It’s probably pretty clear by now that we aren’t interested in mincing words, so let’s all just come together and agree that High Guardian Spice has been marketed terribly. The focus of the only trailer so far has shown almost nothing of the actual show aside from some concept art and instead has focused on the crew behind it, Elevation Studio. There’s no defending the way the team seems to think their marketing budget is best used to toot their own horn rather than show the series they’re supposed to be selling, but the reaction to this has been incredibly disproportionate. Bad advertising does not make a bad product.

There are also many claims that High Guardian Spice is trying to push an agenda more than making a good show. This stems both from the fact that little of the show is shown aside from concept art and from a segment of the trailer where a staff member boasts of the studio’s even split between male and female talent and all of Crunchyroll has been labeled as a bastion for “SJWs” as a result. We’ll just ignore that having an unusually larger female team has been a big selling point for many massively successful anime and manga teams such as Kyoto Animation or CLAMP and point out that every piece of fiction pushes some sort of ideology or moral, that’s the entire point of a theme after all. Let’s also not forget how inherently paradoxical it is to both criticize Elevation and Crunchyroll for creating a show that’s nothing but an agenda while also complaining that they’re telling us nothing about the show itself.

And honestly, why do creators’ politics even matter? We all generally agree that anti-Semitism and pedophilia are bad, yet we also generally agree that Recovery of an MMO Junkie and Rurouni Kenshin are good stories in their own right despite the fact that the former’s anime director Kazuyoshi Yaginuma and the latter’s original author Nobuhiro Watsuki are an open Nazi sympathizer and a convicted child predator respectfully. Good art is good art, regardless of who it comes from.

Speaking of which, seeing little of the series so far is also a poor cause for alarm. Just think of the sheer amount of major Hollywood films that have teaser trailers, this style of advertising is so prominent it has its own name. All these “issues” may turn out to be symptoms of a legitimately bad production after all, but the fact is that countless great products have been made with these same approaches, so writing off the entire distribution platform before the show is released is not an informed decision.