Welcome back to our deconstruction of the popular negative stances taken against Crunchyroll and its upcoming original series High Guardian Spice. To repeat what we said in part 1, our goal isn’t to attack people for not being drawn to a cartoon, we simply aim to address falsehoods and misconceptions behind a lot of this antipathy. There are entirely fair reasons not to like any piece of art or entertainment, but Honey’s Anime does not believe that these reasons are justified when they are based on incorrect assertions. With all that in mind, be sure to check out part 1 if you haven’t already and let’s dive right into it.
Crunchyroll Has Changed for the Worst and I Don’t Want to Pay Them if This is How They Use My Money
Of course, how one uses their money is up to the individual, but this is another head-scratching standpoint that has been echoed through otaku fandom. One of the biggest issues people take with the site's ostensibly new direction is that they are investing in their own brand instead of giving more money to the anime industry in Japan, which tends to be portrayed as some sort of false advertising on the company’s behalf. Crunchyroll, as far as we are aware, has never claimed to be some sort of anime charity that gives all of its money to the studios and admittedly criminally underpaid animators of Japan. Yes, the company has marketed its platform as a way to support the companies behind all of our favorite shows, but that promise was never for anything beyond providing a legal alternative to pirate sites by actually paying for the media hosted on their service. This is where the subtitle of this article becomes especially relevant, as there seems to be an overwhelming number of former fans acting as though Crunchyroll making its own entertainment just came out of nowhere, leaving people like we at Honey’s Anime wondering what site they’ve been using this whole time.
To give some perspective, when I myself left Crunchyroll in early January of this year, every other user I knew thought I was a total idiot and was not afraid to let me know. So now that hating the site has become trendy, all I can think of was how the writing was on the wall the entire time. The fact of the matter is that the platform has hosted plenty of original productions before High Guardian Spice. In fact, going to their homepage right now will reveal plenty of talk shows, interviews with American anime fans and even promotions with Rooster Teeth that they had been spending money on long before the announcement of their newest show. Let’s also not forget that they have paid for multiple conventions and industry award shows over the last few years. Of course, if people don’t like new original content as much as older ventures, that’s one thing, but claiming it’s the first time the company has done such a thing is patently false.
Crunchyroll Has Stopped Using its Budget Correctly
To be fair, the animosity doesn’t always exclusively stem from Crunchyroll investing in itself, as many more reasonable accusations have come up about them not budgeting towards more important aspects of the site. It’s certainly hard to deny that their flash video player is incredibly underwhelming, their subtitles are fraught with errors that are never corrected and their forums are a mess, but this is another part of what I alluded to earlier when I mentioned my decampment from the service. These were all the same factors that lead me to cancel my subscription as so many are doing now, yet whoever I spoke to at the time claimed I should just enjoy the anime and stop complaining about so-called unimportant problems. Unimportant problems that are now making these same people cancel their support just like I did, so you can probably see wherein lies my confusion.
These issues aren’t recent developments either, as little has been improved about the experience of the site in the last several years. Now it may just be that the masses’ tolerance for these faults have collectively run out all around the same time, but given all the other irrational hate High Guardian Spice is getting right now and that the pushback against the site problems coincides directly with its announcement, we at Honey’s Anime feel justified in interpreting this as an excuse. Especially considering that Crunchyroll has been talking about promoting its new html5 player which users had been beta testing for weeks and is now publicly available for all. They’ve made the investments they were ignoring for so long that were supposedly the reason behind the hate for HGS and yet that hate hasn’t gone away. We are confident that many of these people are using problems they were previously fine with overlooking as a contrived reason to send hate to Crunchyroll because of a negative impulse they’ve had towards a single show that hasn’t even had a full trailer yet and we fundamentally reject this attitude on every level.
Final Thoughts
Will this publication influence or change the conversation around High Guardian Spice in any meaningful way? Probably not. Will new ventures by entertainment companies still receive impulsive and misinformed hate from online fanbases in the future? Almost certainly. Nonetheless, it’s always important to keep the truth out there and Honey’s Anime is proud to be doing its part for the otaku community. We don’t know how the show will turn out, but we do know that this sort of blind rejection of something new only hurts the industry that lets us indulge in our wonderful hobby.
But what do you think of High Guardian Spice? What makes you think it will be good or bad? Let us know in the comments and stay posted to honey’s Anime for more on High Guardian Spice and everything else anime related.
Author: Will Bertazzo Lambert
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