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.”