(This post was written as a script for the edited video above, which provides a more complete experience of the post’s subject. The text version below is just for easier reference and comprehension for anyone in need.)
Let me invite you back in time to the Summer of 2018, when the anime streaming service Crunchyroll had just announced their very first original anime series, High Guardian Spice. The site had been involving itself in the funding and production of anime for a little while by then—perhaps most famously with their involvement in the popular Darling in the Franxx from earlier that year—but this was to be the first animated series produced for the specific purpose of being hosted on Crunchyroll. The announcement came with a behind-the-scenes hype video in which the staff introduced themselves and the series with plenty of enthusiasm—and the anime community reacted... strongly.
At the time this was going on, I was in the middle of making a video every single day all month as a stunt to try and breathe life back into my slowly-dying youtube channel. The lady I was dating at the time, whom I’d yet to realize was a literal nazi, told me that I should make a video capitalizing on the controversy surrounding the show. Now, I wasn’t particularly incensed with the existence of High Guardian Spice—although I did think the choice to describe their writer’s room as “diverse” while showing what appeared to be exclusively American white women on screen was incredibly embarrassing—but I WAS incensed with the existence of Crunchyroll.
I am the first person I’ve ever heard of having used Crunchyroll—back when it was a piracy site that made you pay just to fullscreen the video player, and had a better selection than any other illegal streaming sites I could find at the time. Crunchyroll going legit was an unquestionably revolutionary idea for the world of anime; but their business model has always been poorly executed and their company run like shit, regularly trading hands and bleeding employees because, like most of the entertainment industry, it doesn’t treat the people in it very well because they don’t really know what they’re doing—not the way Netflix, Disney and HBO do, anyways—but none of those guys would now be investing in anime if Crunchyroll (and later Funimation) hadn’t opened the doors and made the mistakes for everyone else to watch.
I’d had a lot of problems with Crunchyroll already, which were only amplified when they brought me to the first Crunchyroll Expo in 2017, and I got some sense of the company’s priorities and outlook on their goals. I did not get the sense that they were very well-attuned to the wants of the anime-viewing audience beyond that people really needed a place to watch Naruto. My biggest problem at the time was their garbage Flash-based video player, which I spent the bulk of my very-short video, titled Dear Crunchyroll, Stop, talking about. That video was viewed a million times in less than three days.
There were tons of other reasons that people were upset about Crunchyroll and High Guardian Spice besides the stuff I cared about and brought to attention in my video—but the title was broad enough to draw all of them in. Within a week or two, Crunchyroll finally launched an HTML-based video player; they said it was in beta and had been planned to be launched the next quarter, but whether that’s true or not, it was an instant substantial improvement in the experience of using the site. I was pretty self-satisfied about having gotten something done. Meanwhile, High Guardian Spice... disappeared. The only stuff written about the show in the intervening years has been people wondering if and when it would actually be released. At some point we heard it was still being worked on, but it took more than three years before the complete twelve-episode series was finally quietly slid onto Crunchyroll, and we heard little more about any sort of ‘Crunchyroll originals’ in production.
I have talked to multiple people that attribute the silencing of High Guardian Spice specifically to my video—so let me say to anyone who worked on the show that might be watching this video: sorry about that! If it makes you feel any better, over those same three years I spent all of my money, lost the bulk of my patrons, went a little crazy and privated most of my videos for a while causing the youtube algorithm to murder my channel and a sixth of my subscribers to leave (with maybe a thirtieth of them still actively watching any of my content), racked up as much tax debt as you have student debt, moved back in with family at age 30 and regularly lose chunks of my sub-minimum wage to over drafting my bank. Also, the Nazi who told me to make the video cheated on me with someone who got popular through gamergate and ran off.
On the bright side, I finally found the courage to gender transition, met the love of my life, and spent the last year going on epic journeys around the country—but you can see more of that on my side-channel, Picnic Adventure.
