Voice Actor pages and Rampant Misuse

So a while back I noticed a lot of pages on Voice Actors have a weird habit of listing people as Spiritual Successor. (X is Y's spiritual successor) despite Spiritual Successor being about works, not people. And often the people the person is a "successor" to is still in the business. I opened a Short Term project to deal with that. But as I am going through creator pages, I am noticing issues that seem particular to pages indexed on Voice Actors

First of all, almost all the pages like to list people at the New York/Canadian/Wherever equivalent to another voice actor. Often without actually explaining what that means. First of all it feels really weird when talking about people "Jim is the New York Equivalent of Bob" as it has a connotation of "They aren't individuals and are interchangeable". 90% of pages about professional Voice Actor pages have this.

Lemme give you some examples.

• Cristina Valenzuela:

• Bryn Apprill

• Ami Koshimizu

Lastly, the pages are also prone to other issues. Such as listing male and female voice actors as distaff counterparts (See above), or troping people's appearance and real life and not their work.

We seem to have a small but VERY dedicated clique of editors who work hard on the voice actor pages (based on how they follow very similar formats and writing styles), and for the most part they've done good work (these are some of the more detailed creator pages), but they've also picked up some outright bad or questionable work habits and spreading them to every page they work on.

edited 7th Feb '17 7:15:56 AM by Ghilz

What is it you're looking for? Help with cleaning Creator/ pages, moderators to ban then for misuse of tropes, a new {prewritten pm} text?

More like a solution to addressing those issues. I mean, even if we clean this up, how do we keep this from returning?

Also adding, I'd like to know if we want to keep the "X is the wherever counterpart to Y" lines of if we should cut those.

I don't think those apply to real people. Taking the same roles for different languages doesn't make people "counterparts" the way I see it.

Having looked at the issue, I absolutely agree that all Spiritual Successor and "counterpart" entries need to be removed from creator pages. It's just fanwank.

Also posted an ATT about it: here.

edited 8th Feb '17 3:16:05 PM by Fighteer

I already made a short term cleanup thread for the Spiritual Successor misuse

The counterpart stuff will take even more cleaning. It's more widespread than Spiritual successor. Seriously, if a person's primary job is voice acting, and if they got a page here, 8 times out of 10 some bozo named them the counterpart of someone else.

If I had all the time in the world, I'd draw a web to see how many people are counterparts to the same person.

edited 8th Feb '17 3:19:08 PM by Ghilz

While I can see "counterpart" as being legitimate as a specific form of Pigeonholed Voice Actor in regards to foreign language dubs, the widespread misuse of it for VAs who speak the same language (I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume that Californian English and Texan English did not somehow morph into two separate languages) or for cases where it isn't that close of a one-to-one role ratio basically overshadow it.

So I can't really object to banning the term altogether. It's kind of like strikeout markup; might be worth keeping if people used it properly, but...people don't use it properly.

The basic idea is fine, we have tropes like Poor Man's Substitute for things of that nature, describing artists of any type as being similar to other artists is extremely common. The problem is that the voice acting fandom is still rather niche and so a lot of the claims are just shaky to begin with. It's the idea of trying to compare them according to what union they belong to or just having a different nationality just doesn't really seem notable to me.

edited 11th Feb '17 10:28:27 PM by KJMackley

Counterparts in other language dubs IMO is just fine, although possibly an entire unique trope to itself.

For example Mugihito plays the dub voice for Patrick Stewart in nearly every series or movie he has done. For example he has done Patrick Stewart's role in

• Star Trek The Next Generation
• Death Train
• Star Trek Generations
• Star Trek First Contact
• Star Trek Insurrection
• X Men (TV edition)
• Star Trek Nemesis
• X2 (TV edition)
• The Game Of Their Lives
• Mysterious Island
• X Men The Last Stand

The Other Wiki even organizes them by person they voice if it starts getting notable. And his role as the Alien Commander in Pani Poni Dash! actually makes Actor Allusions to Star Trek TNG.

edited 12th Feb '17 3:45:27 AM by Memers

That would be a form of Pigeonholed Voice Actor.

Which is a different form of Typecasting. What is being talked about is either dedicated dubbers for certain actors in foreign languages or certain VA's of different nationalities having a tendency to be chosen for the same types of roles. I think it's about missing tropes and so they are misusing Spiritual Successor.

The Spiritual Successor misuse was always used referring to actors who spoke the same language.

The counterpart entries sometime include what you're talking about. Very rarely though. 90% include people who again speak the same language.

Yes; Voice Actor X is type cast as "the voice" for Foreign Actor Y. I got that. It generally isn't a "counterpart" because Foreign Actor Y doesn't dub the voices from Voice Actor X.

I'm just pointing out that the misuse comes more from not having the right trope to use.

Except it didn't. 90% of the time is people of the same language.

I don't think voice actor counterparts should be removed. It helped me discover a LOT of voice actors who are in the same range/have a similar voice (i.e. thanks to Travis Willingham, I discovered Patrick Seitz). But oh well, if TV Tropes just wants to be the other wiki or imdb and just list the voice actors' roles, then go ahead, remove them.

