Genshin Impact and HSR voice actor calls for end of strike

Following the replacement of Caleb Yen and Rachael Chau as the Trailblazer in Honkai: Star Rail, fellow HSR cast member Allegra Clark has called for the ongoing strike to end.

“It’s time to end this thing. AAA Productions are actively moving overseas because there’s no signed contract to work on. I f***ing hate it here,” Clark wrote on social media, quoting a post from voice actor Elias Toufexis with a similar sentiment, which has since been deleted due to verbal attacks it caused against him.

Clark, who plays Acheron in HSR and Beidou in Genshin Impact, has previously written about the toxicity and division the strike is causing among voice actors and elaborated on this point. She said that people are “gleefully reporting each other to SAG for working [non-union]” and openly hope for any non-union actors that work on non-union projects to get lifetime bans from union membership.

She described how actors are accusing each other of being “employer plants” and “elites” for wanting to return to work. “This s*** is petty,” she summed up.

Clark also described the threatening letters being sent to VAs, which have been mentioned by Venti VA Erika Harlacher-Stone, among others. According to Clark, they demand information about non-union projects people have worked on under threat of escalating things to go before the disciplinary committee.

This technically just enforces Global Rule 1 of the guild, namely that members shouldn’t work non-union projects, but the issue is that said rule had been largely ignored in recent years by many performers. “So many people worked off the card,” Clark said. “All of a sudden people are tactically reporting to SAG and GR1 is getting enforced.”

Clark said that these reports are designed to make people comply in signing letters to studios, asking them to make their games union projects — this “immediately felt like blackmail” to her.

Describing the situation of many VAs working on HoYoverse – and similar – projects, she said “a lot of people [were] quietly caught in the middle or [ended up] being sacrificial lambs because they held out. People really felt like they were doing the right thing by holding out, but it’s a gray area. A non-union live-service game? We’re very replaceable.”

Fans worrying about the fate of Beidou and Acheron can seemingly rest easy: Clark said that “they won’t” take the roles away from her.

Companies negotiating with SAG-AFTRA have posted their “last, best, and final” offer on May 9, 2025, which the guild declined due to some of the language in the proposed contract being too loose and potentially allowing for loopholes that could disadvantage performers.

This is by far not a unanimous decision, however, with people like Clark strongly arguing that the offer be accepted before even more damage is done to the industry. The situation is complicated further by the way the guild is making these decisions. While members can vote on these things, only a minority can usually make it to the short-notice meetings where such quorums are taken.

“A percentage of members are having their voices heard,” Clark said, “but I’m not even gonna lie, it’s super shady that some people find out early [about when meetings happen] and others don’t. So yes, ‘they’re listening to members’ but it’s not a fair assessment of membership.”

It’s an inherently complex situation to navigate for everyone, including gaming fans who are torn between supporting a strike that started for a good reason and being angry about how damaging it turned out to be, but Clark is objectively correct about one thing: Developers are not waiting to see how the negotiations work out. A lot of recording is being moved out of the U.S. and in the long term this will weaken the union in addition to hurting U.S.-based talent even more.

It’s difficult to even blame the studios, especially those working on live-service games — any live-service game that halts production at any point is essentially a dead product.

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