High Guardian Spice - Tumblr: The CalArt Anime

[BScCollateral]

I'm always torn when I read something like this. I don't bear Raye any real ill-will; I just want her to find a comfortable, productive job having nothing to do with making TV shows.
You can say all you want about Roger Corman, but you can't deny the man had an incredible eye for talent. People in his role today have the opposite, burning hundreds of millions and billions on people like Raye who have anti-talent.

 

[LiquidKid]

I think a big part of it is the idea that a lot of Americans have, myself included. It’s hard to go backwards.
Raye managed to get an animated show she created made and she was the show runner. That’s an extremely rare and difficult thing to accomplish, and usually the next step is either creating another show or rising up the rank to producer or executive. But her show was awful and tanked beyond and consolation prize. She has to be considered poison in the industry at this point.

And that’s not even getting into how many show runners never manage to make a second show. A lot of them step back and take jobs on other people’s shows. And I do believe Raye could probably find character design work, but it’s been 8 months since she last posted that she was looking for work in that field. So I think it’s safe to say her animation career is likely over. But for people who reach that high, can they mentally accept having to go back to an office job or, god forbid, retail?

I have no hard feelings towards Raye. Flat out she just wasn’t talented enough or skilled enough to manage a project like this, and it’s very obvious that crunchy roll gave her a tiny budget and too much freedom. I fully believe High Guardian Spice was set up to fail and was only there to make crunchy roll studios look more appealing for the buyout. Raye was cheap and “anime enough” so they shrugged and went with her. And because she didn’t know any better, she destroyed her art career doing it.

 

[BScCollateral]

She has to be considered poison in the industry at this point.

I hope she is. Her career makes me wonder how many people get undeserved opportunities and screw up everything, how many perfectly adequate future plumbers become utterly failed college students.
And it's sad here, because I unironically think High Guardian Spice had some potentially interesting ideas in it. Character is an involuntary refugee and resents her parents for keeping her out of trouble? That could be dramatic. The bits in the first episode which were all "My bestest friend and I are going off on our first for-real grown up trip!" Hey, that presses my buttons.
It almost makes me think of modern Star Wars. Stormtrooper defecting to the rebels? Rebel Mandalorian girl who's an artist, possibly the first Star Wars character with a hobby? Hey, sounds like it's worth a watch.
Except, of course, it isn't, and every day the audience is trained to assume it's all crap, even if it sounds promising.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Anyway, through this I learned that she was so desperate for any fandom whatsoever that she personally followed any Twitter account that posted porn.

No, that's not desperation. These people just want canon fap fodder and they pretend to say otherwise. And she was using her public, "professional" account for this? LOL.

But the fact there's no fandom to the point there's so little porn is hilariously sad and that's what butters her biscuits. She has failed (bet'cha Women in Animation has some hand in it) because of shitty optics, and she had nothing else to fall back on. This is all on her, this is the world she advocated for, she went on a whiny rampage over her failure, and this was how it repayed her. She's done, and she has no one else but herself to blame at this point.

Also she truly is a fucking waste of potential talent, as that artpiece there isn't bad to look at, but using a failed mascot is in hilarious poor taste. She really put all her chips down on this one project because she's that uncreative to come up with something new and that delusional in thinking she could've made it big with her first and only original(?) IP.

Rebecca Sugar scammed an entire generation of aspiring animators, change my mind.

 

[Koby_Fish]

No, that's not desperation. These people just want canon fap fodder and they pretend to say otherwise. And she was using her public, "professional" account for this? LOL.

But the fact there's no fandom to the point there's so little porn is hilariously sad and that's what butters her biscuits. She has failed (bet'cha Women in Animation has some hand in it) because of shitty optics, and she had nothing else to fall back on. This is all on her, this is the world she advocated for, she went on a whiny rampage over her failure, and this was how it repayed her. She's done, and she has no one else but herself to blame at this point.

Also she truly is a fucking waste of potential talent, as that artpiece there isn't bad to look at, but using a failed mascot is in hilarious poor taste. She really put all her chips down on this one project because she's that uncreative to come up with something new and that delusional in thinking she could've made it big with her first and only original(?) IP.

Rebecca Sugar scammed an entire generation of aspiring animators, change my mind.

well to be fair, in this lady's delusion, the fact that the character she drew for an inspirational BS is a failed character is exactly why she drew it. Like she's trying to tell herself, "Yeah this failed hard, but I can try, try again!" which in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, but if she never learns WHY and HOW this character failed and then fix the associated problems, it's just the definition of insanity

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

There are minor updates. Raye has been “looking for work” all year in LinkedIn, implying the lions gate deal she had did not work out.
She also posted this on October 10th, which is cryptic and without context. One can say animation is in a bad place right now. And they’d be right. But I think there’s more going on with Raye in particular.

