Please outline the contents of the video in your post so people aren't required to watch it.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 5th 2022 at 8:48:09 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Judging by the time stamp, the video posted was by Sarah Z.
The video is a discussion describing the issue of Reactionary and Anti-SJW brigades giving negative spotlight on minority created works and if they're heavily flawed, using internet algorithms and the general internet behavior of finding joy in trashing heavily flawed or bad works in order to create an internet dogpile. These dogpiles are usually made of bad faith actors who want to create a chilling effect on creations that promote diversity, outrage merchants who make money of prolonging the internet dogpile even though it adversely harms minority creators, and good faith actors who offer valid criticisms while engaging in classic internet tradition of ripping into bad or mediocre media but accidentally add to the dogpile by lending their clicks/likes/views/comments to the two previous groups. She uses High Guardian Spice as the dissection example of this phenomenon.
It's a video trying to promote a culture where minority creators can create mediocre or even outright terrible works, without having to deal with a backlash several magnitudes greater than cis, male, white creators, nor have quality of the work be linked with the desire to increase diversity and representation.
Edited by HeyMikey on Oct 5th 2022 at 7:22:34 AM
@Hey Mokey That... is a good way to outline it. I was going to use a less lengthy description, but I didn't know what would count as a proper outline. But yours was rather on point.
Edited by KaabiiFan13 on Oct 5th 2022 at 9:08:22 AM
Before I say anything, what conclusion did the video draw in regards to
And by that I mean, "how" does she suggest promoting a culture where minority creators can create mediocre or even outright terrible works without having to deal with unnecessary backlash.
Cause I'll be honest I have a lot of issue with how High Guardian Spice advertised itself, and I think its approach to increasing diversity and representation was flawed.
In the end, she couldn't really give a good idea for a solution. The video was primarily meant to be informative, explaining the phenomenon to the wider culture so they can be informed of its existence and maybe better minds could figure out something.
All-in-all, she says we should be mindful of works created by minorities and marginalized and do what we best can to minimize harm. It's not wrong to engage in criticism of a flawed work, but be careful of who we lend our weight to. It's not a particularly compelling solution, but again, this is a difficult issue to crack. And again, this is primarily meant to be an informative piece to define a problem, not an activist piece to advocate a solution.
I'm not sure this is the show that deserves defense, honestly. It's not all bad, but it's an extremely flawed show. Crunchyroll's ads and Executive Meddling certainly didn't help, but it was always doomed to be mediocre at best and fairly problematic.
Edited by PhiSat on Jul 2nd 2023 at 6:09:37 AM
Oissu!![]()
LMAO nah. A ridiculous assertion honestly.
It's a fun show in a neat imaginative world with colorful character design and funny dialogue.
The hate's way past overblown. If HGS is the bottom of your barrel that just tells me you don't watch many shows. Hell, whenever people dunk on it I see people bring up extremely minor animation errors you'd never notice in a casual viewing like they're world-shattering problems. Jesus. Literally every animated show has that. Every single one no exceptions.
I'd objectively smack it with the Uncertain Audience trope since it looks like a kid's show despite some Family-Unfriendly Violence and the like while not going far enough with the gorey bits to fully revel in the dissonance. I guess the latter half isn't as good as the front half. But that's fairly tepid criticism. Calling it some abomination is absurd to me.
Edited by ShirowShirow on Jul 2nd 2023 at 12:20:41 PM
You are not alone.I don't watch a lot of shows, no, because so much TV is aggressively mediocre.
The show didn't deserve such a massive shitstorm, but it's overall so boring. The animation mistakes are pretty awful and distracting, but they're understandable given the shoestring budget. But the characters are so... Bleh. The only main one who's just plain awful is Sage, admittedly, but the other main four are pretty generic. I think the only characters that amused me were Snapdragon and Amaryllis. Olive was okay, she had her moments.
The Uncertain Audience bit was Executive Meddling. It was meant for very young audiences, then Crunchyroll demanded it be bumped up to an M rating.
Edited by PhiSat on Jul 2nd 2023 at 6:36:39 AM
Oissu!I always found the show to be... fine. Cute, but fine. Amaryllis is best girl. You can see the rough edges and the writing is weak, but it's a passable show. If it wasn't for the random bits of swearing and violence that were tossed in to make it fit better on the platform, it would would feel like a time-placed 4Kids show that would've aired next to Mew Mew Power back in the 2000s. It's a little baffling that there's an entire YouTube channel that continues to mine the show for content to this day, though I kinda get it from a "this show had potential it didn't reach" angle.
But I gotta agree that if this is the worst show you've ever watched, you (thankfully) haven't been subjected to much bad media.
