When I saw the High Guardian Spice trailer for the first time, my reaction was a bit different from most people's.
While most people complained about the ugly artstyle and the self-insert characters (which are valid), my focus was on the aesthetic. It seemed so uninspired. This show's whole schtick is that it takes place in a world of magic and the main character goes to a school where she can learn how to master the world's magic. Which isn't bad a idea, but so many shows have already done that - RWBY, Little Witch Academia and My Hero Academia - so if you're going to make a show with that premise, you have to make it stand out, and you have to make sure it can be on par with aforementioned shows. This show's character designs and artstyle looked like it was drawn in one day, based on the most generic European medival fantasy background ever and no one decided to do a second take.
And thats my first problem with High Guardian Spice. It doesn't stand out - not in terms of characters, plots, character arcs or anything. Which begs the question, if you're going to copy everythig from another show or make it generic, why even make the show in the first place?
Rose is a vanilla protagonist, what we know about her is that she acts like a child, she misses her mom, she looks like an ugly Chibiusa from Sailor Moon and she likes fighting. These traits are never developed or used in an interesting way, she's not particularly witty or outstanding compared to her peers, and whenever she is the focus of an episode, it's easy to predict what'll happen next. Her character isn't charming, unique or relatable, or even likeable despite her flaws, and there is nothing to set her apart from the vast sea of self insert characters from fanfiction. Despite her genericness, according to other characters, she apparently "has a penchant for justice" (said by Wyverna Dretch in Episode 2 - because other characters shilling up how good your character is good writing). She's also so qUIrKy because she's a ditz, she almsot hit Thyme with her sword and she finds Professor Caroway's dangerous adventures "cool".
This lack of development and singular trait thing is something present in the rest of the characters too. It's like the writers decided to pull up a checklist, assign a few similar ones to a different character, and call it a day. Sage is a crybaby, sensetive and bashful about her skills. Parsely is motherly and overprotective. Thyme is sarcastic and distant. Amaryllis is rude and snotty. Not once are these traits expanded upon, challenged, explored or deconstructed - they're the status quo. The villains are thrice as flat, we're given no information on them except "they're just bad, okay". If you want us to be interested in these characters, at least give us information about them.
That's not the only lack of information, we don't know anything about the lore of this world. What is a "guardian"? Why are literal children being sent to become them? Why are literal children tasked with jobs like handling scypeths? If being a guardian is such a honorable job in society, why are there only like 20 people in the whole school? Why are creatures like mermaids peaceful but creatures like dragons aren't? Why don't they have their owm guardians? How hasn't humanity been wiped out from handling dangerous monsters and missions? If this society is advanced enough to use magic as a way to shapeshift why didn't they use the magic to invent surveillance cameras and catch any spies? If Caroway is such a good guardian that he became a headmaster, why did the spies slip right under his nose? Why is Lavender hailed as a great guardian? Where does the magic come from and how did the humans mold it under their control? What will the villains gain from killing the students/teachers of High Guardian Academy? The show doesn't handle these questions, but you wanna know what it does handle? It spends all of episode 10 exploring if Rose likes Sage and going through flashbacks that don't add anything to the plot.
The few times the main characters are called out for their flaws, it's usually resolved in the span of five minutes. Any time there's a hero/villain conflict the heroes always win by displaying little to no effort, hell in episode 9 a villain runs away because she gets stabbed ONCE, like god, you do realize thats a normal part of fighting right? Why are you running away? WHO HIRED YOU? And if the villains are so intent on killing the main characters, why did they hire someone who said more than once THAT SHE DIDN'T WANT TO KILL PEOPLE?
If you're going to have unoriginal characters, the least you can do is add an original plot, but that's too much for the staff at Crunchyroll, so they went back to their checklist of cliches and used them for plot points. Yes there's an episode when they go to the beach, an episode where they go to a costume party, an episode where the bad guy decides to join the good guys for no reason (if Olive was so against killing why didn't she leave earlier) and an episode where the main character tells spooky stories.
The voice acting is off-key, for some reason they hired complete newbies to voice the characters, except Slime Boy, and he has the worst voice acting. The music is like if someone added a BGM to a Skype call. The animation is like a powerpoint presentation.
After I was done watching all 12 episodes I couldn't even remember what happened accurately because my brain was so numbed.
I'm 99% sure this show only happened because the creator of it had connections. It saddens me that instead of investing money in actual original and entertaining shows, instead the time and effort to garbage like this that nobody asked for, or wanted. This was made to validate the creator himself, it has no love, effort or heart in it. It makes me happy to see that this is getting backlash, as it should, and hopefully this backlash will lead to us getting better cartoons in the future. But with the state of how terrible most cartoons of this year are (sans Centaurworld, The Ghost and Molly McGee, Pibby, Kid Cosmic and Invincible)...its not hard to see why anime is beating comics and western media in terms of sales and fandom.
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