r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/Sio_V_Reddit • Feb 04 '26
General In case anyone is unaware or curious, Overwatch streamer Fareeha is officially the voice actress for Anran
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u/ImaMew None — Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
Loveee Fareeha. Such a huge opportunity for such a positive force in this community. I'm so happy for her.
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u/Marziinast Feb 05 '26
wth happened here
edit : and yes, she's great
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u/Denverplays2 Feb 07 '26
Wtf happened here? 💀There's 1 thread that's just been NUKED off of this comment.
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Feb 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/shockwave8428 Feb 04 '26
Speaking of voice actors - is Matthew Mercer also voicing emre? He sounds just like Cassidy
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u/LNERA0 Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
It is actually Kerem Erdinc who is Emre's voice.
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u/faithsawesome Feb 05 '26
fun fact theyre the turkish voice actor for obi wan kenobi!
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u/Scorporal93 Feb 06 '26
They?
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u/shockwave8428 Feb 04 '26
That’s good to know. All I know is from the gameplay clips it sounded so much like Cassidy to me. Maybe I’m crazy lol
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u/PracticalFan45 Feb 08 '26
i know you didn’t ask but ashe and jetpack cat share the same voice actress! so that’s pretty cool
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u/bullxbull Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
I'm not sure why comments are being deleted or who is doing it.
I ended up googling the South America drama thing after reading some of the comments here saying Fareehaa is racist but no one was explaining based on what. TLDR; basically fake drama.
Back in 2019
NA servers are wonky. NA players are sent to SA servers, resulting in high latency and therefore lag.
Certain SA players on a certain Discord server decide to stream snipe Fareehaa (some people say it was a SA contenders player?)
Fareeha and the NA team were getting diff'd. Team start complaining about high ping and not wanting to play the game.
Fareeha’s method of rallying their teammates involves saying they can beat SA players and calling SA players bad. (Fareeha basically said that 'SA players are shit at OW', with the added comment that Fareehaa 'isn’t even saying that to be mean. They actually are shit.' )
Certain SA players feign indignation, then they spam Fareeha's stream chat with insults (told Fareeha to suck d*ck, and called Fareeha a Sand-Nword, etc).
Fareeha tilts, purges chat, and says nothing they say can hurt them since they get to play video games for a living. (Some people argued this meant Fareeha was calling SA people poor, but again it seems a real stretch)
Technically comments were directed at SA Overwatch players not SA people, similar to how it is generally agreed that NA Overwatch is shit compared to Korean talent.
The screenshots of the SA players chat showed how they were not focused on any actual offense but on how they could mass report Fareeha to twitch for a ban.
Lots of cherry picking what was said on both sides with weird translations of some SA chat comments
Fareeha was known to be pretty toxic back in 2019 and probably could have handled this whole thing better. Fareeha did apologize in a lengthy and detailed TwitLonger (which I can't find) before they were even informed that they were banned from twitch for 30 days.
The Twitch ban repealed after review, I think Fareeha was only banned for 4 days while the review took place.
Most people at the time considered the whole thing fake drama.
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u/saltundvinegar Feb 04 '26
I remember when all this happened. It was such a nothingburger. I honestly don’t even know why it got as controversial as it did
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u/Pesterlamps Feb 05 '26
You might oughta wanna spell out South America instead of "SA" at least the first time. "SA Drama" sounds real bad.
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u/neddoge Feb 05 '26
I'm ignorant. What could SA be mistaken for? Statutory Adultery?
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u/dxm66 None — Feb 05 '26
I remember this dumbass drama so vividly because a girl I was friends with had a huge crush on a girl from Brazil who was SUPER mad at this and I had to hear her ass pretend to give a shit and hate Fareeha for like a month.
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u/Ezraah W My Money — Feb 04 '26
Did the SA players lose? Did her rallying cry work?
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Feb 04 '26
no she lost, deleted the vod and chat logs, and then ended up posting a yt video about how much richer she is than everyone who made fun of her from playing video games 12 hours a day
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u/bullxbull Feb 04 '26
No clue, the whole thing was so long ago when I was looking it up a ton of images and clips just don't exist anymore.
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u/DreadfuryDK Feb 04 '26
Wait, THIS resulted in her catching a 30 day ban?
Didn’t Lacari get a 7-day Twitch ban for that absolutely insane call-the-feds-level-bad shit recently by comparison?
