How (And How Not) to Fantasy | Arcane & High Guardian Spice 

To add a little fuel to the fire here, for those who aren't aware, the main Writers of Arcane (Alex Yee and Christian Linke) have never actually written anything before, at least nothing beyond some bits of lore for the Game, but other than that, Arcane is *literally* their first try.

24:45 "there's more to fantasy than faerie castles and fire-breathing dragons" Note to self: write a story about fire castles and faerie-breathing dragons.

Funnily enough, one of the creators of Arcane mentioned that the budget wasn't as big as some people think and they had to work around those restraints

The fact that the whole marketing of High Guardian Spice was focused on how inclusive and LGBTQ+ friendly the show was, only for Arcane to become one of the best examples of writing LGBTQ+ stories in an organic way when that wasn't even THEIR focus is so funny to me. High Guardian Spice had one job and it didn't even do it correctly.

I think it's funny how the producers of HGS always talk about ther "perfect" LGBTQ+ representation and even at this point Arcane did a better job. And Caitlyn and Vi aren't even a couple yet!!

Two shows about a pink haired and blue haired girl as the main cast. One is a masterpiece, the other the worst kinds of show.

Arcane also has Shimmer as a supernatural element directly opposing Hextech. It also shows the different ways of the two cities. Hextech is refined, safe, and highly specialized, but can only be used for things the engineers design a machine. Meanwhile, chemtech is crude, puts a toll on the user and carries many risks, but it's more versatile and can be used for many problems just by drinking it. Exactly how the two cities developed. Piltover needed focus and clear directions. Zaun needed improvization and constant adapting.

Something that confused me about HGS is that we don't see any other guardians. Not only are these first-year students the only people being trained at the academy (no upperclassmen), but, except for the teachers, the show doesn't try to introduce professional guardians, almost making it feel like these kids are the only ones in existence.

I have to be frank. Arcane has shown up how poor the quality of story telling of the whole media machine, east and west, has been. Arcane is like a modern day Shakespeare. It's a game changer and a fantastic teaching tool to show people how to apply all the principles of premium writing, story telling and cinematography correctly.

Differences in demographic are definitely worth pointing out, in that HGS skews younger but has a lot of weirdly out of place gore and swearing in it, while Arcane is dead set on its particular audience. But worldbuilding should be considered regardless of such

Arcane is what I want adult animation to be. More of it at least. More epic stories maybe a little less comedy.

So in Short you write good fantasy by: 1. Get a World that makes sense and with consistent rules. 2. Get characters with diferent desires, antagonist(s) with desires conflicting the ones from the main cast. 3. From here the story almost writes itself.

Come on, this isn't fair, Arcane is fighting a battle of good writing against a unarmed opponent here

High Guardian Spice is a great example for new writers trying to learn Specifically an example of what not to do

I like how in Arcane, magic is essentially universal in their world but never actually shown except through the lens of being a fuel source for steampunk machinery (and in Jayce's flashback). This keeps the audience off-balance because we never know exactly what magic is or what it can do, and it becomes increasingly disturbing as it becomes less steampunk and more close to its true (horrific) form. The key, I think, is to give the audience exactly the amount we need to know and to control the rest to be used for maximal narrative impact.

I haven't watched HGS, but every time I watch a video about it I'm hit with another haymaker I never expected. It's a bizarre experience.

I didnt even heard of HGS. When I saw this video's first half, I was laughing at you for comparing a show which is *clearly* made for children under the age of 10, With Arcane which is made for Teenagers at minimum. Then you mentioned how it also was made for a similar audiance. Im still laughing.

I think a big part of High Guardian Spice's many problems is that they didn't actually want to make a fantasy show. They wanted to make a slice of life show with a little LGBT/feminist representation mixed in. You can see it with what they focused on in the show. If you could take stuff like Snapdragon's arc out of the fantasy realm, and put it in a more generic high school setting with more focus it could have been pretty good. They did have other issues like budget restrictions and time issues, but not trying to make the show they would have preferred making is why this show failed.

Many say that it's unfair to compare Arcane and High Guardian Spice, both with budget and time constraints. But if you got a good story, neither of those should matter. What HGS lacked was a cohesive direction. It seems to be made of so many parts, neither thought through or fitted to serve the either the plot or the story. There's so many chefs that the soup has become a solid goo. They wanted to show something, but forget to put anything down in writing. The showrunner, Raye Rodriguez, complained that they had to start animate before the script was finished. How?!? What did they spend time on? What did they spend money on? In comparison Arcane is not without it flaws, sometimes a bit forced time-wise. But they had nine episodes(total runtime: 6h20min) compared to the twelve of HGS(Total runtime 4h14min). HGS needed to use the time wisely to tell the story, but seemed to throw a lot of it away on scenes that didn't pushed the story forward. In comparison Arcane seems to have trimmed the fat and squeezed together a coherent story by making the necessary cuts of anything that didn't promote it. HGS could have told so much more and made a much better show if they had someone at the helm who knew what story they wanted to tell, how to do it efficient and use every second and dime to promote the plot. While Arcane felt like a fancy meal at a three-star Michelin French restaurant, HGS felt like a half-baked loaf with dough still in the center. It could have been something good, even mouth watering. Instead it left a bad aftertaste.

I think one thing that a lot of people forget is that Arcane's lore, story, characters has been rewritten, redesigned and remodelled multiple times throughout this story line. That project was 10+ years in the making realistically speaking, with dedicated art teams to design specifically the regions alone. There will never be another series with that much content pre-made before the idea of a show ever touches a screen with as much room to change and redesign even it's tiniest parts of its lore.

Story telling IS writing! I get that combining visuals and audio is animation, but here animation and writing go hand in hand. You cannot have a good animated story without a good script and storyboard (which again, it is writing). Just because a scene doesn't have dialogues, it does not mean there was no writing involved.

Well you can say High gaurdian spice is…. “LEAGUES” away from of “LEGENDS” That is Arcane

Samurai Jack was low-budget too, but managed to pull off visual storytelling.

Im glad HGS exists because: -Its fun to laugh at -its a very good guide on what not to do when writing a story -it shows that anyone can be a shit writer, no matter the gender or sexuality -reminds you that good shows exist and you can appreciate them more -creates confidence for new writers. If you’re an amateur writer, anything you write will immediately be better than HGS

not gonna lie, this is one of the best videos on worldbuilding and pitfalls of fantasy writing I've ever seen. hands down. I am a beginning young adult fantasy writer, so this is going to be useful for me!! tyty

I havent seen HGS but every time I see a video for it the food is all bread and apples. Literally the least apitizing fantasy food I have ever seen. I know not everyone cares about that kind of stuff but growing up on ghibli films, I definitely am obsesed with animated food and I feel like it can tell a lot about the setting. like the food sceene with Vi and Cait. Food tells us about climate, culture, class, values aesthetics, and more. What I can gather from HGS so far is that they live in a temerate climate with lots of wheat and no one has ever heard of a flavor.

The thing that gets me about the clips of High Guardian Spice that I've seen is that there are other shows that have the same, or similar art styles - the She-Ra Netflix reboot comes to mind - but those other shows, while having a simple, somewhat cutesy art style, still look good, whereas there's always something a little off in every frame of HGS

I feel the main problem with HGS is that its creators wanted to create a cartoon that they wish they could've watched when they were kids, but they forgot that aren't kids anymore. This explains the dissonance and even the misunderstanding of what magic is; they are torn between a magic of fairy tales, where magic is a force of narrative and magic of modern fiction, where magic is almost like a force of nature. And, in the end, it fails both as a force of narrative (the magic isn't really linked to the characters' arcs) and as a force of nature (there's really no consistency to magic).

I always compared Arcane to the Dota dragon blood show because I watched the two back to back. The whiplash between "literally the best" to "holy shit is awful" was insane.

I genuinely thought we were comparing a childrens show to an adult show until stated otherwise, now i have even more appreciation for arcane that i didnt even think was possible

The worst thing about High Guardian Spice is bad is that... It really didn't have to be that bad. There's a lot of stuff in there that you could tune up. I'm a prose writer first and foremost. I can't say shit about animation, but when I take a step back, I find a lot of the small details in Spice quietly charming. The main characters are named Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, alluding to the most popular version of an old English ballad, the three headmistress are clearly Maiden, Mother, and Crone - Things like this are really fun for me! ... And none of it has any actual significance.

I always thought that the voice acting in Arcane had something much more natural than most animated media but I didn't know how to explain it, but you hit the nail right on the head: since the animation itself is very communicative, the dialogue has a far lesser load to carry, which makes it flow much better. Like there are so many moments in Arcane where no words are spoken yet much is said because the detail in the faces and body languages of the characters allow them to express with more than just words. Thanks for the enlightenment

They really didn't take advantage of the fantasy aspect as much as they should in HGS. They could have made ANYTHING happen to wow us and instead just uses fantasy stuff to bring the plot from point A to point B. In the first episode, they should have wowed us all with how magical the world of HGS is... but instead all we get to know about the world... is that they had to take 3 different types of locomotives in order to reach the big city with the only notable magical stuff happening is them flying on a broom to skip a line, a pocket dimension spare room, and rodents transforming into flying rodents when they wanted to get it on. Show us the magic of the world. Show us Rosemary and Sage planning to just fly to the city when the line for the train is too long, only to be stopped by a guard who asks them for their flying licenses and lets them off with a warning seeing as they are new people. Show us a magic festival going on in the city when they got there to let us get a taste for the different types of magic that this world has. Show us a thief turning invisible and stealing stuff like Rosemary's locket and when they ask a guard for help they say they are stretched too thin with the festival. Show us a Guardian effortlessly apprehending the invisible thief giving the audience a little wow show on why people want to be guardians in the first place. Lots of missed opportunities.

If u guys want a more vanilla story meant for children but with cool world building check out MLP friendship is magic rather than HGS, u can clearly see who has talent to write stories for younger audiences. Well, actual talent in general.

The difference between the two shows can be summarized in one sentence : Lack of talent and passion

as an artist these both shows are fascinating in it´s own way, Arcane is culmination of years of hard work, if you back track to "get Jinxed" video you can see a great start and potential but it took years in animation workout to reach the literal perfection and that years realtionship with Riot let to the great worldbuilding , while HGS get greenlit via fluke with good intentions but without the expirience to tell a decent story thinking that "because magic" will excuse lack of plot worry more on "the message" than how to tell it. I bet if Arcane had bible of how it was made and such ends at HGS team and try again follow it to the detail. they still fail.

I agree and hope that Arcane is now a new standard to work towards, not to copy, but to be inspired by

23:55 Parnell is the "nonthreatening black man" stereotype. It's a trope built to combat the "scary black man" trope that dominated 90s and early 2000s TV. Instead of making varied and just normal black guys, this stereotype goes in the extreme opposite direction of the "scary black man" trope and creates a severely emasculated depiction of black men.

I'm glad someone finally brought this up. I recently watched a video about HGS from DaftPina and while I can agree with some of the points he brought up I still wondered what Raye's story was meant to be. Also side note but I think Slimeboy's true name is suppose to be Marijuana and the reason he sounds like he does is because he was suppose to look like some kind of stoner. The issue is his facial expressions which I do blame low budget on, otherwise his outfit mildly gives on that vibe.

1:55 that's it, that's the perfect analogy I was looking for to describe how I feel about this show, it's more accurate than "you know how it's fun to watch a video with teenagers doing dumb shit and at least one of them gets hit on the nuts"

