![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Full headline, due to Dreamwidth's continued inadequacy of subject field length: "'Critical Role' Star Ashley Johnson, Six Other Women Allege Physical and Verbal Abuse By Brian Foster"
On the one hand, this is kind of like holy shit. o_O
On the other hand... it isn't actually all that surprising, as there have been rumors for years that Brian W. Foster was kind of a dickhead behind the scenes. Hell, even in his former on-screen role as the host of Talks Machina[1], he seemed like sort of a real asshat (thinly veiled behind self-deprecating "humor"), and if that was how he actively chose to comport himself on air, it sort of makes sense that he would've been even worse off the air.
Tangentially speaking and almost entirely unrelated to the above (or the below), I did indeed stop watching Critical Role again very shortly after the last time I mentioned it and haven't really been keeping up with much news about it or around it until now. I've vaguely considered picking it back up again from where I'd left off in the second campaign, but it's been over a full year now, this time, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] - Which isn't even available to watch anymore, as it (and almost everything else Critical Role-related that involved Foster) seems to have been scrubbed from the Internet, or at least from the official Critical Role Youtube channel anyway.[2] This has apparently been the case since July 2023, which is apparently when news of the above mentioned shit first leaked, though I'm only just hearing about it now, via that Variety article there, which randomly popped up in my Google News app today. Though, as I said, I had heard some of the other rumors going around after Foster was initially fired, back in 2021.
[2] - I mean, fucking hell, they didn't even do that with Orion Acaba (and, to be frank, very little of value would be lost if those first 27 episodes of Critical Role were removed entirely, especially considering that the whole thing was already in media res to begin with, since it started as just a continuation of their private home game), so I guess that is indicative of just how big of a shitheel Foster is. As bad as Orion was (in game and out of it) toward the end of his time there, nothing I ever heard about him comes even close to the stuff Foster is said to have done.
On the one hand, this is kind of like holy shit. o_O
On the other hand... it isn't actually all that surprising, as there have been rumors for years that Brian W. Foster was kind of a dickhead behind the scenes. Hell, even in his former on-screen role as the host of Talks Machina[1], he seemed like sort of a real asshat (thinly veiled behind self-deprecating "humor"), and if that was how he actively chose to comport himself on air, it sort of makes sense that he would've been even worse off the air.
Tangentially speaking and almost entirely unrelated to the above (or the below), I did indeed stop watching Critical Role again very shortly after the last time I mentioned it and haven't really been keeping up with much news about it or around it until now. I've vaguely considered picking it back up again from where I'd left off in the second campaign, but it's been over a full year now, this time, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] - Which isn't even available to watch anymore, as it (and almost everything else Critical Role-related that involved Foster) seems to have been scrubbed from the Internet, or at least from the official Critical Role Youtube channel anyway.[2] This has apparently been the case since July 2023, which is apparently when news of the above mentioned shit first leaked, though I'm only just hearing about it now, via that Variety article there, which randomly popped up in my Google News app today. Though, as I said, I had heard some of the other rumors going around after Foster was initially fired, back in 2021.
[2] - I mean, fucking hell, they didn't even do that with Orion Acaba (and, to be frank, very little of value would be lost if those first 27 episodes of Critical Role were removed entirely, especially considering that the whole thing was already in media res to begin with, since it started as just a continuation of their private home game), so I guess that is indicative of just how big of a shitheel Foster is. As bad as Orion was (in game and out of it) toward the end of his time there, nothing I ever heard about him comes even close to the stuff Foster is said to have done.