Edited by RacattackForce on Jul 2nd 2023 at 8:41:12 AM
Oh god no, it's not the worst show and I didn't mean my comment to come off that way. That would probably be Velma. Velma is so much worse than HGS.
Or Riverdale, but Riverdale at least has the So Bad, It's Good angle.
No, HGS is mostly just boring. The writing is weak, the characters are generic, and nothing happens for like, half the show.
Edited by PhiSat on Jul 2nd 2023 at 6:47:13 AM
Oissu!The main issue is that aggressively mediocre shows shouldn't be held against the community that created it. So they tried to create a more diverse representation and it turned out bad. In a fair world, we'd have our kicks, laugh at its mistakes, say our piece, assign proper blame and move on. But because it's the appropriated buzzword boogeyman of the day (Political correctness, SJW, woke), it gets raked over the coals much longer, blamed on trusting diversity over merit (thereby implying that they're exclusive to each other, while also ignoring creative context surrounding the production), and now everyone associated with the community has a harder time of it. At a certain point, even if I agree with the overall feel of the criticism, I don't want to say any more, because then I'm indirectly lending more weight to the giant mob.
Isn't that true for Youtube as a whole, though? Everyone looks to quickly make content about crap as soon as it becomes topical and relevant to do so. "Just stop talking about it" is kind of an irritating conclusion to draw, especially for content creators that need to stay on top of the algorithm as part of their jobs.
This probably belongs more in the Diversity in Media thread, but I find that video especially disingenuous in that Sarah Z immediately seems to say all of the Little Mermaid criticism was racially-motivated when a) she could barely find comments that supported her point and b) the criticisms that were there were levied at the other live-action remakes. I'm not so naive as to think there was zero racist bad actors involved in the Little Mermaid backlash, especially when there were edits of Halle Berry getting whitewashed (gross) and the poor woman getting death threats, but things like the bland environments and creepy CGI were criticisms in other Disney live-action movies. It's a mix of factors, like general Disney live-action fatigue and pity for the clearly-overworked CG animators getting mixed up with bad faith criticism. If anything, people should be more vocal about good, appropriate criticism and reject the bad faith stuff. Make it clear those arguments aren't acceptable.
As for Sarah's criticisms of High Guardian Spice itself, I'd say they're pretty accurate. That trailer did so much harm to the series and played right into the hate mob in all the wrong ways. Crunchyroll should have waited for there to be more meat to the show to actually show off and probably should not have released it as part of the first wave of non-Japanese original content on their anime-oriented streaming service. Those shows had to be perfect because of the sheer Audience-Alienating Premise of the Crunchyrolls Originals concept and most of them were not good. It was a combo of factors that sunk the show and the anti-woke mob latched on.
The person who has such an intense Single-Issue Wonk about HGS is someone who thinks the show had a lot of squandered potential. It's a little crazy that he's still making videos, but hey, if they pay the bills I guess...
Edited by PhiSat on Jul 2nd 2023 at 7:51:12 AM
Oissu!Did Sarah say something recently about Little Mermaid or is this specifically this video? Realize, this video is a bit old, it came out 8 months ago. At the time, the first teaser for Little Mermaid just came out and suddenly jumped to the list of the top 5 most hated movie trailers on You Tube, a distinction it shared with 2 Indian films that had nepotism accusations against its higher ups, Ghostbuster 2016, and Cuties. That sort of thing does not come about because of a boring trailer, it takes a passionate mob to do that sort of thing. Things like boring CGI and bad animation obviously couldn't be leveraged at a simple 1.5 minute teaser and no one cares enough in good enough numbers about the workers to leverage that sort of widespread action on a movie. Pretty sure any media will have good-faith criticisms against it, but I don't think Sarah meant it literally was all racist backlash, but at the time, it was obvious a good part of the internet discourse was driven by it.
And really, just because it makes money doesn't mean hate merchants basically feeding culture war anger is good. There are plenty of people who do critiquing and bagging on bad media for a living. But usually they like to move on from media to media, or save their ire for something that is currently culturally relevant, rather than just harping on the same culturally insignificant piece over and over again, feeding a toxic media consumption environment.
HGS isn't uniquely bad. It's not Crunchyroll's only original animation. And it's approaching 2 years old since release and five years since its announcement. Most of its creative staff have already spread to the corners and have basically kept their heads down since this farce occurred. They're not industry leaders making decisions nor the creative staff so narcissistically egomaniacal to keep themselves in the public sphere saying they're underappreciated genius talent, at least as far as I'm aware. So all the hub-bub about this is so undeserved, no matter how bad we think the final piece was.
Edited by HeyMikey on Jul 2nd 2023 at 7:23:35 AM

Geoff just posted a video where he analyzes and rates the Crunchyroll Originals, including High Guardian Spice: