This is the opposite of Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A character or entertainer who is fairly popular in one region becomes The Scrappy in another market.
The most common reason for this is usually Values Dissonance, as things that seem normal or relatable in one culture can be seen as offensive, baffling, or just plain stupid in another. Another reason for it can be that a character is supposed to represent the nation that hates them, and this character is seen as offensively stereotypical. In the worst cases, the hatedom of a single character can result in No Export for You for an entire series (something some people are probably going to be grateful for).
This trope is sometimes referred to as "Americans Hate Soccer (Football)", due to the infamous VocalHatedom in the US against the said sport, and more preference towards American Football. (The subsequent Opinion Myopia and Flame War between the sport's fans and haters has also been notable).
See also The Scrappy. Please do not use this page as a place for Complaining about People Not Liking the Show. Also, it's not enough to simply say something is hated. You have to say why it's hated.
See Also: Cross Cultural Kerfluffle.
Compare with Pop Culture Isolation. Contrast with its polar opposite, Germans Love David Hasselhoff. Also contrast with Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales.
Tingle's role in the main series has been largely reduced; He doesn't appear in Twilight Princess (Purlo's appearance was based on him, but they have vastly different personalities) and gets only non-speaking cameos in Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, and Skyward Sword (on a wanted poster, a statue/portrait, and a doll respectively).
He is at his weirdest in The Wind Waker, wherein he refers to Link, a twelve-year-old child, as "Mr. Fairy", and forces his brothers—and one random guy—to dress exactly like him and perform slave labor. He also forces the player to pay him ridiculous sums of money in exchange for information on where to find eight MacGuffins. With all of his annoying traits, it's no wonder that fans joke about him being a sex offender when they're breaking him out of prison for the crime of petty theft as part of the plot of the game.
And not just a sex offender. People have taken the skulls in the room where he hid the Pictograph, through the small tunnel at the back of his prison cell to mean that he's not only a sex offender, but also a kidnapper and serial killer. Yeah, Americans hate him that much.
Joking aside, the main reason why Tingle is hated so much is that he is basically a Man Child, a character archetype that western audiences have little sympathy for. He was tolerable in Majora's Mask because he managed to fit in the general tone of that game, and even then, after you are done with his services, you don't need to interact with him any longer. In Wind Waker though, his presence is made far more obvious, he is far more obnoxious (he was never this rupee-grubbing before now) and you literally cannot complete the game without him, as explained above. There is also the general perception that the Zelda series is meant to be the most "mature" of Nintendo's franchises, thus, elements that seem to go against it is met with derision. This is also why Wind Waker and other games that use the same style is seen as "kiddy-grade" and why the The Legend Of Zelda CD-i Games is so throughly mocked.
The hate of Tingle has also carried over into the Super Smash Bros games:
Tingle has a cameo in Melee, in which it is quite possible to drop him into the ocean. It is not uncommon for players to declare a brief truce for this purpose.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the most respected and influential anime franchises in its homeland. Overseas however, though still respected for its willingness to push boundaries, the show itself is a very strong case of Love It or Hate It thanks to its Gainax Ending and Mind Screw nature. Shinji Ikari is a far more polarizing character in the West than he is in Japan.
Gintama has been in serialization in Japan for almost a decade earning positive sales and receiving one movie and three TV series. In North America only the first 22 volumes were released and the series was cancelled. The anime only had its first 52 episodes released undubbed in DVD and only the first movie dubbed.
Momo Hinamori manages to rank very high in Japanese popularity polls, but she's disliked in America. This may be because Japanese readers like her very feminine, gentle nature and blind loyalty, while in America, those traits are seen as weak and sexist. Outside both Japan and America she's liked well enough, being neither as popular as she is in Japan nor as disliked as she is in America.
Toshiro Hitsugaya is the most popular Bleach character in Japan... but not so much in America, mainly because of his bad habit of jobbing in fights as well as having an even more dispassionate nature than Ichigo. The rest of the world seems to like him just fine though.
The intense ship-related hate toward Masaya of Tokyo Mew Mew for which western fans are infamous doesn't seem to exist at all among Japanese girls; Nakayoshi, in fact, ran a character poll, and he ranked far above Ryou and Kish.
Sasuke Uchiha is much more divisive in America than in Japan, and was hated by large segments of the American fanbase long before his Face Heel Turn. This is because he's seen as a one-note 'brooding' character.
Itachi Uchiha falls into the same boat due to his base breaking nature. Even though he's in the top five in Japan, a lot of the Western fandom regards him as a God Mode Sue, and Creator's Pet who´s also a walking shitton of Deus ex Machina and Ass Pull, while in Japan he's viewed as The Ace.
Sakura Haruno, along with Sasuke, is one of the most hated characters in Western Naruto fandom, particularly due to her Tsundere-ish personality and the subsequent violence she dishes out to Naruto in the anime, as well as pairing reasons. The subject of whether she has been able to improve herself from her uselessness in the early story is fairly controversial. In Japan, however, she regularly features in the top 12 characters in series popularity polls.
This could also apply to Naruto himself as well, while he is the most popular Naruto character in Japan, he is something of a Base Breaker in America.
Both Naruto and Sakura often get hate from Sasuke's hatedom, as both of them are continuing to try to redeem Sasuke, with Sakura passing up an opportunity to kill him because she couldn't bring herself to do it and having to get rescued by Naruto moments later.
Shizuru Fujino of Mai-HiME seems to be verypopular (albeit with a vocalgroup of haters) in most fandom circles, except in Italy. While they were largely supportive of her feelings for Natsuki, the instant she Kicked the Dog by attacking Yukino and killing off Haruka, Yukino's Most Important Person, her popularity crashed and burned.
There is also the shrine maiden Sylphiel, a demure mage with a crush on the handsome Gourry and very much The Medic to the point that she is completely incompetent in combat. Because of the Real Women Never Wear Dresses attitude in the West, she is hated there, and her anime-exclusive replacement, the headstrong yet haughty Filia, is preferred. In Japan, both females are well-liked, but Sylphiel receives more face time because of the popularity of the original novels.
As a Real Robot multiverse with the series-wide motif of War Is Hell (which, inevitably, brings complaints of Anvilicious treatment), a myriad of Gundam series often result in this happening.
Kira Yamato and Lacus Clyne from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and its successor Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny continues to rank high in the top 10 character polls in Japan (including Newtype) long after Destiny ended and Kira himself beat Char and Amuro for the number one spot in the Gundam 30th Anniversary favorite character poll, but they have a rather large hatedom among the western Gundam fandom. This largely comes from the belief that the pair used their Omniscient Morality License to shove their beliefs down the rest of the Cosmic Era world's throats at gunpoint, all based off evidence which Lacus herself admitted might have been faulty.
In fact, Destiny gets this treatment in the west. Not a specific character, but the whole series. The most basic complaint is that Kira Yamato (and many other characters from the previous show) went from simply cameoing in the series to outright assuming the position of the main characters, and with this also became the "right side" in the conflict (without giving a convincing reason why the new cast was wrong). For a good example, Destiny has a hugehatedom in North America; many consider the series to be the worst Gundam series ever conceived, but in its native Japan, it was the most popular anime for 2 years. Two years after the show ended production, it was still extremely popular. Only after the slightly more popular (in North America at least)Code Geass aired. Even then, this trope still applies, especially in R2.
As hated as Destiny is, it's actually just one in a dozen as Gundam in itself has always been a Western Base Breaker. For example, during the 90s, Gundam Wing was widely hated in the West because, outside its plot/story/characterization being looked upon then the same way Destiny's is looked upon now, it was the first Gundam series to be broadcast on American cable (specifically on Toonami); as such, Wing was many a young otaku's first Gundam series, something that Elitist/Old Timer UC fans did not appreciatenote To the point that they labeled any newcomers or Wing followers as "Wingers" and treated them as either Not True Gundam Fans, peasantry to their ancien noblesse or both. Division only increased with each Gundam series that came over the Pacific, continuing to this day with AGE and will likely continue with The Origin and whatever series follows that.
On a related note we have Flay Alster, Kira's first girlfriend. Because of her early actions (namely, blaming Kira for her father's death and then manipulating his feelings for her to try and get him killed), a lot of Western fans despise her to the point where her My God, What Have I Done? moment and her attempts to redeem herself fall on deaf ears. The Japanese fans, however, were more willing to forgive. What makes this really ironic is the director's statement in a post-series interview that Flay was intended to be the kind of character who would appeal to Western audiences. Apparently, something went horribly wrong and reversed.
The voice given to her in the English version might have also had something to do with it. As someone once said of it when comparing voices: "It left you wanting to punch her, as opposed to wrapping her in a blanket and shipping her off to a mental hospital."
Rebellious Princess Relena Darlian/Peacecraft of Mobile Suit Gundam Wing has a split fanbase in America, while in Japan, she often appears in Gundam Ace's "Top 30 Females" list, and is the only Gundam Wing character to ever appear on said list. Back in the day the hatred was truly stunning; originally many viewers had an absolute refusal to recognize any of her character development, but over time this attitude has mellowed and quite a few people will admit to being fans. Nowadays, it's pretty much mostly fangirls in full Die ForOur Ship mode who still carry that torch.
In the original Mobile Suit Gundam, it can be argued that the character of Gihren Zabi is far less tolerated in the west than by Japan for obvious reasons. However in Japan, while he is not as popular as the massively-popular Char he is the poster boy for the Zabi Family and is significantly popular enough to have his own game series named after him. His Sieg Zeon speech is also considered a major moment in Gundam history and has been repeated in various conventions. This is possibly due to lax laws on the depiction of Nazi aesthetics in Japan along with possible influence of Japan's infamous record of war crimes denial about it's actions in WWII. Intrestingly enough, this was a far cry from how Tomino wanted to depict the character
Death Note: While Japanese fans are more or less accepting of Misa Amane, she's loathed in the west, with her English voice actress's performance being perceived as irritating by most fans, and her character seen as shallow, annoying, and stupid. The large number of fans who prefer otherships also have something to do with it.
North American fans of Sailor MoonhatedRini/Chibi-Usa, who is popular in Japan, at least partly because of her original portrayal in the dubbed version of the show (which most North American fans are familiar with) that made her far whinier and brattier than she was in the Japanese script. Her original voice actress was particularly horribly miscast, only exemplifying her annoying nature by her ear-grating voice. Notably, her acceptance by North American fans seemed to increase when the original actress was replaced with a better one, Stephanie Beard, after the show switched from DiC to Cloverway. In contrast, Chibi-Usa is very hated in Latin America as well, despite having an excellent VA with a very cute and nice voice, mostly because the Latin dub used the script and personality from the USA dub, and because her early brattiness can't fly so easily on the local expectation of little girl conduct. Oh well.
On the other hand, shoujo manga sells very well in America; Fruits Basket occasionally outsold Naruto back in the mid-2000's, and the long-awaited rerelease of the Sailor Moon comic was, as of Spring 2012, the best-selling manga in North America.
