I watched a summary of all the episodes and segments of important episodes to see how bad it is, and it is pretty shit, just not EX ARM level of shit, but that's not a very high bar to beat. There's a mature content-not for kids warning at the beginning of the show which tells me that the target demographic is supposed to be adults. Madoka is a mature anime, not HGS which is Madoka-at-home. At least twitter kiddies cannot use the tried and true deflection of "the show is not made for you! It's for children!" to negate criticism.
The overlysaccharine atmosphere, quirky LOLZpenguinZ humor, absolute lack of overarching main conflict until the very last episodes, absolute dumbing down or hammering in of messages, and the absolute lack of subtext, subtlety, and childishness in the dialogue all suggest a show aimed for children. HGS even has edgy swears thrown around which confuses me even more who the intended audience is.
What part of all this would appeal to adults and teens? Generic fantasy land and dnd party has been done a hundred times. There's a fuckin episode 5 where one character has to learn to apologize to another character for saying something hurtful as the main plotline. In episode 8-9 Rosemary and Sage get into a fight where Rosemary is mad at Sage for not wanting to do the carnival activities that Rosemary wants. Sage also gets angry and calls Rosemary annoying, which is enough to cause a rift in their friendship apparently. The supposedly dramatic, sad and tension filled moment is ruined by the gremlin girl hanging out in the background soaking up the drama like a gag. She-ra also has this issue of hamfisting in gags or jokes before, within, or right after tension filled dramatic scenes...do the showrunners not know comedic timing? They're trying so hard to be funni but also serious like Avatar but fail to realize there is a time and place for everything.
In episode 10, purple gremlin girl whose name I cannot recall at the-time is mad that Snapdragon is spending time with Sage and that Sage has "stolen" her bestie. Rosemary and gremlin girl team up to try to get their friends back. That is the entire plot of the episode. They say sowwy to each other at the end of the episode and become friends again.
WTF? This is elementary school fights. Why is there such a childlike understanding of friendship conflicts in these messages. She-ra even had a similar episode where Glimmer gets mad at Beau because he was hanging out with OTHER friends - how dare he! and thinks it means that he's ignoring her and abandoning her. Aren't these people, from HGS and She-ra, supposed to be high schooler aged? These elementary school squabbles aren't the type of drama, insecurity or identity related angst high schoolers deal with. Even Avatar had more nuanced character conflicts than HGS.
I will admit the tradition-vs-my-own-path coming-of-age message is decently handled as a mature theme at first, but then it is hammered over the viewer's head with so little subtlety, exploration, or nuance it comes back full circle to a moral message for very young children.
The dialogue is so stuffed with cliche lines and the most unnatural sounding phrases that makes them sound far from how normal people talk which makes you wonder if the writers have ever had friends or actually conversed with people on a regular basis. It's that bad. There are also very forced feeling jokes that are not really funny, like those in She-ra. Why do these types of showrunners try so hard to fit every 5 seconds with a funni gag or quirky random scene?
The animation is also very choppy with very blatant shortcuts; not the type of efficient and clever shortcuts the anime industry uses, the clearly-lazy-and-painful-to-look-at ones that knockoff low budget cartoons use. The audio mixing is horrid and sounds like some characters are talking into a towel or their lines were recorded in a closet. The background art and foreground art is not well integrated into the scenes and with the character animations. Some food assets and that lamp post look like literal pngs from
shutterstock and google. Voice acting is also amateurish.
Raye also privated their twitter, kinda pathetic. Why did Raye unironically list his role as producer on HGS on their LinkedIn CV like it's some accomplishment when it's extremely blatant that the project was mismanaged to the highest degree with assets, audio, animation, writing, and voice acting. Very extremely pathetic to have two self inserts in your own show.
Edit: I need to add that the Snapdragon fella in one episode is offended when Sage says" guys just don't get girl friendships" while hanging out with the girls then a few episodes later he thinks about being trans because of society's expectations of being burly and warriorlike and tough for men.
TF is that supposed to mean about trangender motivations, Raye? This is horrible representation for trans people. There is so many more media that writes trans characters better.
