High Guardian Spice - Tumblr: The CalArt Anime

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Observotron said:
Watch it like it was made by some traditionalist, bible thumping Republican and it becomes and extremely offensive comedy about diversity.
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High Guardian Spice is an extraordinarily good critique of a list of things:
  1. Skill matters, especially when hiring writers and developing story plots.
  2. Characters that are poorly written will be poorly received.
  3. Writing strawmen is a very, very poor cop-out for actual writing talent.
  4. There are people in this world that are this smooth brained and actually think in terms of pure good vs. pure evil - or in the case of HGS. good moral character who is friendly with everyone vs straight white douchebag that portrays no one that has ever existed.
  5. Just because a character is queer or questioning their sexuality does not make them stunning or brave.
    Those must be proven and earned in the show - circling back to good writing.
  6. If a creator or writer is gender nonconforming, great! Do they have the skill to produce a show? Even better.
    You can use your platform to show that just because you're a girl, doesn't mean you have to like pink things and unicorns - you can take initiative and do great things with your life, and there are certain things you just need to ignore in life; or if you're a boy, blue and cars - you don't always need to take the lead or be an emotionless husk - you're allowed to ask for help and let out some tears.
Sadly, this show is 100% serious, and all those points fall flat on their face. :story:
Well done, Raye, you've not only failed in designating a target audience, (Truly, honestly, who the fuck is this cartoon for? Children, teens, or adults?)
you've also failed to make any compelling or noteworthy characters - except for the douchebag white guy and your self-insert who you wrote into the show to try and groom a vulnerable teenager into taking "new magic" transition hormones. Raye really wrote this for autistic people who care about fluff and shipping.
TheresaCrab said:
finally stops being cool among younger people?
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Disagree: Genderspecialism will never stop being hip so long as it's a liaison(?) for being oppressed by the patriarchy.

morimori-chan said:
fmdnxz8f38x71.jpg

Aaaaaaaand Snapdragon is trans. Wow. I wasn't expecting that at all.
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Snapdragon is completely fictional but this makes my head spin. He's clearly a feminine straight male - so far.
Edit: and of COURSE the twitter avatars are cartoon idealized versions of themselves. AGPs, fatties, and uglies detected.
 
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Shouldn't have Snapdragon changed his name already? It's a beautiful flower, but it's not precisely the delicate flower that a man who wants to be soft as a girl wants to be. They are in fact very phallic looking.

In a normal story, that name would be ironic. Here, it represents the things the character wants to escape from.

The more you think about this show, the less sense it makes.
 
karz said:
High Guardian Spice is an extraordinarily good critique on a list of things:
  1. Skill matters, especially when hiring writers and developing story plots.
  2. Characters that are poorly written will be poorly received.
  3. Writing strawmen is a very, very poor cop-out for actual writing talent.
  4. There are people in this world that are this smooth brained and actually think in terms of pure good vs. pure evil - or in the case of HGS. good moral character who is friendly with everyone vs straight white douchebag that portrays no one that has ever existed.
  5. Just because a character is queer or questioning their sexuality does not make them stunning or brave.
    Those must be proven and earned in the show - circling back to good writing.
  6. If a creator or writer is gender nonconforming, great! Do they have the skill to produce a show? Even better.
    You can use your platform to show that just because you're a girl, doesn't mean you have to like pink things and unicorns - you can take initiative and do great things with your life, and there are certain things you just need to ignore in life; or if you're a boy, blue and cars - you don't always need to take the lead or be a complete statue - you're allowed to ask for help and occasionally let out some tears.
Sadly, this show is 100% serious, and all those points fall flat on their face. :story:
Well done, Raye, you've not only failed in designating a target audience, (Truly, honestly, who the fuck is this cartoon for? Children, teens, or adults?)
you've also failed to make any compelling or noteworthy characters - except for the douchebag white guy and your self-insert who you wrote into the show to try and groom a vulnerable teenager into taking "new magic" transition hormones. Raye really wrote this for autistic people who care about fluff and shipping.

Disagree: Genderspecialism will never stop being hip so long as it's a liaison(?) for being oppressed by the patriarchy.


Snapdragon is completely fictional but this makes my head spin. He's clearly a feminine straight male - at least so far.
Edit: and of COURSE the twitter avatars are cartoon idealized versions of themselves. AGPs, fatties, and uglies detected.
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Well done, Raye, you've not only failed in designating a target audience, (Truly, honestly, who the fuck is this cartoon for? Children, teens, or adults?)
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I said it once and I'll say it again... Adults. With Peter Pan Syndrome. In other words, manchildren.