So anyways, being at this lowly station in life and seeing this show I very profitably mocked once before finally releasing to exactly the public reaming I would’ve expected, I had to get myself on that gravy train as fast as possible. Which ended up being pretty slowly, because I can’t afford a Crunchyroll subscription anymore, and I refuse to sit through back-to-back Olive Garden ads three times per episode. I couldn’t figure out why the fuck Olive Garden was the ONLY ad I was getting on this show until when I just now had to fix the typo Olive Guardian twice. Please, if you have it go to Carraba’s instead. Get one entree and one appetizer and split them both for every 2 people if you want to spend responsibly. It took like a damn week for any of the countless illegal streaming sites I have tabs on to finally pick up the series, and the only publications writing about it at all are politically themed ones propping it up or tearing it down for its congruence with their messaging. All of this suggested to me that the only people who cared about this show in any way were those either using it as just another snack to feed their personal political beast, or meme lords nostalgic for something they had already been geared up to make fun of three years prior. I saw myself closer to the latter category, although it honestly struck me more as an obligation to make fun of this thing as the person perhaps most known for having done so previously, and also being horribly desperate for views. And so, with the show having finally been fully released on a site with a staggering number of pop-up ads (that are just slightly less annoying just because they aren’t in the middle of the episode), I sat down to watch it tonight, and...!
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It’s pretty good. I kinda like it, actually. Fancy that. I really thought I was going to regret trying to watch all twelve episodes of this thing, but by the time I was like halfway into episode two I was like, yeah, fuck it, I might’ve watched this whole thing anyways. That’s assuming I would’ve made it past that fucking godawful opening theme, but we can touch back on that later.
Before actually starting this show, the biggest complaint I expected to have was with the production values. Short clips highlighting poor voice acting and animation were circling the internet, and I really expected to go on a whole tear about the poor use of Flash puppets for most of this video—which is why I was shocked when the animation and, more especially, the background art, were better than like 80% of anime. Any real anime fan knows that most shows blow all their good animation in the first episode, so by that point I already figured it was about on-par with anything else that I might consider a decent-looking anime.
More surprising to me was how much the background music effected the overall tone of the series. There is undeniably some dialog in this show that is likely to make you groan, but that isn’t really weird in a show like this. I groan all the time at the humor in shows that I really love like Log Horizon or That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime, and I’m okay with that because these are not comedy shows. The show itself isn’t trying to be funny, it’s the characters who are tying and failing, and that’s much more acceptable in a show that isn’t relying on comedy to be good. In Log Horizon’s case it tells an intricate and thoughtfully unique fantasy story. Tensura has lovable characters and a comfy atmosphere in which it explores a unique idea for how a fantasy story can progress. High Guardian Spice is, most essentially, a moralistic adventure show for young people in the vein of My Little Pony: Friendship os Magic, with shades of Harry Potter and the anime tinge that comes from being aware of Little Witch Academia. It’s a lot more devastating to have a groan-worthy line in a comedy series like Konosuba, which lives and dies on whether you’re laughing in exactly that moment, than it is for the dorky girl to say something dorky in a story about trying to overcome the self-doubt that follows being made fun-of for your dorkiness. This isn’t to say that all of the shows I just talked about couldn’t have been better-written, but each of them has their own strengths to make them worthwhile in spite of the moments that aren’t the most satisfying to experience.
And even having said all of that, it’s not as though the show couldn’t make me chuckle—and most likely, different senses of humor will feel differently about different gags. When I watched the first episode with my fiancee, he chuckled at Rosemary stating to the train conductor that she and Sage were going to sit one one-another’s laps at the same time. I didn’t but then I did right after when the conductor dryly responded, “hey, listen—I don’t care.” We both continued chuckling and groaning at different bits throughout. He also completely lost interest by the end of the episode, realizing it was just kind of an okay kids’ show, and I became increasingly engaged, realizing it was just kind of an okay kids’ show, not unlike most of what I watch.
Once I’d settled into the detailed fantastical backgrounds, somewhat generic but nonetheless effective soundtrack, and the kinda cute chemistry of the main characters, I honestly found myself enjoying it. The episode’s dramatic climax comes when a bird that happens to share my name—a Trixie—steals Rosemary’s locket, and she and Rosemary follow it over the rooftops and into a mysterious lot in the middle of town that seems to have grown over the ruins of a former property and become the habitat and magical jewel stash of some Trixies. The tension build and sense of mystery which explodes into the Trixie’s takeoff and evolutionary dance with a partner bird were not only splendidly directed and pretty well-animated, but even dare I say a little bit spellbinding. Or captivating, if that pun was too painful for you.
So that’s all well and good but let’s ruin this nice reverie and get into some political talk because I know that’s what we’re here for. Now, being as I’m a trans woman engaged with a man, it should surprise no one that I’ve got zero problem whatsoever with all the gay shit in the show—but as the person who made the Anime is Getting Lazy With Its Meta video and The Asterisk War Sucks, you also won’t be surprised when I say that I’m not a very big fan of senseless pandering; and I was definitely expecting this show to be cranked up to eleven with that shit based on the highlights... lowlights(?) being posted all over Twitter. I bet more than half of us thought for sure Rosemary had two dads when we started the first episode, before the older brother mentions her dead mom.
