When Talent Strikes
The legacy entertainment industry is a machine driven by two opposing forces: the ruthless engine of capital and unquantifiable human creativity. The latter builds the secondary worlds that bilions of consumers escape into—think of it as a reverse funhouse mirror that depicts its viewers as more powerful and attractive than they really are. And while they’re staring at the looking glass, the former seeks to profit off them while exerting maximum control over the process.
But sometimes, those two forces collide. And the effects can be just as revealing as they are disruptive.
MiHoYo/ABC
Two seemingly unrelated incidents—one from the 1988 television season; another from the recent drama surrounding Genshin Impact's voice actors—illustrate the same underlying reality: When the talent who create entertainment go on strike, the machine may not stop, but the mirror cracks.
Call Me Chato, a former television executive with the rare combination of industry knowledge and honesty, released a video in which he sifted through the wreckage of the 1988 fall TV season. His retrospective wasn’t just a trip down memory lane. It performed autopsies on the slew of canceled shows that were murdered when a foundational piece of the creative process was removed.
See for yourself …
In March of 1988, the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike. What follwed was a 155-day shutdown that delayed the fall TV season, gutted its development pipeline, and forced executives to scrape the dregs out of their script barrels.
The result? Old pilots that had been rejected years prior were dusted off and rushed into production. Untested sitcoms were hastily greenlighted. The networks overflowed with miniseries and game shows, which didn’t need union labor.
Some shows, like Roseanne and The Wonder Years, managed to survive the chaos. But they were the exceptions. The average offering was a Frankensteined pastiche of clichéd tropes, awkward casting, and plotlines recycled from mid-tier 70s fare. Without writers, the magic evaporated. Of course, executives tried to keep the money machine going anyway.
That’s why, if you watched television in the fall of 1988, you got the odd sensation of watching a Verhoeven parody show from RoboCop.
Screencap: Orion Pictures
And audiences noticed. Many of the networks’ attempted replacements were quietly canceled after half a season. The entire debacle served as a grim warning: TV execs may own the means of production, but they can’t produce meaning.
Related: A.I. Books: The Death of the Author?
Bear with me, because it’s gonna get weird. But there is indeed a point …
Fast forward to Current Year: the age of live-service games, streaming anime, and parasocial attachment. Genshin Impact, an RPG developed by Chinese company MiHoYo, became an international sensation thanks to its free-to-play model and slick design—above all, its character designs. And not just the visuals, but just as importantly, the voices.
In other words, what writers were to '80s television, voice actors are to Genshin Impact. They’re the voice of the product.
So what happens when VAs go on off on an unhinged public rant?
Mujin, a fandom culture YouTuber, broke down the situation. English-language voice actors for Genshin Impact staged a wildcat strike on the coattails of the SAG-AFTRA walk-out. Never mind that their work with MiHoYo was non-union, and thus, striking in their situation was not only doomed to futility, but borderline illegal. Nonetheless, some VAs opted to repeatedly beclown themselves on TikTok.
One result was that some new characters in Genshin Impact launched without any English VOs. That’s right—when fans played the English version, those characters would go mute.
The impact on Genshin Impact was instant. The parasocial bond was broken, reminding fans that they weren’t being nurtured by a loving artistic team. Instead, they were being monetized by a corporation sustained by hiring unstable talent for non-union jobs.
So much as the 1988 strike broke the spell cast by TV and revealed the bureaucratic churn lurking underneath, the GI actors’ strike likewise left players disillusioned. Parasocial investment is a high wire act. It's balanced on consistent delivery of the illusion that someone is speaking to you. It stops working when the creators are only interested in talking about themselves.
One of the great lies of modern media production is that talent is fungible. Never think for one second that studio heads wouldn’t love to hand scriptwriting duties over to an LLM or replace your favorite VA with an A.I. voice model trained on pirated audio.
And the sad part is, in some cases, the talent have themselves to blame—at least in part.
So, audiences are once again left holding the bag. Don’t buy the tech bro hype. We know when hack directors replace beloved actors with CG ghosts. We know when showrunners can screenwriters in favor of ChatGPT. We know when a book was written by autocomplete.
Related: The Cure for A.I. Slop
The managerial elite don’t believe in creation; only production. They don't care how product made, only that it transmits the right propaganda.
Making real art takes risk, authentic human insight, and dedication to standards. You can't craft a transcendent story by spreadsheet.
Devaluing art has repercussions. The 1988 writers’ strike didn’t just lead to bad television; it helped light the fuse for Cultural Ground Zero.
Likewise, Genshin Impact’s fans learned the hard way that neither the company nor its top-billed VAs really care. Mirror status: shattered.
These collapses have ripple effects. Creators bail, fans head for the exits, and the brand rots.
Related: Cultural Ground Zero
But there is a silver lining. Every time a legacy industry sabotages itself through greed, indifference, or mismanagement, a window opens. Indie creators step in to build anew next to the smoking wreckage.
After 1988, the upstart Fox Network rushed into the breach with edgier programming. Independent film exploded in the early 90s. Animation got weirder, darker, and smarter.
Now, as AAA games flounder and live-service models cannibalize themselves, smaller teams and solo developers are attracting serious attention. The same is true in publishing, music, and animation. The barriers to entry are lower than ever, and audiences have a proportionally greater desire for authenticity.
The 1988 writers’ strike and the Genshin Impact VA controversy are symptoms of the same disease: contempt for the audiences that make entertainment possible. But they are also opportunities. Each system failure teaches the audience to stop trusting the machine; to stop paying people who hate them.
It’s tempting to despair when you see beloved properties skinsuited. But each instance reinforces a hopeful truth.
The entertainment cartels don’t have a monopoly on creativity.
And we don’t need them anymore.
We haven’t for a long time.
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