View attachment 5479357

Spoiler: side ramblings

I won’t go into too much detail, but through a weird twist of events I found out that I’m 1 degree of separation from Raye. we have never met and I have no plans to ever try to meet her, so that’s not exactly identifying info on my part. Anyway, through this I learned that she was so desperate for any fandom whatsoever that she personally followed any Twitter account that posted porn. Both because there was barely any of it and because that was the closest thing to a fanbase HGS will ever have. Kinda sad really,

She drew that? Why does it look 10X better than anything she made for High Guardian Spice?

 

[starborn427614]

She drew that? Why does it look 10X better than anything she made for High Guardian Spice?

Art style isn't an explosion of pastel colours, for one thing. Side note: I actually forgot this thing existed. It had that little impact on the industry, even as someone's "comfort show".

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

I have no hard feelings towards Raye. Flat out she just wasn’t talented enough or skilled enough to manage a project like this, and it’s very obvious that crunchy roll gave her a tiny budget and too much freedom. I fully believe High Guardian Spice was set up to fail and was only there to make crunchy roll studios look more appealing for the buyout. Raye was cheap and “anime enough” so they shrugged and went with her. And because she didn’t know any better, she destroyed her art career doing it.

I don't think she was set to fail exactly. The budget while nothing amazing was bigger than most anime get because she got the same budget as most cartoon shows. US animated productions for good and bad are more expensive because what the talent is used to getting (plus union rules). Anime is more run on passionate and extremely talented artists with high standards that make smaller budget really work because that's the traditional situation there.

She just absolutely used her budget and time wrong. Let's just look what she did with the cheap stuff, writing and storyboarding. Her writing room was huge, she used way too many storyborders and they were not organized right. She started storyboarding before the first scripts were finished. What? No. You don't do that. Look into how Hoodwink was done, a very small budget animated movie made when 3D animation was still extremely expensive. They knew they didn't have any budget to fix the animation at all so they had have everything else done before that. So they had to be sure that writing and storyboarding was tight and final. To storyboarding right you need a ready script. You can still tweak it when see the visual storytelling and timing in action but you need be sure about the main story beats and characters so you don't have redo that much.

How do you achieve that in timely manner? Do something like the classic era the Simpsons method. Have a work weekend with every main writer where you together hammer out the main plot. You do long days and you can't leave without having an idea what each episode is about. Then you go on your own to do a full scrip to your episodes. Then you get together again so the other writers can give you criticism and fix continue errors and such. Then you go to storyboarding.

She probably didn't need be this formal about it because project this size and type didn't really need more than three writers but basics should have been about the same. Do a tight start so the whole production team has a clear picture where you are going and then let people work on their own before getting together again to make sure that you keep unified vision.

 

[LiquidKid]

How do you achieve that in timely manner? Do something like the classic era the Simpsons method. Have a work weekend with every main writer where you together hammer out the main plot. You do long days and you can't leave without having an idea what each episode is about. Then you go on your own to do a full scrip to your episodes. Then you get together again so the other writers can give you criticism and fix continue errors and such. Then you go to storyboarding

Funnily enough, they used to call it the gong weekend as for years they’d rent a giant gong and every time they all agreed on the plot for an episode, they’d strike the gong. Then eventually they decided that was too expensive so they stopped renting it.
They also go to a remote area so none of them can be distracted by family or friends.

I think the weirdest thing about the budget was where they decided to cheap out. Everyone and their mother has talked about the png bread and fruit, but it really can’t be overlooked. The fruit is in such a different art style that it’s jarring, and the png bread they used is very clearly precut factory bread that couldn’t possibly exist in their world.
Then you have the lamppost with the watermark still on it. Okay, steal the lamp. But how can you be so lazy you can’t use the clone tool to remove it? Learning how to remove watermarks was taught in my first week of high school graphic design, I’m sure everyone on the art team knew how to do it. It’s those little things that keep adding up and making it a terrible show instead of just a mediocre one.

 

[Blamo2000]

I won’t go into too much detail, but through a weird twist of events I found out that I’m 1 degree of separation from Raye. we have never met and I have no plans to ever try to meet her, so that’s not exactly identifying info on my part. Anyway, through this I learned that she was so desperate for any fandom whatsoever that she personally followed any Twitter account that posted porn. Both because there was barely any of it and because that was the closest thing to a fanbase HGS will ever have. Kinda sad really,

To be honest, I can imagine for people who came from fandoms, getting a fandom of your own is what considered making it.

 

[Dr. Butt]

Necro'ing, I know, but no one's mentioned that Raye has full-on porn addict face. She's too grody to feel any sympathy for. All she does is invent "muh OCs" to coom too anyway.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Necro'ing, I know, but no one's mentioned that Raye has full-on porn addict face.