Right away there’s a strong lesbian undercurrent between Sage and Rosemary, though less blatant even than Tomoyo’s feelings for Sakura in Cardcaptor Sakura, and nothing inappropriately flirty for their age. Actually, considering they are best friends who grew up together all their lives, I wasn’t even ready to think of either of them as lesbians until some of Sage’s dialog in episode two made it harder to not. As episode six will later reveal, it seems to be a one-sided attraction on Sage’s part, as Rosemary end up going gaga for a pretty blonde boy. By far the vastly more flag-flying relationship in the show is that of the Sage’s cousin and her wife who let the girls stay with them in the city where they will attend High Guardian academy.
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Now look, it’s not that weird for a cartoon to go dumb ham with a married couple’s PDA to make damn sure you know they’re together. Going the extra mile and showing their wedding photo on the wall is kind of extra, but for the sake of people watching this video ten years from now when gayness is so passé that it’s not even a political talking point of much consideration, let me explain why they would do something this goofy. You see, in the last paragraph I mentioned that I hadn’t committed to thinking of Sage as a lesbian until episode two, in spite of her and Rosemary holding hands and generally being more intimate than one typically behaves with platonic friends—and in-fact, in spite of Sage’s cousin being about as visually lesbian-coded as she possibly could be by this decade’s standards, I didn’t even assume that she and her wife were lesbians until after one called the other a pet name with a hand on her shoulder.
You see, I am used to watching copious amounts of anime over the past two decades which flirt with the idea of characters being lesbians without confirming; and, more often than not, eventually denying. I also thought about it in terms like that, ideally, friends should feel comfortable enough with one-another to interact this way. Even if these characters were literally romantically in love it didn’t have to mean that their feelings extended to sexuality—in fact, as far as I know one or both of these girls could be asexual, pansexual, or even straight and just extremely affectionate with their friends. Occam’s razor tells me that the most likely answer is probably the true one, but in a show that was literally advertising its progressive agenda at the tail end of the twenty-teens, that could just as easily have meant any of these possibilities. I might even be assuming to much of the older couple’s genders or sexualities in considering them lesbian based on being both presentationally female and married. The only thing that isn’t ambiguous is that they are definitely married and very much all over one-another. I don’t think it’s healthy on my part that I’m even noticing or attempting to ascribe sexuality to these characters just on the basis that at their relationship is non-heteronormative, nor do I think it will ever come off as not cheesy how hard the show pushes you to notice that they are a non-heteronormative couple, even though I understand that this is only seen as necessary because certain people would turn their brain into pretzels coming up with logic for why these two weren’t actually a couple if it wasn’t as blatant as humanly possible. I only doubt this will be necessary to make a point a decade hence.
And just to clarify why I find this insistence cheesy is only because I wouldn’t personally behave this way, and not because I think it is unrealistic. Some couples really like to signal their relationship to themselves and others, or are comforted by one-another’s touch even in front of others. I’m the type to lay directly on top of my fiancé when we’re chilling in bed, but stand on the opposite side of the room around other people. That’s just our style, though, and they’ve got theirs, which I can respect even if I can’t relate. I don’t even really need to find these characters likable for the show’s narrative to work, and luckily I think the white-haired one is pretty fun.
Across the end of episode one and start of episode two, we are introduced to the rest of our main cast in the dwarven girl, Parsley, and elven Thyme. Parsley is easy to like as a chillaxed voice of reason and expert-level blacksmith who gets moved up to the third-year smithing class immediately, and Thyme is the cynical, standoffish one with a bone to pick against Rosemary and Sage for carelessly bumping into her a couple of times. These two have stronger personalities than the main girls and the group has some decent chemistry coming forward by episode three, with lots of room to grow and develop, and a clear interest in showing that happen on the part of the series.
All of them get something to do to some extent in episode two, but the main focus here is on Sage and her feeling overwhelmed at the quick pace with which the school pushes its students into the thick of figuring things out. She is bullied for being a hick and practicing ‘old magic,’ and unprepared for being separated from Rosemary by their different educational courses. All of this while trying to find an answer to the headmaster triad’s assignment of determining vows as a Guardian to be screamed into a hole in the middle of the school’s main hall.