This extends to even ships involving Japan: England/Japan is easily the first or second most popular ship in Japanese fandom. In western fandom... not so much. Some Western fans even seem to dislike the England/Japan ship mainly because of its massive popularity in Japan. Even Greece/Japan, the most popular ship for Japan in western fandom, seems at times to be favored not so much because more Western fans like it than Japanese fans do, but because all other ships for Japan are simply less popular in western fandom than in Japanese fandom, and it just had the good fortune to not conflict with Western fans' most common OTPs (i.e. America/England, France/England, Russia/America, Russia/China...). Netherlands/Japan and Turkey/Japan, in particular, have decent followings in J-fen but Western shippers for them are virtually an endangered species. Japan/Taiwan goes a similar way, since J-Fen has it as the most popular het ship for Japan and THE Taiwan ship, but it brings quite the "controversy" in W-Fen circles since it's used to bash Taiwan and mistakenly accuse her of being a Relationship Sue for Japan.
Ironically, when the successor series, Best Wishes, introduced Piplup's Expy Oshawott, Western fans weren't nearly as spiteful. Besides the fact that he doesn't become as much of a Creator's Pet despite having a similar personality to Piplup, a lot of fans feel that Oshawott's generally less annoying, has at least marginally better Character Development, he doesn't need to show off in Contest battling, and his cuteness isn't quite as force-fed to the audience as Piplup's was. This is kind of funny considering Oshawott the species was originally seen as The Scrappy in the early days.
A similarly sized contingent loathe Pikachu just as much, calling him "Godchu" and "Deus Ex Pikachu" and decrying his alleged plot-warping powers.
May's Skitty and Squirtle. The former for constantly winning battles by spamming Assist, which anybody who plays the game knows is a ludicrously bad tactic. The latter for being overpowered despite being a freshly-hatched baby and having moves that Squirtles aren't supposed to have.
Similar to the Sailor Moon example above, Lynn Minmay of Robotech fame is loathed primarily for her atrocious dub performance, especially her songs. Her Super Dimension Fortress Macross counterpart, Minmei, is somewhat of a cultural icon in Japan, and Mari Iijima (her voice actress) is a beloved personality and decently-respected singer.
Americans' traditional hatred of Minmay went weird when ADV commissioned an English dub of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series, and Mari Iijima herself reprised her iconic role for it (one of the only times in anime history that that's happened). A few people still complained, mostly that Iijima's accent stood out among the very American cast (though ADV did make an effort to ensure at least Minmay's parents spoke with an accent too).
This can generally apply to the Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo series in general. For those who do like the series in the West, there's Beauty, the heroine, who is well-liked in Japan, but mostly hated in the West for being the resident Damsel Scrappy throughout. For the sequel manga, Shinsetsu Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, there's Namero Yononaka, who eventually becomes the new emperor for The Empire of the series; he's the most popular of the three new protagonists of the manga (making 9th place in the last Japan popularity contest; the other two came in 11th and 20th respectively) but his nihilism, narcissism, and lack of humor make him despised among the sequel's small western fanbase.
Yubel from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was so despised by American audiences, that the 4th season where she merged with Jaden was dropped in favor of 5Ds. Keep in mind that Japan has a much higher tolerance for androgynous characters than America does, where they're seen as overly feminine and often gay stereotypes.
Walmart, despite being the most successful chain of stores in the world, has some locations where it does very poorly.
In Brazil, local suppliers didn't like the way Walmart did business (basically amounting to Walmart telling the suppliers "You let us dictate the price of product X, or we won't carry product Y; also, let us look at your books so we can figure out which product you make the most off of so we can blackmail you more effectively, and if you don't like it we won't carry any of your products"), and basically told them to fuck off, leaving Walmart with limited, overpriced, and/or crappy stock. It has become better in later years, to the point it's the third largest supermarket chain - though their related gas stations only took off after changing from self-service to the locally-preferred gas jockeys.
In Japan, where high quality is the usual marketing strategy, the Walmart mantra of "Low Prices" is viewed with suspicion that they're buying poor goods, rather than as a godsend to the pocketbook; as a consequence, its subsidiary in Japan suffers from a general lack of profits and is dependent upon support from corporate HQ in Bentonville.
Walmart has had to make many changes to be accepted in the Canadian market. The first change was to lose most of the greeters and the floor staff—Canadians generally see abundant floor staff as proof that the management distrusts its customers and is snooping around looking for shopliftersnote Canadians are pretty much correct in their assumption here. Another change was to sell popular Canadian brands and not whatever their American suppliers could provide; the federal government got into that mess when a popular clothing manufacturer was banned from Walmart because it had a plant in Cuba (unlike the US, Canada has no trade sanctions against Cuba). More recently, Walmart's attempt to introduce the Supercentre into Canada failed miserably due to Walmart's refusal to take local differences into consideration. It turns out that Canadians are far pickier about the quality of their food than many Americans are, caring more about quality than price and expecting a much wider variety of products than Americans do. They looked at the low-quality, white-bread selection at Supercentre and went elsewhere.
There were some things Walmart wouldn't budge on, though. Jonquičre, Quebec briefly made headlines when the efforts of local Walmart workers to unionize actually prompted the store to pack up and leave, which is actually standard practice for Walmart. It is company policy to liquidate supplies and close the store when there is a tangible risk of unionizing (when a group of Walmart-employed meat-cutters in Texas voted to unionize, Walmart responded by firing every meat-cutter in the country). Walmart even shut down all its Sam's Club warehouses across Canada in 2009, though this was largely due to economic conditions and the fact that Costco (which, coincidentally, is unionized) has already long been established across Canada.
Walmart also spectacularly failed to gain a foothold in Germany, for a number of reasons. Much like Canadians, German customers are not used to employees packing their shopping bags or greeting them at the entrance, and felt harassed by them; not helping is the fact that Germans find constant enthusiasm and small talk to be forced and dishonest. Huge stores for convenience goods are generally unpopular compared to the more compact and easily navigable discount stores that are ubiquitous in just about any place ever, while electronic goods, clothes, tools, and so on are usually bought in specialized tech stores, boutiques, hardware stores, etc. instead. Also, local chains like Aldi and Lidl already hold the low-price market segment tight in their hands, so Walmart actually had to go up against tough rivals competing with them eye-to-eye.
Lastly, and most critically, as a place with traditionally strong organized labour and the oldest welfare state in existence, Germans detested Walmart's business practices regarding their employees. Among other things, Walmart's "Statement of Ethics" that prohibited relationships between employees was ruled by a German court to be not merely illegal but in fact in violation of constitutionally guaranteed basic rights. Needless to say, this did not make for entirely good PR as far as Walmart was concerned.
And the UK... well, that's complicated. The UK has Asda, which are owned by Walmart as a subsidiary. However, the only real mention of Walmart is on the front of the store, as the store is just a typical big modern UK supermarket. Generally, Asda tends to have better employee relations than the US parent, but still drives the "low price" angle, and employees also have to wear horrid lime green uniforms. A couple of the old Asda hypermarkets have been rebranded as Walmart Centres or something similar, but still the name Walmart is relatively obscure in British towns.
In its home country, Walmart has failed to get a foothold in very urban and very rural areas because their store size is a poor fit. Local grocery stores and small store chains like Family Dollar and Dollar General still dominate there, despite the company's Neighborhood Market and Express concept stores.
Walmart is also notably weak in Michigan, where the native Meijer hypermarkets are more common, and especially around Meijer's home base of Grand Rapids.note Total count as of 2013: 13 Meijers in the Grand Rapids area to only three Walmarts, of which only one is a Supercenter Meijer has a reputation for keeping prices low (often by the same ruthless methods), but not the reputation for rapaciousness (deservedly or not) or shoddy products (the produce/grocery section in particular is well-regarded—it helps that Meijer started as a grocery chain—and the home-goods sections more closely resemble those at the better-regarded Target). Some have suggested that Walmart might never have become the dominant force in American retail if Meijer had expanded outside the Midwest region and thus given them a legitimate competitor to deal with.
Meijer is also unionized, which helps it do better in Michigan, which is a state that up until recently has been a haven for unions.
New York City has fought tooth and nail to keep Walmart out, to the point where one of their former CEOs, Lee Scott, said that he didn't think it was worth the effort to expand into the city (and looking at the various countries on this list, that's saying something). To this day, there are no Walmarts within the Five Boroughs; every attempt has been successfully rebuffed. Much of this is due to concerns from both unions over the company's business/labor practices, and from the city's many small businesses over fear that Walmart would stamp them out.
Ditto Vermont, for many of the same reasons as New York City plus the state's strong environmental activism. They were only able to get their first stores in the state after promising to build them in vacated buildings in downtown regions and malls, rather than building new suburban boxes. Unsurprisingly, Vermont was the last state in the union to get a Walmart, not doing so until 1995.
Inverted, in a very odd way, in Mexico, where Walmart is doing well for very different reasons than in the US. While Walmart is associated with a cheaply-priced and cheaply-made selection in many countries, including America, in Mexico Walmart has a reputation for quality. The reason is because Mexicans hate buying in smaller supermarkets (like the ones owned by the government, which tend to be smaller and with fewer products to sell), and a bigger store is a sign of having more products and better service than a smaller one. It does help that Walmart's Mexican branch (and franchise) is owned by a Mexican supermarket chain, rather than by their American branch, but this could change due of the recent corruption scandal involving Walmart with Mexican authorities.
You may have noticed that France has not been mentioned here yet. That's because the French have gone out of their way to keep Walmart out completely, perhaps taking this trope to its extreme. On the other hand, France is home of Carrefour, which has a similar enough business model to be able to fend off Walmart even without prejudice against it.
Same goes for the Netherlands. The store concept is NOT popular at all (Some larger brand Supermarkets have non-food sections, but only the largest stores.) the only thing similar to Walmart are Makro or Sligro which have similar layouts and quantities but are more meant for businesses and hospitality.
When Walmart first made moves to buy the Massmart Group (which owns the Pick n Pay franchise, among others) in South Africa, there were widespread protests among Massmart employees, who perceived Walmart as a bad employer. Most consumers either did not care, or were annoyed at an American takeover for reasons unrelated to Walmart itself.
Starbucks opened with huge fanfare in Australia and soon had branches everywhere. But, within a few years, the franchise flopped spectacularly and most of the stores shut down; leaving only a handful in the capital cities. Business commentators suggest that this was due to Australia having had a 'coffee culture' since the post World War II immigration boom from Europe. Even small towns had a place where you could get a cappucino, so Australians simply weren't impressed by the variety of coffee that Starbucks offered.
Barbados was not loving McDonald's when the franchise set up there in the late '80s, to the extent that the Golden Arches pulled out after a couple of years. (Unlike KFC, which thrives there to this day.)
Burger King was a major flop in Japan (you probably have a better chance finding them in US Army and Air Force bases), and probably other countries as well, which might explain how most non-Americans' perceptions of the Burger is the kind you get at McDonald's.
Taco Bell was a major flop in Peru.