She is a magical girl fan, of which yuri is rampant, and she adored Tumblr because yaoi/MLM was easier to roleplay on it. No doubt she browsed porn blogs and drew rule 34 fan-art, the latter of which she would've wisely kept to herself before she got brave enough to start her BL self-insert dating sim.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

Oh wow this thread. Good times, probably gonna reread it.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

Wait, you mean the same "Steenz" that ruined took over the newspaper comic Heart of the City?

For context, this is what it looked like before Steenz (Mark Tatulli; Heart is the character on the right, on the left is her friend Dean):
View attachment 2436322
And this is what it looks like now (Heart's on the left, Dean is the guy hanging off of the second 2):
View attachment 2436324
Even knowing nothing about the comic at all, which one do you think has more personality? Which one gives you more of an idea of character? Which art-style looks more appealing? If you picked "the one on top", congratulations! You're not chugging the SJW Kool-Aid. (SERIOUSLY, WHY IS EVERYONE SO FAT?! The Heart of 1998-2020 would be like if she could see what she looks like now.)

On topic though, holy SHIT does HGS look like trash. Not even interesting or trainwreck level trash (like Steven Universe or Magical Girl Friendship Squad), just one big pile of blegh.

Between that and what they did to Mark Trail, newspaper comics are being overrun with Calarts refugees.

So is however much they dumped on this why Crunchyroll is getting shut down.

It was actually Tatulli’s idea to give it to Steenz as he wanted to quit the strip to focus on his Liō strip.

But I don’t know why Steenz even wanted to take over the Heart of the City strip. Especially when the strip had comics like this:

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

But I don’t know why Steenz even wanted to take over the Heart of the City strip. Especially when the strip had comics like this:

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a comic that's consistently worse than Garfield? Ain't easy, but by god Heart of The City managed to do it day in and day out. They don't call the comics section The Funnies anymore ever since they started printing Heart of The City.

Bring back The Far Side.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Calvin & Hobbes' departure legit left a huge hole in the comics industry that others have tried and failed to fill. The artstyle for Heart of the City is nice, yet it's just not the same.

Same thing is happening with animation, just couldn't exactly tell you what show left what hole behind that can't be filled again. Might've been A:TLA, although that might've been more of a crater in that ever since then, animation changed and not for the better.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a comic that's consistently worse than Garfield? Ain't easy, but by god Heart of The City managed to do it day in and day out. They don't call the comics section The Funnies anymore ever since they started printing Heart of The City.

Bring back The Far Side.

HoTC wasn’t the best comic strip ever, but when Tatulli drew it, it looked better than the current artist. I was reading the early strips on GoComics, and it was quite enjoyable at times.

Fun fact: Garfield was never meant to be funny in the first place.

Calvin & Hobbes' departure legit left a huge hole in the comics industry that others have tried and failed to fill. The artstyle for Heart of the City is nice, yet it's just not the same.

I think that if C&H lasted, it would become the Calvin’s Dad strip. Calvin’s father was obviously Bill’s self-insert, and was on his way to becoming completely flanderized as he was becoming more of a soapbox for Watterson’s viewpoints.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

A new Magic Knight Rayearth has recently been announced, so I'm expecting Raye to start sperging about it since Hikaru was her personal hero.

 

[LiquidKid]

Raye has once again made a very cryptic doom post. But this time with more details.

I truly don't know what to do.

I'm out of money. I went through my savings long ago, and have been living off of unemployment, credit card debt, and the help of my (not wealthy) parents. I'm close to maxing out my credit cards, I don't have health insurance anymore, I don't have enough money to pay rent this month...

I need a job. I need to move to a cheaper place. I need to get my life together. But how am I supposed to do that..?

I've applied to hundreds of jobs online over the last few years, many outside of the animation industry. I search and I apply every single day. To silence.

My animation dream came true seven(!!) years ago now, I did the thing, I made a show. And I haven't been able to get a full-time job in animation since. The closest I got was a Supervising Director role on a show in development that wound up getting canned when the WB-Discovery merger happened in 2022. We didn't learn it was officially dead until summer of 2024.

I have a second show in development, l've been working on it with Legendary TV and Amazon since 2020. This show means everything to me - these are characters l've had since I was in middle school, it feels like this is THE story I was put on Earth to tell. I have put my heart and soul into developing this show and thank god it's still in the running. The thing is, development doesn't pay.

If my new show gets greenlit I will be saved, I will have money coming in again, I will be back to working in animation, the thing I love more than anything. But it isn't up to me. I did my best up until now, but I have no control over the outcome or when things may move forward.

And in the meantime I have to survive. But how am I supposed to survive if I can't get any work...?

I don't want to give up. I can't give up. But I can't go on like this...



So... if you're looking for an experienced and highly qualified Showrunner, Supervising Director, Director, Character Designer, Storyboard Artist, Revisionist, or Color Designer.

Please consider hiring me.

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

couldn't have happened to a nicer genderblob.