Graha Voice Actor Change?

[Emerest]

It's hardly psychoanalysis when you've got people apparently feeling sick about the fact he sounds different. I understand it may be exaggeration on their parts but there is a very obvious line between "I respect this voice actor and like their work as this character" and "My life has been genuinely impacted by a casting change to the point it is causing me genuine distress."

Being in the latter camp, unfortunately, reeks of parasocial obsession and isn't healthy. Hence why I'm suggesting people chill a bit instead of continuing to feed into each other's bad feelings by doom and glooming for thirty consecutive pages.

[Oizen]

^^My personal favorite response from this thread to "muh budget" concerns.

I guess I just think you and I have different expectations for Square Enix and how they treat their products.

For me those expectations are "none" and yours are clearly higher than that.

[Doopliss]

It's hardly psychoanalysis when you've got people apparently feeling sick about the fact he sounds different. I understand it may be exaggeration on their parts but there is a very obvious line between "I respect this voice actor and like their work as this character" and "My life has been genuinely impacted by a casting change to the point it is causing me genuine distress."

Being in the latter camp, unfortunately, reeks of parasocial obsession and isn't healthy. Hence why I'm suggesting people chill a bit instead of continuing to feed into each other's bad feelings by doom and glooming for thirty consecutive pages.

At the risk of sounding cruel: How people here conduct themselves within their personal lives should be none of our business. What actually matters is not using that information to tell them they have no reason to seek transparency in regards to a product they paid for. People are well within their right to expect transparency from SE, regardless of how emotional they may or may not feel in the moment.

I apologize, again, if you truly are speaking your concerns from the heart, but to me your post had read as using a select few responders' personal emotions to be dismissive about the issue at hand. Still, I'll try to take your word for it and leave my reply at that. I don't want to be the cause of another derailing.

[KiraRavens]

Don't get me wrong, I get that a potential recast for a beloved character is something that can be disheartening.

But also I feel I've gotta urge a lot of you to tone it down a bit. Analysing every facet of this guy's life in a bid to prove it's not because he's busy is a dangerously high level of obsession, well into the territory of being parasocial. Same with clamouring for a response from SE when they are, unfortunately, under no obligation to give any at all. As for the thing about how he's not taking questions about XIV, that's pretty common? Busy guy possibly under an NDA doesn't want to engage with a site that routinely farms drama for clicks, wowee.

Finally, voice lines aren't recorded the literal day of the patch. We've no idea how far back this was recorded, the conditions and so on.

I don't think that looking for reasons as to what could have caused a voice actor change in a game when all parties involved remain silent is even remotely the same as being "parasocial" with the VA - which is the feeling of somehow being intimately connected to a person who doesn't even know you.

No one here claims they know Jonathan Bailey.
No one here feels any sort of intimate connection to him or claims knowledge of his personal life.
Everything discussed in here is based on public knowledge/timelines and things he has publicly said in interviews, and it's being discussed with the sole intention of gaining an idea about what could be the reason for the different voice in 7.4.
People have even stressed multiple times that there's a degree of doubt regarding his previous statements exactly because we don't know him and can only assume in good faith that he indeed meant what he said.

The people here aren't obsessed with JB at all.
We are a bunch of people who are worried our gaming experience might significantly change and who came here looking for reasons to believe that won't happen after all.

[ZephyrMenodora]

. Hence why I'm suggesting people chill a bit instead of continuing to feed into each other's bad feelings by doom and glooming for thirty consecutive pages.

We aren't trying to feed anyone's bad feelings. We already felt bad the moment we listened to the acting in this patch, and are trying to share information and keep up visibility in hopes of being addressed by SE - like it would have had this happened in JP.

I'm sure the EN/NA audience pays a good portion of this game's bills, and we should receive the same polite consideration as any of their other markets.

For some gaming companies based in Asia, the EN/NA market spends even more money than the market in their home country. I don't feel like digging through a financial right before bed, but if it broke down this information I would not be surprised if that was the case with FFXIV as well.

I don't think that looking for reasons as to what could have caused a voice actor change in a game when all parties involved remain silent is even remotely the same as being "parasocial" with the VA - which is the feeling of somehow being intimately connected to a person who doesn't even know you.

Sometimes I get the impression that people recently learned the term "parasocial" and are now at the point where they keep trying to use it in a sentence. The number of people who fling that around regarding this issue as a buzzword is regrettably quite high on other platforms.

[paradisea]

Analysing every facet of this guy's life in a bid to prove it's not because he's busy is a dangerously high level of obsession, well into the territory of being parasocial.

So I'm gonna adress this directly, because I'm aware of the fact people are sharing screenshots of my post in social media and ripping my character to shreds based on the most bad faith assumptions they can fathom.

Neither I, nor anybody here, was "analysing every facet of this guy's life in a bid to prove it's not because he's busy".

The point made was a simple one:

Bailey has always been a busy man, so while being busy may, of course, be the reason he needs to step away, be it permanently or temporarily (and that it is, obviously, absolutely fine if he needs to) it is not some great news people here aren't aware of. The reason I included anything relating to his recent projects is because people kept bringing it up like everyone here wasn't already aware, often among waves of misinformation of when these projects started and ended.

The point was clarification of frequently brought up misinformation, not some twisted attempt at directly shouting at the man "you're not busy enough to drop this voice acting role, so get back here now!". I find that to be a completely bad faith reading of a post that was doing nothing more than relay publicly available information so that people would stop coming here to derail conversations by implying Bailey finished filming Wicked two months ago.

Additionally, I want to say to people out there (which I don't know if you're included among), that neither I nor nobody here "compiled and posted his schedule down to the minute like a mob of creeps". An user here, in an effort to clear misinformation, posted on Bluesky a timeline of Bailey's publicly known projects—something you can find literally on his Wikipedia page—and laid them in a list along the release dates of the FF14 patches he participated on. It was literally separated by months and years. Not even days, let alone minutes, let alone anything involving Bailey's private life.

No one went digging into minutiae of Bailey's life to write down an extensively detailed schedule of his everyday life. That's insane.

It is, once again, people jumping the worst possible conclusions and painting the people here as parasocial lunatics based on their impression of isolated posts in thirty page thread. I think it'd do many of you well to remember that, much like Bailey is a real breathing human being, I am too. So is everyone here. I don't exist in isolation in this forum, and I see what people have said about me elsewhere. I encourage you to be more considerate of the people behind the screen, and to try and least read some of the thread to get further context as to why a post like mine was even written.

Same with clamouring for a response from SE when they are, unfortunately, under no obligation to give any at all.

This is where I'll simply agree to disagree. I believe costumers are owed transparency from the companies they give their hard-earned money to. Moreover, this entire debate is also heavily about the fact that the ENG community is not afforded the same transparency the JP community is. Like many have iterated, we'd never have had to speculate on anything, because SE would have reacted and communicated with their JP fanbase immediately—especially because VA work is arguably an even bigger deal on that side, and they'd be livid to be in the same situation the EN fanbase is now.

Finally, voice lines aren't recorded the literal day of the patch. We've no idea how far back this was recorded, the conditions and so on.

I'm unsure why you're pointing this out like we aren't aware of it. We know patches are recorded in advance, but we certainly don't know when 7.4 precisely was recorded, hence why my post literally has the sentence "We can't account for how the guy was through the whole year, nor do we know when precisely 7.4 was recorded" in it.

The point of giving sources to moments throughout this year where he made public appearances and his voice sounded fine was twofold: to clear things up to people who said that he was, through this whole year somehow, still with his voice strained because of Wicked, which finished filming nearly two years ago, as well as the "swollen tongue" incident from the BAFTA interview that people kept bringing up as a possible recent cause to this when it was explicitly a 2018-2019 issue.

Lastly, I want to emphasize to all the people who are coming here from other social medias, that nobody here wants to keep Bailey hostage to this role. However, we'd like to be informed of his departure from the company we give money to instead of simply booting the game one patch and finding G'raha's voice to be not him (whether you agree that's the case or not goes beyond the point), after seven years of consistency.

If it truly comes down to Bailey stepping away from G'raha after all these years for his own reasons, I, at the very least (and I feel confident in saying this applies to everyone here), will only wish him the best in the future of his career and thank him deeply for what he's already given us. You can find this sentiment echoed multiple times through this thread, if you take the time to even skim through it. The uncertainty and anxiety most express here is of Square Enix's side, the fear of a Troy Baker situation, among other shady company practices that may have led us here and may have nothing to do with Bailey.

Our expression of how much Bailey's performance means to us is not intended to put pressure on Bailey, but on Square Enix, in the case Bailey does wish to continue but there's any sort of corporate barrier on SE's side that's stopping it from happening. Hence why we are addressing Square Enix, in their forums, and not doing something truly deranged like spamming Bailey's personal social media.

Have a good night, everyone. I'll certainly be taking a bit of a step back from here after the absolutely vile things that have been said about me over that post, but I'll keep the post up all the same, because I know many appreciated the publicly available, repeatedly iterated information compiled in it in a more digestible, organize manner for their own reference.

(As a last note, if you shared my post in your social media with the good intention of spreading the information in it to those who may be interested in it, that's alright! If you could add this post as an addendum to it, I'd appreciate it—even if I doubt it'll dissuade people who have already decided I'm a deranged, parasocial stalker who wants to cage Bailey to the voice recording booth.)

[Emerest]

Again, I'm not here to bash on the people genuinely trying to figure out what's going on with a beloved character and everything I say is out of genuine concern, as unbelievable as it may be.

So I will start with addressing my use of the term "parasocial" since that's being debated. A person can, in fact, be parasocial towards fictional people and if you are genuinely so negatively affected by a character sounding different due to reasons we don't currently understand and reacting as if this is the worst thing to ever happen to the game, then maybe that's what it is. I would like to assume it isn't, but there has been a level of fuss about this that strays far past what might be considered acceptable.

Yes, it's not my place to pry and it certainly isn't my place to judge but damn if it ain't concerning nevertheless.

As for the second thing I'd like to address, expecting transparency from SE about any issue is expecting far too much at present. They still haven't said a word about the connectivity issues affecting NA since 7.4 released and I'd assume that's a much higher priority than this is, since people being unable to play the game is far less healthy for their profit margins and so on. Shit just kinda sucks for getting answers at the moment, and being NA is suffering.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Again, I'm not here to bash on the people genuinely trying to figure out what's going on with a beloved character and everything I say is out of genuine concern, as unbelievable as it may be.

So I will start with addressing my use of the term "parasocial" since that's being debated. A person can, in fact, be parasocial towards fictional people and if you are genuinely so negatively affected by a character sounding different due to reasons we don't currently understand and reacting as if this is the worst thing to ever happen to the game, then maybe that's what it is. I would like to assume it isn't, but there has been a level of fuss about this that strays far past what might be considered acceptable.

Yes, it's not my place to pry and it certainly isn't my place to judge but damn if it ain't concerning nevertheless.

As for the second thing I'd like to address, expecting transparency from SE about any issue is expecting far too much at present. They still haven't said a word about the connectivity issues affecting NA since 7.4 released and I'd assume that's a much higher priority than this is, since people being unable to play the game is far less healthy for their profit margins and so on. Shit just kinda sucks for getting answers at the moment, and being NA is suffering.

Perhaps it shouldn't be "expecting far too much" and we should actually expect far more consideration from a company who asks us to give them money every month. The status quo of being overlooked doesn't mean we have to just shut up and accept poor customer relations and communication on their part - which this is along with the issue regarding connectivity issues.

Sitting quietly doesn't communicate that at some point their customers will just get fed up, in regards to issues like this or simply having their time wasted / mats wasted due to being booted out of the game.

Your account is from 2013, and I didn't start the game much later than you. This is a story many of us have been coming back to for over a decade of our lives. So of course we will have some attachment and interest in how it is going, like we would with any other ongoing piece of media.

No - it's not life altering, but that doesn't mean it's something we can't care about.

[CosmosNovaRose]

Have a good night, everyone. I'll certainly be taking a bit of a step back from here after the absolutely vile things that have been said about me over that post, but I'll keep the post up all the same, because I know many appreciated the publicly available information compiled in it.

Thank you for your work in consolidating information into an easily digestible read, and I'm sorry to see bad faith actors jumping at the chance to smear the community, and to call you all sorts of things for it. We are here in the forums in the hopes that we can express to Square Enix that yes, we noticed the voice changed, yes, we noticed the audio quality, and *yes*, we prefer transparency. We *do not want what happened to Troy Baker to happen again.*

I get the feeling that people see the opportunity to bash fans of G'raha Tia/Bailey because catboy popular and get tunnel vision about it.

[KiraRavens]

So I will start with addressing my use of the term "parasocial" since that's being debated. A person can, in fact, be parasocial towards fictional people and if you are genuinely so negatively affected by a character sounding different due to reasons we don't currently understand and reacting as if this is the worst thing to ever happen to the game, then maybe that's what it is. I would like to assume it isn't, but there has been a level of fuss about this that strays far past what might be considered acceptable.

My honest, good-faith opinion on this:

If you prefer to only enjoy media on a level superficial enough that it never affects you emotionally, that's great for you. And your choice.

I'd rather care about the characters in the stories I consume - deeply and unapologetically, cause ultimately it brings me way more joy than it could ever distress me, even if I am occasionally distressed because of it.
And this is my choice.
And since I assume we're both adults, I don't know you and you don't know me, you voicing your potential concern about it is rather inappropriate.