Above All, Be Your Own Biggest Fan
I was born in 1987, and by the early 2000s Tooniverse—South Korea's cable channel specializing in animation—was bringing a flood of characters and animated shows into my life. My first love was Asuka Jr.—known as Sherlocks in the Korean dub—who never realized Meimi was Saint Tail. Then Hoshin Engi and Saiyuki took over my mid-to-late teens. Saiyuki had that gloriously cringeworthy chuunibyou, dark-dragon energy. I deliberately carried myself like a lone wolf, drew Sanzo all over my hands, and wrote Saiyuki between my fingers.
I loved the sensibility of Saiyuki creator Kazuya Minekura, and I adored Korean voice actor Hong Si-ho's performance as Sanzo. I also loved the Korean performances of Kim Seung-jun, Kang Soo-jin, and Choi Won-hyeong, as well as Gu Ja-hyeong's Yozen in Hoshin Engi. My favorite Hoshin Engi character was Dakki, played in Korean by Yang Jeong-hwa. She was a villain, but I practically wanted to grow up to be her. If a Japanese shonen manga had the right swagger but was too niche to receive a Korean dub, I made my own imaginary voice cast. Those casting notes are still written in the old manga volumes at my house.
I watch current hits for study, but I do not fall for them as deeply as I once did. I have seen Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan, and Jujutsu Kaisen. Gojo came closest to moving me, but even he never quite took root. I still return to the older series instead. Like KIAN84 watching Taejo Wang Geon a hundred times, I keep replaying One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach; Hunter × Hunter, too. I remain happily buried in the past, with no updates.
I think everyone should be a fan of something. You need something you love so intensely that you catch yourself thinking, "Have I lost my mind?" But at the end of that devotion, you have to find yourself. Above all, you should be your own biggest fan. I have been a longtime fan of N.Flying, but I do not love them for their happiness. I love them because loving them makes me happy, and because that passion helps keep me alive.
The lines I loved as a teenager may look embarrassing or overdramatic to someone else, but they kept me from feeling alone. They made me brave and gave me a reason to stand behind the choices I made. That fan's sensibility was part of the basic equipment that helped me endure.
Through the Judicial Examination and the Stage to the Microphone
I spent my school years in Gangwon Province. Studying was what I did best, and I loved to talk, so I grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer—a job that would let me use both. In 2006, I entered Seoul National University's College of Humanities and gained a little freedom from my parents' supervision. I decided to enjoy more of what I loved. My two great obsessions at the time were manga and idols.
I never wanted to stop at simply liking something. At school festivals, I was the student who went onstage alone and danced to BoA. I wanted to take dancing seriously, so at twenty-one I sent a message through Cyworld, the dominant Korean social network of the time, to every member of Crazy, YG's in-house dance team. I kept asking if I could at least audition until someone replied. I passed and spent about two years working as a dancer at YG. That was the beginning of my professional life.
I loved dancing and loved sharing stages and concerts with the idols I admired. But twenty years ago, it was difficult for a junior dancer to turn that work into a stable livelihood, so I returned to school. The prevailing advice then was to choose one path and put academics first. I knew very little about the range of professions available or about my own aptitude.
Only while studying for the judicial examination did I begin to understand what lawyers and other legal professionals actually did—and whether the work suited me. A lawyer represents other people, empathizes with their cases, and fights alongside them. If I had chosen that profession, I think every day would have brought a kind of stress entirely different from acting. I realized late that doing well in school and enjoying public speaking were not enough. That realization allowed me to quit. My heart had remained on the stage, under the lights, and in front of the camera.
Starting over as an aspiring announcer at twenty-six felt late at the time. I had no double major, overseas study, or internship experience, and it was daunting to begin learning vocal production and correcting my pronunciation from scratch. There were far fewer resources than there are now, so I studied my body and voice closely on my own. I passed the announcer recruitment process after about a year and a half.
For KBS's open-recruitment voice-actor audition, I devised a little strategy. I can cry within seconds simply by watching or remembering something, and I can compose myself just as quickly. If the script gave me a reason to cry, I planned to cry immediately. Then, if the judges asked whether I could continue, I would switch at once to a completely unaffected voice and show them the next performance. I passed after only a month of training specifically for the voice-actor exam. Because I had started late, I cut the preparation period down ruthlessly in an effort to reach something close to the same starting line. I believe life takes both talent and tactics.
When You Hold Too Tightly to the Work You Love
By the time all those paths finally led me to voice acting, I was thirty under the Korean age-counting system then in use. I thought I had reached my professional destination. Senior actors often say the vocal cords age slowly, and many continue working well into old age, so I decided I would stop moving from job to job and live as "voice actor Lee Daseul" until I was a hundred. I also felt as though I were finally entering the Disney castle I had only dreamed of as a fan.
Neither was true. Both ideas were shattered. After my cohort was recruited by KBS, we spent an initial term as exclusive voice actors before beginning our freelance careers. I had already worked inside a broadcaster as an announcer, but surviving the freelance jungle after that exclusive term ended was another matter. The place I had imagined as a Disney princess's castle turned out to be a fortress.
Failure and slumps cannot be removed from life, nor can we avoid them. I feel especially tender toward people in a slump, because a slump proves how much they care. Voice acting hurt me so badly because I loved it so much. I was gripping it hard enough to punch a hole through my fist. I suffered as "voice actor Lee Daseul" after work, and even on weekends when there was no work to go to.
I could not loosen my fingers through willpower alone, so I decided to hang other weights from them. If I spread out my energy, perhaps my grip on voice acting would relax. In 2017, I pursued a yoga instructor certification and used my old strength in academics to enter graduate school. Early in my freelance years, when voice work was scarce, I returned to dance and went looking for teaching jobs that sometimes paid less than twenty or thirty thousand won per class.
Dividing my energy among yoga, graduate study, and other work gave me room to breathe. That distance made metacognition possible. Misfortune that had felt unbearable and uniquely mine began to look different from one step away: "Wait, this is all right. It isn't so bad." Even if voice acting had been a suffocating fortress, I became able to feel some gratitude for it, because that hardship helped make me who I am now. I love teaching yoga and being a student, but the experience also confirmed that voice acting remains my identity and my center.
GiGA Genie, a Voice That Became Both Poison and Weapon
GiGA Genie, KT's Korean AI voice assistant, was the turning point that gave voice actor Lee Daseul a real presence. Before that, playing Rell in League of Legends gave me pride as a voice actor. Yennefer in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt helped establish my professional identity. GiGA Genie finally gave me a presence.
In acting, the voice inside me is only material. What matters is expressing an intention clearly enough for it to reach the listener. If people understand what a character means and what message the character wants to convey, the performance has worked. In that sense, I think of my voice as gray. People sometimes hear my work without realizing it is me, and just as often ask, "Is this you?" about something I never recorded. That could sound like having no vocal color, but I love that my voice can blend into almost anything. I believe that quality helped me become GiGA Genie.
AI voice is a kind of poison for voice actors. My past self can end up consuming my future jobs. When I auditioned for GiGA Genie six or seven years ago, there was not yet an environment in which we could examine contract terms or imagine what AI would become. The job arrived, and I did it as a working voice actor. The world changed quickly. Voice actors may lose much of the ground beneath their feet, and many other professions are being pushed into uncertainty as well.
Still, I believe one percent survives anywhere. We have already passed through the future imagined by the classic Korean animated series 2020 Wonder Kiddy. I want to use GiGA Genie as my weapon and become part of that one percent. I say this half in jest, but if people travel to the moon around 2040, I hope my voice guides Korean visitors there. Since things have come this far, AI Lee Daseul might as well conquer space. My voice might as well remain on Earth after I die.
Many people close to me did not know I was GiGA Genie. After I appeared on the popular Korean television program You Quiz on the Block, they began saying, "I talk to Genie every day," or "My parents are always talking to Genie." I was happy to learn that my voice had seeped naturally into their families.