The headmaster triad is my favorite thing in the show up to that point. One is the salty and cynically humorous elder, one the composed and Princess Celestia-sounding regal woman, and the third is the soft and nurturing one—all of them intersecting one-another as they speak in a way which emphasizes the complex, even contradictory nature of trying to guide a diverse set of people into finding their own completely unique ways of life in guardianship. I think these three are a great idea and executed excellently in the writing to be at once funny, thoughtful and legitimately educational. When we get to hear their own current Guardian vows after they play a reel of the kids’, they are even sold to me as legitimate characters.
How Sage’s conflict with her classmates is resolved is also a lot of fun, if not the most original idea for a magical school show. The potions teacher poisons the whole class with something that changes their bodies in random ways and promises to kill them all in an hour. Thanks to the bully spilling Sage’s drink on her beforehand, she is unaffected, and springs into action immediately to save the rest of the class. It might be a little predictable, but still a fun bit.
By the end of the second episode I am actually struck by how many different characters and concepts we’ve been introduced to while still having scenes that stuck out in my mind enough to write about them—and none particularly negative. I don’t feel pandered to, I don’t feel beaten over the head with political messages, and I even feel a sense of verisimilitude from the setting and characters. The very first class Rosemary attends is an ethics class, and the message she’s given by this hot succubus teacher that would’ve had gallons of porn of her drawn and posted all over Twitter if this weren’t a show people were mostly out to hate, is just that one should not respond to violence with violence, and that conflict springs primarily from the fear of ‘the other.’ I can’t say that I found any of it objectionable.
Going into episode three, we finally start to see the expected dip in animation quality, though it still isn’t any worse than the average animated show. This kind of awkwardness is especially likely in a more ambitious setting, and while it does detract from the experience to some degree, it’s hardly ruinous and probably wouldn’t even be noticed by most people. What WILL be noticed, and most certainly has been by the internet, is the bit where Rosemary’s professor explains that he is transgender—so let’s dive right into that!
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The context for this scene is that Rosemary has been pulled aside by a close friend of her mother to discuss her indecision over what to do with her elective period at school. She begs him for stories about her mom, and he obliges, pulling out a photo album to show her, and when she comes upon a picture of him at school-age, she is surprised to find that, as she puts it, he “used to be a girl.” The professor explains that he is transgender, meaning that the body he was born with didn’t feel right to him, and so he alters it by drinking a magic potion every month to maintain a masculine physical form—which Rosemary thinks is neat.
Speaking as a trans person, I actually appreciate this scene quite a bit. Obviously when I show people old photos myself it comes with a similar explanation, and it’s not like the show is going out of its way to celebrate this character’s transness—it just is what it is. If the word ‘transgender’ wasn’t used in this scene, and it was just a character in a fantasy series telling us that they drink magic potions to change their physiology for the sake of comfort with themselves, most viewers would find that interesting. Magical gender transformation is certainly not a new concept, especially to anime, but I want to go a step further and talk about why I’m glad they used the phrase ‘transgender’ explicitly.
When I first started experiencing gender dysphoria as a teenager, the best metaphors I came upon to describe my experience were those of Ranma 1/2, who transforms between male and female forms based on having hot or cold water poured on him and views the female form as a sort of curse he hopes to cure, and what we in the English-speaking anime community know as ‘traps’—highly effeminate men that are often mistaken for women by the other characters, usually to their chagrin. My biggest difficulty in self-identifying with these characters is that most of them seemed to view their own femininity as problematic, with very few characters actually identifying as women as a means of personal comfort and stability—and even then, there was often an overtone of sexual promiscuity or desperation in the way they are presented, and not a whole lot of happy endings for those characters.
I experienced gender dysphoria from childhood all the way until I was 28 years-old, when I finally learned enough about what it means to be transgender and what I could do to abate my dysphoria to begin the transition process—and I am very happy to say that the my dysphoria has lessened by now to the point of hardly registering on the list of things I’m most worried about in life. Even having only gotten to do HRT for a few months before I stopped being able to afford it, I have changed so much about my life that I am getting by even without it and able to work hard toward getting back to being able to afford it again—a process which you can easily expedite by supporting me on substack, patreon, or just by cashapping or venmoing some money to goldenwitchfire. All support is appreciated!
I really do believe that a moment as small as this one could’ve been monumental to me had I seen it at any point in my upbringing, or even in early adulthood. Just knowing that a person like this could exist and knowing that there was a word for it would’ve gone a long way toward making me realize the options that existed for someone like me, and I will always be happy to see trans representation in media, especially in a context that I don’t find to be forced, as it makes perfect sense in the narrative, and from a character that is legitimately aspirational and obviously treated with respect by the people writing the show.
