LoveLive, Takasaka Honoka, CV Nitta Megumi (she was revealed to have gone to the sea).
Although the Nitta Huihai incident is not a problem with the dubbing content, we can feel from this incident that astringent content is a negative for female CVs. On the one hand, male consumers want CV to provide welfare content, but on the other hand, they are only willing to spend money on CV without any "bad deeds". From this point of view, the choice of practitioners is actually just following the guidance of the "invisible hand".
There is nothing new in the world
Is it a good thing for voice actors to idolize, and should Chinese dubbing also learn to follow the path of Japan's idolization? I don't have answers to these questions, and ultimately it's up to the market to decide.
It can only be said that every practitioner has the freedom to choose a career path, whether to be an idol or a behind-the-scenes worker, whether to earn money or seek fame, it is all personal freedom. And consumers also have their own freedom, which is to spend their money on the things they like.
Since last year, the vigorous ML movement has been vigorously launched, and the underlying logic is also based on this. The ML movement calls on players to pay for their favorite content, to stimulate production with payment, and to strive for manufacturers' resources to favor themselves.
However, the CV swap event uncovers a loophole in this logic, revealing the invisible elephant in the room.
If the lack of supply of ML content in the market is a problem of money, then players only need to pay for it, and there will be services when there is more money. But what if the reality is that someone doesn't want to be involved in producing certain content, regardless of how much money the player spends, and the decision is made out of value judgment rather than economic considerations?
For example, in the CV industry, most of the CVs of female roles are female practitioners. Of course, some of them are open-minded, but there are also concerns and resistance. Some extreme players can shout "expel female copywriters", but can players expel female CVs?
This also explains why the dusty community must interpret this CV change incident as "commercial suppression", because the logic of ML movement can only be established under the premise of acknowledging the business logic (that is, you can buy everything for money and get services if you pay). Only by admitting that the incident is a commercial suppression can the player say: "It's not that CVs don't want to dub, it's that they were forced by some forces to leave." ”
But the question is, what if the CV doesn't want to dub something and opts out?
It can only be said that in this incident, most of the CVs were very professional and respected the players enough. Some CVs also expressed their support for the audience by expressing their love for the characters, and they also received a lot of thanks in the comment section.
As a player, don't live up to such kindness. What kind of work is CV willing to take, this is CV's dedication, express gratitude. CV is reluctant to take on any work, that is also CV's freedom, express blessings.
The so-called "movements" of cutting, isolating, and blocking these positions do not solve any problems, but only intensify contradictions and condone speculation by manufacturers. ACG reconciliation still relies on respect, understanding, tolerance, and seeking common ground while reserving differences. Of course, it is difficult to do this, and in today's online environment, it is even hopeless that it will never be possible.
But it is equally unrealistic to want to put all these aside and solve all problems purely with money. No one should forget that it is not machines that provide content and services to everyone, but people who have independent thinking. As long as people have their own ideas, they will have different three views, and there will be times when money fails.
Isn't there a saying that people who try to buy everything for money can only attract fraudsters in the end.