High Guardian Spice

About

High Guardian Spice is an animated series created by Raye Rodriguez and is co-produced by Ellation Studios & Crunchyroll.

History

On August 22nd, 2018, Crunchyroll tweeted about their plans to release an original anime-inspired series on their streaming platform, highlighting High Guardian Spice as the first to be released in 2019. The tweet included a short promotional video for the series, which included interviews with the show's creative team. Within 24 hours, the tweet received upwards of 1,900 retweets and 7,700 likes.^[1] Meanwhile, a YouTube^[5] upload of the promotional videos received more than 37,600 views in the same time period.

Online Presence

On August 21st, both official pages for Twitter^[6] & Facebook^[4] page was launched. The following day, the /r/HighGuardianSpice^[3] subreddit was launched for discussions about the then-upcoming series.

Reception

The day of the announcement, YouTuber Digibro posted a video titled "Dear Crunchyroll: Stop," which criticized the promotional video and Crunchyroll's use of Flash on the site (shown below). Within 24 hours, the video gathered upwards of 133,000 views and 2,800 comments.

The same day, Crunchyroll manager Miles Thomas posted a tweet that the response to High Guardian Spice was "mostly positive," with the exception of angry "hand-wringers" (shown below, left). Meanwhile, YouTuber Geoff Thew, known for his anime-focused YouTube channel "Mother's Basement", referred to critics as "the most fragile of snowflakes" for "getting mad at animated shows that don't exist yet" (right).

Release

On October 26th, 2021, the series was finally released three years after it's initial announcement. The plot of the anime was revealed to be a typical slice-of-life style show, where there isn't a supernatural threat or otherwise deadly high stakes, and instead focuses on school life at High Guardian Academy, which the main characters attend. Among the many things picked apart by viewers online, the most common negative sentiment comes in the form of pointing out how background elements do not visibly match with the characters, making it look very discombobulated and patchworked together by separate teams. This is noted in a Tweet^[7] by @momiji_doa on October 30th, who earned 550 likes for showing two pictures with pngs of assets thrown in and not at all matching the style (shown below)

Search Interest

External References