By Twitter, For Twitter. That's the only theme you need, right? Because if you dont like it then you're a bigot. Hah! Checkmate.
That's why I think HGS was greenlit. CrunchyRoll were talking up making their own anime amid a period of High Woke, and so were convinced that the first show they would greenlight was entirely because it was woke, even though it wasn't anime. They're not exactly known for respecting their customer base, so it could have been as simple as 'we won't give you what you want, we'll give you what we think you need, and you'll thank us for it'. Many other creative endeavours have tried the same thing - comics being the most egregious. So they announce their new woke show aimed at the loudest whiners on Twitter.
Undoubtedly someone in the company had parroted the idea that there was this vast, untapped audience of dangerhairs and genderspecials that would jump on the chance to support a product aimed for them. What they'd carefully omit is that these people are loud but small in number, never satisfied, usually broke, and will rationalise their way into pirating your content. No one has successfully monetised them for an amount above six figures unless there's some lying involved, and the vast majority of your audience, if they like your product, will do so in spite of that wokeness.
How it's Raye that got the nod is unknown - could be rich family, could be some fujoshi worked at CrunchyRoll and was a fan from Tumblr. But CrunchyRoll annouces with great pride its new, self-created anime, paid for by the subscription fees of their fans. Which starts with an ad that shows next to nothing of the show but a whole lot of the obnoxious people behind the scenes who have no desire to make the show entertaining but instead want to make it all about representation and inclusivity, with a very clear subtext of, 'So it's not
for you fucking weebs, it's for
us.' And a large customer base of people who had mostly made the active choice to pay for a subscription to things they could have gotten for free found out the money wasn't going to what they were paying for, but was going to make a vanity project for dangerhairs - and that even though troons are often obsessed with anime, because this show wasn't anime and troons don't pay for shit that they wouldn't be interested either, and they certainly wouldn't become subscribers because of it. I'm presuming they lost a fair number of subscribers, those people were never replaced by the mythical unrepresented dangerhairs because mythical, and that's why after a couple of weeks of woke posturing and cries about the alt-right the project got hidden away, as little publicity as possible, and eventually dumped out as the wreck it is.
Tl;dr: It's basically Twitter/Tumblr's fault that a show like HGS was commissioned. Why it was Raye's self-inserts specifically, I suspect there's an employee - or, hopefully, former employee - who could be considered responsible, just like I suspect there's a couple of people who worked there who could be considered responsible for such an ideology-over-profit idea. I think they'd be interesting to dig up, but I doubt it will happen. But it definitely seems that CrunchyRoll, while not necessarily learning 'get woke, go broke', has at least learned 'if your product's only selling point is wokeness, then no one will buy that product'.
archive.ph