Anyways, the other parts of this episode are fun little escapades of Parsley being tested on her ingenuity with a tiny hammer, and Sage’s bully tampering with her potion to accidentally turn the school cat gigantic and able to speak with a vengeance. It’s all pretty standard fare for an animated kids’ show, and decently entertaining.
On that note, I do need to emphasize that this is without a doubt a show for kids. It has a content warning because I guess they say shit a few times and there’s a bit of blood, and, more likely to cause that warning, because a lot of parents would clutch their pearls about the LGBT aspects of the characters if it was marketed to children, but this show is substantially less dark than Adventure Time, vastly less irresponsible to show a child than Regular Show, has less racy content than Code Lyoko or Totally Spies or Total Drama Island, and isn’t asking a lot more of your intelligence to keep up with it than My Little Pony. If there is a reason you think your kids can’t watch this show, you are probably a shitty parent.
Episode four sees Parsley dealing with family drama as her parents want her to come back from school to help them with her thirteen-and-counting younger siblings, and dragging along Thyme, who is trying to avoid her hardass mother, while Sage deals with the conflict of her cousins trying to get her a staff with which to perform new magic, and her worried about what her conservative mother would think about her using it. All of that is fine and good—another solid episode—but it does contain another scene which has been clipped and made infamous online, and which gives me a great opportunity to discuss the voice acting.
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90% of the voice performances in High Guardian Spice range from adequate to decent, which by my estimation is actually above-par for American cartoon voice acting, and vastly superior to all but the very best anime dubs. I’ve never heard of any of the actors in the show, and plenty of them sound like they may be early into their careers, but on average I rarely found the performances distracting. The trans professor does have a bit of an over-the-top put-on enthusiasm to how he talks, but it’s a way that I’ve known people to talk in real life and, honestly, he’s pretty adorable; not to mention he is actually performed by the show’s creator, Raye Rodriguez.
By far the most noticeable performance comes from Slime Boy, who sort of awkwardly mumbles and stumbles his way through his dialog like someone that’s afraid to talk to you at an anime convention. It’s definitely weird, and intensified I think by the discordance between how he sounds and how his face is animated. Like, based on his dialog and personality it’s obvious that he’s supposed to be an awkward and strange character—he goes by Slime Boy for chrissakes—but the particular way that he is performed doesn’t really match the limited expressions of his face, and creates a second layer of seemingly unintentional awkwardness that kind of hurts to watch. It doesn’t help either that he seems to be recording through a worse microphone or something than the other actors—though the discordance is nowhere near as drastic as, say, between even the main characters in the first season of RWBY—and let me stress that Slime Boy is just a bit character with maybe five minutes of screen time in the season.
Like in most productions, the bit characters give the worst performances. I think Rosemary’s mom bothered me the most, and even then it wasn’t catastrophically annoying like any side character in any anime dub. I didn’t love Rosemary’s performance all the time, either, but I did consistently enjoy hearing Parsley’s voice, and the other two main characters were perfectly adequate. All in all, I don’t think the voice acting deserves to be a major complaint about this show.
In episode five, Thyme accidentally hurts Sage’s feelings and then, after being congratulated by Sage’s bully, Amaryllis, for making her cry, realizes she doesn’t want to be comparable to Amaryllis and teams up with the others to find Sage and apologize. This episode isn’t particularly memorable, but it does some legwork in fleshing out the personalities of Amaryllis and her sidekick, Snapdragon, and also introduces a cute little emotionally unwell kid named Parnell as the show’s woobie. It also begins planting hints that new magic, with all its awesome power, may be causing yet-untold environmental damage to the magical world.
Episode six, meanwhile is a lot more interesting, as it dives into some real gender and sexuality politics that you just know I’m chomping at the bit to talk about right after I hit you with another ad break.
Naw I’m just kidding, I wouldn’t do that to you! But I will tell tell you to subscribe to my music channel, Branches of Ygg, where I review albums and songs, interview artists, and even host my own rap shows and albums, such as the latest and greatest, Hurricane Season by Vizier and the Golden Witch. Here’s a snippet!