The role also began with a senior actor's recommendation. A renowned female voice actor whom I had admired since childhood suggested me when someone asked whom they should invite to audition. She reportedly said my voice would suit the project, my diction was clear, and I could handle a long recording intelligently. I learned this only when the recording was almost complete. I was asked not to mention it, so I still have not thanked her directly. I hope I will have the chance someday to tell her how deeply grateful I am.
Leaving Galbrena as Deep-Blue Soil
These days, many people who hear the name Lee Daseul probably think of Galbrena in Wuthering Waves first. Like most voice work, it began with an audition. Not every audition is open to every actor. Studios and production teams look at a character and the reference materials, then invite a handful of people they believe can carry that voice and sensibility. The moment I saw Galbrena's eyes, atmosphere, and costume, I thought, "This one is mine." The Chinese audio and other samples also sounded like something I could do well. I wanted the role badly.
I had already played low, grounded characters such as Yennefer and Rell. Even Galbrena's colors suggest the deep sea. She is not a bright emerald blue but a dark, blue-black shade. Her atmosphere and story felt naturally aligned with the tones and emotions I knew how to express, so I never worried about the character herself.
What worried me was timing. Just before meeting Galbrena, I had lost three auditions in succession: a major lead in an animated production, a famous audiobook role, and a subculture game I desperately wanted to join. I believed Galbrena was a perfect match, but I wondered whether luck and momentum would fail me again. About two months later, when I had almost forgotten the audition, I received the call asking me to join. Opportunities to audition for subculture games can come fewer than three or four times in an entire year. I was profoundly grateful to be part of Wuthering Waves and to play Galbrena in a story that closed out the year in such an important role. Recording a game also gave me the feeling of recording the animated works I have always loved.
I have seen people say that Galbrena sounds too plain or lacks a strong character. I do not consider that hate. Some of it was intentional. Her childhood and adult life are sharply severed. She spent a lonely time with Chimera, then began to find companions and somewhere to lean within the story of Wuthering Waves. I did not know how she might appear in future storylines, so I did not want to complete her too early. I wanted to leave her a little dry, rough, and unruffled—like soil inside a greenhouse. I wanted to leave room for whatever flowers or trees might later grow there.
At the second-anniversary Wuthering Waves event, I went looking for every Galbrena cosplayer I could find. I stood in line and asked, "I'm actually Galbrena's voice actor. Would you take a photo with me?" They were fans, so they were the ones who ended up surprised. If it helps Galbrena remain loved and become better known, I will do anything I can as her voice actor. Would cosplaying her myself be going a little too far?
My dream is to display figures of all the famous characters I have played, lined up in different colors like the casts of Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach, which I loved as a child. For now, five or six Galbrena figures given to me by fans fill my small display space.
The more games I work on, the clearer it becomes what I love and what comes naturally to me. My easiest colors are the muted, heavy ones: Galbrena, Yennefer in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Damiane in Crimson Desert. At the same time, the work reveals what I have not yet tried. I would love to play a boy, or someone powerful with a slightly sensual edge. When I visited Nam Doh-hyeong's channel, he told me my color was finally becoming distinct. Dark and heavy roles may be my established ground, but give me someone cute or bright and I can deliver that, too. If Lee Daseul's name has not yet appeared in your project, please feel free to call me. I will repay your trust with good work.
To Breathe Well Is to Rest Well
Even when I sit here as voice actor Lee Daseul, yoga is impossible to remove from my story. I began after leaving dance, as a way to ease the emptiness in my mind and the stiffness in my body. Twenty years ago, yoga in Korea mostly meant Ock Joo-hyun; it had not yet become established as it is today. While studying for the judicial examination, I grew depressed and began losing patches of hair. I started with a twenty-thousand-won monthly class at Gwanak Youth Center, treating it almost like light stretching. Today, I teach yoga and want to develop a style of my own. It has become the largest part of my life after voice acting.