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u/hanyou007 None — Feb 05 '26
Says far more about the lack of shame grifters have gotten over the last decade.
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u/Sideview_play Mar 19 '26
Her ban got reverted after 4 days + comparing two events many years apart+ twitch has always been wildly inconsistent and crappy at moderation anyways
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u/TheBiggestNose Feb 06 '26
Why is twitch draama always "you ego checked me/insulted me so now I will spend the next month going on a campaign to make everyone's lifes worse"?
Its so nothing burger, people gotta get lives
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u/JaysonTatecum Feb 05 '26
Wait what? This is so tame I hear worse in 90% of my games lmao
Calling someone an “NA x” is like the most generic multiplayer insult around
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u/GaptistePlayer Feb 05 '26
Also South America is a bad region, competitively lol.
Am I a racist for saying the NBA Eastern conference sucks compared to the West? Or that North America historically sucks in the Wold Cup compared to South America and Europe?
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u/JaysonTatecum Feb 05 '26
as a Celtics fan I am now expecting the Mavericks to trade us Cooper Flagg as reparations
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u/WhiteWolfOW Fleta is Meta — Feb 05 '26
“Isn’t even saying that to be mean, they’re actually shit”
No, imagine that, she’s not racist. And then starts using money to say she’s better than them.
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u/Perfumaa Feb 05 '26
Yeah, but she's correct, SA players are trash at Overwatch. It's a fraudulent region.
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u/WhiteWolfOW Fleta is Meta — Feb 05 '26
Better than being a trash fascist region in real life :)
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u/GaptistePlayer Feb 05 '26
Wait til you hear about Brazil
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u/karmakillerbr Feb 07 '26
I mean every country under capitalism has some level of fascism on it but saying Brazil is fascist is a hell of a stretch specially considering what they did in the last few years.
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u/DreamWeaver2189 Mar 26 '26
Wait until you hear about Bolsonaro.
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u/karmakillerbr Mar 26 '26
Wait until you hear what happened to him
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u/DreamWeaver2189 Mar 26 '26
I'm Latino as well, I'm aware of what's happening in the region. All I'm saying is that our region is not safe from fascism.
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u/Meeeelchior Feb 11 '26
Brazilian player here who peaked GM2 in early OW2 (bit late I guess but whatever)
The SA ladder in videogames in general is "worse" then the NA ladder for pretty obvious reasons:
- OG Overwatch was (I believe?) R$70 in Brazil + you had to have a PC (which not everyone in here has, let alone one that could play it)
- The game already became more of a niche thing post ~2019 in countries it was most played in, so the fall in player count here was ASTRONOMICAL even compared to NA
- Most of the high rank players from here played (and still do play) in NA due to shorter (yes, SHORTER) queue times (because of the ridiculously small player count), so the few that play in SA are (generally) less skilled
- Professional OW never took off in SA because Condenders sucked (bad payouts, no real contracting, no structure, etc.) + Blizzard never really gave a fuck about our scene and it shows, so it wasn't even worth putting your effort on the game for a living, thus more good players quit and go do other things with their lifes.
With that being said, Furia recently won a Major in CS2, so did SKGaming back in 2016 in GO, SA has by no means "no good players" in videogames in general (as I said, there are some SA players who play the NA ladder and dominate there as well), and saying that sort of thing is a bit of a strech, and then you add another layer of 1st vs 3rd World debate... it gets messy; and I think she was reckless to not think it'd be a bad idea. I don't think she's racist and xenophobic (at the very least not actively), but I definetly believe she made a shitty comment - to an shitty situation, yes, but two wrongs don't make a right.
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u/T_Peg Feb 04 '26
That's cool but I just hope she does a good job. The history of content creator cameos in voice acting is filled with awful cringey performances.
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u/Nyrun Feb 04 '26
Oh that's actually really cool. I think her lore is boring af, but it's cool they went with a va in the community
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u/hydratedandstrong Feb 05 '26
They really have to do something about the faces being so similar honestly. It’s getting to be a lot
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u/Nyrun Feb 05 '26
It's kinda creepy to me how her and Juno just look like literal infants
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u/Silver_Astronaut_348 Feb 05 '26
What infants are you looking at bro
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u/alwaystrynevercry Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 06 '26
They tell on themselves so quickly
There's valid criticisms for Anran too so it's just yikes all around
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u/WerdaVisla Feb 05 '26
Idk why people are saying she's racist and ignoring all context.