(Hurricane Season snippet)
Episode six sees the cast trying to navigate a hedge maze in teams of two without using magic, and Rosemary going gaga for a cute blonde dipshit that just transferred into their class. Sage is overwhelmed with jealousy and complains about it the whole time to her partner, Snapdragon. What this leads to is an exploration of both toxic attitudes of masculinity AND femininity. The blonde boy has the predictable problems of thinking he’s hot shit just because women tend to treat him well in spite if his bumbling idiocy—most of which Rosemary is willing to forgive until he starts talking down to her about things she is confident she understands better than he does. It’s all pretty cliche, but more interesting to me is the problem Snapdragon develops with Sage talking about them constantly and insisting that he wouldn’t understand because ‘male friendships are different’ and ‘men don’t talk about their feelings.’ This relationship is actually a lot more subtle, as Snapdragon is both portrayed as ambiguously attracted to Sage and also as ambiguously LGBT, and in the end they resolve to share feelings with one-another, leaving me with open questions about this character’s potentially unresolved sexuality or even gender identity. All of this comes through the characters sharing their feelings naturalistically and feels much less blunt than the very obvious portrayal of chauvinism from the blonde guy.
In the background of all that, Thyme is teamed up with Amaryllis to discover how some of her dark personality is likely from her disastrous parents, and we see her being pitched as more of a marauding berserker once she gets ahold of an axe instead of putting up the dignified Draco Malfoy magician persona. This episode made me actually start to like and want to know more about this character, and the resolution of Parnell and Parsley’s victorious team up is also pretty cute. I’m not going to say this episode couldn’t have been written more subtly, but I do think in comparison to the shows that it’s most fair to compare it to, it is perfectly fine and no more heavy-handed than you should expect from, y’know... a cartoon.
Episode seven finally takes us on a proper adventure, with the whole class of students heading into a deadly cave on a mission to retrieve healing water from a magical fountain. They end up falling deeper than intended into the cave after finding a dried-out fountain, getting attacked, and Rosemary getting injured. At the bottom of the cave around a huge magical water spring, the girls have a chance to do some emotional bonding, with Rosemary admitting for the first time her doubts about her mother, Lavender, still being alive after disappearing on a mission four years ago. Thyme also reveals that her family used to live in the fairy forest, and had to leave thanks to the spread of a magical disease of the earth called The Rot, which her father stayed behind to investigate, and which she attended High Guardian in the hopes of learning more about. It seems pretty obvious that the Rot is being caused by the over-plundering of magical water for the production of weapons powered by new magic, and the end of the episode reveals a cat girl being assigned against her desires to murder the four girls before they learn too many secrets of the magical world. It was a pretty fun episode, and the first to feature enough bloody violence to earn it a PG rating by my estimate. Remind you, this is supposed to be an anime, and swearing and bloodshed are commonplace even to anime aimed at children, and increasingly to cartoons from the United States.
Episodes eight and nine comprise a dramatic two-parter in which every established character appears at the town’s big fall festival—sort of a combination of Halloween, and the Japanese summer festivals commonly portrayed in anime. Or Nightmare Night or the Enchanted Parade from MLP and Little Witch respectively. While cat girl Olive is trying to find and hopefully ensnare without having to kill the main four, Rosemary and Sage are finally having conflict as Sage realizes that Rosemary’s pushy and self-absorbed attitude is starting to get on her nerves, while Rosemary argues that Sage has simply become too boring. The boiling over of this tension is written really well, and in spite of a large-scale and high-stakes danger scenario playing out through the middle of their conflict across both episodes, it remains unresolved by the end, with Sage seeking solace in the understanding friendship that she is developing with Snapdragon and leaving Rosemary lonely in reconsidering her actions.
Snapdragon’s own inner turmoil starts when she turn up in a stunning mermaid costume, only to get hit on by a classmate and then called a freak. Amaryllis takes her aside to create what I’m going to call a magical safe space, and tries to talk her through what’s hanging her up, but Snapdragon isn’t comfortable talking about it and can’t find an acceptable middle ground with Amaryllis’ pushy approach to trying to get something out of her either, putting them on the outs, and sending Snapdragon off with Sage. Along the way, there are plenty of suggestions of Sage becoming attracted to Snapdragon from seeing her in feminine presentation, and through her patience and interest in what Sage has to say, contrasting Rosemary’s foolhardy bluntness.
