>>8163900Getting through both round 1 and 2 is fucking hugely far along. 2 is the giant culling point after 1 (which is where they dumpster 98% of the entries) - to pass both those, is literally home stretch.
The chuuba you know today as Finana got to the last round for this gen too, so maybe the finalists are only like, 2-3 people per char. Pomu also got through round 1 but not round 2, because, she didn't really have enough material out there to work on (at that time, before she did Maid Mint). If there were like 50 other Round 3+ finalists, OP wouldn't have had any reason to be so confident about it, but if there were only 2 and Finana was the other one and.. maybe someone tipped off that the current Mumei likely had the job, then this girl would have posted in semi-confidence.
So say, what if, they have the general framework of the models made in advance, which can be customized more later by the talents after they're picked - and then they shop for voices to fit these characters. They are explicitly matched up to whatever voice the producer had in mind in his head. Mori got accepted almost instantly from her interviewing, just blew through without even trying - because they were looking for a husky sexy voice for that model and she was a perfect match for what they imagined. For context, her same voice would be real fuckin' weird in Gura for example, but if they already divide up by-character in later rounds that actually doesn't matter whether or not Gura's role was picked (and or for a time, it was uncertain if Gura or Ame could in fact have been swapped their models, because they both are for small girls [ame is REALLY short, most fanart doesn't convey this at all] and both have very high pitch voices). So in this case, say they were looking for a match only for Mumei and had just a few to go, maybe it was (current Mumei) and a handful of others.
The selections actually can go pretty fast - they used to fling out new gens entirely in like 3-4 months in 2019. There are just more and more things they wanna do these days that can really bog it down. And as you know, EN management is QUITE something else to deal with and would only bog things down even more.
