Back in 2018, a trailer for Crunchyroll’s first original series made a huge splash in the anime community – but not in the way the series creators intended.
In August of that year, the creators of High Guardian Spice put out a short video. It was their introduction to Crunchyroll and the anime community. As I recall, they didn’t say anything that was directly inflammatory. The problem was that they focused on the fact that their team members were diverse and that High Guardian Spice would break new ground for characters that had been underrepresented in animation thus far.
The response from the American anime community was predictable.
The executive producer, Raye Rodriguez, is a Cuban-American transgender man. The rest of the creative team were white women. This was the “diverse” team that they touted.
It was more than a simple misstep. The trailer was their one chance to present the series in its best light, but they badly misjudged the anime community and the backlash was huge.
Fast forward to October 2021, when Crunchyroll announced the release of all twelve episodes of High Guardian Spice. I’d actually thought that the project had been dropped since I’d heard nothing about it after that first trailer, but it turned out that all the episodes were completed back in 2019.
The fact that Crunchyroll released all twelve episodes at once was seen as a bad sign by many anime fans. The premise - four girls studying at a magic academy to become ‘guardians’ - didn’t really appeal to me. I don’t watch a lot of shojo series. But I was curious about the much talked about diversity of the show’s characters, so I committed to watch the entire thing.
Rosemary and Sage are two teenage girls who leave their village to attend High Guardian Academy in the city of Lyngarth to train to be guardians. They briefly stay with Sage’s cousin and her wife before moving into the academy’s dorms, where they are eventually joined by Parsley, a girl from a blacksmith family, and Thyme, an elf girl. (Yes... like the old Simon and Garfunkel song.)
From the above description, you may already have images in your mind of what the characters look like. If you’re picturing typical anime characters, however - you’d be wrong.
The anime community - already irked by what they viewed as SJWs pushing their agenda on everyone - reacted badly to the character designs. I have to say that I agree about the character designs. It was another misstep to have them look like American cartoon characters rather than anime characters.
Particularly Rosemary, who is the show’s protagonist.
Despite the kid-like, cartoon look to the story, most episodes opened with a mature content warning, which made no sense since there was no sex or violence in the first few episodes (there was no sex in the series ever, actually). One commenter speculated that the warning was there because of Sage’s lesbian relative, or maybe because of a scene a few episodes later when Professor Caraway, a formerly female friend of Rosemary’s mother Lavender, is introduced. The professor, now a transgender man, explains that he takes a magic potion every month to maintain his new masculine body.
If you’re getting the sense just from what I’ve said so far that High Guardian Spice is a mixed bag, well, you hit the nail on the head. So it might be more helpful if I answer a question that you can use to decide whether the series is worth your time.
Question: The show currently has a rating of 1.8 out of 5.0 possible stars on Crunchyroll. Is High Guardian Spice literally the worst series ever, like, so bad that you could watch it to make fun of it in a nasty way?
Answer: No, not by a long shot. It has its moments and is genuinely enjoyable at times. Overall, it’s a solid C- on an A-F grade scale. For me, its flaws tip the scale to not-watch rather than watch, but that might just be my personal tastes speaking, as I prefer shonen to shojo shows.
Maybe a pros/cons approach would be better. What works and doesn’t work about the series?
Pros: The character development was decent. The art direction was good. What action scenes there were, were executed well. Though some have criticized the voice acting, I didn’t find anything to complain about in that regard.
There were diverse characters, more in the LGBTQ sense than race, but it was a good effort.
Cons: The first seven episodes were too slice-of-life and slow moving. There is literally no story to speak of until Episode 8, when an enemy of the four guardian girls is finally introduced.
Also, there is no explication of the world the girls live in. What is the government in this medieval European-looking land? Is it a monarchy or something else? What role does magic play in society? What do “guardians” do, actually? None of this is explained.
High Guardian Spice is a genuine oddity. Part of me wants to defend it at least a little, because its creators are clearly talented and their aim of wanting their story to be more inclusive was sincere. But I still don’t understand who the series was intended for. Was it meant for children, teenagers, or adults?
Putting aside all the questions that High Guardian Spice leaves me with... maybe I’ll end by talking about a scene I truly appreciated, a scene that moved me.
One of the four girls’ classmates is a boy named Snapdragon. Normally gentle and soft-spoken, he is bullied over having cross-dressed as a mermaid at a school event, and responds by pounding the snot out of the bully.
Professor Caraway speaks with Snapdragon and draws out what lay beneath his reaction. For the first time, the boy talks about how he doesn’t feel right in his body – that his shoulders are too boxy and his hands are too big. He also recounts how his brother said he was "girlish" and that in response, his father told Snapdragon to be "a fierce warrior." (There have been hints before now that he is trans, so this doesn’t come as a surprise to the audience.)
When the professor tells Snapdragon about “transition magic,” through which he could transition to being a female, the relief on Snapdragon’s face is a revelation. It’s a moment anyone can appreciate - that moment when a kind authority figure tells a young person something that could change their life for the better.
I’m not sure what else I can say about High Guardian Spice. It’s not the train wreck people have said it is, but it’s not the best thing you could watch this year either, in my opinion. If you do watch it... I sincerely hope you enjoy it.