HGS suffers from a lack of mature development of its central moral problem. On one hand, the writers want to tie Old Magic to limited conservative ideas, but then on the other hand, the writers want to tie New Magic to out of control industrial progress. Since the writers want perfect main characters incapable of doing anything wrong, they can't acknowledge the characters as inconvenienced by the loss of support of Old Magic OR by any radical shift from New Magic. Because that would mean the main characters were capable of basic complacency within the society. And we all know main characters MUST be outcasts, out of sync with everything their society does, so they can properly rebel, admonish, and shame their society without confronting any internal issues first. If you took another social issue, let's say, women's rights and the industrial revolution, and talked about how my grandma and I have more similar lifestyles to each other (simple clothes, gardening, belief in traditional values) than to my mom, who believed "going to college meant she wouldn't have to touch dirt" and has TWO closets full of clothes that she swaps out with each season. I ask my mother to consider the problems with fast fashion, my mother asks me to consider the problem of people thinking I'm poor if they see me in the same outfit in the same week. Pretty deep issues, you know? But, the sort of stuff you could really explore with a cast of four young women exploring their family dynamics and what being a woman meant in each generation of their family. ... But HGS is the kinda studio that would claim they were going to write about that, and then make all the main characters orphans. XD Then how are they going to explore it? Oh, in this one minor character who isn't even friends with the main cast. Because if one of the main girls cared more about fashion than environmentalism, she'd be "The Bitch" and wouldn't be allowed to have any further depth to her character until she received a heavy-handed Aesop about how fast fashion is hurting the environment! HGS wouldn't even let her be a normal middle-working class girl getting her clothes from Target. If she cares about fashion, she MUST be Rich Bitch and she's not even allowed to look good in her clothes, she must be gaudy and over-styled. ... Same thing, of course, with other shows like RWBY. ONLY the rich, white kids are allowed to have fantastic racist ideas against the faunus. If a normal person was racist or even just scared of faunus, that would involve confronting uncomfortable truths about how pervasive racism can be. Nope, 8 seasons and ONLY people already designed to be hated ever show the slightest fear of faunus.

Two-headed animals are not broken at a genetic level. I am sure their genes aren't the problem. The problem is developmental. Most of the time two-headed animals are produced by conjoined twins developing in the same egg/womb, resulting in repeated body parts and sections.

24:51 Joyce's finger moved the fabric around the stone! The detail!

To be fair, Neon Genesis Evangelium manages to tell its story despite overusing still frames and even resorting to no animation at all at times. I think the issue is deeper than lack of confidence in the animation, as it is also tonal, a matter of target audience and story themes and so on.

glad to see your videos are getting more attention and breaking through to the youtube algorithm.

I think the phrase "High Guardian Spice is a shitfish" is probably one of the best summaries for it that can be given

The cookie scene kind of cracked me up. Not just because one of the characters appeared to be eating from an infinite supply of invisible cookies that occupied the same physical reality as the cookies that later got removed, but that edit? Flawless. That's how you do storytelling with minimal animation budget. Just some spoopy music, an emoji and a couple of lines of text. Edit: Professor Dunder Mifflin. I can't even. Send help.

It's definitely good that *High Guardian Spice* failed because Crunchyroll incredibly underpaid everyone so I'm glad a show paying animators in the west a third of minimum wage didn't become popular

This was definitely one of the best videos explaining the failings on High Guardian Spice, purely on a logical level. The way you explained the basics of storytelling while comparing the two shows was extremely helpful! I’ve been wanting to write my own fantasy story for many years now. It’s gone through many revisions, but still never got the basics necessary to make a coherent story. This truly helps to understand the true basics in a fantasy universe, and I can’t wait to apply them to my own writing!

This was a very interesting video! While the two shows are very different, they do share a lot of similarities. And the funny thing is, Arcane actually got its begging from the same place where HGS is now: an inexperienced team just wanting to create a fantasy world. Early League lore was a big mess of disconnected ideas and lackluster characters. It was very similar to HGS, if not worse in some aspects. But the team didn't give up and continued creating stories for their game. They learned, experimented and kept on learning, finally arriving at the point where Arcane came from. Today, League has a whole section of the community dedicated to the world and characters because it's just that good. Instead of jumping right into a full-blown animated show, the crew of HGS should have taken more time to think and plan out their story more. The whole thing feels like a first draft to me. I just hope they take this as a learning experience and keep on creating. After all, if you hit rock-bottom, the only way out is up.

16:03 Heimerdinger, i can understand that for someone unfamiliar with the game, his name would be hard to remember, after all he is infamoud for using noob friendly turrets that do a lot of damage, which he doesnt in the series... Yet.

Another example of towns and a city is in bofuri. The starting town has plants growing everywhere, its part of the Infrastructure while a forest surounds the town. Or the metal city that looks like a poorly maintained machine. Gears rusted, bits of machinery laying around. It fits the world's lore that the people who made it disappeared and now there's only people who don't know how to maintain it living there.

I see alot of time where shows do the "tell not show" instead of the "show don't tell"

It's actually very simple: spice didn't have a clue to what was it supposed to be nor supposed to tell. They couldn't decide if they go for a more mature tone or a children show, they couldn't decide in what storyline to focus, they couldn't decide what rules magic follows, they couldn't even decide WHAT A GUARDIAN *IS*. Arcane did know where they wanted to get and traced a path to that goal.

