Bayonetta 3 has had one of the rockiest launches of the year due to Hellena Taylor's allegations regarding Platinum Games and Hideki Kamiya offering her only $4,000 to voice the entire game as its protagonist. The controversy started on Twitter, where Taylor posted multiple videos of her discussing how Platinum Games approached her when work on Bayonetta 3 started, allegedly offering her less than $4,000 at the time. She then claimed that only after she sent a private email to Kamiya himself about the matter she was offered more, namely the $4,000 to reprise her role in the series, which she declined because it's too low for a multi-million franchise.
In those same videos, Taylor also asked her fans and fans of Bayonetta as a series to boycott Bayonetta 3 and donate money to charities, instead. This sparked a positive and long-overdue debate about voice actors and their pay in the gaming industry and outside of it too, leading to Taylor becoming the hero of the people overnight when Kamiya's behavior in the aftermath of the videos led to him being banned on Twitter. However, the positivity surrounding the voice actress lasted for mere hours, as past tweets from Taylor started to surface and things took a turn for the worse when she was caught lying about what she was offered. Still, this shouldn't sink the discourse about VA pay.
Why Hellena Taylor's Discourse About VA Pay Should Go Beyond Bayonetta 3
A few days after Taylor's videos went viral with thousands of likes and retweets, sources started to come out and say that the actress was actually offered more for her role in Bayonetta 3 than she claimed she did before the $4,000 offer, which eventually she confirmed. This was already outrageous to many long-standing fans because it felt disingenuous on Taylor's part, as she evidently omitted details from the situation as a whole to try and win the people's favor online.
Whether this was done out of spite for Bayonetta 3, Kamiya, the new Bayonetta voice actress Jennifer Hale, or for any other reason, it remains unknown even now that the dust has settled a bit. And yet, this was only the beginning of Taylor's downfall in popularity, as she was found out following openly transphobic people and praising Blue Lives Matter posts online, which was generally seen as distasteful for her role in the game. Although the situation looked dire already, and people had already started to put the brakes on the VA pay discourse, new information emerged.
In fact, on her Twitter account, Taylor went on to ask that those who did boycott Bayonetta 3 donate their money to anti-abortion charities, including US-based billboard companies with the sole objective of spreading anti-abortion messages. She went from being the people's hero to a villain in a matter of days and is now fast approaching the cancel stage on social media. As such, the rightful discourse about voice actors being paid incredibly low amounts of money to perform their job is in danger of sinking and being forgotten about when it was the only good thing the whole Bayonetta 3 controversy did.
Even the game itself spawned more controversies, with Bayonetta 3 erasing years of women-empowering character development and LGBTQIA+ representation, which didn't help the cause Taylor inadvertently started. While the anti-abortion charities were pretty much the final nail in the coffin for many former fans online, who are rightfully losing faith, this doesn't take away from the fact that voice actors don't tend to be paid across the board and can't share their wages outside their unions because of NDAs. Ultimately, even if it's hard to support a cause started by someone who proved to be a very different person than she presented herself as, the voice actor pay discourse should be kept going for a better future.
Bayonetta 3 is available now, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.