Anime & Manga "Infamous" Anime

[ParadiseLost]

MD Geist is disgusting but not because of the graphics. It's so misanthropic it makes stories like Borrasca. Worm and ASOIAF look positively uplifting.

ASOIAF and Worm aren't really comparable. I'm not sure I'd consider either of them truly misanthropic. Both of them have strong anti-traditional-authority themes, which is consistent with modern Western fiction.

ASOIAF is, thematically, a more 'realistic' and much less subtle take on the Lord of the Rings.

With Worm, it all depends on whether or not you think Nietzsche's view of humanity is misanthropic, since Taylor is basically straight up the Ubermensch.

 

[The Immortal Watch Dog]

ASOIAF and Worm aren't really comparable. I'm not sure I'd consider either of them truly misanthropic. Both of them have strong anti-traditional-authority themes, which is consistent with modern Western fiction.

ASOIAF is, thematically, a more 'realistic' and much less subtle take on the Lord of the Rings.

With Worm, it all depends on whether or not you think Nietzsche's view of humanity is misanthropic, since Taylor is basically straight up the Ubermensch.

Nah they're both mean spirited and antihuman. But Martin is a far superior writer I'll grant you that

And I'd argue ASOIAF was an attempt to fuse the plotting of a Le Carre novel and stuff from Mario Puzzo with high fantasy. To varying degrees of success.

 

[ParadiseLost]

Nah they're both mean spirited and antihuman. But Martin is a far superior writer I'll grant you that

In what sense?

Quite frankly I'll take Worm over A Song of Ice and Fire any day.

Unless you're speaker purely in terms of prose and (maybe) editing, I strongly disagree.

G R R Martin is quite explicit about his inspiration coming from the Lord of the Rings.

 

[Bear Ribs]

So has anybody else seen High Guardian Spice?

It's Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime, notable for being extremely woke with the staff mainly emphasizing how diverse the writers were and how LGBTQ the cast was rather than anything about plot, characterization, or story, because it doesn't have much of those things to talk about in the first place.

https://www.crunchyroll.com/high-guardian-spice/reviews/helpful/page1

The reviews are hilarious though, of course, somehow it's all trolls review bombing that caused it to have mostly 1-star reviews because... I'm not sure why all the vast number of people who allegedly thought it was good didn't leave reviews but there it is.

The plot's nonsensical with almost no conflict (the villains don't even appear until episode 6... of a 12 episode "anime") and an endless array of feel-good affirmations and hugbox positivity about the characters life choices, while everything that could possibly be a problem solves itself in short order so that the characters have no reason to ever quit the stream of caring affirmations to each other. There's so little plot it has to resort to an enormous quantity of filler, when I watched the first episode I found that scenery of them traveling around took up over a quarter of the episode, it was the 7:55 mark before anything happened besides the girls cutting in line (which, of course, had no negative consequences at all for them and just got them on the train sooner) and multiple hugs and lap-sittings to make sure we're aware of how very lesbian they are. Then? we got a lazy-ass dream sequence. After that do we get plot? No! We get them sharing a bed, followed by them eating pancakes in the morning! No plot for you! Trying to get into the story of High Guardian Spice is like eating styrofoam.

Adding insult to injury, the ditzen who made it tried to go with anime-style theme naming by making all the characters named after spices... and failed at even this as all the mains are named after an herb and none are named after spices*.


*For them as is wondering about the difference, herbs are made from leaves, roots, or, rarely, other parts of the living plant such as flowers; spices are made from seeds. Said ditzen managed to somehow pick all leaves, flowers, etc. with no mains and only a couple of support characters being named after seeds.

 

[ParadiseLost]

I saw reviews mocking High Guardian Spice. They were fun to watch cause there's clearly a lot to mock there. I think Crunchyroll & Funimation are wasting their time spending money to create any "American" anime.

To be honest, the whole reason I consume Japanese media primarily is because I don't like American media. So producing very strongly "American feeling" shows like High Guardian Spice is antithetical to my entire purpose in watching anime.