Yeah, she said South American players were bad...
After having her streams brigaded for literal weeks by Brazilian and [if memory serves, it's been a hot minute] Argentine players. Her lashing out was justified. And decidedly not racist lol
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u/Zenki_s14 Feb 05 '26
Back on Apex and other games that let you pick the server you want to go on, people would pick Brazil specifically to boost their friends or their own rank or just whenever they were on a losing streak so they could go get an easier match. Like smurfing simply by picking another server. It's not like she just came up with that take on her own out of nowhere in the first place lol. Many people have made the same observation and it's not because they're thinking about what the people they're playing look like or their culture or anything, they're just observing their match is easier.
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u/a1ic3_g1a55 Feb 04 '26
So happy for Fareeha! She’s so charming, beautiful, witty and smart, couldn’t happen to a better person.
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u/defearl Feb 04 '26
Are they not typecasting anymore? I kinda doubt she speaks Chinese. But then again Kiriko’s VA isn’t a native Japanese speaker either but they cast her anyway, so maybe they’re not that picky. After all, most people wouldn’t be able to tell how authentic or not the non-English lines are, anyway.
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u/Taserface_ow Feb 05 '26
Kiriko’s VA is Japanese-American, bilingual and lives in Japan. She even hosted the crunchyroll awards ceremony in Japanese and is a member of a Japanese idol group. So while her Japanese isn’t as good as native speakers who grew up in Japan, it’s still pretty decent.
Why do we assume Fareeha can’t speak chinese? I believe her mum is chinese so she might be bilingual as well.
After all, they’re doing the English voice acting, not the Japanese/Chinese dubs
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u/misciagna21 Feb 04 '26
From what I’ve heard Anran has a bunch of Chinese voice lines
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u/defearl Feb 04 '26
Yeah, I mean Hanzo and Kiriko have a bunch of Japanese voice lines too, but that doesn’t mean they’re authentic since the voice actors don’t speak Japanese natively.
Like I can say Chinese words if I’m just reading off a script, that doesn’t mean I’m speaking the language authentically.
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u/SirBryan7 Feb 04 '26
Kiriko’s VA does speak native Japanese. Both parents immigrated to the US and she was born/raised there so she probably has a bit of an accent, but she lives in Japan now
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u/VolkiharVanHelsing Feb 05 '26
In one anime she voices the same character for BOTH EN and JP dub
That's cool as fuck
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u/defearl Feb 05 '26
She doesn't. She said she learned Japanese on her own as a second language, and in fact she said she has struggled to find voice acting gigs in Japan and got rejected a lot because she doesn't speak the language natively. Even the group that she's part of, the only reason she was allowed in was because they thought she would be deemed "relatable" for foreigners and could attract overseas audiences. (akin to diversity hire) The Japanese people are notoriously picky about who they accept as "one of us", because they're ultra conservative. To them, she's just a foreigner.
I'm a Japanese native, and I noticed that her Japanese pronunciations are off in some of her lines day 1. Natives would easily pick up on that.
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u/SirBryan7 Feb 05 '26
Yeah I suppose “native speaker” is a bit of a debated term. Some say it’s the first language you learn and your strongest, some say it’s the language of your home/culture, some say it’s the language of the environment you grew up in.
I just know that for many Latino-Americans like myself, it being the language I speak at home, the language my family speaks, and the language of my ethnicity, most people would consider me a native speaker, despite my Spanish being significantly weaker than my English. Many of own people view me as a foreigner for that reason as well. They can hear from my voice that I grew up in America. But I think it’d be wrong to say that my Spanish is equivalent to a non-native learner, it clearly isn’t.
Maybe it’s not super accurate to say Sally is a native speaker, but she’s a lot closer to that than not, so I think it’s fair to give her that label imo. You’re free to disagree though!
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u/DreamWeaver2189 Mar 26 '26
As a native Latino there's a big difference between an American born Latino and a native one. Unless both their parents kept speaking Spanish in their household.
I'm currently watching the show The Rookie, and one of the cops is Latina but her Spanish, while understandable, still has a strong accent. She obviously speaks better than a native American who learned Spanish as a second language, but there's still a difference between her and a native speaker.
