In a development which, if true, would mark yet another PR disaster for the anime streaming platform, noted English anime dub voice actor David Wald has alleged that, for roughly half-a-decade, Crunchyroll has been helping themselves to his personal mail.
Wald, who readers may recognize as the English-language voice of Gajeel Redfox in the Fairy Tail series, both Paulie and the villainous Baron Tamago in One Piece, and Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu in My Hero Academia, put forth his claim on October 25th via a post made to his personal Twitter.
“Dear friends,” the voice actor began, “if you sent me anything care of Funimation or Crunchyroll in the last 5 years, I apologize, I didn’t get it. I learned yesterday that @Crunchyroll opened my private mail, threw away your letters, and passed out any included items to their staff.”
In a follow-up tweet, Wald would put out a request for help in finding a specific package which contained a number of fan-made merchandise items depicting his SK8 the Infinity character, Ainosuke Shindo, as sent to him by Twitter user and series fan @alchimique.
“Dear fellow workers at @Crunchyroll,” said Wald, “below is a photo of the complete contents of one of the packages addressed to me that was opened and distributed to employees. If you ended up in possession of any of it, I would very much like it returned to me.
From there, Wald would be pressed by fellow English anime VA Damian Mills, perhaps best known as the current dub voice behind Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s Kaworu Nagisa, “Are you serious?!?!?!”.
“So, so, so serious,” replied Wald. “Possibly never more serious.”
Next, the voice actor was asked by a fan if he could provide any insight into Crunchyroll’s response to the discovery.
However, much to both his and the fan’s chagrin, Wald was only able to confirm that “So far they have replied to none of my emails on the matter.”
In the wake of his revelation, Wald was met with an outpouring of support from anime fans, with many doing what they could to help by both bringing attention to the matter and directly demanding a response from Crunchyroll’s various social media accounts.
Returning to the topic several hours later to find it had become the ‘Friday night talk’ of Twitter, Wald would close out this chapter of the story by joking, “Me, thinking: ‘…Jeez, it’s a good thing I didn’t tell them about the gay discrimination. Or the medical discrimination. Or the union busting. Or the continuous culture of fear. Or the hostile workplace environment, or…’
As of writing, Crunchyroll has yet to offer an official response to their alleged mail theft to either Wald or the general public.
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