The Voice Over Nexus
(Voxus for short) is an amateur voice acting troupe. Originally called "Let's Read Homestuck", the group was formed on the MSPA forums by some Let's Players who thought it'd be fun to make a dub of Homestuck. Three years later the group numbered over thirty people and had produced over thirty hours of webcomic dubs and Let's Plays on YouTube, having branched out from being just a Homestuck-focused group, plus Occasional gaming streams. Projects they have included:
- Let's Read Homestuck
- Let's Read Paranatural
- Let's Read Supermahou
- Let's Read Monster Pulse
- Let's Read Prague Race
- Let's Read Ruby Quest
- Let's Read Undertale
VOXUS have finished some webcomic shorts, including a few Paradox Space comics, and completed a dub of Ruby Quest. Let's Read Homestuck, still the group's most popular project, went on hiatus on July 22, 2015 due to Creative Differences within the group, but the group later returned and are still airing episodes as of April 13th, 2021. Former member Tooch also did a solo dub of Problem Sleuth, but due to the aforementioned Creative Differences, the series is unlikely to be continued. Several of the groups members parted ways with the main group, two (Alex, voice of Dave, and Tooch, voice of Nanasprite, Hussie, and others) going on to re-purpose the CoLabHQ channel for their personal Let's Play channel and the main bulk of the group creating a new youtube page to host content.
Tropes of VOXUS in General
- April Fools' Day: Usually the group uploads something special for April 1st, including a video masquerading as the next episode of Let's Read Homestuck released early which was actually a video of the Let's Read Homestuck VAs reading assorted logs from the comic with the characters all switched around, and a Let's Read of the notoriously terrible Homestuck Fan Fiction, Homestuck high.
- Let's Read Homestuck uses inconsistent autotune whenever any character references the in-universe comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff to present its Stylistic Suck audibly.
- Cast Full of Gay: A good chunk of the group membership sits comfortably at various points on the Queer spectrum; Actors Allusion (Doc Scatch) is gay, Vex (Sollux) is pan, Kate is a lesbian, and that just scratches the surface.
- Compressed Adaptation: As much as possible, Voxus' Let's Reads tend to cover all of the comics except for occasional non-essential easter-eggs. The start of Act 4 of Let's Read Homestuck, however, compresses things from the comic a little, since Hussie found that many readers missed vital plot detail from the interactive walkaround flash, he made pages of the comic depicting those missed events. In the Voxus version, the opening of the flash and initial conversations are shown at the time the flash is placed in the comic, then the rest of the flash is placed where the recap panels were, an episode later.
- Dark Reprise: Non-song version; A lighter version of the same uneven, sporadic autotune used for Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is played straight in ''Let's Read Undertale," to highlight Big Bad Flowey's demonic, inhuman nature.
- Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend: Kate's girlfriend, Shaz, is the healer of Kate's Friday Night Dungeon Crawl, though does not seem to enjoy any benefits other than access to Kate's Dungeons & Dragons books. She is also assists with branding matters and marketing for Voxus.
- This gets switched around in later Friday Night Dungeoncrawls, as Kate got access to D&D Encounters, a set of premade adventures, and the DM becoming an alternating position, with the first new DM being Shaz.
- End of an Era/Wham Line - After 9 months with no videos, Alex and Tooch released a video rebranding the Co Lab HQ channel as their personal Let'sPlay channel. Backlash from this, involving a post explaining some of the backstory behind the CoLabHQ split, resulted in the original video being taken down, and they later uploaded A new video in cooperation with Voxus a video explaining that Voxus and they had come to an agreement on how to move forward.
- Hilarious Outtakes: Six videos worth of them. Almost all from Let's Read Homestuck, since the sheer amount and complexity of the dialogue tends to lead to many line flubs.
- Of note is Vespa, who has managed to get an entire video to herself.
- Larynx Dissonance: In Let's Read Homestuck, Nannasprite, an old lady, is played by male VA Tooch, minor young male characters in Homestuck and Paranatural as well as some other short comic dubs, are often played by female VAs like Adoxographist and Vespa.
- Man of a Thousand Voices: Several of the VAs could qualify, especially Adox and Tooch.
- Medium Awareness: Doc Scratch is apparently not only aware of the medium, he's aware of the change of mediums as well, as shown when he mentions that there are "sight gags that don't translate to video". This raises unsettling implications.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: Let's Read Homestuck features some. Naturally when adapting an often heavily text-focused webcomic with highly metatextual elements to video, there has to be some.
- Doc Scratch: "To be less precise, 8^y. Which, if you were to type it out, would form a facsimile of the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff sign. I told you bro. I told you about those sight gags that don't translate to video."
- The Troll Quadrants section, where large parts of the text are copied and pasted to troll the readers, is speeded up to about 8x speed to try to stave off audience boredom while keeping the gag intact.
- During the Strife! gag with Jake English, where it was suggested that the reader go to the bandcamp page to pick an appropriate song, footage was inserted of one of the editors doing just that.
- And in possibly the biggest example, the banner gags during the Scratch Narration, which would have been impossible to translate directly to video, were re-imagined as Youtube pop-up ads, complete with a the x that normally makes them vanish. More than a few viewers reported attempting to close them out.
- Running Gag: A few on top of regularly referenced Homestuck ones:
- In an early blooper reel, Kate becomes angry at an Ice cream van interrupting her recording. Several livestreams and Let's Plays by the group since reference Kate's nemesis "The Fucking Ice Cream Van" or attacking ice cream vans with chainsaws, including during a game of Left 4 Dead 2 in which Badger shouts it as a battle cry on picking up a chainsaw weapon.
- Flaming Trumpet Skull is now something of a Voxus meme after one Dungeons & Dragons stream. The character has theme music and even fan art.
- This has culminated in the group having the side quest of assembling a band made up of defeated enemies. Members so far include Flaming Trumpet Skull, Orcarina the ocarina player and Melody Fortissimo the banshee vocalist.
- Special Guest: Dante Basco provides the voice of Rufioh in the Openbound episodes of Let's Read Homestuck.
- Stylistic Suck: True to the source material, Lets ROAD Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is rife with bad inflections, wonky editing, and random unneeded distortion effects. And it's all the more hilarious for it.
- Suddenly Shouting: Vex has a tendency to start shouting in the streams, mostly for joking purposes.
- Vocal Evolution: As you'd expect from such a long project, especially since many of the early members particularly were teenagers and had little to no experience at the start of production, the quality of the acting and recording improves over time, and the VAs get more comfortable with the voices they perform. Even Badger, the narrator, sounds more subdued when you go back to early episodes, later developing a more bombastic, energetic narration style. In addition, many of the actors were using higher-pitched voices due to playing 13 year old characters, so after an in-universe Time Skip of around 3 years, they began using something closer to their natural voices, to illustrate the characters going through puberty.
