[Feedback] Wuk Lamat's English Voice

[KuroMaboroshi]

I think the only people who think it sounds too manly are the ones being transphobic. The ones who think the delivery or emotion are off are the ones who have a more legitimate criticism.

The transphobic people are the ones who purposefully misgender or deadname her, not the ones who simply express criticism of the voice in game. If they don't like the voice, that's that. Nothing wrong with it and nothing to be done about it. You can't feel wrong. Even if their point of criticism is that they wanted a more feminine voice for the character, that doesn't mean they wish harm upon the VA or want to treat her badly. Sure, there are some bad actors in this thread, but to put out such blanket accusations is not helpful.

As another user put it earlier...

And thus has the well been poisoned and camps set up for people to preemptively fall into based on their political views, rather than their opinions on a subpar performance. The modern internet sure is a marvel.

I want to give most people here the benefit of the doubt and assume they just want to honestly discuss their opinions of the VA's work, not the VA's personage. Tastes vary, and there is no such thing as "feeling wrong". If you enjoyed the voice, okay. If you didn't enjoy the voice, that's also okay.
Sure, there are definitely some transphobes trying to stirr up drama in the thread and the OP clearly started this with trolling intent knowing it would happen, but to assume everyone criticising the voicework to belong to that crowd is neither helpful nor fair. At the same time, the other side accusing those defending the voicework of only doing so out of similarly external reasons is equally silly. I wish we could all just take a deep breath and calm down, but alas, this is the internet and the official forums to boot.


On the actual topic, I don't really have a horse in this race, as my native German's dub is awful (mostly its utterly poor voice direction) and when I started playing I had a choice to switch to one of two foreign languages whose sound I was at least somewhat used to - sorry, French. I vibed with the JP dub more than the EN one and have stuck with it since, grating though JP Tataru is on my ears and I wish I could have something closer to the English dub for her - you win some, you lose some.
I've not listened to the English dub much since, outside of trailer material and watching some streamers who play with EN dub, so for what it's worth, the only time I've heard Wuk Lamat's English VA so far was during the Fanfest trailer, where I thought she sounded fine.

The one thing I do want to push back a bit against is the "compare it to JP" argument that keeps cropping up. Fact is:

Square Enix does not and has never tried to keep character interpretations by their VAs consistent across languages.

This is true for both long-established characters and newcomers alike. Some examples have already been named in the thread, and I'd like to add Tataru, Alisaie, or even a really minor part like the magician's voice in P9(S) to the list.
JP Tataru sounds nothing like EN Tataru, EN Alisaie emphasises completely different traits in her performance than JP Alisaie, the P9 magician soul is a young witch in JP and Gruntilda from Banjo-Kazooie in EN. Not to mention EN had the whole VA cast swap after ARR, none of whom tried to sound much like the character's previous VA. And who knows how it is with the French and German dubs. Many of these characters are well liked, in spite of these glaring differences that if we subscribe to "diffent = bad" they should receive an equal amount of pushback.
Best faith assumption is that those interpretations, while not the same, did not bother people, so they feel no need to compare in the first place and now that it does, they start doing so and suddenly notice those differences.

If so, that's okay. I hope they compare a few of the other voices and will find that this is not about Wuk Lamat's voice, but about all of them. If that's a problem, then the criticism should be directed at this phenomenon in general.