In the midst of all this, Thyme, fed up with pretending to care about other shit now that she knows there might be a way to stop the rot, is attempting to bring the healing water back to her father in the Fairy Forest, when Neppycat transforms himself into giant mode again so that he can warn her about Olive and the conspiracy to kill the girls. Neppycat’s dialog and vocal performance in these episodes is honestly hilarious, and he accidentally leads the girls straight into Olive’s trap, whereupon the magical spell she unleashes to try and turn the girls to stone is deflected by Sage onto the entire town, including Parsley and Neppycat, who don’t make it into the safety bubble.
While the entire town is frozen, there is plenty of tense humor and action surrounding the fact that the residents could easily perish from being tipped over, and even a heartwarming bit where Olive gives away her position to the attacking Rosemary because she stops to put a cushiony bag underneath a child that had been in mid-run. Olive and Rosemary’s fight is pretty well-choreographed and animated, and I can honestly say that if this show had been on TV when I was like 10-12 years old and I’d happened to catch it, I probably would’ve watched the whole rest of the series just on basis if it being a badass enough fight. I appreciate as well that the show manages a careful tonal trepidation, as we keep wondering if someone is going to actually die, and Olive ends the episode with as many physical wounds as her opponents do emotional ones.
Honestly, I think this was a pretty great pair of episodes. The dramatic centerpiece was memorable and the action and drama tightly paced. All of the side-characters have something entertaining to do, with the teachers getting hammered and accidentally implying that they attend a type of party they’d be embarrassed to describe to children together, Slime Boy and Parnell jamming out on the bandstand, and all kinds of fun stuff going on in the background. The weird magical VR gaming goggles kinda came out of nowhere and felt a little forced into the plot, but that was my only real complaint. All of the stuff I’ve seen people make fun of out if this episode made a lot more sense in context, and it saddens me that people have made fun of the scene with a trans character expressing their inner identity in public for the first time and getting made fun of for it, as if that wasn’t a real and relatable and likely quite damaging experience which plenty of young people to go through, trans or not.
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Episode ten sits on the emotionally dreary side, with a desaturated color palette and all of the characters sad about the state of their relationships. Amaryllis and Rosemary try to concoct funny plans to fix them, with Slime Boy and Parnell along as comic relief sidekicks and a moral center guiding the girls to simply apologize, while Sage and Snapdragon continue bonding. It’s a cute, if only somewhat memorable episode, with the main developments being Snapdragon suggesting to Sage that she might be romantically attached to Rosemary, and both Sage and Amaryllis pushing toward Snapdragon’s realization of her transness, while Parsley tails Thyme on an ultimately ineffective operation to summon a demon to help with her father’s situation in the fairy forest. I will also note that Slime Boy’s voice actor has toned his bit down by this point and doesn’t feel nearly as out-of-place as he did at first.
Now for episode eleven, it’s time to call upon the Seaponies!!
In this one, Sanpdragon gets teamed up with the guy who tried to hit on her before, and gets fun through the gamit of transphobic remarks before she finally... snaps and just beats the shit out of him. This leads Professor Caraway to pull her and her broken wrist out of the mission, thus missing out on the chance to live the glorious dream of being a beautiful mermaid warrior. Snapdragon is finally talked into opening up about her past, in which her brother would beat her up for playing with animals, and then her father would teach her to ‘man up’ and retaliate like a good warrior. I found this anecdote personally relatable, not because of my own dad who pretty much gave up on trying to get me into sports pretty early on, but because of a friend (who, like most of my childhood friends, realized he was gay later) whose dad would treat him like this, as well as myself in the few encounters we had before I decided I really didn’t like him. In the end, Caraway teaches her about transition magic, and Snapdragon seems to step onto the transitioning path. Needless to say, I like the way this was all handled and would have loved to have seen this story as an adolescent.
The seapony plotline mostly involves Thyme’s libido suddenly activating at the site of a mermaid girl, and then a kind of heavy-handed ending in which Sage accidentally kills a sea serpent. I appreciate what they were going for with the traumatizing idea of accidental murder, but in a show that previously had scenes of these character slaughtering what they considered ‘evil’ monsters with abandon, it felt a little bit overplayed to get as heavy as it does about this particular killing—but that’s a small complaint about what is otherwise a good scene in an okay episode. By the end, it has become clear even to the teachers that the world is on the verge of ecological disaster thanks to magical imbalance.
Episode twelve is the last currently extant episode of High Guardian Spice, and while it is a very entertaining big action spectacle, it honestly left me feeling pretty cucked. The evil Triumvirate sends a guy to lead Olive back into the school to kill anyone who knows the secrets of the Rot, and mostly it consists of his machinations leading to a series of increasingly intense battles and the burning down of High Guardian Academy. Olive, who I always thought looked kind of like a displaced Touhou character, predictably turns to the good team, and everyone ends up taking to the sky in what I can only describe as a battle that takes clear visual influence from the Touhou franchise—which makes sense to me as Touhou is definitely core trans culture, unintentionally or otherwise.