Also, I've found a rather interesting theory in the HGS subreddit...

r/HighGuardianSpice - Deep Dive into the Lore of High Guardian Spice

19 votes and 1 comment so far on Reddit
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
Here are some terms and their associated details before we begin.

Old magic

-Limited capabilities

-Requires runes, ritual, and reckoning.

-There is a cost that needs to be given back in order to retain the balance

-Can be taxing on the body

-Can involve conjuring magic from the Earth itself

-Is responsible for the creation of healing medicine, sigil enchantments, and terraspheres

-Considered sacred.

New magic

-Requires terraspheres

-Multiplies your magic capabilities

-Requires a strong mind’s eye

-Powerful and unstable

-Near unlimited potential

-No supposed cost

-Individual terraspheres can potentially run out of magic. They could also bond to specific people.

Witch Country

-A rich island region that is likely responsible for the emergence of terraspheres and new magic.

-Has secrets relating to the rot.

The Imbalance

-The physical environment is changing due to a generally unknown cause.

-Healing water wells that would otherwise naturally form from the earth itself are drying out. The trabers in these areas where the wells are dry are more hostile compared to the ones parsley encountered in the caves under the school.

-The rot is spreading throughout the sacred forests and the sea.

-Sea fauna are reacting poorly to the change, likely from the rot restricting their dietary habits.

The Rot

-An entity or organism spreading across the land and sea, parasitic infections and killing off plant life.

-Is susceptible to things containing high concentrations of magic like terraspheres and the healing waters.

Deep dive into the Triumvirate's goals

Now why is the Triumvirate in Witch Country so adamant to eliminating a bunch of high school girls who found out that the healing waters can cure the rot?

The rot cannot survive long in areas sustained with high concentrations of magic as seen with Neppy cat inserting a terrasphere into the trunk and Thyme giving a drop of healing water to the tree. Therefore, they would thrive in areas containing lower amounts of magic. This could be due to some mechanism in the plants that use magic to resist the rot.

But the most important bit is that the rot thrives in areas of low magic. Combined with the fact that the wells are drying up and the rot is spreading, it seems apparent that the overall magic in the world seems to be decreasing. But why?

The one thing we do know is that Witch Country is really wealthy, likely from all the terraspheres and spark spells they’ve been creating to facilitate the use of new magic. Since their main source of revenue is from the existence of new magic, it would make sense that one of the secrets of Witch Country is that there is a connection between the imbalance of the world and new magic.

Sage was taught that in old magic, everything had a cost. But what if new magic also had a cost to it as well? Old magic revolves around the idea of paying back, as heard from Sage's quote, "As magic gives to you, you must give to it, or the balance will be destroyed. After a sizable spell, she plants a tree in thanks.” And from what we've seen from terraspheres, huge amounts of magic is used whenever casting a spell. But where is the magic coming from?

The word terra in terraspheres means “Earth”, so it is technically an Earthsphere. Could that possibly mean that new magic is directly tapping into the world’s magic supply?

New Magic’s capabilities are nearly limitless, but what if that’s because the source of the magic is from the planet itself?

If that is the case, then the entire problem is relatively simple as why the Triumvirate is targeting people who get close to the truth.

New magic is taking the magic already present in the world without giving anything back. This would lower the overall amount of magic, causing the healing water wells to dry up and allowing the rot to spread.
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Vyse Inglebard said:
The clashing colors, the derpy face, the fact that it looks like she's just pasted onto the background.....That's it. That sums up the entire show in one single picture.
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Yeah, it’s all of this that reminded me of something…and it dawned on me-it looks like the illustrations you find in those Dollar Tree bible stories for kids books
 
karz said:
There are people in this world that are this smooth brained and actually think in terms of pure good vs. pure evil
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A story of pure good vs pure evil, or at least as close as you can get, can be very good and very well received assuming you do it right. LoTR, and OT Star Wars for instance.
 
I'm confused. Did Raye actually have a substantial say in how the show was developed? They were bragging about how it was an all female production 3 years ago, so I had just assumed that meant Raye had little to no involvement beyond VA work. Since Raye identifies as a transman and all, that'd be uhhhh pretty hypocritical of them.
 
PoisonedBun said:
I'm confused. Did Raye actually have a substantial say in how the show was developed? They were bragging about how it was an all female production 3 years ago, so I had just assumed that meant Raye had little to no involvement beyond VA work. Since Raye identifies as a transman and all, that'd be uhhhh pretty hypocritical of them.
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Hypocrisy and the SJW are like peanut butter and jelly - they're inseparable.
 