^^ Two different voice actors speaking the same language and having similar roles seems plenty tropable to me, as I said it's not far off Poor Man's Substitute. From what I've seen, a number of these comparisons happen in the description of the actor and not in the tropes pertaining to them, such as Crispin Freeman.

x8 Not really since he isn't limited to that in any way, its just a few of his hundreds of roles.

That just makes me think it's shoehorned. A few times out of hundreds isn't much.

Eitherway, if there's a missing supertrope, feel free to make it. In the meanwhile will keep correcting the counterpart crap. Which is a bit annoying as some tropers are re-adding it.

It wouldn't be a supertrope in any case. Spiritual Successor is about works which aren't actually successors!

"[A] type of sequel that is not part of the same world or story as its predecessor..."

So, I've been cleaning up a few voice actor pages a bit recently (removing a lot of the counterpart in particular). The "counterpart" thing occurred because someone editors like me ended up picking incredibly bad habits by looking through several TV Tropes pages and didn't think it through. That being said, after doing a bit research, I need to address several issues I came across when it comes to the "counterpart" issue:

• Counterparts in general, have a tendency to be very subjective. Just because one person thinks one voice actor is a counterpart to another voice actor, doesn't mean they'll be the same. When it comes to the Pigeonholed Voice Actor, it's gonna be clear that multiple voice actors are often typecast into a particular role or character archetype. Christine Marie Cabanos (a page that started myself), Sandy Fox, Caitlynn French, Hilary Haag and Brittney Karbowski are often known to be typecasted into Token Mini-Moe characters. Yet, if you look into their resumes, you can see each voice actress is unique on their own when it comes to the loli typecast. Same goes with J. Michael Tatum, Todd Haberkorn, Liam O'Brien, Keith Silverstein all are often typecast into villains, yet if you look in several tropes of each of the villain they voiced, they fill a different niche of villain (J. Michael Tatum and Todd Haberkorn tend to voice more hammy villains, Liam O'Brien's villains tend to be more psychopathic, and Keith Silverstein's villains tend to be The Stoic and more cold and calculating.
• In regards to foreign language counterparts (Japanese to English is very common), the said same thing can be applied from the first point, but this can overlap with "comparing apples to oranges" level as well. Voicing acting in Japanese and English are two separately and completely different focuses and typecasting is different in both English and Japanese. In Japan, a voice actor is often associated with a character archetype while in English, the voice actor is often typecast out of uniqueness (in addition a voice director being familiar with a voice actor's niche). The foreign languages counterpart also have a tendency to be very opinionated when it comes to vocal ranges and typecast and can vary from person to person. For example, I personally think Bryce Papenbrook's and Christine Marie Cabanos's Japanese "counterparts" are Yoshitsugu Matsuoka and Rina Hidaka respectfully when it comes to typecasting and vocal ranges, but others may think it's Yūki Kaji and Kana Hanazawa respectfully. No one is going to share the same opinion, and that's why there is going to be a problem when people are listing counterparts when, because no one is going to have the same opinion with this.
• There are some voice actors that coincidentally share the same roles with a foreign language counterpart. One infamous example is Johnny Yong Bosch sharing seven different roles with Jun Fukuyama and Erik Kimerer and Yūki Kaji sharing five different roles with each other (the last one is something Erik Kimerer himself lampshade a lot in his social media). In this case, it's best to list this under Relationship Voice Actor or Casting Gag and cite examples (heck even the Relationship Voice Actor page has a section dedicated on listing two voice actors of different languages sharing a number of voice roles).
• In regards to the "counterpart" stuff, there is a huge issue of edit wars and flame wars due a sheer number of fan bait. There is a good reason why some voice actors may be uncomfortable of being compared to another voice actor (especially if you have someone like Illich Guardiola and Scott Freeman that did something incredibly controversial that got themselves into trouble).
• It's not only the "counterpart" stuff that has problems. Some of the tropes listed either have voice actor's personal life involved, or have tropes listed that associate with the characters they voiced don't have examples listed. I had to spend time revising several of the tropes listed under Matthew Mercer to cite few voice role examples so that they will not be deleted. There are still some personal life stuff that needs to be mentioned in some voice actor's pages so readers can understand why someone like Scott Freeman or Illich Guardiola isn't getting any anime roles and such.

That being said, I'm trying to clear up all the counterpart stuff in every voice actor pages as per ATT. It's gonna take a while, but I think it's best that we nuke all of the counterpart stuff and try to avoid the voice actor's personal life unless if it relates to how it'll impact their career (i.e. Scott Freeman being arrested and charged for child pornography and etc.).

Just deleted a few Relationship Voice Actor entries from Matthew Mercer, as it listed Japanese actors he dubbed and one Western he replaced. The trope is for working together, not sequentially.

Is that also a common problem?

Relationship Voice Actor also overlap with a number of characters being shared with the same English and Japanese voice actor. If you scroll down to the trope's page itself, you'll see a huge index of a number of characters shared by the same English and Japanese voice actor. So the Relationship Voice Actor with Matthew Mercer with the Japanese voice actor stuff is appropriate, it just needs to be worded better.