In Mexico all Taco Bell's attempts to establish have failed miserably, for obvious reasons: For Mexicans, Taco Bell means little more than a joke attempt of the U.S. at Mexican cuisine; In one of their latest attempts, they modified their menu with the same style of tacos you would find in a Mexican taco parlor, but because of the name, prices and franchise's costs, they could not compete with the taco parlors that were already established in virtually every corner of the country.
Coca-Cola is largely successful in Sweden. However, they lose a significant market share around Christmas and Easter, to a domestic soft drink called must, branded as julmust for Christmas or pĺskmust for Easter. Since its introduction to Sweden, Coca-Cola been desperately trying to brand itself as "the Christmas drink" with huge marketing campaigns every year. (It didn't work.)
Coca-Cola has also had trouble catching on in Scotland, where Irn-Bru (aka "Scotland's other national drink") is usually the best selling soft drink all year round.
Similarly, Pepsi outsells Coca-Cola in Quebec (largely due to its association with Quebec celebrities) and in the Central Appalachian Mountains.
Years ago, Pizza Hut had a major opening blitz on Long Island. It failed spectacularly after a few years and now there aren't many Pizza Huts left up there. New Yorkers are famously picky about pizza, and Pizza Hut had trouble competing with the area's many independent pizzerias.
IKEA had a harder time settling in the US than in any other country.
Text messaging was slower to catch on in the U.S. despite widespread popularity in Japan (thanks to a taboo on talking on phones in public) and Europe, due in no small part to wireless carriers charging an arm and a leg for texting services. A generation of teenagers did make it popular, though probably not with the parents who were paying the phone bills.
The wildly popular Krispy Kreme doughnut chain made a massive expansion into the New England area, at one point being almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks in eastern Massachusetts. A few years later, they were all but gone. Apparently, New Englanders refused to convert from their long-loved Dunkin' Donuts. Same in Canada, except with long-established Tim Hortons instead of Dunkin' Donuts being more popular than Krispy Kreme. (Dunkin' Donuts is still around in Canada, but generally only with a few locations in Quebec.)
An extremely localized variant: Wherever there exists Shipley's Do-Nuts and/or HEB Supermarkets in the state of Texas, there stands a decent chance that Krispy Kreme isn't going to do well, except in instances where so much commerce exists that it can also sustain a Krispy Kreme. Shipley's has been a regionalized sensation for much longer than Krispy Kreme has existed in the state of Texas, and HEB has often been a place where people will go to pick up doughnuts. At least Krispy Kreme is doing better in the city of San Antonio than its national competitor; the only Dunkin' Donuts in the city is located inside the airport.
Tim Hortons itself also tried and failed to compete with Dunkin' Donuts on its home turf. They had been limited to Buffalo, New York (co-founder Tim Horton's last stop in his NHL career) until their mid-1990s expansion, aided by their partnership with Wendy's at the time (and the closure of nearly every Hardee's in metro Detroit, giving them plenty of buildings to move into). Like Krispy Kreme, they tried to expand into New England, but Dunkin' Donuts dominated the market, forcing Tim Hortons to pull out of the region (save for Maine, and one store in northern Vermont) late in 2010. It also didn't help that said expansion was largely achieved by buying out the also-popular Bess Eaton chain.
They have, however, had more success in the aforementioned Michigan, along with Wendy's-era expansion through Ohio. Since being sold off by Wendy's, they've expanded into Kentucky, and the rest of the East Coast, to the point where they now have locations in New York City and as far south as Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. In fact, they've completely dominated over Dunkin' Donuts in most of Michigan, to the point that there are very few Dunkin' Donuts in metro Detroit, only one in Lansing, and none in the Tri-Cities, Grand Rapids, or Flint.
Cadbury/Schweppes tried to introduce Dr Pepper to Australia in the 1990s, and withdrew it after less than a decade because most Aussies hated the taste of it. A few specialty retailers continue to carry it for that small number of Australians (and the occasional American expat) who like it, but they have to get it by importing it from the States, so it's fairly expensive (around AU$22 for a 12-pack).
Seafood chain restaurants Red Lobster, Long John Silver's, and Arthur Treacher's all had difficulty expanding into New England, where fresh quality seafood is so easy to acquire that its almost ubiquitous. A few years after each expanded into the region, they all immediately retracted after leaving local customers less than impressed (Red Lobster has just four locations in all of New England all in Western Connecticut. Long John Silver's has three that are slightly more spread out in the region. Arthur Treacher's has not a single location).
Department store chain Belk can be found in nearly every shopping center in the Deep South, from small rural stores to massive anchor stores in urban megamalls. But they thin out considerably even as far north as Kentucky and Virginia, with none north of the Maryland panhandle. Most of their stores west of the Mississippi are similarly located only in smaller towns, except for a late-2000s entry into Dallas-Fort Worth capped off by the 2013 opening of a flagship at Galleria Dallas. Belk's slogan, "Modern. Southern. Style.", even suggests how synonymous they are with deep-Southern retail.
Belk is also curiously absent from three major parts of Florida: Tampa/St. Petersburg, Orlando, and Miami. The former two markets have only one eachnote although they used to have several more, and Miami has never had one. They were also late to Jacksonville, making their entry in 1998 by acquiring four Gayfers stores that Dillard's didn't want when they bought out that chain.note Three of the four were in malls already containing Dillard's, while the fourth — anchoring an outdoor shopping center which was at the time being converted from a traditional indoor mall — likely just came along for the ride. In fact, Dillard's itself was a latecomer to Jacksonville, arriving in 1990 with one newly-built store and two conversions from Ivey's.
To further prove Belk's regional nature — when they bought out the Parisian chain in 2006, the few northerly Parisian stores (one store each in Memphis, Dayton, and Indianapolis, and three in metro Detroit) were not sold to Belk.note A store in Chattanooga was also sold to Dillard's, but this was only because the mall already had two Belk stores. The Memphis one was sold to Macy's, while the latter five were re-branded to other nameplates owned by Parisian's then-parent, Saks. Dayton and Indianapolis respectively became Elder-Beerman and Carson's, but the Detroit stores held onto the Parisian name until Saks finally converted them to Carson's in 2013.
Parisian was apparently unpopular in South Carolina. In South Carolina, the Greenville store was the first to go, spending a few years as Proffitt's (which was also sold to Belk) before closing. One store each in Columbia and Charleston were sold to J.C. Penney in 2006, and the other Columbia store simply closed.note While the latter three were all in malls containing Belk, this was not a hindrance elsewhere, as department store mergers have made the concept of a department store having two locations in a mall much more frequent.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, both Parisian and Belk were unpopular. Parisian had three stores in the state: two in Baton Rouge (Mall of Louisiana and Cortana Mall) and one in Lafayette, all opened in 1998. Within a couple years, two of them were sold to Foley'snote one of many chains which is now part of Macy's, and the third to McRae's (which was owned by Proffitt's from 1994 to 2006). When Belk bought Proffitt's/McRae's in 2006, neither of the Baton Rouge McRae's stores was converted.
There's also Dillard's, which does extremely well in most of the South, but often struggles in the few markets it has outside that area (mainly the Mountain and Lower Midwest states, which were largely entered by acquiring other chains).
Before that, the now-defunct Mervyns chain of California (which went under in 2008) made a few easterly expansions in the 1980s and early 1990s that proved largely unsuccessful:
In 1986, they aggressively expanded in Atlanta. However, they bailed in 1997 due to the crowded market.
They entered Florida in 1986 with a single store in Lakeland, then expanded in the late 80s-early 90s by snapping up a handful of locations from Lord & Taylor, plus a few Jordan Marsh stores to boot. All of these closed in 1998, again due to a crowded market.
Minneapolis-St. Paul was the last expansion, made possible by the acquisition of several Carson Pirie Scottnote an Illinois chain that entered Minnesota through stores that were originally Powers Dry Goods, then Donaldson's locations in 1995. These were all closed in 2004.
Oddly, they managed to stay in Michigan until 2006, when the chain entered its death throes.
Burger King often struggles in Texas, to the point that towns as big as Temple (population 60,000-plus) are completely devoid of it. Some of this may be due to Texans' fierce loyalty to Whataburger.
And speaking of Whataburger, they tried Tampa—in Burger King's home turf of Florida (the chain is based in Miami)note BK's insistence that its disputes with franchisees be litigated in Florida made it to the Supreme Court—twice: in the 1970s and in the 2000s. Both attempts failed.
Jack in the Box often struggled in the eastern half of the U.S., with many markets (including Chicago, Detroit, and New York) bailing on the chain way back in the 1970s. However, they've continued to have a presence in a couple markets such as St. Louis and Nashville, and made successful entries into Indianapolis and Cincinnati in The New Tens.
For some reason, Chick-fil-A has had a near-total aversion to Michigan. None of the state's malls have ever had one, and the only one in the entire state is an "express" location on a college campus.
For that matter, Chick-fil-A is practically persona non grata among the LGBT community and straight allies, due to its CEO's opposition to gay marriage and the company's donations to anti-gay groups. At one point, the mayors of Boston and Chicago even publicly told Chick-fil-A not to bother trying to expand into their cities.
Although Kroger is the second largest grocery chain in the US, the Kroger name itself is only found in the Great Lakes regions and most of the South. A few of their sister chains fill in the ranks elsewhere (most notably Smith's in the Mountain states, and Fred Meyer supercenters in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska), but they are still absent from a great deal of the country in any form. Markets from which they've withdrawn include Milwaukee, St. Louis, Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga, Cleveland, New Orleans, and Charlotte. They also tried to operate in parts of Florida as Florida Choice and Welcome Markets, but those failed too.
Minnesota-based supermarket Cub Foods has withdrawn from every other market they tried to enter: Colorado, Nashville, Atlanta, Dayton, Columbus, and all but one store in Chicago. None of these markets was particularly long-lived, either, with most lasting a decade or so.
The Switzerland-based Nestlé is one of the most-boycotted companies in the entire world, largely thanks to its questionable marketing of baby formula in the developing world. The boycott is especially strong in the U.K., where many universities have banned the sale of Nestlé products from stores and vending machines.
Cars
Anyone driving a Hummer outside of the US is likely to be made fun of, and/or have people throw things at them due to their large size and poor gas milage. It also probably doesn't help that Hummers can be seen as a symbol of American military power, since they're almost indistinguishable from the Hummvee the US Army uses. Though they're a popular target for derision in the US as well,note In fact, there's at least a few American-based websites dedicated to Hummer hate (one is made entirely of user-submitted pictures of people flipping hummers off). they were actually selling when people had the money to buy cars (and of course before the Hummer brand went under in 2009). A few specific examples:
Oddly in Venezuela, if you drive a Hummer you probably are some sort of Marxist-socialist big fish (meaning a politician or a business man connected to the Chavez government). Of course, with gas costing less than the equivalent of 20 US cents in Venezula (lower even than what the Saudi royal family pays to fuel up their cars!), its gas-guzzling nature isn't such a big deal there.
