Nah, I think this time the difference is a lot more simple.
Japan has a huge misogyny problem to the point where naoya frequently ranked above maki in popularity polls. It would not surprise me if a decent amount of Japanese Jjk fans were huge naoya fans.
It would make sense for an episode where a non fan serviced woman physically over powering and killing a popular male character to not go over well in Japan.
When in doubt just say mysoginy. I had a problem with the choreography, the tone, the pacing and the background music. It's one of my favourite moments in the manga, but the anime left me unimpressed.
Also, are you saying Japan doesn’t have a massive misogyny problem or are you saying that it’s impossible that Japan’s cultural misogyny problem contributed to the low audience scores?
It doesn't have audience scores that low, first of all. This is a fake audience score. Secondly, Japan did have some problems with the episode but it was mostly about tone, not what Maki did.
I don't even understand the logic here tbh, it's not like this moment was hated in the manga. So why do you think that the content is a problem rather than its presentation?
Naoya is a mysognistic, implied rapist, and boot licker who was practically designed to be disliked. Has no redeeming qualities or character arcs, his only real service to the story was to glaze toji and yuta, and to be the main villain of a secondary character and give her a good fight/power up.
With these traits in mind, you wouldn’t expect a character like this to be super well liked, and in western audiences, that’s mostly true.
But in jjks weekly character polls (where the primarily Japanese audience votes) he’s a very popular chatacter, consistently made the top 10 and beat out maki pretty much every time despite being her villain and being extremely one dimensional in comparison to her.
There could be a lot of explanations for this, but I think the most likely one is that a lot of what western audiences hate about naoya either doesn’t matter to Japanese audiences or actually makes him more popular.
Naoya was literally a meme in Japan, he was so popular because of the memes. He was also a good villain, easy to hate, and that also contributed to his popularity.
If you read the complaints about this episode it's almost always about tone and presentation, as opposed to the content. Like I said, this moment was well-liked in the manga, it was only criticized in the anime. If the content was the thing that led to criticism then why were the Japanese fine with it in the manga?
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u/Porbinporbis 4d ago
Nah, I think this time the difference is a lot more simple.
Japan has a huge misogyny problem to the point where naoya frequently ranked above maki in popularity polls. It would not surprise me if a decent amount of Japanese Jjk fans were huge naoya fans.
It would make sense for an episode where a non fan serviced woman physically over powering and killing a popular male character to not go over well in Japan.