“YOU CAN’T JUST HAVE YOUR CHARACTERS ANNOUNCE HOW THEY FEEL! THAT MAKES ME FEEL ANGRY!!!” -Robot Devil Season 4

Thanks for this video. I'm just graduating college, but I'm already animating a teaser trailer for my own animated show. It's a modern day-science fantasy, takes place in a world where magic one day just manifested following a near apocalyptic event. I'll be sure to take notes on your video.

23:53 The animation director for arcane must be god tier when it comes to psychology. I was impressed by the fact that they had microexpressions at all, but I didn't notice until I watched your video that the shop owner is visibly hurt went she says "candy shop"

As someone who is creating a high-fantasy story this is a perfect guide on what/what not to do (I.e. incorporating magic into the background, presenting history and depth into a setting…) it’s a great compare and contrast critic with notes I’ll DEFINITELY use in the future.

As an example of animation not being everything, another of my favorite new shows on Netflix is Dogs in Space. Fairly simple animation, simple looking premise, but *great* characters that play off each other and create a story managing both fun sci-fi fantasy and some gut wrenching moments of tragedy and betrayal. I like how it doesn't pull its punches with the question at the core of that conflict "is humanity actually _worth_ saving?"

What makes Arcane so good is the fact that yes it's fictional characters, locations so on and so forth but there's so many things in that series that we can relate to and it deals with a lot of very real cultural, social and political issues that we deal with every day

Story telling can be very tricky especially on a specific theme, but if you are making a story in general there are a few rules I find personally Important: why is it happening, what is happening, how it is happening & when when it is happening, if you cannot answer any of those questions while making your story you will have holes in the story that will make the story either unfinished or just not believable. The biggest key especially in visual stories is show don’t tell, how many times did I had a movie or a serie where they just tells you the story without doing anything, exploring the plot of the story makes the viewer wanna learn more for curiosity is a human thing, plus it’s more enjoyable to make your own plot then just someone telling it like every anime serie I’ve seen.

The one thing I can give both of these is the character design. The visual character designs, at least. Arcane's are beautiful and complex without feeling unnaturally cluttered, and HGS's are simple and mostly appealing. Could use a few colors switched and added here and there, and maybe a few more interesting details, but they're overall nice for the simple style.

Fun fact: In "high Guardian Spice" none of the main characters are named after spices

One of the points I have to make about High Guardian Spice is the fact it was slated for release in Spring of 2019, the team working on the show wrapped production and moved on in 2019, so the show is the worst of 2019 not 2021, it was released by a subscription service for free when it's parent company began the process of trying to sell it. It is the equivalent of a store placing excess stock out for free to clear out storage space. High Guradian was put out to get all the skeletons out of the closet for Crunchyroll, it was reluctantly released. That the company dragged it's feet and hoped people would just forget the show existed says it all. When you do fantasy right your backer doesn't try to hide your show and release it for free only when forced to.

slime boy is a celebrity cameo, his voice actor is a member of a famous band, neutral milk hotel. He plays the saw which is why the character plays the saw in the halloween ep

The way how you described your opinion on High Guardian Spice was excellent and I share the same opinion. Part of me was sad, as I wanted the creators to pleasantly surprise me with a banger story, but another part of me wants to look at it with that morbid curiosity of a dumpster fire.

Comparing High Guardian Spice to Arcane is like comparing The Room to The Shawshank Redemption.

Honestly another major reason why these shows tackle fantasy so differently and HGS is so much less nuanced, is because HGS was intended to be a kid's show and was planned and began production with a preteen demographic in mind, then midway through production Crunchyroll requested it be more oriented towards adults, because adults are the primary users of Crunchyroll... This is why it feels so dumbed down and simple for an adult cartoon, and why the somewhat graphic violence or swearing feels so out of place, because it is.

I didn't expect someone whose videos have this level of quality to have fewer than 3000 subs. Your stuff is amazing.

the absolute whiplash i felt when i heard a character swear in spice, it looks like something that would air on a saturday in the 90s before something actually good comes on

I think another good show to note that had fantastic story telling with a minimal animation budget was Fullmetal Alchemist (Brotherhood).