In Mexico, if you're from the north/west, you're likely to be ordered to stop for a search on the road. Drug dealers like them very much, apparently.
The updated Ford Focus wasn't sold in the US (where the current model is still based on the first-generation European spec) for reasons that get... complicated:
Ford would require them to sedan-ize them, as "hatchbacks don't sell in the US."
Considering that they made a four-door sedan for the first Focus for the US, it was more an issue of the second-generation Focus being too expensive for American markets, which see small cars as cheap cars—the second-generation European Focus was very well-appointed and very expensive by American small-car standards. This turned out badly for Ford, as later refreshes of the US Focus, formerly a class leader, were surpassed by foreign competitors, were panned by the American auto press, and experienced rapidly falling sales. The upcoming next model of Focus will be sold in both the US and Europe as part as Ford's new strategy of consolidating its worldwide product lines.
This may also reflect the difference in the perception of car sizes in the U.S. and European markets; U.S. buyers generally prefer larger cars than European buyers, so while the Focus may be "small" by U.S. standards, it's fairly middle-of-the-road in Europe, hence not as "small car" price sensitive. It may also make sense if you consider that the Focus probably isn't perceived as a particularly "small" car by European standards. In other words, it's not that Europeans don't like cheap small cars (there definitely is a market there) or generally pay through the nose for them - it's that the Focus is a midsize model.
Speaking of Ford, the Ford F-Series is by some estimates the second best selling passenger vehicle of all time despite the full-size truck market being almost exclusive to North America.
City cars like the MCC Smart series and any of the small Toyotas (Yarises and Aygos) and their many competitors are popular on the narrow congested streets of Europe. Americans have a suburb culture, and their roads (even in the cities) are quite broad enough to allow for even the heftiest SUV or pickup truck. The idea of buying a car just for driving in the city is ludicrous to them. That being said, smart cars have made slight inroads in California for their fuel efficiency (petrol prices are higher in California than anywhere else in the continental US), and New York City where it is notoriously difficult to find a parking space and millions of residents never leave the city.
The Yaris is fairly popular in Canada, too.
Japanese companies got their first foothold in the American market by offering small cars that were a better fit for urban areas. These cars were normally fitted with larger engines than their European and Japanese market versions to better handle highway driving.
The Smart has been a failure because it's only available with a gas engine that gets about the same gas mileage as a Yaris or Fiesta, and doesn't have any real parking advantage in the U.S. The redesigned ForFour would have been a far better competitor, but Daimler-Benz lost their relationship with Mitsubishi when they sold off Chrysler.
In the 1970s over half of Mercedez-Benz's cars sold in the U.S. were diesels due to their reliability and excellent gas mileage. Several other companies followed suit, adding diesels to their vehicles in the early 1980s, but most were underdeveloped and fuel quality at the time was poor. GM's diesel 350 in particular received major backlash due to its extreme lack of power and inability to start at low temperatures. This effectively killed the market outside of heavy duty trucks. Hybrids got a more positive reception in the country than most areas because the cars only had to compete with less economical gas engines.
With the US Federal government now mandating higher-grade low-sulfur diesel for passenger vehicles, diesel automobiles are slowly increasing in popularity due to their better fuel economy; particularly in states with even more stringent fuel regulations, where the availability of biodiesel is similarly increasing.
There's an urban legend that the Chevy Nova sold poorly in Latin countries because the words "No va" translate to "doesn't go".*
They do, but the two words "no va" are simply not the same thing as the one word "nova," which is Spanish for "new." The story is like claiming Americans wouldn't buy a dining-room set at Ikea because it was called "Notable."
Diehard Detroit Muscle Car enthusiasts tend to have a general hate towards imported sportscars and supercars, especially Japanese sports cars. One such car receiving a lot of such Hate Dom is the Nissan GT-R R35, whose performance is nearly up there with the likes of the Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1, yet costs less, has less horsepower, is heavier, and is said to be better handling and more practical (eg unlike most high performance sports cars in the Corvette range, the GT-R is a four seater as opposed to a 2 seater). This fanbase went up in arms when the GT-R scored a laptime just a fraction of a second off the ZR-1's at the Nurburgring Nordschleife.
There's the European car enthusiasts who frown down on American cars because that they are "plastic pigs", as well as Japanese cars because they are perceived to be inferior to cars from the likes of Italy and Germany:
One part of it is that Japanese cars are perceived as "soulless" because most Japanese car companies (with the notable exception of Honda) are simply the automobile arm of giant industrial conglomerates, as opposed to the dreams of men like Henry Ford, Ferdinand Porsche, or Charles Stewart Rolls and Sir Frederick Henry Royce.
On the other hand, most European-made vehicles are banned from being imported into the United States because they fail the very strict emissions standards set by American lawmakers back in ca. 1990 - 1991. On the other hand, Japanese- and Korean-made vehicles have met those very same emissions standards year after year, hence the reason why they've (especially Japanese vehicles) been able to grab such a foothold in the American car market.
The Pacer, Gremlin, and Eagle Wagon were smashing successes for the financially troubled American Motors Corporation in the United States and Mexico, and often had innovative features such as the Eagle's all-wheel-drive system which would later be implemented in other companies' cars. On the other hand, in Europe all of them were flops; the big, thirsty I6 and 5+ liter V8 engines were desirable for American drivers for their fast response time and torque at lower RPM, but not so much for European drivers with much higher gas prices and car taxes, which was ironic as the Pacer and Gremlin were marketed as economy cars, and were mocked and hated at the time. Though now the cars are mockedpretty muchby everyone because of their Love It or Hate It styling, the Pacer and Gremlin are dragstrip monsters with AMC's 6.5 liter V8, and the Eagle can out-do any car in rough terrain, courtesy of its Jeep drivetrain.
Clothing
Hooded sweatshirts, or hoodies. In the US and Canada, they're viewed as normal casual wear no worse than blue jeans, especially in cooler weather and among young people, and many schools and colleges sell hoodies branded with the school logo. In Britain, on the other hand, they're associated with the "chav" stereotype and criminal behavior. Lately, however, the Trayvon Martin shooting in America has given greater publicity to the idea that kids with hoodies can be perceived as criminals.
Comic Books
Alpha Flight never got popular in Canada, where the team is supposed to originate from. This might be because the characters seems to have been inspired from stereotypes of Canadians. Which is ironic when you realize the team was created by Canadian artist John Byrne.
The Disney comics are traditionally more popular in Europe than the United States. However, according to Don Rosa, the confrontation between Scrooge and Soapy Slick in Part Eight of The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mcduck, in which Soapy's riverboat casino was destroyed, was frowned upon by European readers for supposedly making Scrooge look like a Batman-esque vigilante (although Rosa never wrote what exactly happened and constantly maintained that the tale was meant to be exaggerated through legend).
Tintin: Universally popular, even in places you might not expect like Africa, The Middle East, China,... Except in the U.S.A., where it is still more a cult strip. Case in point is Steven Spielberg 2011 movie adaptation, which was a box office success across the world, except in the United States where the media attention and public interest where very low. Most Americans seem to be puzzled about Tintin's lack of super powers and see it more as a detective comic with a lot of slapstick.
Astérix: Very popular in Europe, where the time period of the comic (Ancient Rome) is a lot more closeby, than in the rest of the world. Still it has been universally translated and sold. Only in the U.S.A. and Japan it has never caught on.
Jommeke: Unbelievably succesful in the Belgian region Flanders, but other countries never liked it.
Film
Indians seems to feel this way about any humorous depiction of Gandhi, for very obvious reasons. There was a major backlash on YouTube over the "Gandhi II" clip from the Weird Al Yankovic movie UHF, a fake movie trailer that re-imagines Gandhi as a 1970s blaxploitation-like hero. This is doubly funny as many seem to be attacking the person who posted the clip as though he's the one who created the video, not realizing it's from a movie that's more than 20 years old. Also since the whole joke is how completely and utterly it misses the point, to the point of having him order a rare steak at a restaurant.
Roberto Benigni's 2002 Live-Action Adaptation of The Adventures of Pinocchio was lambasted by American audiences and was the recipient of six Golden Raspberry Awards, including one for "Worst Picture", both because they saw it as a vanity project for Benigni (who wrote, directed and starred in the film...as Pinocchio), and were somewhat disturbed that the title role, traditionally fit for a little kid, was being played by a man in his forties. It also was a closer adaptation of the book than the Disney Animated Canon version, reinstating Pinocchio's obnoxious personality and such incidents as the hero being hung by a noose at one point, and not surprisingly American viewers didn't find this charming. And the film was initially released by Miramax only in a roundly condemned All-Star Cast English dub (Breckin Meyer voiced Pinocchio, for one thing). The film performed much more favorably in Benigni's home country, where it was nominated for a handful of awards by Italian film critics.
Borat, unsurprisingly, was not at all well received by the Kazakhs, to the point that it was banned in Kazakhstan. Russia discouraged cinemas to show it, because many felt it would lead to race riots (as Russia has a Kazakh minority population and, unlike the United States, Russians actually know that Kazakhs do not look or act like Sacha Baron Cohen's character). The movie wasn't shown in theatres, but it is available on DVD.
Superhero movies have a history of underperforming outside of the U.S. However, the recent box office successes of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises suggest that this trend is coming to a close.
Disney's Hercules was well-received by critics and audiences alike, and hated by the Greeks; who apparently did not like the film's portrayal of their culture and history. Considering how Disney's take on an American legend is generally considered Snark Bait by American Disney fans, it's surprising this hasn't happened with their other non-European fairy tale/story adaptations. Mulan even became a massive hit in China.
Toy Story 3, while a critical and box-office success pretty much everywhere else, was a complete flop in many Eastern European countries (such as Russia). Many explanations have been offered, the less imaginative being that not many people there had seen the other two films because of Russia's economic troubles in the 90s, resulting in 3's Continuity Porn lacking appeal.
Slumdog Millionaire was hated by Indian people, due to its obliviousness to the Bollywood cliches that were in it. Elsewhere the reception was almost universally positive, where it won 8 Academy Awards (including "Best Picture"), and the film currently has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Argo was a major box office success in the US and won the Academy Award for Best Picture but was not well-liked in Canada due to the large number of inaccuracies made to the story to make the Americans out to be the sole heroes of the rescue (according to a Canadian national who was involved with the actual rescue, the Americans only did about 10% of the work while Canada handled the lion's share of what went on). The film even got such a poor reception at the Toronto Film Festival that director Ben Affleck had to go back and recut some of the film (less than a month before opening) to give a fairer portrayal of the Canadians.
For reasons mostly related to his lengthy career as a USO wartime entertainer, Bob Hope was (and still is) almost unknown (and sometimes ridiculed) outside the U.S.
Literature
Harry Potter has an in-universe example: the book Quidditch Through the Ages has a section dealing with the status of Quidditch around the world. Americans apparently prefer the game Quodpot, a sort of hot-potato game involving a Quaffle that has been tampered with and explodes - probably a joke on Americans who prefer American football to soccer and are obsessed with Stuff Blowing Up. In Asia, however, Quidditch is only slowly gaining appeal because Asian wizards have traditionally preferred flying carpets to flying broomsticks. The exception to this rule is Japan.