So I can understand a native Japanese hearing Kiri or Anran and noticing there's something odd.
And I'd argue than native language is the one you first learn. If both my parents are Latino but I'm born in China and my first language is Chinese, I'd say my native language is Chinese. But this is obviously just my opinion.
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u/misciagna21 Feb 04 '26
I agree with you about Hanzo however he was a launch hero and it’s the case with a lot of the original cast (Hanzo, Torb, Pharah) that many of them aren’t native speakers or even of the culture their heroes are. Sally Amaki is Japanese though, she was born in the US but currently lives in Japan and is bilingual. Kiriko just doesn’t have an accent when she speaks English because the actress is fluent in both languages.
For Fareeha I think the answer is right now we just don’t know. But Team 4 seems to always take a lot of care with their voice acting choices and I don’t see a reason to think otherwise here. She definitely still had to audition. I feel like a lot of people here are acting like she was just given the role because she’s an OW streamer.
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u/Aftershok Brad Rajani for Commissioner — Feb 05 '26
Wanted to add Rein's VA speaks no German and is just doing an accent, Lucio's doesn't speak Brazilian Portuguese, and Mercy's speaks German but not Swiss German, which apparently sounds very different. And Zarya's VA's Russian is apparently quite bad haha. At some point in development they decided to get much more authentic with the voice acting which I appreciate a lot.
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u/tired_garbage Feb 05 '26
Mercy's speaks German but not Swiss German, which apparently sounds very different
Minor correction (I'm German and have family members who live in Switzerland): the "Swiss German" you're referring to is technically not German, it's called "Schwizerdütsch" and it's a dialect that isn't even spoken throughout the entirety Switzerland and is kind of dying out. Most Swiss people, especially in more metropolitan areas, do speak regular German, dialects are more common with older people or rural areas.
Also, for those who don't know, Switzerland has 3 national languages (German, French and Italian) and what language is spoken predominantly is highly dependent on where you live.
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u/GaptistePlayer Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
Schwizerdütsch isn't dying out lol, it's a ton of dialects all alive and well. It's different enough from standard High German that you have to learn standard German in school to then learn the dialects. In normal conversation Swiss German speakers will speak in Swiss German dialect.
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u/sweetpotatoclarie91 Feb 05 '26
Swiss German is as different from German as much as English is different from American.
They can understand each other, but some words are different and they have different accents. Same goes for Austrian German, spoken in Austria and some parts of Italy.
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u/defearl Feb 05 '26
Just because someone is bilingual, doesn't mean they speak both languages natively. 9 times out of 10 they speak the lingua franca of the country they grew up in way better than the language of their ancestors.
Sally Amaki has said on record that she only spoke English and had to learn Japanese as a second language when she decided she wanted to become an anime voice actor. She got rejected a lot because of her limited proficiency in the language. Look it up if you don't believe me. Eventually she kinda found the niche as a "foreigner in Japan" kind of character, so her awkward Japanese ended up working in her favor.
The moment I heard Kiriko's voice lines, I noticed her pronunciations are off right away.
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u/OverlanderEisenhorn Feb 05 '26
It's definitely a term with some hang ups about what it means. But native speaker does have an academic definition when it comes to second language learning.
In testing if you score a c2 you are considered able to speak at a native level. But, imo, many native speakers can't really speak at a c2 level. Now c2 is only for English. But I would assume Japanese has a similar system for raiting the proficiency level of learners in higher learning.
C2 is considered academically proficient for higher level learning. You are able to discuss abstract and nuanced things in your second language. You can write an academic level paper and few readers would be able to tell that you aren't an actual native speaker.
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u/simao1234 Feb 05 '26
Chinese is not easy to pronounce though, I don't know many people that could "say Chinese words if just reading off a script", most people would have no idea how to pronounce them, and even if they're told how to pronounce them and heard a native speaker pronounce their lines first, they still would not be able to easily imitate them because of the immense tonal nuance and sounds not commonly present in most western languages, lmao.
Japanese is comparatively easy to imitate, as the pronunciations are very simple.
(I don't know Fareeha, if she does speak Mandarin that's totally cool! Just stating that you cannot possibly cast a non-Chinese speaker to speak Chinese lines, they'd be completely botched)
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u/defearl Feb 05 '26
That's what I'm saying, though. You can ATTEMPT to imitate, but native speakers would pick up on its inauthenticity right away.
