I think different voices for characters and the narrator would be funner for people to do and look at than flat-reads! Anyone can do a flat-read all by themself, so it'd just be a collection of those, but reading chapters together is a community effort! You can plan out who will be which voices, and make lots of clips to share with everyone, and get commentary on which ones sound good... It's more exciting! It'd even be more exciting for people to watch - I don't want to sign up for voice acting, but it would be fun watching everyone talk about voice acting and share clips!
Why not just have both set up, though? You could have a collection of flat-reads where anyone could submit theirs and get put on the list, and then also work on the mixed voice acting one. It's not any extra work for anyone (except whoever updates the list, I guess), since people would only do each when and if they felt like it.
Also, is it really a problem if it doesn't sound spectacular? It's just people having fun, not trying to make a tv series. It would be disappointing if a lot of people got kicked out even though they wanted to do it, just because they haven't practiced voice acting very much! Bad microphone is a little different, I guess, since static is hard on everyone's ears.
If you had enough people joining, maybe you could make different groups, or tiers? Like the people who had great microphones and wanted to do Skype sessions and try over and over until they got their lines perfect could be in a group, and people who just wanted to play around or do what they liked could be in a group! Then there could be multiple versions of a chapter.
Also, as it gets into the further chapters and the excitement to narrate dies down on the forum, there will probably only be a few people willing to narrate the last few chapters, at which point it stops being a community thing and starts being something that only a small group of people are involved with. (I don't know if you guys think this is important.)
That doesn't seem like much of a concern! Whoever's having fun should do it, even if it's just a few of them. Community things are nice, and it'd be sort of sad if interest died down if it had been really exciting, but if people want it to be a community effort again, they'll participate!
If we doll out characters in blocks [...] or until they get bored [...] the excitement will probably never die down.
That seems good! I don't know about never, but it seems way funner for everyone if you could just jump in anytime. Otherwise, it gets to be a lot of hard work trying to keep all the current voices involved for the entire fanfic.
Auditions sound fun, maybe have a list of all of the main ensemble (Mark, May, Alan, their Pokemon, Chaletwo, etc.) and have everyone record a bit of each part that matches their gender?
Why should it match their gender? It's really common for real voice actors to have a different gender than their character! You know, like, Ash was voiced for years by Victoria Taylor.
Also, there are lots of trans* people on the forums! Including people who are non-binary genders (who might want to try for binary characters!). So that's kind of a sketchy territory. And what if there are way more $gender characters in a chapter than people of that gender who want to participate that round? Or what if it's a Mew chapter, but no agender people are voice-acting? It would have to be put in hold indefinitely. (
"all legendaries who are genderless in the games [...] don't have a gender as we know it.")
Giving people an incentive to try for lots of roles is good, but deciding it by gender is silly. I think everyone can talk about things like "hm, I was hoping we could get a deeper-sounding voice for Mark. Anyone up for it?" without making it about gender! Then if someone happens to be able to do a good deep voice even though they don't have the same gender as Mark, they can go for it (I don't think Mark has a deep voice, but). There's no need for people to be made to feel voice-shy because of gender! It would be a lot nicer if it were comfortable for anyone.