Vyse Inglebard said:
Hypocrisy and the SJW are like peanut butter and jelly - they're inseparable.
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Along with the two slices of bread that are cognitive dissonance. For example... They say gender roles and the gender binary are evil, but their brains will do all kinds of stunts and acrobatics to justify why feminine men are trans.
 
morimori-chan said:
Along with the two slices of bread that are cognitive dissonance. For example... They say gender roles and the gender binary are evil, but their brains will do all kinds of stunts and acrobatics to justify why feminine men are trans.
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Or how twans people disprove the gender binary when it's literally a flip from 1 to the other.
 
Jaimas said:
@Omnium Ultimatus isn't fully wrong here, but he's missing something critical: These projects keep happening despite being massive moneysinks and gigantic marketing failures. You will never see a profitable toyline made off of HGS. You will never see an HGS movie. It's just one more terrible creative endeavor pandering to the exact same audience that doesn't actually watch or support much of anything.

All of that is a direct defiance of the paradigm you talked about, where only profitable shows get made. No one is buying this shit - as is usually the case with blatant trash in the same vein. Which, in turn, necessitates the obvious question: "Well, if it's not profitable, why are they doing it?"

The short answer is that pushing the messages matters more to them than anything, including making a profit. The longer answer is a bit more entertaining though, so I'll get into it here:

One big reason shit like HGS keeps happening despite not being successful is because of a phenomenon that's hit a lot of creative circles. I've covered it a few times in the past, but it bears repeating here: this is the end result of when industries get idologically captured. You can see this with a lot of fields (especially tech fields, in recent years), but it's really visible in creative outlets, and many of them have the exact same hallmarks: a need to push "diversity" and "inclusion" over any quality writing or world-building, a hatred of merit and achievement, and a willingness to do anything to make these works happen, no matter how much it involves betraying and/or alienating an existing customerbase or fanbase.

The creators of HGS are cut from the same cloth as Chuck Wendig - in that they have almost no real talent in writing or animation, but yet have been handed a massive amount of money and carte blanche to do what they want to make their vision happen. This has happened because of blatant Entryism, whereby ideologues get into an industry and gradually, push out talented and capable people (who are filthy wrongthinkers) in favor of people who are true believers (no matter how incompetent they are). This is a critical aspect of how these people work: in their worldview, someone who pushes the message but can't do anything of value is more inherently virtuous than a thirty-year veteran of their field with multiple awards that tangentially disagrees with them.

Their staffing choices ultimately reflect this and it doesn't take long for an industry to resemble SBNation's infamous Doomsday Player Class: Because only adherence to the ideology matters, not talent, skill, or creative potential, you wind up with creative industries who don't have a single person who knows how to tell a story effectively or do worldbuilding worth a damn. The landed ideological gentry have chased off everyone talented, and actively oppress newcomers to prevent them from establishing themselves, because anyone with actual talent showing up will quickly show exactly how untalented they are.

All of this is exactly why @I Love Beef has an excellent point: their entire ability to maintain this is leveraged the same as it is in Television, Comics, and Hollywood - on the ability to control what does and does not reach market. The problem (for them) is, there's plenty of ways to sidestep, circumvent, and ignore them entirely.
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Let me be crystal clear - the paradigm I described was one where mostly low-budget shows get made. There is no room for profitability when there is no mechanism for profit maximization.

The actions of the ideologues in the industry are a symptom of the problem, not the cause. They wouldn't have been able to take over had it not been for the centralized legacy nature of the industry (tech is in the same boat). Even if you were to purge all of them, the problems with the industry would still persist because the root cause would not have been changed.

You underestimate the importance of economics here. In a free market, you wouldn't have ideologues dominating every facet of the industry, since there would always be competition, rendering it impossible. A good example of a creative industry akin to what I'm alluding to is gaming. Yes, Triple-A game publishers and developers are packed full of cultural marxist idealogues. The same goes for a significant portion of the indie scene. But at the very least, there is nothing stopping people from developing and publishing their own games. There are still lots of great "politics-free" games being made nowadays. The same, however, cannot be said for animation where, because of the lack of profit-maximizing business models, you have the exclusive club you described, since no creative who values their work is going to get paid less than their job's worth.

The solution? Step away from Netflix, Amazon and all these other subscription services, and operate under a transactional business model that permits profit maximization. This would empower studios and allow them to fund projects by actual talented creators independently. I agree that there are plenty of ways and opportunities to uproot this controlled market from the ground up, but we can't do so by playing by their rules.
 
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