How The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio Captures the Reality of Gig Work – This Week in Anime

senpai July 7, 2024

0 4 9 minutes read

How The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio Captures the Reality of Gig Work - This Week in Anime

The new anime series is far more forthright about the idol and seiyū industry, from maintaining relevance on social media to subsisting on substandard wages.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Steve

Lucas, I’ve had my fill of controversial topics over the past couple of weeks. This time, let’s stick to debating something nice and low-stakes. Something that would feel right at home in a Seinfeld opening monologue. So here we go: should butcher shops be selling fried food? Yes or no?

Lucas

I mean, far be it from me to tell a small business, sole proprietorship, or independent contractor how to do their job, but I worry they’re doing too much! It’s a shame that the market is such that butcher shops must sell fried food to remain competitive and solvent! Perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue with better labor conditions or reframed consumer expectations, but that’s not the landscape butcher shop owners are working in…

Okay, I was just going to say “yes,” but that doesn’t make for much of a column in retrospect. Plus, you seem to have tapped into another thematic well that The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio has been drinking from. So yeah, let’s talk labor. The famously uncontroversial subject is labor.

Oof, I might have to underline the “The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network” disclaimer this week!

So, it might be best to discuss how The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio explores these issues in its first three episodes before bridging out into the real-world conditions that inspire these themes or even how other series tackle them.

Works for me! Voice Actor Radio isn’t the only series to broach these subjects, nor is it necessarily the most adept at doing so. However, it is currently airing, plus it’s crammed several facets into these early episodes, so I think it’s a great springboard. I enjoy how it leads with our protagonist’s double life as a student and part-time seiyuu.

Oh yeah! Out of the gate, Voice Actor Radio is great at setting up the kinds of scrutiny that its leads face as people with public-facing jobs and how that engenders anxiety, being overly critical of themselves, and hostile relationships with their peers.

I actually found the bluntness with which this anime raised these issues to be pretty refreshing!

…Even if it undercuts that message with some pretty out-of-place fanservice just moments prior.

Ugh, the highs and lows of this show. I love it when these kids confront the realities of working in the entertainment industry while having big feelings they’re not sure how to process for each other, but I hate it when they grope each other under the most contrived circumstances imaginable.

What really trips me up about that bath scene is just how tonally dissonant it is with the rest of the show. It’s strange that an anime that straight up acknowledges how young people’s youth and inexperience are commodified and exploited by a problematic industry and then just commodifies and exploits a lead character for the viewer to ogle. That’s weird!

Isn’t that just the catch-22 of writing a critique of the medium you are working in? To a certain inevitable degree, you will be guilty of the sins you condemn. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be as cognizant as possible, but that’s how it goes. And to Voice Actor Radio‘s credit, aside from that scene, it’s been pretty focused on sympathizing with its characters and highlighting the myriad stresses of the entertainment industry. I’m a big fan of the writer with the perpetual bags under her eyes because that’s me.

Never have I felt more represented as a writer than when Mirei Asaka showed up on screen!
And now that my griping about the male gaze is over, wow, does Voice Actor Radio pack in a lot of critique about working as a VA/idol or about working in entertainment more broadly. Multiple characters are working themselves to clear exhaustion, numerous mentions of salaries being unsustainable for people new to the industry, and a consistent fan/producer voice that places the value of the end product over the wellbeing of the people making it.

That’s all good shit!

To me, the show’s core strength so far has been the casual frankness with which it broaches these subjects. It hasn’t gotten particularly deep or serious about any of them, but subtextually, it’s been layering a lot. For instance, while it doesn’t explicitly explain any of this, it implicitly shows us how the girls must cultivate and utilize their social media presence to support their voice-acting work.

Which is one of my biggest frustrations about the entertainment industry! How people always need to be on brand and feel the need to commodify their personhood. Nobody should get passed over for a job due to their social media metrics, and I sincerely believe Twitter would have died a year and a half ago if so many people weren’t motivated to maintain the clout they’ve built up there.

That’s indisputable if you ask me. So many people’s careers have been built on services like Twitter, Patreon, Etsy, etc. And almost all of these services have become demonstrably worse and more unfriendly to their users, partly because they’ve come to dominate these spaces. Artists and creators are beholden to them. At one point, they might have promised disruption and an equal playing field, but time has reconstituted the same old power dynamics of an underpaid majority tossed around by a wealthy elite who couldn’t care less.

All while that exploited majority turns their ire and criticism towards one another because it’s infinitely easier to have a tangible impact on another person who’s struggling than those who profit from our infighting.

The end of the third episode gets extremely “crabs in a bucket” in a very authentic and familiar way. It’s a great character beat for Yasumi too. I love her inner monologue telling her to shut up as she unloads on Yuhi because who hasn’t been in that situation?

