The other day, I wrote about Hideki Kamiya’s weird power trip and there I also mentioned that Hellena Taylor was (apparently) offered 4,000 USD to voice the full game when the franchise (apparently) made 450 million dollars.
Well,… that didn’t age well.
What happened?
After having been called out repeatedly, Hellena Taylor came clean about some things she committed.
In a thread, she states that she “feels the need to defend [herself] and [her] reputation in the industry”, so she explains that the offer to do voice work for Bayonetta 3 was too low.
That offer initially was 10,000 dollars total (something she didn’t mention in her original video). Then she lists the “450 million dollar (not counting merchandise)” number again that she has yet to give proof for. She wrote to Hideki Kamiya who then offered her an extra 5,000 dollar for the job.
According to her: She then declined to voice the game, they didn’t respond to her for another 11 months, and then she was offered a flat fee to voice a few lines as a cameo for 4,000 dollars.
Does the end justify the means?
In the original videos that she posted to Twitter, asking people to boycott the game, Hellena Taylor made an emotional appeal to people, talking about her situation and circumstances as well as everything she did for the franchise.
She feels justified in what she did and she has a just cause for sure.
Voice Actors are getting paid abysmal rates for some projects in animation and games… but what Hellena Taylor did was not the right way to approach it.
Talking about VA work and how underpaid people in the industry are is good and important but Hellena Taylor lying by omission will harm the industry for years to come.
If someone’s paid very poorly and reaches out about it publicly in the future, people will reply to it saying “Remember that Voice Actress back then who lied to get better pay?” – and then they’ll ask whether this VA is also lying about it.
Hellena Taylor manipulated fans and lied about the sums she was offered. It’s what she did.
Yes, she told half the truth by mentioning the final offer being 4,000 USD – but…
- she didn’t mention the previous offers.
- she didn’t mention that the 4,000 USD were for a cameo/”a few lines”.
- she lied about having been offered 4,000 USD for the whole game.
- she keeps repeating this fictional number of a “450 million dollars franchise” that I can’t really find proof for.
Why did I believe her?
As always, people that come out with allegations aka victims of said allegations should be heard. You should believe people initially when they say something that can be so damaging to their reputation and that can harm them in so many ways.
Victims that come out with allegations often will get gaslit, attacked, insulted, harassed and threatened for making these allegations.
Hence, I personally want to assume good faith and not assume that they’re lying right from the get-go. After all, why would you do this if you’ll get harmed by it?
Hellena Taylor broke NDA (which is incredibly bad) to appeal to her fans and audience – something that shows how desperate she is. There must be something to the story then if she risks legal actions being taken against her… right?
But now she’s talking about the things she didn’t mention which basically breaks down to “I wanted more pay. When I got more pay, I wanted more. Then I got nothing… and then I had a chance to get some money still but I instead decided to do this here.”
What does this change?
Hideki Kamiya still is questionable. He seems like a very unpleasant and problematic person that blocked me for criticizing him (fair enough) but who keeps calling people “brainless insects”.
Hellena Taylor is questionable as well. She damaged her own reputation and the reputation of other Voice Actors by breaking NDA to harm a company’s reputation… only to then backpaddle by talking about the sums she was offered that she didn’t initially mention at all.
Arguably, her initial videos will see a lot more traffic than those tweets she made in post now.
Why did she do it? Probably because she thought she could get more money out of it and because she thought she could get away with lying by omission – after all, she’s not telling lies… just half-truths… but she’s still breaking NDA.
Voice Actors need to be paid more!
This point still stands. I don’t know if 15,000 dollars is fair for Bayonetta 3 as a whole… but it certainly sounds like a lot of money that she could’ve taken. Instead, she decided that it was too little for her considering her status as someone who advertised the game so much.
According to this article here which has no sources listed, audiobooks can often net $2,000-$5,000 dollars as an established voice talent. That’s when you’re established in the industry… and again, there are no sources.
I have no clue how much is fair for Voice Actors and I assume that a lot of them don’t know much about it either.
But if you consider the amazing work that some of them deliver, like Misaki Kuno who lost her voice while recording Faputa’s Lines in Made in Abyss, you’d expect that they’d get paid a good amount of money that then would help them survive for a few months, right?
Again, I don’t know the exact rates. According to this article here, video game VAs often will get paid around $850 for a four-hour session – which is an estimate as well and it’s not across the board.
Either way, what we do know is that animators and VAs don’t get paid enough which is why many of them will have to find other jobs to do alongside their VA gigs… and then you have all the issues that come with VA work like it being voice work and thus requiring you to be healthy enough to voice lines and persistent enough to stand there in a booth and voice lines for hours.
Conclusion?
Frankly, there needs to be more discussion about voice actor rates and what counts as a “fair rate”.
What Hellena Taylor did here will harm the industry more than it helps.
It’s unlikely that there will be as many eyes on the full story compared to the original videos that Hellena Taylor has published that went viral last week. Frankly, breaking NDA and then making an emotional plea sort of makes it easy to just trust Taylor on the story and believe her… meanwhile “corporate bad” is an easy-to-understand narrative, too.
It’s honestly disappointing that someone like Hellena Taylor did this because it will harm other Voice Actors in the industry.
My initial standpoint was that it was hearsay.
I mean, I mentioned Hellena Taylor’s tweets in that other post but mentioned that it’s “according to her” and “apparently” and stuff… which I should have made more clear. I apologize for that if that contributed to misinformation being spread.
I now have edited those sections and made them bold… and I added a section linking to this post for clarification.
In the future, I’ll have to hold myself accountable more for these sorts of things… and I’ll need to make it clearer when something only has one source – like in Hellena Taylor’s case where her source was herself (with a little “trust me” attached to that and some Lazarus at the end).
The other post wasn’t about her but it certainly sparked it… My view of Hideki Kamiya, however, doesn’t change. Calling people insects is horrible.
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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