Upsetting Day: Holy Spirit Miracle Academy

Today it's hard to remember that there was a time when the right wing was vocally opposed to all things Harry Potter. Back in the 2000s, the biggest crime a piece of media could commit for the religious right was not being "woke," but undermining Christian values by encouraging children to cast magic spells, capture and battle pocket monsters, or use martial arts powers to blow holes in planets after six episodes of charging up their ki. In ways, it was a more simple, comprehensible time. In others, it was an even more intensely stupid one than our current moment.

But whatever you want to say about the quality of its writing (bad) and the views of its creator (cartoonishly evil), Harry Potter was a massive cultural phenomenon. Christians attempted to provide alternatives for their children, some of which — like Shadowmancer — became bestsellers even though you've never heard of them because Christians will notoriously buy anything that panders to their worldview. But fast forward twenty years and things look somewhat different.

Conservative Christians have been rehabilitating Harry Potter ever since Rowling's heel turn, because while they might not like magic, most of them know it isn't real. You know what they don't like that is real? Transgender people. So today, the Christian Harry Potter is… Harry Potter. But that hasn't stopped enterprising grifters from trying to brew up some magic of their own.

Meet Richard Lee Armstrong, whose LinkedIn page suggests nothing more than a simple man who Fills Commercial Buildings Commercial Real Estate Office ,Retail, Warehouse Highlight Realty Network.

Scroll down, however, and you'll see there's more to Richard than Professional Office Spaces.

Huh, one repost each on those. I know LinkedIn suppresses external links because the internet has been fundamentally broken by corporations, but one repost? Off 1,303 followers? I fear our Richard may have been suckered into purchasing followers on the second most brain-damaged social media platform on the internet.

I love how threateningly vague "Smart Solutions For America" is. It sounds like the name of a think tank whose policy proposals range from "kill all of the poor" to "kill 90% of the poor."

As for his language proficiencies, I'm not sure what "70 by ipad" means. Is Richard saying that because he can translate into 70 different languages on his iPad, he's proficient in all of them? If we're just counting everything the electronics we own can do as personal skills then I need to add "sandblasting clits with industrial grade vibration" and "running Soulcalibur" to my LinkedIn profile.

But we're not here to talk about Richard's day job, which is ostensibly some kind of real estate thing according to his company's website, much of which is given over to a detailed analysis of his genetic ancestry that claims that he is related to Susan Sarandon, Leo Tolstoy, and Sting.

We're here to talk about his art. His passion. Richard wrote a book called Holy Spirit Miracle Academy in 2022, but I just read an entire novella about meat superpowers, so I'm going to follow the time-honored tradition of book club procrastinators everywhere and just watch the movie.

Yes, the movie. It's two hours long, and I had to pay for the pleasure of watching it. I asked Richard for a review copy, but he wisely told me to fuck off. Not — I need to be clear — because he suspected what I was going to do with it, but because he seemed confused by the idea that anyone would actually want to engage with the film.

You won, Richard. You hear me, you son of a bitch? You won. You got what is undoubtedly your first $15 for your personal streaming service, APS Movie — which as far as I can tell, doesn't actually stand for anything. But hey, someone was Netflix's first subscriber too. I don't remember Netflix ever having an "About Us" page that features an enormous, AI generated, racebent image of its founder, though.

You already knew that's where this was going. Generative AI hit the grifter community like crack cocaine hit inner cities in the '80s. That doesn't explain why Richard made himself look Korean, but that was probably just a mistake. I bet he doesn't even know this is there. It's possible — nay, probable — that I'm the first human being to ever look at this website. But enough stalling. Like Longinus said during the Crucifixion, this guy ain't gonna skewer himself.

Holy Spirit Miracle Academy is about two mutant Dreamworks children who want to be Christian wizards when they grow up. Not that kind. The kind that wears pristine white robes and battles black demons and— hm.

Ok, starting over. Wendy and Richard — that's weird — want to be faith healers and exorcists when they're adults.

We're told this by a narrator who looks a lot like Richard Lee Armstrong dressed like a wizard sitting in a study, magic room, shoulder level lightbulb, realistic, half-Asian, fantasy, trending on ArtStation. He's in a completely different style from the rest of the film.

This is actually what roughly 50% of the movie looks like, this one shot of Richard's wizardsona stonily narrating the proceedings. The rest of the movie is split between about 25% head-on shots of single characters, 20% empty landscapes, and 5% group shots. Whatever AI generator Richard used doesn't seem to be reliably able to handle multiple characters in frame at once, because whenever there are more than a couple on screen their faces start to become nightmarish Benadryl visions.

It goes without saying that the characters and locations change appearance radically between shots, because this isn't a movie so much as a series of words and images assembled by an advanced autocorrect machine that cost billions of dollars and even now is poisoning our precious drinkable water. One thing that stays consistent, though, is Richard's bizarre Texan accent. It sounds absurd coming out of this off-model anime character.

Wendy and Richard know that they're special because they see signs everywhere they go. Things like birds, and also numbers on clocks. Apparently seeing that it's 11:11 is some kind of a sign from God? Now, I'm no expert, but that feels like numerology to me. It's TikTok girlie woo woo nu-spritualism. But I guess there's also nothing in the Bible about going to Christian Hogwarts and meeting angelic Timothee Chalamet.

I'm haunted by the idea that Richard (the man) typed "Timothee Chalamet angel blonde Timothee perfect robe magic Christian anime" into the prompt box. I'm even more haunted by the fact that he named the character "Arceus", which is the name of the Pokemon that is the canonical creator of the universe in the Pokemon games. You can catch him and make him fight normal birds and living ice cream cones for you. He has a move called "Judgment."

Arceus (the angel) tells the kids that they're at the Holy Spirit Miracle Academy for a year, but only minutes will pass in the real world, so we can add Narnia to the list of things Richard's ripping off here. Mostly, though, it's Harry Potter. Children from around the world go to a magic school to learn from a group of teachers with idiotic names like "Mr. Tossmall", "Mr. Story", and "Ms. Zoom", only instead of learning to make potions or whatever they're advancing their miracle skill trees.

A lot of the class segments are just the teachers droning on about how to tell when God's talking to you versus when you're just having normal human thoughts. Sometimes, they're standing in front of blackboards covered in nonsense chalk scrawlings that look like a vague mishmash of Korean and Chinese.

Again, I'm not a trained theologian, but isn't this at least a little heretical? First off, where does this school exist? In heaven? Limbo? A pocket dimension carved out of the aether by Arceus's Kwisatz Haderach angel powers? Second, why do these kids need to go to miracle boarding school if God already gave them Christ magic? I'm asking a lot of questions to which I already know the answer: fuck you.

Because this movie was generated when Richard plugged his book into a machine and told it to make him a film, Christian, popular, successful, Pixar, blockbuster, the narration often doesn't line up with what's going on. He's got a line after the kids get to the Miracle Academy about Wendy deciding not to put her hair in a ponytail for once, when she's been appearing with her hair down the whole time.

At one point, Wendy's disappointed Richard (the boy) couldn't come to miracle school. In the next scene, she's talking to him about all the miracles they're learning. The characters get up, have breakfast, and go back to bed. They talk about what they did at god academy last year when they've only been there for a couple of months.

But really, did you expect any different? We know what kind of shit generative AI spews out. It's going to look stupid and bad and ugly and the people who loathe art and worship death will use it anyway to own the libs and/or cynically attempt to make a quick buck. The result of religious grifter meeting undercooked plagiarism machine is a series of barely-connected images and words generated by the last flickering neurons of a baby drowning in a baptismal font.

Wendy and Richard meet a bunch of other kids with unusual names: Renilyn, Jonah, Crestelle, and Cheska. They all get their school-assigned holy water and little chariots that follow them around and carry their stuff (not pictured). They go to the place where they were staying, which would serve as the place where they were staying. Wendy meets a woman named Ms. Hanna and says "lovely to meet you, mom." It's hard to tell where Richard's (the author) incompetence ends and the computer's hideous, alien efforts to imitate the works of man begin.

I thought that this guy might have been a Snape stand-in. But the idea of a character betraying Christian ideals out of human weakness was beyond Richard/the machine's storytelling abilities, so the only antagonists are demons that possess people and are the source of most illness. The AI really cut loose here — these fuckers look like concept art for a Darksiders game that was sued out of existence for ripping off Spider-Man.

How do the children defeat the demons? Not through cunning, or logic, or creative problem solving, obviously. They do it by praying super hard. And at this point I realized something. This isn't even really Christian Harry Potter. It's Christian Dragon Ball Z.

The solution to everything is praying, and when that doesn't work, you just pray harder, or maybe fast for a few days. The core group of characters even goes into a "praise chamber" where they engage in the deepest possible worship to improve their Prayer Level. Wendy wonders whether she can withstand "such rigorous worship time." We've found our Yamcha, minus the baseball skills.

There's something about a plan by the Devil to release demons across the earth. There's a girl named Lupe who's sick because God gave her too many powers. The kids learn about God's wisdom, which can be used to: help you at job; help you not go bankrupt; help you against unjust lawsuits. Feels like we're getting a little peek into Richard's (Lee Armstong) life here.

And look: we could pick this shit apart all day. "Christian AI Harry Potter" is such a hack joke premise that it would make Dennis Miller blush harder than a God-fearing geezer at a Topeka hooker convention, Cha Cha. But, for the last time, isn't the concept in itself un-Christian? Didn't God bless man with a divine spark? Shouldn't delegating the creative act to a base, un-ensouled machine be considered some form of blasphemy? Or is all fair in love and proselytizing?

Maybe I'm just cranky because while I was poking around Richard Lee Armstrong's many websites, I realized that Holy Spirit Miracle Academy was uploaded to YouTube for free. But I discovered something else, too.

His website holyspirit.services is transparently the low-effort work of a maniac and/con man. If we head over to the "Giving" page, we first see a lot of contextless pictures of smiling Filipino children holding out money. Did Richard give it to them? He'd certainly like us to assume that. And hey, it's possible.

That's not the weird part, though. I mean, it is kind of weird, but if we scroll down a little further, there's a bunch of texts from Asian women thanking "boss" for their air conditioners.

Unsettling, but possibly Richard is just purchasing cooling systems for his actual employees and it's all totally above board. Let's just take a look at one more of his sites, his real (fake) estate company, "Office Leasing Inc."

See? Those were just his employees! I mean, they look a little… artificial, but—

My God. Cheska, Jonah, Crestelle — those are the characters from Holy Spirit Miracle Academy! They're all here, and they're all AI-generated Asian women that Richard claims work for him at his real estate company based in West Palm Beach. What the fuck is going on? Does Richard, who according to the video "Richard Lee Armstong's Journey Through the Time" has a background that's almost entirely European, have some kind of fixation on Asian cultures or peoples?

Wait. The faux Korean on the blackboard. The image of him on his streaming site. His other movie, The Disciple, that's allegedly about his life story, in which he looks like this:

His upcoming movie, Seed of Favor, which could be a movie about five young AI-generated women juggling work, love, and religion were it not for the massive, mixed-race version of Richard's head looming over them.

We've got a bona fide Christian weeaboo on our hands. Like a boomer Oli London, Richard has made right what God got wrong by transitioning through the power of AI into what he has known himself to be all his life: a sort of rugged, vaguely handsome Asian man. I think that's beautiful.

We could leave it there, but just one more thing. On that same Giving page on the Holy Spirit website, there's a slideshow of pictures of smiling people and Richard shaking hands while upbeat royalty-free music plays. But there's also what appears to be a photo of a screen displaying a Zoom call. Computer, enhance.

Cheska. Jonah. Crestelle. They're real people. Real people whose names Richard used in his children's book/movie and also assigned to AI-generated images of staff on his real estate website. Like the Mystery of the Trinity, this raises endless questions. If these women actually work for him, why use AI photos of them? Is naming his characters and AI-generated coworkers after them an act of homage to his disciples or an attempt to digitally recreate them for some mysterious, possibly salacious purpose? Just who is Richard Lee Armstrong, really?

The answers to all of these questions, and more, will no doubt be revealed in Richard's upcoming sequel to a timeless work of human literature.

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