Henry James wrote two political novels during the 1880s — one novel, The Bostonians, about women's rights movements in America, and another novel, The Princess Casamassima, about labor unions and terrorism in England. Bostonians was a hit in England, but widely denounced in America as cruel and unsympathetic, while Princess was a hit in America, but dismissed as exploitative and narrow in England.
Live Action TV
Due to differences in attitudes as opposed to the source material of Super Sentai, Power Rangers has some elements that don't gel with American audiences.
The general rule is that Super Sentai works best while being silly, and Power Rangers works best when being serious. For this reason, the serious Chouriki Sentai Ohranger almost ended Super Sentai; but the silly Gekisou Sentai Carranger saved the series from cancellation. Inversely, when Ohranger was adapted into Power Rangers Zeo, it was and is a season that is well-regarded among Power Rangers fans; while when Carranger was adapted into Power Rangers Turbo, it almost got the series canceled.
Villains also get different treatment. Rescue Sentai Go Go Five had villainess Denus, who is well-regarded in Sentai fandom. When it was adapted into Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, her equivalent, Vypra, was hated by fans, thanks in no small part to the X-Pac Heat leveled against Jennifer Yen. It got to the point where Linkara, in his review for his History Of Power Rangers series, all but cheered when Vypra was absorbed into Queen Bansheera later in the season.
Somewhat tying into the general examples of Japanese character popularity above, Kamen Rider fans in the West tend to dismiss Wataru Kurenai (and, to a lesser extent, Ryotaro Nogami) for being 'weak' and 'unmanly' compared to many of the other protagonists in the franchise.
When MTV's American remake of Skins was cancelled, the creators invoked this trope, claiming that Skins was a "global phenomenon" that just wasn't catching on to Americans for whatever reason, though most of the blame can be placed on MTV amping up the sex and drug abuse on a teen show, which caught the ire of a lot of anti-media indecency groups and cost the show a lot of sponsors (the Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Jesse Eisenberg made fun of this). In contrast, the original British show does have a strong cult following in the U.S., comparable to its popularity in other non-European countries.
M*A*S*H is very much not liked in South Korea. This is based on the view that it portrays Korea as a war-torn, third-world country inhabited by prostitutes, criminals, and primitive morons. In fact, many Koreans seem to see M*A*S*H as a symbol of everything that is wrong with Western portrayals of their country.
Music
The Sex Pistols recorded a UK #1 album with Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, which never cracked the top 100 in sales in the US. It did not help matters that the Pistols' sole US tour during their original run was a publicity stunt concocted by Malcolm McLaren that saw the Pistols touring the Bible Belt (one oft-shown image has a theater marquee somewhere in the South showing the Sex Pistols headlining that week, with the next week's show featuring Merle Haggard!) to generate lots of "rednecks v. punks" news. One of the only shows in punk-friendly territory was the very last in San Francisco — and that one ended with Johnny Rotten leaving the stage, and the band, abruptly.
This has to do with the way the U.S. and U.K. punk scenes developed. The American scene was more artsy and bohemian, while the British scene was predominately working class. Johnny Rotten openly mocked Patti Smith's performance in London in 1976. On the other hand, The Ramones, an American band, pretty much launched the British scene. They firmly believed in Three Chords and the Truth.
Similar to how Grunge was largely ridiculed outside North America, American indie music in the 90s was largely ignored in the UK, with blur being the only famous British band to draw any influence from bands like Pavement. These bands weren't immensely popular in America, either, but they were even less popular there. This ended when The Strokes released Is This It, which had an immediate impact in the UK that was unmatched in America.
British indie music in The Nineties, in turn, was largely ignored in America, except in music magazines and on College Radio.
In Israel, Richard Wagner's music is very unpopular, mainly due to the composer's virulent (but not murderous) anti-Semitism and his popularity within the Nazi party inner-circle. Many Holocaust survivors moved to Israel, and the Nazi death camps were known to blast Wagner over the speakers.
Even The Beatles were victims of this, in a few different places, in 1966. The most famous one involved John Lennon's infamous "we're more popular than Jesus" comment, which was more or less dismissed as harmless in the Beatles' native Britain, especially after Lennon clarified it... but this was not the case in America. There, a few radio stations in the South held burnings of Beatles records, and the whole ordeal turned into a media ruckus. The anti-Beatles sentiment wasn't actually very widespread, but there was enough of it in some areas that the Beatles had to cancel a few tour dates due to threats. Far worse was the reception they received that year in The Philippines, when they were essentially chased out of the country for refusing to play for Imelda Marcos, and to a lesser extent, the controversy in Japan from their appearance at the Budokan (which is now a popular concert venue, but at the time was reserved for martial arts, and many saw the Beatles' appearance there as disrespectful). All of these incidents, along with the increasingly complexity of their music, made 1966 their last tour.
In the Northeast and other "blue state" parts of the US, being a fan of country music carries many of the same connotations as being a fan of NASCAR — unless it's a hip alternative country band, a crossover pop artist, or a legend with universal appeal (like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, or Patsy Cline), admitting to being a country fan will most likely get you called a redneck, a hillbilly, or some variation thereof. The New York City area, for example, did not have any country stations whatsoever between 2002 and 2013, despite it being the largest radio market in America and country being, by some measures, the most popular genre of music in America.
It's similar outside America. When the Country 2 Country music festival was held in Britain, for instance, many critics'discussions of the event focused on the "American" nature of the music and its association with stereotypes of Type 2 Eagleland. There are only a few other countries that can be said to have significant country fandoms — Ireland (whose own tradition of folk music fed into Appalachian folk, which is an ancestor of modern country), a few parts of West Africa (possibly due to the popularity of the banjo), Brazil (a mishmash of American and local subculture, including rodeo acts and even the descendants of ex-Confederates), Canada, and Australia (both of which have frontier histories and vast rural areas not unlike those found in America).
In Canada you tend to find either a gentler brand of country (i.e. Anne Murray) or a more folk-infused style (like when Great Big Sea or Barenaked Ladies make occasional forays in to the genre) being heard universally — although country stations exist and more hard-core country groups are out there, they tend to stay in and around Alberta, which likes to identify with the culture. (It's not called "Canada's Texas" for nothing.) There is, however, a curiously large aboriginal following of country music.
Power Metal bands often do well in the Europe, placing high on the charts and playing stadiums and arenas. They do even better in Brazil. In the U.S. however, they're lucky if their CD gets a release, let alone charts, and the few bands that do tour the States are reduced to playing small clubs. DragonForce is the exception, having been made popular thanks to Guitar Hero.
The British rock magazine MOJO acknowledged this trope in their list issue, where they listed 10 British artists/groups who wouldn't get free drinks at any American bar, and 10 American artists/groups who wouldn't get free drinks at any British pub.
PSY's memetic hit "Gangnam Style" has been popular everywhere in the world... except Japan, where he received a horrible reception. This article explains this as being due to PSY not fitting the stereotype that the Japanese have of Korean pop stars being incrediblygood-looking, on top of anything that isn't mainstream not doing well (PSY's song was a parody of K-Pop, and he normally does genres that aren't mainstream pop), as well as a surge of nationalistic flame wars between Japanese and Koreansnote Motivated by a South Korean Olympic soccer player demanding that Japan return a number of disputed islands to South Korea, as well as South Korea's President saying that the Japanese emperor should apologize on behalf of Japan for its past colonial rule of Korea..
While The Wanted's popularity is extremely local to the United Kingdom, they were able to score a major international hit with "Glad You Came." However, in no country did their career tank harder than in the United States. When their single "Glad You Came" was released stateside, it was very well recieved and went to the top 10. However, rivals One Direction had a dedicated American following that was growing much faster than The Wanted's, and were ready to be sent into the US. When 1D hit the American scene, they generated a Beatlemania-like response, even outshining the Fab Four by becoming the first British band to have a debut album ("Up All Night") enter at number-one on the Billboard 200. When The Wanted released their album, it debuted at number 7 and wasn't even able to sell more than 1D that week. Their album fell out of the top 10 the next week, and the week after that was out of the top 40 (in comparison, "Up All Night" spent its first sixteen weeks in the top 10, was number 11 the next week, and went right back in the top ten for seven more weeks afterwards, bringing their total to 23; It went platinum in July, the The Wanted's EP has yet to sell more copies than "Up All Night" did in its first week).
Their next single, "Chasing The Sun," failed to make the top 40, while 1D's "One Thing" hit #39, and around the time it peaked, "What Makes You Beautiful" passed "Glad You Came" to become the best-selling song by a boy band in digital history.
They haven't done much better in awards shows either, with 1D winning up all of their nominations at the Teen Choice Awards, Video Music Awards, and Kid's Choice Awards. The Wanted went home empty-handed all three nights (they weren't even nominated for the latter award).
When 1D's "Live While We're Young" was released on iTunes, it went straight to the top of the charts, debuted on top of the Billboard Hot Digital Songs with 341,000, and hit #3 on the Hot 100, surpassing their highest peak ("What Makes You Beautiful" hit #4) while matching the peak of "Glad You Came." "I Found You," released a few weeks later, failed to go top 10 on iTunes, fell short of the top 40 on Digital Songs, and barely made it onto the Hot 100 that week.
The performance of One Direction's sophomore album "Take Me Home" only adds insult to injury to The Wanted's fading American stardom. It sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week, hit one million five weeks later, and was the fifth best selling album of the 2012 — and it was released in November. The Wanted still don't have a number-one or platinum album in the US, while neither of One Direction's albums have failed to accomplish either. It's obvious America doesn't want The Wanted.
People
William Mulholland was responsible for building The Los Angeles Aqueduct diverting water from Owens Valley to San fernando. He's hailed as saving Southern California, but in Northern California he's painted as a Villain responsable for turning Owen's Valley into a desert as well as turning Mono lake into a crater. There he's especially hated. The famers who's livelihood was destroyed tried to destroy the Aquaduct. It's only been in recent years that water is starting to be reverted back
Happened to a lot of famous conquerors who are heroes in their homecountry, but seen in a less positive light in the countries that were invaded by them.
Genghis Khan: A brilliant monarch in Mongolia, a compassionless genocidical warlord in the rest of Asia and to many people in the West.
The 16th century Spanish duke of Alva: in Spain he is seen as a national hero. In Belgium and the Netherlands he is remembered as a ruthless war criminal who executed thousands of people.
George III of the United Kingdom: For the British he is just one of their several monarches, only memorable for his madness. In the U.S.A., where the American War Of Independence was fought against his army, he is seen as an evil king who surpressed the Americans' desire for independence.
Napoleon Bonaparte: In France he is remembered as a political and military genius. Many European countries also praise his accomplishments in these fields, but do also classify him as a tyrant who occupied huge parts of Europe and is responsible for murdering thousands of people. Especially the British have cast him as a villain for over centuries.