Yeah, that scene rang true to me as well. I know this is true in all facets of society under late-stage capitalism, but in entertainment, it’s super easy to equate another person’s success to your failure. The capitalistic ideas of society are a meritocracy and linear professional growth that doesn’t gel with any creative field.

And it’s rough when, like Yasumi, you keep putting yourself out on the line only to fail to hook anything. All job searching is a crapshoot nowadays, especially for the arts/entertainment industry.

Using myself as an example, I only got this gig here through the sheer luck of being a Twitter mutual with the right people at the right time. I’m not the most talented writer or an anime luminary—I’m just a guy.

Hey, don’t sell yourself short. By virtue of creative fields being entirely subjective, each and every one of us here at ANN can claim to be the best gosh dang entertainment writer in the world, and there’s no way for anyone to disprove that!

But yeah, it is rough out there right now. My friends in production say that the streaming bubble bursting means that there are more people with entertainment experience than shows/movies/animations to work on, and things aren’t much better in entertainment writing. Even good and super-established people are getting laid off, and there’s only so much freelance work to go around.

And that’s not to mention that freelance life, even in optimal conditions, is rough! I’m fortunate to have a day job supporting my basic needs and leaving enough time to wax poetic about anime as a side gig. Barring a miracle, I don’t believe I’d be able to support myself in writing alone. The whole field is so fickle and through no fault of the writers themselves.

That’s bad because the field shouldn’t only be open to people like me who have a safety net. If more people could follow their passions and make a decent living from them, we would have more diverse voices and, in return, a richer critical environment.

That’s another facet Voice Actor Radio touches on as well. Yasumi is lucky enough to have a supportive mom, and while Yuhi’s mom is less enthusiastic, she’s still comfortably wealthy with or without her idol career.

And I think that’s why so many people feel so cynical about the future of digital and traditional media right now. When the industry isn’t sustainable for large swaths of the people working in it on a micro-level, it becomes really shaky on a macro level. I’m freelancing more than ever now that I’m in between full-time gigs, but I don’t know anyone my age who’s making it as a full-time writer right now, and that doesn’t bode well for folks younger than me who are trying to do this.

I also appreciate how grounded Voice Actor Radio is and how it treats working in entertainment as a gig like any other. This series is living in the shadow of Oshi no Ko, but I think that season of anime sensationalized acting as a profession as much as it critiqued the entertainment industry, which lessened its overall impact for me.

Voice Actor Radio could just as easily be about teenagers struggling at part-time jobs in any other profession, and I dig that approach and attitude.

Oshi no Ko certainly has…a lot…going on besides its industry critiques. Because of those aspects, it stands out as a gonzo pulp thriller, but that messaging can get muddled. Even if the messaging is very on point at times.

Girlish Number, on the other hand, is more in line with Voice Actor Radio‘s vibe, but more acerbic and cynical. I like it!

Haha, you’ll be able to speak to anime that tackle working in different elements of the anime industry better than I can. Still, I think there is a trend of slice-of-life series working as PR for the topics they’re covering. It’s great to hear that there are anime out there that are as fed up with industry nonsense as I am, though!

If we zoom out a bit, the premise of Zombie Land Saga is a darkly funny example of this, too. Not even death stops Franchouchou’s talent and passion from being exploited. However, it’s a bit less funny if we think about this in the context of holograms and AI being used to reproduce an artist’s likeness and labor without their consent, especially if they’re dead.

We made it pretty far into this chat, and I think it’s finally time for me to get on my VTuber soap box. This new idol industry permeation is facing all these problems AND MORE! While I’ll be the first to acknowledge that VTubing has given plenty of people an opportunity to make a solid amount of money through a side hustle, the culture isn’t great and, at a top level, lets the industry brass separate people from their labor to an incredible degree.

Yeah, I think the big demystifying point to keep in mind is that no matter what these gigs are—VTubing, voice acting, writing, freelancing, idol stuff, etc.—at the end of the day, they’re jobs. They each have their quirks, but they’re still jobs. And try as we might, neither Japan nor the US has figured out a way to decouple the acquisition of money from the acquisition of life’s basic needs. Once something becomes a job, you mold a part of yourself to it and its “necessary” evils. It doesn’t work the other way around.

While some of that is a manifestation of unchangeable parts of the human condition, there are so many things that could be done on a social and governmental level to address these issues. Off the top of my head, universal basic income, socialized medicine, and a greater proliferation of organized labor bodies would all help tremendously in alleviating these evils.

I frequently have other thoughts that I’ll refrain from spelling out in an article published for the general public to read. Still, yes, at the bare minimum, more socialist policies would do a great deal of good, making these industries more sustainable, more diverse, and less beholden to a callous capitalist class.

Hey, I’d love to hear how you’d address longstanding systemic societal woes, but I understand that might fall outside the scope of this column. And don’t worry, Yumiko! Before too long, you’ll be too burnt out to worry about not getting enough work! That’s how everyone working in the biz deals with dry spells!

There’s no business like show business!