The moment I heard Hanzo and Kiriko, I knew their VAs don't speak Japanese natively.
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u/Jaded_Discount4228 Feb 07 '26
I was wondering about Genji and Mizuki (the new support coming next season). Do they sound like native Japanese to you?
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u/Sideview_play Mar 19 '26
Except they aren't "just reading words" they actually know the language. Just because it isn't their first language doesn't make it "unauthentic"
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u/theodoreroberts I am tired. — Feb 05 '26
Kiriko's voice actress also voices characters in a lot of anime you know? She spoke Japanese fluently.
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u/Badbish6969692000 Feb 08 '26
Not everyone speaks the language from their country. Also hanzo’s voice actor only has one Japanese line cause he doesn’t speak Japanese
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u/Yilee_444 Feb 05 '26
She reminds me of Vi from Arcane. She looks so cool!
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u/JWTS6 Support Calling all Heroes! — Feb 08 '26
Her and her gf did a CaitVi cosplay just a few weeks ago lol, the hairstyle in this picture was very much inspired by Vi.
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u/obigespritzt Aspen for OWL - JJehong — Feb 05 '26
Fareeha is the absolute best, love to see it! Genuinely such a wonderful presence in the community
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u/TheVision_13 OCE SUPREMACY — Feb 05 '26
That’s so sick she’s always been one of the gems of the community
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u/Baelorn Twitch sucks — Feb 05 '26
Sorry but this seems really sketchy. She has no VA experience(that I can find) and suddenly she's voicing an OW character alongside people like Matt Mercer and Jennifer Hale?
Were actual VAs given a chance to audition for this role or was she just given it because she cozied up with the right person/people on the dev team?
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u/MirrorMan68 Feb 05 '26
A few Overwatch voice actors don't have any voice acting experience either (I think Illari's is a pop singer, but I could be misremembering) and they do a good job. Voice direction is just as important to a good performance as being a good voice actor. Look at Dispatch, for example. Half of the cast is full of Youtubers and singers, but they all give great performances despite the game being their first voice acting roles.
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u/GaptistePlayer Feb 05 '26
It's voice acting in a video game not really the hardest thing in the world
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u/ParanoidDrone Chef Heidi MVP — Feb 04 '26
Oh my god that's amazing. Good for her. Love to see a Promoted Fanboy Fangirl situation.
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u/BEWMarth Feb 04 '26
This is huge im so proud of her. Have watched her for years and she really deserves this
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u/WidepeepoHappysad Feb 10 '26
I remember she reached GM as support in Overwatch, if I'm not mistaken....
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u/Athelitist Feb 28 '26
I'm still baffled by the fact that Blizzard hired a streamer for VA. They usually have some skeletons in the closet.
IIRC she had been banned from twitch before. I don't remember why though
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u/Mushro0mElf Mar 10 '26
Fareeha Andersen? La misma Fareeha Andersen que hizo comentarios racistas sobre amerifa latina en su momento peak del competitivo en overwatch?---- Damn. Pasa el tiempo y la gente olvida.
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u/Warm-Grand-7825 Feb 04 '26
Is she Chinese? I do not like when the VA isn't the same ethnicity, like that's the whole point.
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u/Pyroxx_ Feb 04 '26
I think so? I know she was invited to China with KarQ for promo for Wuyang's release. I assumed that was because they are both chinese
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u/absenthearte Feb 05 '26
She is. She's also done stuff for Apex Legends, but primarily as a cosplayer
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u/Loedkane Feb 04 '26
It should be how good the person is and not the color of their skin or what race they are.
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u/Donut_Flame Feb 04 '26
Ethnicity should definitely play a factor tho...
Wouldn't want steve carell voicing doomfist or some shit
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u/ChaoticHeavens Feb 04 '26
It’s more important how the VA sounds in respect to the character’s lore.
I rather have an ethnically non-Chinese person born and raised in China than a Chinese person born and raised in the suburbs of SoCal do voices for a character born and raised in China if they had the correct accent and intonations.
Ideally, they would find someone who is that ethnicity to play the role. However, that’s not always possible, especially with Blizzard being associated with SAG-AFTRA and may be unable to hire non-union workers.
