#like call me a nuanced media for adults enjoyer but they don't have to be happy for me to like the ship

[scurvyboy]

GET THAT NASTY BILL OUT OF YOU AND HOWS ABOUT YOU DRAW FIDDLESTAN HAPPY FOR 1 SINGULAR TIME, PLEASE, I CANT STAND SO MUCH ANGST, I CANT SIT SO MUCH ANGST EITHER

is this what you want? is this how you see them?

[elfhunk]

justice for q force & high guardian spice

i was yelling on the bad bird website and i forgot i can also yell here now so i want to yell about the completely embarrassing legacy that we, the collective royal we, all of us hooligans on the internet, cursed high guardian spice and q force with.

this is for two reasons:

i think the way our cultural forums decided to burn these shows stake because we did not personally like them extremely sucked, especially if you were a queer person in those industries watching it happen, especially if you were one of the many queer people working on these shows.

they were just genuinely super funny if you gave them a chance and didn't prescribe preconceived notions of what good queer animation is supposed to be.

the cosmos is compelling me to yell about this. so i am. you cannot stop me.

so, both of these shows were burdened with a press cycle basically yelling at everyone from the hills, okay! hey! the new gay show is here! if you're gay you should like it!

anyone familiar with how media works should already be going like "aw geeze" if you weren't there for this in real time, but the resulting shitshow was heard round twitter, tumblr, youtube, and probably other places i don't use as much.

instead of cheering on these underdogs and politely recommending people give them a shot, or just politely stating if they were or were not to our tastes, it became like... a cool fad among posters on all platforms to explain why these shows were actively intrinsically, irreparably bad!

when the shows were perfectly fine, with some mediocre lows but overall high highs!

q force, for every softball joke about lesbian uhauls makes five more genuinely hysterically specific jokes while treating its cast with a huge degree of respect. if you did not get these jokes, that's fine, but lines like "call me miss congeniality honey cause i'm a femme top with a gun" and the entire endgame of eurovision hosted by a small european nation whose economy is based entirely around christmas (twink's favorite holiday from harry potter) live forever in my mind. it was a stupid little adult comedy, but the characters talked like me and my friends. characters like twink especially, was allowed to be funny and silly while still respected by the people around him. i cannot express to you how rare it is to find stories where a flamboyant drag queen twink is given his degree of nuance and development.

on the other hand, high guardian spice was doomed from the outset, but we all jumped at blood in the water instead of letting it exist as it was. it takes no research effort to learn that high guardian spice was yanked around through development hell for years and very clearly had no time or money to make their original pitch a reality.

i'm the first person to admit high guardian spice is, put kindly, a complete mess, but it's a mess with an unbelievable amount of heart and charm if you just engage with it organically instead of making fun of every little production error. i cannot stress enough how little time or money they had to make this thing. it was straight up unethical.

and despite that production hell... it was funny? high guardian spice was straight up just way funnier than most cartoons lately if you just engaged with the jokes as jokes and got the hate-watch stick out from under you. the character chemistry was super compelling, the voice performances had that bee & puppycat amateur charm, and it was a viewing experience so genuinely enjoyable my friends and i have literally watched it like three times from to back.

so, this completely mediocre and janky western anime should've just fallen by the wayside right? nope! it became political baby! it became about wokeness ruining animation, and we all participated in that narrative because we thought that one scene where a character says he's transgender very bluntly was awkward!

the way that everyone, mostly without watching more than ten minutes of the first episode, decided to jump on a hate train spearheaded by 4chan to completely destroy the show's chance at survival was... quite frankly? pretty embarrassing! it was genuinely super awful to watch otherwise reasonable members of our community to act so callously because something was... cringe? annoying? even if high guardian spice was as bad as everyone was saying it was, this kind of behavior is kind of straight up cruel if you took a second to listen for the cacophony of dogwhistling and the way that the cast & crew of the show was being spoken about.

as these things go, it became an easy way to punch down and earn some sweet engagement by posting jokes you thought sucked or where budgets and production timelines faltered.

it was really stupid. i am not asking for an apology for these shows, but i am asking that you give them a chance if you previously avoided them or otherwise bounced off. if you don't like them, that's okay, i don't care. i just want these works by queer writers, artists, and actors to... actually get to exist on its own terms, instead of being swept up into a cruel and pointless circus of engagement farming.

because you know what the industry takeaway extremely is going to be moving forward? guess people hate this, let's make sure future products for this market receive less time and funding.

if they do get made? gotta make sure they completely avoid all of the meatier and mainstream alienating subject matters both shows genuinely got into if you gave them the time of day.

every time the next gay movie or television show comes out in this online fandom space i have my eyes peeled for the kind of buffoonery that we subjected q force and high guardian spice to because they had the gall to make queer cartoons that were not for everyone.

they were specific, they were weird, and they were rough around the edges. and they've stuck with me because of that.

so far, it does not feel great to see media with non-threateningly nothing representation where characters peck each other on the lips briefly and wave a flag but otherwise never engage with each other, their identities, or their communities, and have everyone praise it because it didn't dare say anything specific enough to alienate anyone.

i would rather not connect with a gay character in a movie or cartoon because they just weren't the type of character or story i connect with... instead of not connecting with a gay character because there was nothing there to connect with in the first place!

okay i'm done i love you goodbye.