The reason I feel cucked is that the plot doesn’t resolve in any way, and in fact ends on a cliffhanger with Rosemary’s mother still alive as a dark knight working for the enemy. I’ve got no idea what made the team behind this show so brazenly confident that they would get a second season, but I’ve got some heavy doubts about it happening now.
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Let’s be honest—my original video about this show only got as much attention as it did because the anime community was violently disinterested in it—and most of them still would be. Magical girl and slice-of-life anime are hardly beloved to mainstream audiences, and a lot of people who call themselves anime fans very strictly do not care about American cartoons, no matter how much anime influence they might take. Combine that with the already controversial Crunchyroll’s horrible marketing, and you had a recipe for people to get pissed at the thing’s mere existence. Me being a trans woman that started her career analyzing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, rewatches Cardcaptor Sakura, and generally spends inordinate amounts of time watching kids’ cartoons and anime, High Guardian Spice was pretty much made specifically for people like me. That there are those who consider me to have personally buried this show is once more proof positive that there’s nothing I’m better at than shooting myself in the dick.
But hey, if I really had the power to kill this show, then maybe I’ve also got the power to bring it back to life. Without further ado, here is my review of High Guardian Spice:
I give this series a solid 7/10. I like where it’s going with the world building—the foundational blocks are simple and traditional, but some of the unique flourishes really shine, and the backgrounds and music do a lot to bring it to life. The monster designs are pretty freakin adorable, even if a couple of them are clearly cribbing from Pokemon. I like that it doesn’t take itself too seriously to do fun stuff with magic, but retains a level of verisimilitude. Its social commentary is well-woven into the narrative and characterization, and I think the development of each character’s arc is well paced and mostly satisfying, though Parsley and Sage end up getting less attention than Snapdragon and Amaryllis in the latter half and I needed a lot more of them both. Parsley was the most imminently likable character to watch, and Thyme was a fun Raven clone with places to go narratively. From one witch-themed girl with blue hair to another, Sage was adorable and her vocal performance often grounded the show. The trans theming, while fairly incidental to the show’s actual story, was well-handled and would’ve spoken to me at any point in my life. Amaryllis was a lot of fun once she slid into her looser and more maniacal personality around a third of the way in. Both cat people were a joy. Lots of stuff is still underdeveloped in a way that could let the show get even better if it got the chance to flesh them out, though after three years, it’s hard to know if all of the staff would even be interested in returning to this widely-mocked property. I want to know if Rosemary can return Sage’s feelings, or if Snapdragon will win the Sagebowl, I want to see Thyme defeat the rot and save her father, I want the obvious fact that new magic is draining the planet’s resources to be revealed, and I want more Parsley-centric plotlines.
If High Guardian Spice ends unresolved with only twelve episodes and a cliffhanger, then it’ll be that much more apt to describe it as “anime.” Usually original shows are more likely to actually try and tell a contained story, since there’s not a manga or light novel I can pick up to continue it, though if I had to read a comic to get the rest of this story I probably wouldn’t mind that. And hey, maybe this show will catch enough updraft that Crunchyroll can sell it to Netflix and it can actually have a shot at reaching an audience. It’s worth a dream.
I mentioned earlier that the opening theme was garbage, and after listening to it a few more times, I still think that’s mostly true. I get it’s supposed to be kind of like an alma matter so I don’t mind that it’s cheesy—it’s only as much so as goofy Pokemon openings that I love—I just think the singing on this recording leaves something to be desired. I can’t figure out if the ‘vocal perfection’ credit was meant to be sarcastic or patronizing, but it can only be one or the other. It’s not a terrible melody, though, which I would say if the ending theme. Adorable visuals, terrible song, and not just because the voice actresses are singing it awkwardly. Anyways, there’s your mean-spirited complaints for this show that I pretty thoroughly enjoyed.
I hope you also thoroughly enjoyed this thorough analysis, and that you’ll support me on Substack for bonus articles and podcasts, or for the same on Patreon. Hear my musical content on Branches of Ygg, and watch my irl excursions on Picnic Adventure. Find me on social media and on cashapp and venmo as goldenwitchfire. This has been Trixie the Golden Witch reminding you to never forget: anime forever.