Its why I also didn't like it when one of the big manga-publishing presidents released a statement saying that manga should be made more Western-friendly. I was very happy the reaction to his statement was negative enough that he apologized.

They also quite clearly didn't have a good animation budget. I'm not even sure they can compete with your low budget one-season isekai or rom-com trash that are cheaply produced and exist just as advertising to get people into the LN/manga.

 

[Circle of Willis]

So has anybody else seen High Guardian Spice?

It's Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime, notable for being extremely woke with the staff mainly emphasizing how diverse the writers were and how LGBTQ the cast was rather than anything about plot, characterization, or story, because it doesn't have much of those things to talk about in the first place.

https://www.crunchyroll.com/high-guardian-spice/reviews/helpful/page1

The reviews are hilarious though, of course, somehow it's all trolls review bombing that caused it to have mostly 1-star reviews because... I'm not sure why all the vast number of people who allegedly thought it was good didn't leave reviews but there it is.

The plot's nonsensical with almost no conflict (the villains don't even appear until episode 6... of a 12 episode "anime") and an endless array of feel-good affirmations and hugbox positivity about the characters life choices, while everything that could possibly be a problem solves itself in short order so that the characters have no reason to ever quit the stream of caring affirmations to each other. There's so little plot it has to resort to an enormous quantity of filler, when I watched the first episode I found that scenery of them traveling around took up over a quarter of the episode, it was the 7:55 mark before anything happened besides the girls cutting in line (which, of course, had no negative consequences at all for them and just got them on the train sooner) and multiple hugs and lap-sittings to make sure we're aware of how very lesbian they are. Then? we got a lazy-ass dream sequence. After that do we get plot? No! We get them sharing a bed, followed by them eating pancakes in the morning! No plot for you! Trying to get into the story of High Guardian Spice is like eating styrofoam.

Adding insult to injury, the ditzen who made it tried to go with anime-style theme naming by making all the characters named after spices... and failed at even this as all the mains are named after an herb and none are named after spices*.


*For them as is wondering about the difference, herbs are made from leaves, roots, or, rarely, other parts of the living plant such as flowers; spices are made from seeds. Said ditzen managed to somehow pick all leaves, flowers, etc. with no mains and only a couple of support characters being named after seeds.

The saddest thing about High Guardian Spice, IMO, is that it is very far from being Western entertainment's first foray into anime-esque productions. Forget ATLA, I remember watching Martin Mystery and Totally Spies (made by the same studio, Marathon Media, which is sadly no more IIRC) when I was a kid...in the early to mid-2000s. And both of those looked and felt way more like 'real deal' anime than HGS ever did (I've best seen its aesthetic described as 'a low budget mid-2000s CN precursor to Steven Universe drawn by a fan of both the CalArts beanmouth style and the earliest 'How To Draw Manga' books' on another forum), on top of just generally being way more interesting to watch.

Not only was HGS an epic failure by pretty much any & every metric I can think of, it couldn't evolve on or even match the standards set by Western animesque cartoons from literally two decades ago. Dare I say, it's actually a regression away from their standards...

 

[ParadiseLost]

A serious problem was that High Guardian Spice was made by a Western animation company with a budget of an average low budget anime.

The problem with that is that Japanese animation studios are generally masters of cost controls. American animation studios are not.

So they had to produce a show with the budget of an anime without all the cost control experience that actual anime studios have.

RWBY was far more successful by every metric.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I saw reviews mocking High Guardian Spice. They were fun to watch cause there's clearly a lot to mock there. I think Crunchyroll & Funimation are wasting their time spending money to create any "American" anime.

To be honest, the whole reason I consume Japanese media primarily is because I don't like American media. So producing very strongly "American feeling" shows like High Guardian Spice is antithetical to my entire purpose in watching anime.

Its why I also didn't like it when one of the big manga-publishing presidents released a statement saying that manga should be made more Western-friendly. I was very happy the reaction to his statement was negative enough that he apologized.

They also quite clearly didn't have a good animation budget. I'm not even sure they can compete with your low budget one-season isekai or rom-com trash that are cheaply produced and exist just as advertising to get people into the LN/manga.

Yeah, I tried to find a clip on YouTube and had to scroll through about three pages of negative reviews to find anything that wasn't bagging on it.



You can see pretty clearly that while they're trying to ape anime aesthetics, they can't quite get themselves to abandon the modern trend towards rounded bulge-eyed characters like the abomination that was the Thundercats Roar.

Looking at HGS you can pretty clearly see that they tried to hybridize them and... the two don't mix. Actually killing the modern rounded art style entirely would be a grand thing for western animation in my opinion, it certainly didn't need to have a kid with anime.

 

[The Immortal Watch Dog]

G R R Martin is quite explicit about his inspiration coming from the Lord of the Rings.

And my response to that always was. Homeboy sought out LOTR when he should have sought out Dune.

IE he doesn't understand LOTR at all and basically transposed cold war thrillers and mob intrigue stories onto it as a cope.

Yeah, I tried to find a clip on YouTube and had to scroll through about three pages of negative reviews to find anything that wasn't bagging on it.



You can see pretty clearly that while they're trying to ape anime aesthetics, they can't quite get themselves to abandon the modern trend towards rounded bulge-eyed characters like the abomination that was the Thundercats Roar.

Looking at HGS you can pretty clearly see that they tried to hybridize them and... the two don't mix. Actually killing the modern rounded art style entirely would be a grand thing for western animation in my opinion, it certainly didn't need to have a kid with anime.

God damn that art is fucking repugnant and regressive.

 

[ParadiseLost]

Looking at HGS you can pretty clearly see that they tried to hybridize them and... the two don't mix. Actually killing the modern rounded art style entirely would be a grand thing for western animation in my opinion, it certainly didn't need to have a kid with anime.

It works for some shows, like Gravity Falls or The Amazing World of Gumball, but both of those feel very... parodic. I don't think their art style would work for an action show or a more serious kids show like the original Teen Titan or ATLA.

Also look at the High Guardian Spice trailer and compare it so something like Madoka tonally:



Ignoring the animation, the presentation is completely different. There's a feel to anime shows and to anime trailers that HGS does not capture.

Tonally, High Guardian Spice feels like Steven Universe.

Anime trailers tend to feel a lot more subdued. High Guardian Spice feels and sounds like a trailer for a Nickelodeon/Disney show. It doesn't feel anime at all.

 

[Circle of Willis]

I don't know if it'd be fair to blame all of HGS' woes on the budget (or lack thereof), although that's apparently what its creator, Raye Rodriguez tried to do on Twitter. With a higher budget they might've been able to avoid the most egregious pitfalls, like the JPEGs of bread and lampposts which they clumsily tore off a Google search and photoshopped in (even forgetting to remove the watermark!), but I fail to see how throwing more money on it could've fixed Rodriguez's writing.

Keen eyes on a certain forum for New Zealander agriculturalists found that the characters & concepts are actually pretty old, having only been slightly tweaked since 2012-13ish (main heroine Rosemary, for example, used to be a more obvious Madoka clone down to the hair ribbons), and had a very 'first ever fanfic, do not steal' feel to it all. Rosemary and Caraway, the trans professor character, are pretty blatant self-inserts of Rodriguez's to the point that Caraway is voiced by Rodriguez. Who apparently, like so many of the old Tumblr crowd that it's a meme, is not exactly receptive to criticism which isn't absolutely fawning in tone and suggests that maybe their work could use some improvement in this-or-that regard.

 

[ParadiseLost]

I don't know if it'd be fair to blame all of HGS' woes on the budget (or lack thereof), although that's apparently what its creator, Raye Rodriguez tried to do on Twitter. With a higher budget they might've been able to avoid the most egregious pitfalls, like the JPEGs of bread and lampposts which they clumsily tore off a Google search and photoshopped in (even forgetting to remove the watermark!), but I fail to see how throwing more money on it could've fixed Rodriguez's writing.

I don't blame much of it on budget. If the show had been truly well written, animation would have mattered much less. Having said that, bad story or not, I think having decent animation would've helped the project. At the very least it wouldn't have been an embarrassment. I'd hate to be the exec that greenlight HGS, or one of the managers that argued for it.

That's actually why the budget is/was a notable issue: budgets being equal, American studios can't compete well with Japanese studios.

Raye also talks about writing being a budgeting limitation... wasn't Raye the writer? As a writer, you've gotta be prepared to write on your own time, especially with your first project. Starting any new project as the leader requires a lot of personal loss taking. If Raye was counting every hour of their writing against the budget... that's kind of Raye's own fault.

I can't even figure out Raye's gender. Are they a transman? Transwoman? I can't even tell which, incredibly androgynous, Raye needs pronouns on their twitter ffs.

 

[Circle of Willis]

Female-to-male trans, apparently. Although 'Western fujoshi who fried her brain from cooming too much to yaoi' seems a more accurate assessment, something which Plebcomics has lampooned.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I don't blame much of it on budget. If the show had been truly well written, animation would have mattered much less. Having said that, bad story or not, I think having decent animation would've helped the project. At the very least it wouldn't have been an embarrassment. I'd hate to be the exec that greenlight HGS, or one of the managers that argued for it.

That's actually why the budget is/was a notable issue: budgets being equal, American studios can't compete well with Japanese studios.

Raye also talks about writing being a budgeting limitation... wasn't Raye the writer? As a writer, you've gotta be prepared to write on your own time, especially with your first project. Starting any new project as the leader requires a lot of personal loss taking. If Raye was counting every hour of their writing against the budget... that's kind of Raye's own fault.

I can't even figure out Raye's gender. Are they a transman? Transwoman? I can't even tell which, incredibly androgynous, Raye needs pronouns on their twitter ffs.

Agreed. The artstyle doesn't help, there's a limited range of shows that Calarts can work for and it's not that, but it could still have been decent if the story made any sense. But it's a gaping mass of plotholes and convenience with everything brushed aside for maximum feel-good self-affirmation.

I mean, the most exciting thing that happens in the first episode is a rooftop chase after a Trixie that steals Rosemary's locket. But that scene only works because Rosemary and Sage forget they have a flying broom, which they used to cut in line earlier and would have circumvented the entire Trixie plot. That's not a problem with budget, a first-time fanfic writer with a budget of used kleenex can keep those kinds of details straight. It's a problem with the story being completely subordinate to the dictates of more feels and hugbox moments. They needed to have the Trixie plot to break the locket, so that the girls would meet Parsley who is able to easily repair it and makes things all better, not because the Trixie is ever going to come up again or that the rooftop chase and Trixie mating scene did anything to service the plot.

 

[Sol Zagato]

Space Runway Ideon
Genocyber

 

[Agent23]

Not touching any Western "anime". Like, ever, and I want the damned US corpos to keep their filthy paws off of Japan's anime industry.

 

[Terthna]

That's actually why the budget is/was a notable issue: budgets being equal, American studios can't compete well with Japanese studios.

To be fair, part of the reason anime can be made so cheaply is because they overwork and underpay their staff. More than a few end up living at their workspaces 24/7, and burnout rates are high within the anime industry.

 

[bullethead]

EX Arms, Handshakers, and Berserk 2016 are all infamous for being various levels of shit in terms of production quality and art assets, with EX Arms having the added bonus of producer hubris. Said producer claimed it would "declare war on western scifi" and it didn't live up to that at all... which was obvious with the first trailer.

 

[Agent23]

EX Arms, Handshakers, and Berserk 2016 are all infamous for being various levels of shit in terms of production quality and art assets, with EX Arms having the added bonus of producer hubris. Said producer claimed it would "declare war on western scifi" and it didn't live up to that at all... which was obvious with the first trailer.

Wasn't Ex Arm sponsored by either Netflix or some other US entity and didn't they have SJWs on the production committee.

 

[bullethead]

Wasn't Ex Arm sponsored by either Netflix or some other US entity and didn't they have SJWs on the production committee.

That has literally fuck all with the Japanese production being a total shitshow.

It was sponsored by Crunchyroll, but AFAIK, they didn't have any creative input.