For years, my KakaoTalk profile line was "Healthy body, healthy mind." Yoga is sometimes treated in Korea as a beauty workout for women, but it is both exercise and discipline for caring for body and mind. Meditation teaches you to observe your mind, notice what you are thinking, let it pass, and return your attention. I would recommend it to everyone, regardless of age or gender—not only to voice actors.
When I teach at Seoul Hoseo Art College and at an academy led by Nam Doh-hyeong, my classes always begin with physical training: breathing and stretching rooted in yoga. To speak is to load the cargo of your vocal color onto the ship of breath and deliver it to the other person at exactly the right distance. Yoga helps you understand every part of the body and send breath into it.
Instead of receiving a script and trying to decide in that instant where to tighten or push, it is far more useful over time to spend an hour each morning on yoga-based stretching and exercise. I can say firmly that it improves vocal transformation, expression, endurance, and explosive power. Anyone who wants to become a voice actor must learn to see and hear whether they are breathing well, emptying and inhaling fully, and allowing their breath to emerge from the body rather than collapse into a sigh.
To me, resting and breathing are nearly the same thing. If you breathed well today, you rested well. If your breath was blocked, hurried, and so unconscious that you never noticed it, then your body and mind spent the day being chased. One of my mottos is "Busy, but joyfully." However busy my body is, paying attention to my breath creates a small opening in the mind. It gives me enough space to enjoy the day.
After I appeared on You Quiz on the Block, people often asked how my life had changed. I always give one answer: I had six jobs before the show, then added a seventh—author. My first book's rough English title is Hello, I'm a Professional Multi-Careerist. It was an essay close to a self-introduction. Publishing it led to lecture tours, where I discovered how many people wanted a life like mine, or wanted to be versatile professionals rather than narrow specialists.
We face the uncertainty of a 120-year lifespan. Many people believe that keeping a foot in several professions can make life more resilient. I am preparing a second book with the broader working title Anyone Can Be a Multi-Career Professional. For the third, I am finally writing about voice and speech, drawing on more than twelve years as an announcer and voice actor as well as my teaching experience. It will include breath, mental discipline, and physical training.
A Voice People Can Trust and Feel Excited to Hear
As of 2026, I am exactly ten years into my career. When I had just passed the audition, I focused almost entirely on skill and vocal individuality. I thought it was important to have a signature base tone that people could identify anywhere: "That is Lee Daseul." I obsessed over what made my voice distinctive and, if it had no defining quality, what I should push forward.
After ten years, I find integrity as important as skill. Sometimes you hear a performance and think the narration is extraordinary because the person themselves is good; their character seems to live inside the voice. I may think differently in another ten years, but right now I want to be a good person whose words sound good for that reason—a voice that can seep in and blend wherever it goes.
I had thirty years of life before becoming a voice actor. I would not dare intervene at any point in that past. If I met myself as a teenager, I would offer no advice and let her live as she chose. If I met myself in my twenties, I might want to shorten the wandering. But like About Time or The Butterfly Effect, one small intervention could lead somewhere even worse. Perhaps I would only say, "Do not worry."
Sometimes I regret qualifying as a voice actor at thirty. In private, I admit that it would have been nice to reach my tenth year at around thirty-five. I wish I had qualified a little sooner and wandered a little less. But I also believe the time I spent wandering is why the person I am now is fairly all right.
I doubt I will be very different at fifty. I may have added another job or two. Singing has been a lifelong insecurity, so I have been studying for years and preparing to release a song of my own. I also want to become a television drama writer, and I am already writing toward that. Perhaps my fifty-year-old self will look back and tell the version of me at forty, "You were always intense. Because you were there, I am still doing fairly well. Thank you."
My name and voice are not yet widely known, but within subculture games and animation I want to be remembered as a voice people can trust and feel excited to hear. I want fans to say, "Lee Daseul was cast? This is already exciting. We can trust the performance. No need to worry. Even beside the Japanese, Chinese, American, and Russian tracks, the Korean voice will clearly be the best." That is the voice actor I want to become, and how I hope to be remembered years from now.
I am deeply grateful to have a place where I can share my story. I hope many more voice actors will be able to meet and speak with fans in a space like this.