The same goes for pirates and explorers:
Christopher Columbus: Used to be a hero to the West for discovering the New World, but native Americans consider him to be the man who started the mass genocide and exploitation of their people. In recent decades the character has become more controversial among non-native Americans too.
Francis Drake: the British glorify him as a brilliant admiral, while the Spanish dismiss him as being nothing than an ordinary pirate.
Piet Hein: In the Netherlands he is praised as the man who defeated the Spanish Silver Fleet, while other countries consider him to be a pirate.
European colonists have a far worse reputation in the African, South-American and Asian countries they colonized.
Charles De Gaulle is a national hero in France for leading the resistance during World War II and bringing hope to occupied France during sour times. In the United States and other European countries he is also remembered as a very individualistic, stubborn and vain man who always seem to have a completely different opinion when important political decisions about Europe's future had to be made.
Ronald Reagan: an "American hero" in the USA, a "man who helped to defeat Communism" in Eastern Europe, a "senile old man obsessed with nuking stuff" in Western Europe.
He's not very well liked by those on the left in the United States, many blame the current state of the country on his economic policies such as cutting taxes on the 1%, even poining out that those on the right have turned him into a mythic figure, forgetting about his support of gun contol (Reagan supported the right to bear arms, but believed assault weapons belonged in the hands of soldiers), his raising taxes 11 times, and giving amnesty to millions illegal immigrants, all those on the right are against.
Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il: revered as deities in North Korea, where the repressed population -admittely- hardly has any other choice, but seen as totalitarian dictators in the rest of the world.
Emperor Hirohito of Japan: To the Japanese he is a beloved emperor. To all the countries that suffered under the Japanese occupation of South-East Asia during the Second World War he is held responsible for the atrocities committed in name of his armies.
Performance Art
For all the jokes about the "Frenchiness" of Cirque du Soleil, which originated in Quebec, France is one of the few countries that didn't take to it when it first arrived. After an initial, critically roasted visit to Paris in 1990, Cirque didn't bring another show there until Saltimbanco in 2005. The books 20 Years Under the Sun and The Spark point out that circus has been a staple of French entertainment for so long that a) Cirque's style wasn't particularly new to them and b) it just takes a lot to impress critics there with so much competition.
Professional Wrestling
Hulk Hogan was one of, if not the, biggest WWF star of all time... but when he brought the flexing, no-selling, All-American character to WCW, the fans were lukewarm at best at first, and progressed to booing him and throwing his merchandise back into the ring. He got over with them as the villainous Hollywood Hogan, but when he returned to Hulk Hogan, the fans still weren't impressed. This was largely because most WCW fans were fans of the old NWA and hated the WWF's campy, story driven style compared to the NWA's hard action (which was why wrestling ratings on TBS tanked for the brief time that the WWF was on there). Ironically, the WWF/E tried to bring Hogan back as Hollywood in 2002 but had to revert back to Hulk Hogan because their fans refused to boo him, even after he plowed a truck into an ambulance that had The Rock inside it.
Samoa Joe has caught surprisingly negative reactions from Japanese fans, who see him as a ripoff of many Japanese wrestlers from the '90s.
For whatever reason Ken Shamrock was nearly booed out of whatever Canadian city in which he was wrestling.
Sports
In the United States, speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno is thought of as a national hero, the USA most decorated winter Olympian ever, and one hell of a dancer. However, in South Korea the Japanese-American champion is one of, if not the, most hated individuals in the nation and nicknamed "The King of Fouls". It started after the 2002 Salt Lake City games when he won a gold medal after Korean skater Kim Dong-Sung was disqualified for blocking him, and he happily celebrated afterward. There were massive protests against the United States after he won (even though US servicemen accidentally killing a couple of Korean schoolgirls probably also had something to do with that) and the United States embassy had to be closed the next day because of threats against them. The first verse of Yoon Min-Suk's hit song "Fucking USA" was all about Ohno — the rest was about Bush threatening North Korea. They thought what Apolo did was worse than a potential war. They even sold toilet paper with the multi-time medalist's picture on it. They apparently also released a game where you could shoot Expys of Ohno. It got so bad that a year after he won not only Apolo but the entire US speed skating team did not enter the nation due to death threats — and after that he only entered the country while surrounded by armed guards. In South Korea, Ohnolike has even entered the lexicon as meaning "dirty trick". The hatred against the Dancing with the Stars champion swelled up again during the 2010 Vancouver games after 2 Korean skaters took each other out and Ohno won Silver, however by the end of the games it was the Australian embassy that was being shut down because of death threats because of a controversial decision to disqualify the women's relay team made by Aussie referee Jim Hewish, who just happens to be the same judge that disqualified Dong-Sung in 2002 giving Apolo his first Gold. During the 2002 World Cup, the South Korean team scored on the U.S. team and re-enacted Ohno's "bump" as a part of their celebration. South Korea erupted in laughter. America essentially said "lolwut?"
Then there's Korea's close tracking of figure skater Kim Yuna and the manufactured rivalry with Asada Mao, a Japanese competitor who she beat on the way to winning the 2009 Grand Prix. When she set a new record, Korean media just had to mention that Asada's score was pretty unimpressive.
Traditionally, ice hockey is only popular in Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the northern US, with those eight countries producing the most NHL players, and winning the most hockey metals in the winter olympics. The obvious reason is because it's traditionally a winter sport. Attempts to spread it outside of those regions have not had much success. The National Hockey League, for instance, added or relocated a number of teams to the Southern United States, with mixed results (as a General Rule of thumb, any region in the Southern US with a large enough population of Canadian Snowbirds tends to have a hockey team that at least does well enough). Taken Up to Eleven with the St. Louis Blues. Missouri is right on the deviding line between the the region of the US where hockey is popular, and where it isn't, so in the Northern half of Missouri, the team is popular and among the top ten in attendance nearly every year, while in the Southern half of the state, they get less coverage than high school basketball and their popularity is limited to certain parts of the area. Meanwhile, in parts of Canada hockey is a year-round major news source, eclipsing not just all other sports combined but also politics, religion, and the arts.
While we're on the topic of Hockey, it's infamously unpopular with African Americans, even in the north, compared to say, Basketball, Baseball, or Football, something which a number of black stand-up comics have noted. This is also true with NHL players, of whom few are black. While the two almost certainly related, it's unclear wheather the game has fewer black fans because it has fewer black players, or the other way around.
NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) is easily one of the most popular forms of auto racing (CART used to be one of the top until the CART/IRL split) in the United States and if you consider it a sport its popularity is up there with the NFL. While it has fans from other countries in North America, it has a niche fanbase in the rest of the world at best, because even in the US, it's often considered a "redneck" sport (detractors often using terms like "Non-Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks"). In the Prohibition era, people would occasionally set up races between each other to see who had the better car set-up for transporting moonshine, which eventually evolved into NASCAR. It was invented by people considered to be "hillbillies" or "rednecks", and the majority of its drivers also tend to qualify under such names.
Conversely, Formula One is often coined as the "Pinnacle of Motorsport" and is up there with the FIFA World Cup in popularity in most of the world. In the US however, it has little love, hence there has not been a US Grand Prix in years. (Note: There will be one at the end of 2012.) One of the turn-offs in F1 to most US racing fans is the difficulty in passing, which is something that happens a lot in NASCAR and CART/IRL (then again, passing is easy in oval tracks, which F1 cars never race on). This is deemed by most American racing fans to make Formula One races much less exciting.
It doesn't help that because of time zones, most races are on only in the early morning in the US.
Another difference is that Formula One is has fewer limits on the equipment, and in many ways is considered a showcase of technology, resulting in a larger gap between the top teams and bottom teams, whereas the major US auto racing racing series have more limits on the cars and the engines in an attempt to make the driver a bigger factor.
Lacrosse is only really popular in the United States and Canada, which is fitting, as it was created by Native Americans, and even then, it is very regional, being mostly popular in the Mid-Atlantic States. In the UK it's thought of as a girls' school sport, albeit a brutal one - see the St Trinians cartoons/films. Lacrosse is also almost solely a girls' sport in Japan, where it's currently experiencing a surge in popularity, especially the box version of the game in the hockey mad Upper Midwestern USA.
Even in the United States, lacrosse is mostly associated with rich East Coast prep school kids, and isn't played much by poorer people.
Curling is big in Canada (where even the smallest town usually has a curling rink), but not so much in the rest of the world, which wonders what the heck those people are doing with brooms on the ice. Curling is known in Scotland (being that's where the sport was invented) and isn't viewed as peculiar and unusual as it is elsewhere in the world, but its popularity is not nearly as big as it is in Canada. That being said, it does score big ratings during the Olympics, probably because it's the only native Scottish Winter Olympic sport...and for the longest time was the only distinctively Scottish Olympic sport in general (shot put, hammer throw, and rugby sevens, although originating in Scotland, aren't distinctively Scottish, and golf hasn't been Olympic since 1904...although it will return for Rio 2016). In the Northern US, where winter sports like hockey, cross country skiing and tobogganing are considered traditions, curling is seen at best, a winter activity akin to horseshoes and bocce ball.
Oddly enough, curling is also developing a following in Washington, DC.
Baseball is popular only in North and Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, some islands in the Pacific Ocean, and not many places elsewhere.
Heck, American Football is only really popular in the United States with a limited fandom in Canadanote where a local variation is played and hence called Canadian Football and Mexiconote where there are a few college leagues but no pro leagues, and that's pretty much it.
There are pockets of popularity throughout Europe and The NFL has hosted international games in London to sellout crowds.
Even within sports, different teams/individuals can have differing reputations from country to country. Diego Maradona, for example, is idolised in his native Argentina and is a byword throughout the rest of the world for a supremely skilled individual. Except in England, where, due to the infamous "Hand of God" goal, the word "Maradona" is synonymous with "dirty cheat".
When playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Sidney Crosby is very popular among the hometown fans, as is expected for a team's star player. When it comes to international hockey, though, pretty much every American hockey fan hates his guts because of his gold medal-winning goal for Canada against the United States at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.
It was such that after those Olympics, some fans of the Detroit Red Wings - one of the Penguins' biggest rivals - created a Facebook page titled "Now ALL of America hates Crosby!"
Italian footballer Paolo Rossi was the hero of the 1982 World Cup championship... and absolutely loathed in Brazil, as he scored the 3 goals in the game that eliminated the best Brazilian team in years. (when Rossi visited Săo Paulo, once a taxi driver recognized him he kicked Rossi out of his car)
French footballer Thierry Henry falls into a similar conundrum to Maradona. While he's well respected in England and his native France, he ended up becoming hated in Ireland for handling the ball in the run up to scoring the goal that kept their team out of the 2010 World Cup.
In Sri Lanka, Muttiah Muralitheran is the greatest spin bowler in the history of Cricket. In Australia, he's a cheating chucker who stole Shane Warne's Test wicket record. The rest of the world just doesn't care.
