Jesus, I remember when they announced he wouldn't be back for Talks at the start of C3, but I had no idea about any of the reasoning behind it.
Tough decision for sure, but definitely one that speaks to their integrity as creators and as a company. Best wishes to them moving forward, and hope Ashley is doing well of course.
While there is speculation that him leaving was related to this, there's no confirmation, and chances are it was a different reason. Personally I suspect it was related to his substance abuse issues and his frequency of lashing out at trolls online. The breakup and restraining order were both this year, and DV is VERY often hidden in plain sight. Most people who interact with DV victims are completely unaware, because most people who commit DV are very good at being charming when they want to be and the victims are usually too afraid to let the people around them know.
Remove hundreds of hours of content because of one piece of shit (and make no mistake, he is a piece of shit) but is still in the pocket of Amazon.
That's such a tough call I don't envy having to make. Some of the content created while he was ok is one of a kind. I'm picturing the interview he had with Quyen Tran where she shared her and Sam's 9/11 story. We're missing that verbal history for people to hear, now. Balancing that with not giving him air time, or worse, having to pay out to him must have been an extremely hard decision.
Considering the reasoning, I have zero issue with this. BWF is scum, and a good cleaning of their presence from the brand is perfectly in order.
I don't follow Critical Role, mind explaining?
BWF is Brian Wayne Foster.
He’s one of the (now ex) members of critical role. He was engaged to Ashley Johnson (from critical role, Ellie in TLOU games, waitress in avengers) and they separated with restraining orders because of abuse and general assholeishness.
So critical role is removing him from their content as best as they can so he doesn’t get visibility and such.
Ah, seems reasonable. Would be kinda difficult to just edit him out of it entirely
Luckily he isn't in the main Campaigns, just side stuff. But the stuff he's in he's usually the main focus (host in Talks Machina, GM in Undeadwood) so it would be impossible to edit him out of those.
Didn't he intro a couple of live episodes? Did they remove those?
No, those are the exceptions I think. I suspect that removing them would have caused too much trouble for the main campaigns, because they would have had to explain that there is missing content and why for anyone who would be watching them for the first time.
Good question!
Considering one of the things they are removing is a talk show that he hosted that lasted for multiple seasons, yeah. kinda.
tl;dr would be that one of the main actresses on critical role (Ashley Johnston) was in an abusive relationship with this guy named Foster, and Critical Role has now scrubbed every notion of his existence from their page by deleting all videos with him in it.
A valuable lesson on the importance of local archiving and not trusting any online source to stay online.
Sorry, stepped away to make dinner. Looks like others gave you the reasoning though.
100% in support of the decision… but from a purely selfish perspective I always had the Honey Heist on my someday/maybe catch up list.
Good to see the clear show of integrity from the team.
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