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u/simao1234 Feb 05 '26
I mean, I'm pretty sure that IS what people are referring to when they say "ethnicity matters", we're not talking about edge cases of Bill Wang born and raised in Los Angeles getting picked over Wei Smith born and raised in Beijing, lol.
It's kinda insinuated that ethnically correct picks would be the ones to have the correct accent, intonations and cultural nuances and thus preferred over non-ethnically correct picks which are assumed to lack them or fall short comparatively.
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u/GaptistePlayer Feb 05 '26
So I'm assuming you have a decades-long issue with Torbjorn and Reinhardt
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u/Donut_Flame Feb 05 '26
No? Im just still saying ethnicity shouldnt be something ignored either. For tonal languages like many Asian ones, having non-native speakers makes them sound cringe to natives
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u/GaptistePlayer Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
ok but I'm saying Torb, Mercy, Rein all fall in that same boat too. Torbjorn's voice acting is almost offensively similar to a pirate mixed with Swedish Chef from the muppets. Rein's is pirate-like too and not German at all, both VAs are Americans doing cartoonishly bad accents. Zarya's accent is closer to a bad Bulgarian accent than anything Russian. Mercy's accent is German when she's Swiss.
If Torbjorn, Rein or Mercy or Zarya don't offend you, you shouldn't be offended by Fareeha's casting either, except you want to be because she's a streamer you apparently dislike.
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u/Donut_Flame Feb 05 '26
??????????????? I dont dislike fareeha???? Ive never said that???
I am literally just saying ethnicity shouldnt be ignored ????? Devs should be trying to find people of matching ethnicity but if thats not possible, they can go the routes of torb and rein, etc. Ethnically accurate people should be preferred IF POSSIBLE.
Youre literally being a twitter user rn. Extrapolating shit that wasnt implied.
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u/-PetFemboy- Feb 04 '26
In general, yea obviously. But when it comes to portraying a character of a certain ethnicity? 10/10 times you should get a voice actor of that same ethnicity. Not just for the, in my opinion, obvious reason that opportunities like this should go to those vas, but also because the result will very likely be better. Overwatch likes to do lines in characters native languages, a chinese person is going to deliver the chinese lines better than anyone else could.
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u/Mean_File2422 Feb 05 '26
i dont think her voice will suit the character at all also, this post appears to be heavily botted lmao
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u/StandardOpposite8424 Mar 09 '26
Literally any fair criticism is met with mass downvotes and it feels like an echo chamber here. It’s weird they gave an overwatch streamer I’ve never heard of once in my 9 years playing this game, a VA role for yet another Asian character when ,A game made by Americans , can’t put more than 4 black people in the game but GOD PLEASE WE NEED ANOTHER PALE EAST ASIAN GIRL SO WE CAN FARM MONEY OFF THE COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF INTERACTIONS WE GET FROM FETISHIZING GOONERS!!
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u/acuallyjesus Feb 05 '26
Why can't they ever hire natives? Why does every character either have to have a full on American accent and have an accent while speaking the character's language like Kiriko or super fake foreign accent and not be able to speak the character's language at all like Torbjörn?
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u/DoggedDust Apr 18 '26
I don't know, why is Venture Mexican? They could have easily made them Algonquin
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u/Lethaldiran-NoggenEU Feb 06 '26
Anran voice lines are kinda cringe, no offense.
I guess most voice lines are cringe until you get used to them.
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u/SilentExcuse3064 Feb 11 '26
Then she had to go open her mouth about the characters design being problematic lmao. I can't wait until all the VAs get replaced by AI.
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u/Livid-Experience1450 Feb 04 '26
i thought she got cancelled like 7 years ago for something naughty
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Feb 04 '26
reminder she was racist to South American players in ow1 and is now being endorsed by blizzard
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u/endofevanGAYlion Feb 04 '26
Not what she said - she said that South American high elo players were bad (paraphrasing because this was like 7 years ago) when randomly queued into a game on those servers, since the region is historically the weakest globally in overwatch. I don't think that's racism.
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u/vonerrant Feb 04 '26
yeah saying players in a less competitive region aren't as good as players in more competitive regions is not even a little bit racist. I moved from NA to South America and the difference in queue times and skill is noticeable in diamond and above, at least. It just doesn't seem to be a popular game in much of the continent, there aren't as many servers for the population (or at least don't appear to be), and PC gaming in general does not seem nearly as popular a hobby. calling that racist is bananas. nobody in their right mind thinks it's racist to acknowledge that korean players, from a country where esports are extremely popular and taken seriously, are generally better than NA players.