Famously, soccer—sorry, "football"—in the United States. Far and away the most popular sport in the rest of the world, with the World Cup being the most popular international sporting event outside of the Olympics, soccer today remains a niche sport in America. Probably the only place soccer is considered popular in America is in a school or youth community group, and even then, it's only used as a measure to keep kids from getting fat and/or teach them that there's more to life than spending your free time with computers, video games, texting, or committing petty crime.
While soccer is not as popular in the United States as baseball, American football, or basketball, and likely never will be, this is not quite as true as it was a generation ago. The MLS has a loyal if relatively small fan base, soccer is a popular youth activity, and the World Cup is a bigger television event than it used to be. (The World Cup's popularity has been greatly assisted by the increased success of the American teams, as the men's team has made every tournament since 1990 and the women's team is a world power.)
Similarly on the American example, the Philippines is notable for the lack of enthusiasm for football as opposed to its neighboring Asian countries. While there has been a recent surge of popularity in the sport with the help of the Younghusband brothers, the sport has always been seen with low regard due to its perception as an expensive game and perceived difficulty. Lack of major victories from its national team can also explain the lack of popularity of the sport. It does not help that whatever sport Americans like note Do mind that the Americans once colonized the islands and had a profound effect on the type of popular culture The Philippines receive (basketball, baseball, boxing, etc.), Filipinos will end up trying to idolize it. Especially basketball, where it is considered serious business to the point that this troper has been endlessly asking why the Philippine government has yet to recognize basketball as the national sport of the Philippines.
Transversely, women's soccer is pretty popular as it was one of the most popular sports played by female athletes in the US.
Gaelic games such as hurling or gaelic football are huge mainstream sports in Ireland, attracting massive media coverage and crowd attendance in the tens of thousands. Elsewhere they are almost entirely unknown outside Irish immigrant communities.
In the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, when the St. John's Maple Leafs hockey team of the American Hockey League (AHL), the farm team of the Toronto Maple Leafs, moved to Toronto in 2005 as its sister team the Toronto Marlies, St. John's got a replacement hockey team in the form of the St. John's Fog Devils, an expansion team of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL, otherwise known for short as "The Q"). Although its first season had decent ticket sales, the Fog Devils did poorly in its overall gameplay record, and actually lost money in its second season, to the point where the QMJHL franchise was sold to Montreal businessman Farrell Miller in 2008, who renamed the team the Montreal Junior Hockey Club. It was sold a second time in 2011 to a group led by former NHL defenseman Joel Bouchard, who moved the team to the northern Montreal suburb of Boisbriand, where it became renamed the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada.
It's been speculated that the move of the Fog Devils may have happened because, while the Maple Leafs were a fairly popular AHL team for 14 seasons (1991–2005), the QMJHL, despite having a strong presence in Atlantic Canada since 1994 (when the Halifax Mooseheads were first introduced), the QMJHL may not have been looked as much positively in Newfoundlanders and Labradorians' eyes. As a result, Newfoundland and Labrador is the only province in Canada without a team in the Canadian Hockey League (CHL, which the QMJHL is one of three leagues it's part of), and it was the only province without a professional ice hockey team until 2011, when the AHL returned to St. John's through the move of Winnipeg's AHL team, the Manitoba Moose, which became the St. John's IceCaps, the farm team of the new Winnipeg Jets.
Curiously, Australian Rules Football is not popular everywhere in Australia. While it is huge in South Australia, West Australia and Tasmania - and practically the state religion in Victoria, where the game began and where the national league is headquartered - it has traditionally been unpopular in New South Wales and Queensland. Which is why the AFL has spent most of the last two decades moving teams from Victoria to those states, or just starting new ones entirely. Some of the gap has been made up, but the national game still isn't that national.
Rugby and Cricket are very popular internationally, but are far less popular in the US and Canada than even Soccer.
Stand Up Comedy
While not exactly beloved in America, Neil Hamburger seems to be hated by British audiences, possibly because Jerry Sadowitz has been playing a similar character on the UK comedy circuit for years before.
In his earlier American tours, Hamburger usually opened for rock bands or much bigger comedy acts. Which meant trouble in front of audiences who didn't get the joke. If you looked up reviews for the shows he opened up, chances are you'd see complaints about him.
Theme Parks
Ah, Duffy the Disney Bear. Apparently a huge hit when he was introduced in Tokyo Disneyland, he was brought to America in 2011 to many delighted cries of "Who the hell is that?" and "Why is heeverywhere?" It appears as though America does not get the appeal of Mickey Mouse's little plushy friend, in part because he doesn't appear in any other Disney media (the animated canon, shorts, TV shows, etc.).
An earlier version of Duffy was Never Accepted In His Hometown: The Disney Bear was introduced at Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney in 2004 as an attempt at breaking into the Build-a-Bear market, but it came "pre-built", and the reception was lukewarm at best. Plans for his introduction at Disneyland (which had an actual Build-a-Bear store in their Downtown Disney by then) were cancelled, and he was pulled from Disney World (which now has its own Build-A-Bear store) just three years later.
Video Games
Aside from Final Fantasy and Pokémon, or the brief surge of western popularity generated by FFVII, JRPGs have generally sold poorly outside of Japan. One of the reasons may be the prevalence of both androgynous males and tween prepubescent characters that appear to not translate well with a Western audience.
A very notable example is Dragon Quest. It is said to be the most popular game franchise in Japan (every release of a Dragon Quest is probably akin to a Japanese holiday), and it is both critically and commercially successful there. Everywhere else, the series still earns critical acclaim, but the series merely has a small cult following, probably due to the "kids' stuff" issue, since the games generally have a colorful art style. Nintendo is aiming to turn this around, though, as they published Dragon Quest IX under their name and heavily marketed the title to make it one of the best-selling games of July 2010 in the US.
Not to mention that because Japanese publishers don't expect JRPGs to do well in the West, they don't properly promote or market the games effectively, resulting in low review scores from gaming journalism sources; and in many cases they don't even bother localizing them. As a result, gamers aren't motivated into buying them (Or even knowing about them!), which led the publishers into further thinking there's no market for JRPGs, creating a vicious cycle.
Rinoa from Final Fantasy VIII is a very popular character and a pop culture icon in Japan. In the West, she's something of The Scrappy.
Likewise, Tidus from Final Fantasy X is very popular in Japan, but in the west he's a divisive figure, mostly because he looks exactly like actress Meg Ryan. And because he spends most of the game whining, which is only made worse by James Arnold Taylor's over-the-top delivery.
To a lesser extent, Cloud may also count. He remains relatively popular in the United States, though emphasis on his emotional issues has alienated some American fans. In Japan, he remains among the most popular Final Fantasy character of all time, and among the Top 5 most popular video game characters ever.
Sprite-based games are appreciated in Japan about as much as high-quality 3D-graphic games, and Hand-drawn sprites are common. However, outside of Japan, they get seen as kiddy, are criticized for being "primitive" and being called "SNES Sprites", without regards for how much work actually goes into the creation of sprites. Only handheld and indie games seem to be able to get away from this "outdated" or "kiddy" stigma, leading to an interesting Double Standard, where games like Dust: An Elysian Tail are praised for having such a beautiful artstyle while other sprite-using games are praised for looking "dated".
Mexicans really hate T. Hawk in Street Fighter, perhaps because he's apparently supposed to be Mexican but obviously isn't. El Fuerte has become some sort of inverse Replacement Scrappy. The Jamaican kickboxer Dee Jay, who was added to the Street Fighter II roster under the suggestion of American playtester James Goddard, is beloved by the North American fanbase (and also in his home country). In Japan, he rarely appears, and when he does, he doesn't do much of anything. Humourously enough, Dee Jay and T. Hawk both happen to be the only new characters from Super Street Fighter II left out from the console versions of Street Fighter IV (which included Cammy and Fei-Long); however, both ended up returning in Super Street Fighter IV.
Americans hateCody's prison garb (which is an existing prison uniform, although it hasn't been used for years now) because it reminds them of a certain fast food mascot.
Mortyr (2093 - 1944), a Polish WW2FPS (with a strange Time Travel element in it) spoiled the Polish press in its day, while it was regarded as a laughing stock abroad (Penny Arcade notably took a jab at this game on this strip). In somewhat of a contrast, however, its sequel got some flak from the Polish press this time around (didn't help that Poland had SOMETHING at the time), while some foreign reviewers regard it as passable at best.
Raiden wasn't as hated in Japan as much as he was in America and Europe when Metal Gear Solid 2 first came out. Most of the complaints players had in Japan wasn't with Raiden himself per se, but from not being able to play as Solid Snake. This is probably because being bishounen, as Raiden is, isn't as big of a deal to Japanese gamers, whereas it tends to put off American gamers (this is evident by the amount of homophobic insults that were thrown at his character). It helps that Kenyuu Horiuchi, Raiden's Japanese VA, actually made him sound like a real adult (giving him a voice almost as deep as Akio Ohtsuka's performance as Solid Snake) instead of the approach that Quinton Flynn went with.
Mighty Kongman/Bruiser Khang is very popular among Japanese Tales Of Destiny fans, especially after his personality got expanded in the game's remake, where he becomes something of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. But since many of these Tales remakes and spinoffs never leave Japan, North American audiences, meanwhile, get stuck with the Jerkass Khang seen in the PlayStation version, and don't understand why he's appeared in so many spinoffs.
Barry Burton of Resident Evil, despite being a minor character, has achieved praise and Memetic status in the West for his ham-handed acting, cheesy lines, and his family man values (even if they're only shown in the first game), while in Japan, he's mostly ignored. The opposite is true for Rebecca Chambers, with her being the closest thing the series has to a Moe character. In the West, to this day, she's still divisive.
Leon has generally been the more popular of the series' two male protagonists on both sides of the pond, but Chris' hulking up by Resident Evil 5 and his relationship and working with his partner Piers Nivans in Resident Evil 6, along with the story during his scenario and some Character Development, has boosted Chris' popularity in Japan (in regards to Piers, the seemingly Bara Genre overtones may have something to do with it). Like Rebecca, he's divisive still in the West.
Emil Castagnier of Tales Of Symphonia Dawn Of The New World also has a case of this. In the 5th Tales of Character Popularity Poll (in Japan), Emil came in 12th (out of every character in every Tales game). The majority of overseas fans hate him for being whiny, cowardly, effeminate and annoying. It certainly doesn't help that up until a certain point, in every fight he has to rely on his Superpowered Evil Side to fight for him. These flaws are ironically also present in Luke fon Fabre of Tales Of The Abyss who is well recieved by American fans, although he doesn't suffer the same hate due to being a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass whose annoying factors are overcome sooner... That said, there are some American fans who want to give Emil a hug.
Similarly, Reala does not have many western fans. As well as her ridiculously girly appearance (which is so unrealistically thin that it reaches Uncanny Valley levels), there's the fact that her story makes many western fans cry Mary Sue: She's a one-woman Spotlight-Stealing Squadwho also happens to be the daughter of a goddess, on a mission to find a "hero", who is doomed to be erased from time if she kills her mother, but comes Back from the Dead anyway just so she can be with Kyle. Japan is far more tolerant of her.
