Just watch this video. Watch it and pay close attention to what the creators of Crunchyroll’s upcoming original magical girl show, High Guardian Spice, have to say about it.
At first, it doesn’t look too bad, if we can overlook the mediocre artwork and ignore that the title logo looks as if it came off a bottle of nutmeg. The show’s creators start out by telling us that their new series is about some girls who live in a city and go to school to learn magic. Sounds pretty formulaic. But, obviously, other franchises have seen success with the same premise, so this is not in itself necessarily a problem, even if it’s not breathtakingly original.
But then notice what else they tell us about the show: it has a “modern reflection of the world”—even though the art suggests a historic or fantasy setting. And then they tell us the characters and cast are “diverse” and that half the people involved in the show’s creation are women. And, ironically, they tell us that the “writers’ room” is all women—because, you know, they’re “inclusive.”
In other words, they tell us nothing about the show at all, aside from its involving a magic school. Then they virtue-signal. And they tell us the cast is “diverse,” even though every person we see talking to us in the video looks like some variation of this:
In case you didn’t watch the video, that living, breathing stereotype is from an actual screenshot.
Any of the people working on this project might have real talent, but given both what they look like and what they talk about in this promotional video, the chance that they actually tell a good story rather than deliver a condescending sermon about their personal psychosexual issues is near zero. I mean, that’s all they focus on even in the promotion. How could they forget to tell us what the show is about in a promotional video for it?
This would be like me telling you I have a novel coming out about a black Jewish guy, an Irish-American redhead, and some ambiguous lesbians, and then smile smugly and forget to mention the magical girls fighting space dinosaurs. The makers of High Guardian Spice have simply left out all the interesting parts. Does their show even have interesting parts?
It is probably no surprise that comments are disabled on the promotional video. At the time of writing, the upvote/downvote ration is a few hundred to several thousand. I was about to screenshot it, so I refreshed the tab to get the latest count … only to see the numbers disappear, suggesting that YouTube has chosen to hide them (though this might, rather, be an issue on my end).
What you see here in this brief video encapsulates the problem that many in so-called “gate” communities (Sad Puppies, #Gamergate, #Comicsgate, etc.) see with the “Social Justice Warriors” or “SJWs” who have taken over most every institution producing art and culture. It’s not that they have opinions or political views or sexual hangups or even weird haircuts, but that they insist on their personal opinions informing absolutely everything they do to the point that everything devolves into a sermon preaching the dogmas of identity politics, even when it is wildly inappropriate—such as inserting a green-haired butch lesbian into a historical fantasy setting, as they’ve apparently done here (judging from some of their character designs), or such as giving a fantasy work a “modern reflection.”
There are other creators out there who are able to restrain themselves. For example, I had an argument on Twitter with the director of Miraculous Ladybug, who I found to be a priggish, virtue-signaling SJW, and who called me various insults over the course of our conversation. I still respect his work, because he still knows how to make great cartoons. He can put aside his identity politics when he’s directing anime-influenced superheroines.
The staff at Crunchyroll apparently can’t do that. They make it painfully clear even in the promotional material that their work is all about identity politics. Their worldview does not have room for anything else.
For the most part, I have liked what Crunchyroll does; they make available a lot of anime, including shows and movies they’ve rescued from obscurity. They seriously need to update their player, which is still running on Flash, but aside from that I like what they do.
But this … this I can’t get behind. And if this is what Crunchyroll is like behind the scenes, it’s an indicator that the company will eventually lose its ability to fulfill its original purpose, which is to faithfully translate and archive anime. There are already rumblings suggesting that they’re beginning to lose that ability, hints of political messages being inserted into subtitles. Their close ally FUNimation, which does dubs, recently promised to put a stop to a similar problem by refusing to hire any more freelancers to translate. So we’ll see if this worsens or improves over time.
