Genshin Impact CN community calls for HoYoverse to replace all English VAs amid Kinich VA controversy

The recent controversy surrounding the recast of Kinich's English VA in Genshin Impact has been a much-talked-about topic in the community for the last few days. It has now become such a popular topic that this issue has reached the Genshin Impact Chinese player base as well.

For those out of the loop, Kinich's original English voice actor, John Patneaude, was recently recast due to his prolonged absence from the game (owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike against unethical AI usage in video games). However, instead of being welcomed by the community, Kinich's new voice actor Jacob Takanashi was severely criticized by some of the other English VAs, who didn't approve of him taking the role of an artist who was on strike.

Ever since then, this controversy has been building up, and it has now reached the Chinese Genshin Impact community as well. The CN community has always been known for being very vocal when it comes to voicing their opinions — and they are now calling for HoYoverse to replace some of the "extremely unprofessional" English voice actors of Genshin Impact. Read on to find out more about this situation, including the Chinese player base's reaction to the entire controversy.

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Genshin Impact Chinese community demands that HoYoverse replace "unprofessional" English voice actors

Once news of the Kinich VA controversy reached the Chinese Genshin Impact player base, they began protesting and demanded that HoYoverse recast every single English voice actor who behaved "unprofessionally" and allegedly participated in "harassing" Kinich's new VA Jacob Takanashi.

According to posts from Weibo, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu (Chinese social media platforms), the Chinese player base has been uninstalling Genshin Impact as a form of protest against the supposed "unprofessional" behavior displayed by the English voice actors over Kinich's VA recast.

The English voice actors who are part of the SAG-AFTRA union have been asking HoYoverse to sign the SAG Interim Agreement, which would essentially make HoYoverse a union game, thus rendering it difficult for non-union VAs to continue working on it. The official SAG-AFTRA account on X has also asked HoYoverse to sign their agreement.

However, this was now received well by the Chinese community, who feels that the "Americans have been trying to bully HoYoverse." As a result, the CN community is now demanding the replacement of all SAG-AFTRA union voice actors working on Genshin Impact.

CN community's reaction to EN Kinich VA swap + EN VA's reaction to the swap (translated posts) byu/boyiqing inGenshin_Impact

Other than this demand, the Chinese player base has also not taken kindly to certain English voice actors "bullying" Kinich's new English VA Jacob Takanashi on X. Reacting to this entire issue, a certain Bilibili user by the name of 木子依-mz commented:

"Damn EN VAs are kind of crazy."

With even the Genshin Impact CN community joining in this issue, it now remains to be seen if HoYoverse takes any action about the demands placed by their core target audience, and if they actually go ahead and replace any of the other English VAs in Genshin Impact.

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