Kairi (and her counterparts Naminé and Xion) are unpopular in the US (to the point where Nomura worried that Aqua wouldn't become as well-received as she is because she was different from Kairi, Namine, and Xion; a notion that's laughable in the West). A large part of the KH fandom consists of Yaoi Fangirls, and in America they tend to loathe the female protagonists for getting in the way of the Ho Yay. Japanese fangirls just don't feel the same way. In fact, a search of popular Japanese fanart sites turns up little to no pictures bashing Kairi or the other girls (contrast to US sites like Deviantart...), even from yaoi fangirls. Instead, you will find a lot of pictures that pair them up together instead. Kairi/Namine, Namine/Xion, Kairi/Xion, or Kairi/Namine/Xion...it's all over the place there.
Sora too. He's the most popular character of the series in Japan (after all, he's the protagonist), but is a Base Breaker in America.
The Tower of Druaga is very popular in Japan, spawning numerous sequels, spin-offs, an anime, and even its own amusement park attraction. Westerners who have played this game view it as a sluggish, obtuseexercise in frustration. None of the console versions reached Western countries until the Compilation RereleaseNamco Museum Vol. 3, where it received consistently poor reviews.
The Monster Hunter series, despite being one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time in Japan, has only established a small, dedicated following in North America. Many Western gamers dislike the games because you can't lock-on to targets.
Lyra from HeartGold and SoulSilver, while fairly popular in her home country, there are many Western fans who hate her for her Moe appearance, and others who hate her simply for not being Kris, although she still has supporters.
General opinions on the creatures themselves differ in Japan and America. Japanese fans tend towards the "cuter" Mons such as Pikachu (the series mascot) and Jigglypuff, while American fans tend to prefer the Badass types such as Charizard, Mewtwo, Rayquaza and whatever new uber-powerful legendaries are being hyped at the moment.
Legendaries aren't immune either. In Japan, Reshiram is the more popular of the two Generation V legendaries, and Pokémon Black (where you obtain Reshiram) sells more than Pokémon White (where you obtain Zekrom). In the US, it's the opposite: Zekrom is the more popular and White sells more than Pokémon Black, while Reshiram is a Base Breaker.
Jynx was a big one for this. Americans disliked it intensely because although it was based on a Japanese style, to Americans, it looked like a blackface stereotype of African-Americans. Changing Jynx's skin tone to purple in all future releases hasn't made the stigma go away, either.
Relating to Pokemon, but also other games with this mechanic: One Game for the Price of Two is widely considered a Scrappy Mechanic in the west, while Japan loves it and considers it a Socialization Bonus. This comes down mostly to handheld gaming in general being much more popular in Japan, combining with higher population density and higher use of public transport equating to easier access to others with the game. Since the games with this trait tend to be developed in Japan, a lot of them feature mechinics like this, and even before Streetpass was introduced Expies of it showed up in games like The World Ends with You. Furthermore Japanese games often have achievements that involve trading with people X amount of times, or passing people X times, which nearly always become That One Achievement in the west. The hate is even evident in the trope title itself, which shows that, while Japan considers it an encouragement to socialize, westerners see it as an encouragement to buy both games and two consoles.
In America, The Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess did extremely well, whereas in Japan, the game did mediocre at best. The West seems to prefer games which feature Link as an adult, but Japan seems to prefer him as a child.
In the Sengoku Basara universe, the Japanese fans certainly love Oichi and she is pretty much theEnsemble Darkhorse of a series seemingly tailored for Yaoi Fangirls. In America? She's considered a useless whiny emo girl, made even worse by the fact that the only "English" SB franchise that features her and can be reached by western audiences is the anime, which downplays her powers severely.
The Xbox and Xbox 360 had dismal sales figures in Japan. Microsoft fought to turn this around by obtaining exclusive titles that appeal to Japanese audiences; outside of a few brief sales spikes connected to the release of certain games, it largely failed. Keiji Inafune has suggested that consumer nationalism played a role in Japan's rejection of the Xbox brand (its rivals, the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, were both made by domesticcompanies), while The Game Overthinker pointed out that the systems are considered (on both sides of the Pacific) to be delivery platforms for FPS games, which leads into...
First person shooters are, in general, a niche genre in Japan. While they have a cult following there (perhaps comparable to JRPGs in the West), nobody is under any impression that the next Modern Warfare game will outsell Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. This is also true, to a lesser extent, in Europe.
Similarly, PC gaming in general, when compared to other Asian countries like China and Korea; is a very small niche in Japan and when it really comes to down to PC games in Japan, it is often Visual Novels. According to a Kotaku article, this is mainly because PC games are often associated with FPS games like Xbox360; and the fact that many Japanese find PC games to be "too expensive" and rather keep their gaming console and computers functions as separate.
Character-wise, the Two Qiaos. The complains are majorly because they're not contributing to anything to the story, only existing as 'Sun Ce and Zhou Yu's wife'. The Japanese have no problem with those, their young look fit well to their fandom of Joshikusei and Token Mini Moe sorts. In the western areas? They, especially Xiao Qiao, is accused to be bratty annoying little girls that has no place in the battlefield and due to Values Dissonance, they're creeped out with their presence because it's making Sun Ce and Zhou Yu look like pedophiles, for them anyway.
The Saga game franchise has been praised in Japan and just about every installment has sold over the million mark over there. Other than the firstthreegames (which were all given the Final Fantasy moniker to boost sales), Saga has been hated in the west. While SaGa Frontier sold well in the states, critic and fan reviews are very split (and both a weird translation and its confusing stories don't help), and reactions to Unlimited Saga in particular were polar opposites to one another (good reviews in Japan, revile reviews in the west).
While the games set in Marth's world are loved in Japan with the third game being heralded as the very best, the rest of the world sees them as some of the weakest parts in the series.
On that note, the 4th entry in the series is widely considered one of the best, if not THE best, game in the series by western fans. In Japan, it recieved the lowest Famitsu score of any game in the series. Oh, and Sword of Seals, tied for higest score, is not all that well liked in the west either. In fact, if you want the general western opinion on the series, put those scores in order from highest to lowest, then reverse the list.
Regarding Fire Emblem 4, the low Famitsu score might be case of 8.8, since the January 2012 Famitsu Top 50 Nintendo Games poll has it as a highest Fire Emblem game at number 11.
Twisted Metal is extremely popular in America but poorly-received everywhere else, where it is considered to be brainless and requiring no strategy. A good example of this is when the PlayStation 3 sequel closed Sony's E3 2010 conference, where it was considered a crowd pleaser by American gamers and bad everywhere else, especially France, possibly because TM2 let you blow up the Eiffel Tower.
In Corpse Party, Ayumi is usually on the top of the polls in Japan. In America, she's the Damsel Scrappy.
The King Of Fighters characters Ash Crimson and Benimaru Nikaido are off-putting to some western audiences, both due to their mannerisms (Benimaru evokes imagery of stereotypical gay men and Ash has some very effeminate quirks). Likely this is caused by the opinion that a fighting game character should look like they could actually hold their own in a fight, of which both characters do not exude.
Cream the Rabbit is a popular enough character in Japan that she's become a mainstay in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, whereas in the west she is hated almost as much as Big the Cat. A likely reason is because Cream is ultra-polite, submissive, and somewhat withdrawn. Also, she has a really high-pitched voice. These same traits makes her irritating to many western gamers.
The Legendary Starfy is among the best-selling Nintendo franchises in Japan, but only one game was ever released in America, and was among the worst-selling Nintendo DS games ever. This is likely due to the cutesy title character, and it being one of the few games not subjected to American Kirby Is Hardcore. Despite positive reviews and an extensive marketing campaign, US gamers' tendency to favor manliness over cuteness caused the character to be dismissed. Even his Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros Brawl is met with derision rather than praise.
Many Rated M for Money games, such as God Of War, sell horribly in Japan. While God Of War III was a massive hit in America, where it sold over two-and-a-half million copies, it barely made it past 100,000 copies in Japan. Maybe Japan just doesn't want to play as Kratos.
Americans often consider the Sega Saturn one of the worst video game consoles ever released due to its poor line of game, its lack of Sonic the Hedgehog (which is the Killer App for all other Sega consoles), horribleadvertising, its horrifically botched North American launch, and the introduction of the Playstation and Nintendo 64. In Japan it's often listed as one of the more remembered consoles and generally was a lot better received. It helps that the Saturn suffered from a major case of No Export for You; most of its best games didn't get released internationally, and in Japan, it has an awesome advertising campaign in form of Segata Sanshiro.
While the Nintendo Entertainment System was the icon of The Third Generation Of Gaming in North America, it was rejected in the UK, where the technically superior home computers already dominated the market by the time the console was distributed in 1987. (Rare, despite being based in the UK, had to produce its early NES games mainly for the North American market.) This video further elaborates on why the NES wasn't successful in this region.
Sam And Max Freelance Police is one of the most popular franchises in the PC gaming industry in America. European critics, on the other hand, tend to have a strong dislike for the series. For example, while Season 1 of the Telltale reboot was critically acclaimed in America, it was widely panned in Europe.
The Sony PSP is an odd example. Though American-made games for the PSP sell well in the United States, with the exception of certain games like Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, and Persona 3 Portable, the JRPGs do not sell as well. Perhaps as a result, while new games of all kinds are still being produced in Japan, in North America it is considered a dying market.
The Mass Effect games while extremely popular in the West did poorly in Japan, not helped by the fact that the first game was an Xbox exclusive; one of the most common criticisms from Japan was that "There are too many options and it isn't clear which one is the correct one".
Which is probably a perfect illustration of one of the main reasons why JRP Gs typically don't do very well in the West (no options whatsoever).
In India, there was mass protest over Clone High's portrayal of Gandhi as a womanizing party-freak, where in America he has achieved meme status. He wasn't actually meant to be the real Gandhi anyway, but a clone who acted that way because he had to live down the intense pressure put on him from being the clone of such a great man. Apparently for a lot of Indians, though, the irreverence in his portrayal was just a bit too strong.
There was an episode of Ed Edd N Eddy called "Shoo Ed" that lampshaded this, where the Eds train Johnny to be the most annoying person in the world so they can charge the kids to get rid of him. However Rolf, the immigrant kid practically falls in love with him. Even taking his belching in stride: "You are full of pickles and beets today, my friend." Double D's response to this is the page quote.
This has happened to the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Japan. While the 1987 Turtles were very popular back then, the Japanese audiences were expecting the newer Turtles to be like the 1987 Turtles and got Darker and Edgier Turtles instead. The newer cartoon didn't catch on and 52 episodes were dubbed before it got canceled.
An in-universe example in The Critic when Jay's writing staff said the first two Ghostchasers films didn't do well in Italy (not saying much that Jay hated those films) after Italians discovered that the title translated to Your Mother Has a Hairy Back and rioted by throwing bricks and using Michaelangelo's David as a battering ram. Also, the Ghostchasers underpants didn't do as well in Mexico as hoped, but we don't get information as to why.