Ah yes. My favorite arcane character: dundermiflinn. XD

I can't believe you mentioned Arcane and that show in the same sentence. It's like two completely different worlds lol

great analysis

11:45 Another example is the Academy City from the fictional country of Magnosdadt from the anime Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic. It too is also a circular city, what makes it unique is its history and composition. It is a city where magicians are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder due to the founder who is a magician, having experienced discrimination in his past sought to make a city safe for his kind, because of this, the city uses magic extensively for most things such as transportation, food production, water distribution and even military defense.

Thanks for the video! Sadly I did watch one episode of HGS and that was all that could stomach where as Arcane looked and sounded more worth my time. If I wasn’t interested about it from hearing of its glowing reviews then your video really got me interested in checking out, if and when I get the chance.

Haha, finally someone took those two shows in comparison. My thread was flooded with acclaims for Arcane alongside thrashings of HGS for quite some time now.

To be fair Arcane had a major head start in world building, characters, lore, etc. They went in knowing what direction they wanted to go in. HGS has no direction, it was basically a cartoon for 5 year old kids.

Drives me INSANE how people praise Slime Boy's "performance" because he "sOuNDs sO NaTuRaL".

Ok, I haven't watched hgs (you know why), but I honestly want this to still somehow succeed. It kinda reminds me of first part of jojo, which is sometimes really hard to watch. However it is a very good setup for later parts, where the characters from Joestar bloodline are often criminals and stuff, but they still have the same heroism as Jonathan in part 1. Unfortunately in hgs there's pretty much no setup for later seasons

Me : yeah, not a bad vidéo Vogjam : **référence kill la kill** Me : I will now proceed to instantly smash the like button.

I subbed and liked as soon as you said the two headed fish metaphor. Really vivid

the jinx & ecko fight gives me chills even in this video w/you talking over it, it's so good

Thank you for saying it. Writing and visuals can not be separated in a visual medium, be it animation or live action. Because the visuals ARE the story. If it’s only strong point is writing, make it prose! Let the readers imagination fill in the visuals.

Lmao. I wouldn't be making that face in 3:37. Especially when I'm being chased by a 15, or 20 ft tall ice golem. This is ridiculous. Draven Draven is crying of laughter.

Really cool analysis! I'm gonna show it to a friend that's writting a couple stories in a fantasy/mythological and hope he can use the most of the advices ^^

I really needed this video. Thank you ;)

Neat video. Good stuff

This video is funny to me because HGS is actually the reason how I found Arcane in the first place--from a meme clip of HGS on youtube. But miraculously, I got an ad at the middle of it and at first I thought it was just some new Valorant promo ad, until i saw the netflix logo at the corner, and then then title tag. I never had visual whiplash until that very day

This is sooooooo helpful to authors of any kind oh my god 😩💖 I’ve learned so much

yesss 😭 as a fellow fantasy fan you summed up how i felt about shows exactly

Bro comparing arcane to high guardian spice is like comparing saving private Ryan to any toddlers show it just shouldn’t be done. And the fact that arcane is based on League of Legends and you don’t even need to play or like the game to enjoy the show is amazing.

I swear, I love every character in arcane and I never even knew how much I'd love Grayson.

Never heard of you before, but now I'm subscribed, and gonna check what else you've got going on. I'm an artist/writer and I want to create my own indie comic/manga cut style of story one day, and some of the details you've touched on here actually had me pull out a notebook and start writing... about 15 pages. It even had me come up with some storytelling and plot ideas on the fly that I'll have to refine. So yeah, good stuff!

Yes keep making stuff like this! This stuff is amazing, as are you!

My favourite fact about High guardian spice is that the name of the show THINKS the main characters are named after spices, when in reality they're named after herbs, which is not the same thing like .. at all

finally someone makes a comparison between the two shows

"High Guardian Spice" as a title makes me think of someone being super high af on spice from *Dune*

How does this video not have a lot of views. This explains what makes storytelling work while entertaining an audience. Props to you man for making this gem ;)

Your analysis on Rose and her goals reminds me of a Gon from Hunter x Hunter. In it, he wants to become a Hunter because his father was one and he also wants to find his father.