Crunchyroll is on a roll lately when it comes to getting stuck in the mud of controversy over an originally funded show called High Guardian Spice. The reception to the San Francisco-made animated show was not very positive from Crunchyroll’s paying subscribers. In fact, it was downright derided by the community because they felt it was pushing the Social Justice Warrior agenda, and Crunchyroll was taken to task for not putting subscriber money back into the coffers of Japanese anime studios. Crunchyroll made a follow-up post to explain that they are putting some of the money back into the hands of the Japanese, but also that they’re working on their own original content, such as High Guardian Spice. This still did not go down well with subscribers.

In result, the forum thread for High Guardian ended up getting embroiled in sociopolitical debates between normal people and Liberals. And since Crunchyroll could no longer control the narrative, the volunteer moderators shut down the forum thread.

The thread popped up shortly after the announcement for the show on August 22nd, 2018.

After 43 pages of back-and-forth bickering between Social Justice Warriors and anime fans, one of the moderators, going by the handle of Karkarov, stepped in to write the following…

“Well I can clearly see people didn’t listen.

 

“This has gone on long enough, political discussion outside of the Miscellaneous forum is against CR rules. This thread has been all politics since page one. As for the two people who don’t have any understanding of how this site works, talking back to a mod is just going to get your post deleted (notice how I deleted them), and mods do not work for CR we are volunteers.

 

“Locked and closed. Do not restart it outside of the Miscellaneous forum and if you do restart it there expect it to be heavily monitored and forum rule violations to not be treated nearly as forgiving as they were here.”

And with that, the thread was locked and closed on August 27th, 2018.

Before the discussion thread was closed down, SJWs were trying to play the guilt-by-label game, claiming those who didn’t like the show were putting their “misogyny on display”.

Some of the mods and dedicated defenders of the show claimed that they didn’t like the terms “SJW” and “feminazi”.

Others pointed out that it was hard not to talk politics about the show since one of the writers for High Guardian Spice, Kate Leth, is rather active on social media constantly talking about social justice, sociopolitical topic matters, and plenty of politics, as pointed out in an article by Bounding Into Comics.

Leth was also previously a writer at Marvel Comics, having worked on comics like Hellcat, which was cancelled after an 81% year-over-year decline in sales.

Essentially it wasn’t so much that the Crunchyroll community was talking about politics in the High Guardian Spice thread, it’s that they didn’t agree with the politics being put forward by the show’s creators, which is ironic given that the initial announcement trailer didn’t reveal anything about the show’s plot and was geared 100% on the sociopolitical nature of the show’s development.

So basically, a trailer that Crunchyroll produced that was all about politics, wasn’t allowed to be discussed on Crunchyroll’s own forums due to the rule on not discussing politics.

Hilariously enough one of the forum goers even pointed out the hypocrisy of the rules compared to what was presented in the trailer, with the ballsy user Balzack writing in a separate thrad…

“So is this one going to get locked too? A few people were being pretty annoying in that thread with circular arguments and quote pyramids. But I fail to see how discussion about the content of their launch video and how we feel about the ideals they were presenting in it means everyone who participated in that thread had some kind of political bone to pick from page one.

 

“Crunchyroll chose to focus more on identity politics than animation in their video, not us.”

Nevertheless, the company had schadenfreude compounded onto an already stacked cake of fail when a poll was published in the forums asking what subscribers thought of the reveal trailer for High Guardian Spice. Well, the numbers say it all…

At this point in the culture war many normies are waking up to what’s going on. Core fandoms are well aware of the SJW takeover happening in entrainment media. A while back they were warned that an Animegate would be on the horizon given the natural migration habits of SJWs attempting to infiltrate and subvert every popular fandom they can get their hands on.

In this case, we can see that Crunchyroll’s subscribers really aren’t taking this High Guardian Spice situation lying down, and the slow ramp up of censorship will likely begin to wake up more people and alert the anti-SJW forces about what’s happening at Crunchyroll if they haven’t been alerted already. From here, it’s just a matter of seeing how Crunchyroll will react and respond to the pushback being exhibited by their own community.

I attempted to reach out to Kate Leth for comment, but she has me blocked on Twitter.

(Thanks for the news tip This Is Mugen Tenshin)