Author: Gabriel Persechino-Forest Published: August 30th, 2018
Crunchyroll Does it Again
Recently, Crunchyroll announced that it was diving into the market of original content and that their first title would be High Guardian Spice. It did not go over well, to say the least. First off, they announced that they had created Ellation Studios, which raised many red flags among the community who felt that Crunchyroll was using the profits they gained from their licensing of anime to fund their personal projects and thus were failing to support the very Japanese industry they claim to love. Then Crunchyroll goes on to talk about how they don’t want animation to be seen as just “For kids” but follow up by making a series that looks like your average American cartoon for kids.
Then, there’s the fact that very little has been revealed about the first series they plan to release and they have focused solely on the fact that the staff making the series is “Diverse”, even though an all-female writing staff of white women hardly fit the definition of diverse. Anyways, people immediately began to suspect what I’ve been warning about for a long time: They are finally here and they are pushing the agenda in our fandom, whether you like it or not. “They” are the Social Justice Warriors and the “Agenda” is the politically correct code that now seems to rule behavior, thought and art in our society. And there’s also the fact that Ellation Studios is headed by Margaret Dean, who also heads the Women in Animation organisation, leaving little doubts that a clear agenda is being pushed here and likely will be in any future works from the studio.
The announcement has gathered over 700 comments, the overwhelming majority of them negative. The Anime News Network article on the release also gathered strong and largely negative reactions in their comment section. Unfortunately, due to the new rules ANN promised would not be used to stifle discussion based on a political bias, the comment section has been heavily censored and comments negative of the series have been largely deleted. So if you had any illusions as to what ANN’s new rules were really about, now it should be clear: It is simply another step in the mainstream media’s attempt to censor and control speech on the internet.
Following this, Crunchyroll disabled comments and likes on their announcement trailer on YouTube due to the overwhelmingly negative reactions they were receiving; a screenshot was taken before it was disabled, to give you an idea:
Storms over the topic raged on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit as well as other social media and many Crunchyroll subscribers seem to have cancelled their subscriptions in response. Eventually, Crunchyroll closed the thread on their own website where the topic was being discussed. However, they did give users the ability to discuss the topic in another section of the forums and eventually re-opened the thread. A poll was made on Crunchyroll to determine how members felt about the new series and it showed predictable results:
Since then, Crunchyroll released a statement acknowledging that they received fan feedback and have listenend to it. They also attempted to reassure people that the funding for the project was not coming at the expense of their licensing endeavors (Although how this is actually possible is another matter entirely) and promised to update their player to the HTML5 in the near future (I assume, as a way of calming angry subscribers). Throughout their statement, they refrained from attacking anime fans and showed professionalism, which is in stark contrast to how other mainstream outlets have handled such matters in recent times. Meanwhile, Comicboook.com released an article attempting to pretend that the majority of people support the show, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.
Throughout all of this, many have begun to suspect that AT&T’s purchase of Crunchyroll might have something to do with this new development. This is highly unlikely. The purchase was very recent (Weeks) and this project would have to have been in production for a long time by now. I’m afraid there are no scapegoats, this one is on Crunchyroll.
AnimeGate has already begun, too many such controversies have popped up in the last month alone and more are coming. Many didn’t think it could happen and many still don’t think it is happening, but it will creep up on them eventually and they are in for a rude awakening if they thought anime was safe from the agenda.
The announcement video for the series
Source: Crunchyroll