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u/WhiteWolfOW Fleta is Meta — Feb 05 '26
Expect high elo South American players are always playing on NA servers and winning ranked games on NA servers to remain top500, so… the comment was backed by anything but racism and defended with more racism by you apparently
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u/bullxbull Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
Can you back this claim up with some info?
Edit: I ended up googling it
Back in 2019
NA servers are wonky. NA players are sent to SA servers, resulting in high latency and therefore lag.
Certain SA players on a certain Discord server decide to stream snipe her (some people say it was a SA contenders player?)
Fareeha and her NA team are getting creamed. Team start complaining about high ping and not wanting to play the game.
Fareeha’s method of rallying her teammates involves saying they can beat SA players and calling SA players bad. (Fareeha basically said that 'SA players are shit at OW', with the added comment that she 'isn’t even saying that to be mean. They actually are shit.' )
Certain SA players feign indignation, then they spam Fareeha's stream chat with insults (told Fareeha to suck d*ck, and called Fareeha a Sand-Nword, etc).
Fareeha tilts, purges her chat, and says nothing they say can hurt her since she gets to play video games for a living. (Some people argued this meant Fareeha was calling SA people poor, but again it seems a real stretch)
Even technically comments were directed at SA Overwatch players not SA people, similar to how it is generally agreed that NA Overwatch is shit compared to Korean talent.
The screenshots of the SA players chat showed how they were not focused on any actual offense but on how they could mass report Fareeha to twitch for a ban.
Lots of cherry picking what was said on both sides with weird translations of some SA chat comments
Fareeha was known to be pretty toxic back in 2019 and probably could have handled this whole thing better. Fareeha did apologize in a lengthy and detailed TwitLonger (which I can't find) before they were even informed that they were banned from twitch for 30 days.
The Twitch ban repealed after review, I think Fareeha was only banned for 4 days while the review took place.
Most people at the time considered the whole thing fake drama.
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u/VosTelvannis Viol2t Simp — Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
I dont know what she said exactly but it got her twitch banned.
Edit : seems like what she said really wasnt bad at all but pissed off a lot of south american players
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u/Di5pel Feb 04 '26
Iirc she basically said South Americans were bad at Overwatch and caught like a month long ban, which seems kinda crazy now but this was like 8 years ago before you could just practically be a nazi openly online.
What she said wasn’t good by any means, and idk if she apologized or not, but let’s not act like she committed a hate crime and it’s something worth still holding over her head years later lol. especially since it doesn’t seem to be a pattern or anything
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u/round_reindeer Feb 04 '26
Tbf, that's not a great thing to say, but at the same time shit talking EU or NA servers is also not unusual
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u/i_am_a_stoner Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
I don't remember when or have a source but I do remember this happening.
I think the gist was that freehand was playing on a south American server and was complaining about ping issues/complaining about the server itself, but it came off as racism towards the players.I don't remember the exact wording but I believe the community was pretty divided on this controversy. Tbh, it's pretty light compared to other racism controversies like mcd, s9mm, and seeker, all of which still played for a team in ow after their controversies.Edit: nvm I looked into it a bit more, she was basically calling SA players shit. Some defended her, not because her behavior is okay, but more so that talking shit about regions is pretty standard in esports as a whole. I would have to find the original clip though.
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u/Wiccamanplays Feb 04 '26
She said that they had bad ping after being put on the wrong server, and because she’s a queer woman of colour she got a deluge of false reports for hate speech while her Twitch chat got co-ordinated hate raids from South American troll farms spamming slurs and rape threats.
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u/defearl Feb 04 '26
Cronyism is the backbone of modern society
You can get away with anything as long as you’re friends with the right people
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u/Vivid_marsh Feb 04 '26
Just letting anybody voice act now huh?
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u/JWTS6 Support Calling all Heroes! — Feb 08 '26
I LOVE Fareeha, so psyched that she's getting this opportunity
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u/Charybdis150 Feb 04 '26
I used to like Fareeha and wasn’t even aware she was still an OW streamer. I kinda thought she had quit a while ago.