Never Accepted In His Hometown / Real Life

Examples of being Never Accepted in His Hometown in Real Life.

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Comedy

• English stand-up comic Al Pitcher, immensely popular in his adoptive Sweden but barely lukewarm in England (to the point that he has a Swedish, but not an English Wikipedia page).
• During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Benny Hill's comedy shows were an international hit due to the risqué bathroom humor, and absence of any dialogue. In his home country England, his comedic talent was never met with much respect and most Englishmen were even embarrassed by his popularity. His shows haven't been shown on British television since his death in 1992.
• Irish comedian Dave Allen became successful in the UK and gained some attention in other English-speaking countries. By contrast, his comedy was controversial in Ireland because of his satire of the Catholic church.

Writers and Poets

• Dante Alighieri was Florence's Butt-Monkey (when his natal city declared an amnesty for all the exiled politicians, he was the only one not included). He begged all his life to return, but he never could. He died in Ravenna in 1321. When they realized Dante was the greatest modern Italian poet, Florence came to regret Dante's exile and made repeated requests for the return of his remains. The custodians of the body at Ravenna refused to comply, at one point going so far as to conceal the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Nevertheless, in 1829, a tomb was built for him in Florence in the basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante's body remaining in Ravenna, far from the land he loved so dearly. In June 2008, Florence passed a motion rescinding Dante's exile.
• Likewise, James Joyce is celebrated in Ireland today as a national hero. For most of his life, however, Ireland regarded him as persona non grata.
• The Grapes of Wrath was burned in John Steinbeck's hometown, and when he moved back there he wasn't treated well because everyone thought he was a communist. It's gotten better though as he is now a celebrated hero there; the town is home to The Steinbeck Center, the Steinbeck festival is held every year, and he even has a library named after him.
• Dutch people are always baffled by how non-Dutch people cite the "boy putting his finger into the hole of the dike to save the town / day" story at them as if this is part of Dutch culture. Non-Dutch people seem to think this is an established fairy tale / fable in the Netherlands (or worse, actual Real Life events that happened) while it's not. The origins of this fable / fairy tale are unclear, but the author who first formally put it into literature, is American, and the story is much more well-known outside of the Netherlands (in particular, in the U.S.A.) than within it.

Music and Musicians

Genres

• The entire Genre of Techno was founded in Detroit, MI; this is not widely known because techno was largely ignored at the time of its creation in America. It barely took root until producers went to Europe, where it exploded. While Techno has gained some recognition in Detroit, it pales in comparison to the attention R&B, Hip-Hop and Motown receive. To this day Techno still remains more popular abroad than at home.
• This trope can also apply to the Metal genre. The pioneering bands were mostly either American or English but since the mid-'90s many of the best bands are either Nordic (Nightwish, Amon Amarth, Dimmu Borgir) or Continental European (Rammstein, Behemoth).

Performers

• In the '90, Eurodance duo 2 Unlimited received a good amount of success around the world, except in their native Netherlands where the typical reaction was "Meh."
• Singer Anastasia is much more popular in Europe and Asia than her native United States, so much so that you'd probably be hard-pressed to find many Americans that have heard of her.
• Andy Gibb's "Shadow Dancing" was a No. 1 hit in the U.S. but never made the Top 40 in his birth country of Britain, and only got to #11 in Australia, where he was raised.^note Though Andy was born in the UK, the Gibb family moved to Australia when Andy was 6 months old, and he was based in the U.S. for most of his career. This was at least better than another one of his American No. 1s, "Thicker Than Water", which never made the British chart at all (it got to #13 in Australia). Gibb's one song that reached #1 in both the U.S. and Australia, "I Just Want to Be Your Everything", only got to #26 in the UK. On the other hand, his highest-charting UK single, "An Everlasting Love" (#10), got to #5 in the US but failed to make the top 50 in Australia.
• The Swedish eurodance artist Basshunter is hated beyond belief in his home country, yet fairly popular everywhere else.
• Björk. She's legendary everywhere in the Euro-American sphere … except for Iceland, where many people know her from childhood and know her family well. Many Icelanders would prefer that she went away to one of these places where people love her and that foreigners would stop asking about her. (Iceland is a nation, sure, but its small population makes it more of a hometown.)
• As an Anglo-Irish singer-songwriter (albeit born in Buenos Aires), Chris de Burgh was generally never popular in the UK (or in the US), other than a few hits such as "Don't Pay the Ferryman" and "The Lady in Red", which both gained exposure on MTV. He has, however, long been popular in mainland European countries, especially in Norway, as well as in Brazil and in Iran.
• This was the case for Def Leppard in the UK for quite some time as while there was some early buzz and excitement around them, UK audiences turned hostile once the band recorded the song "Hello America" seeing it as the band betraying them and selling out to the USA (to the point where the audience pelted them with garbage while they were performing in the Reading Festival in 1980). From then on the band produced multiple top ten hits in the U.S. and it wasn't until the release of Hysteria over a decade later that the band finally scored a top ten hit in their home country with "Animal" and audiences back home finally accepted them once again.
• Australian singer/actor Jason Donovan was popular worldwide, except North America, Italy, and of course, his homeland, Australia. He used to have a decent popularity in his homeland due to his acting career and starring in Neighbours, but then, as his pop career rose, many people in Australia thought that his music was "an embarrassment". Due to this, many of his songs barely played on the radio and didn't reach the top ten in Australia and his fourth album was never released there, despite the songs in the album being more mature than his previous three albums.
• Lenny Kravitz, despite being one of the biggest musicians of the 90's, has noted that he has received a chilly reception from his own African-American community throughout his career, due to performing rock rather than R&B or hip-hop. While he's collaborated with several urban artists over the years, he's never been invited to the BET Awards and they almost never play his music, and it was ten years into his career before he first appeared on the cover of VIBE magazine in 2001.
• Limp Bizkit was once one of the most popular bands in the United States and helped make Nu Metal a mainstream genre. Unfortunately for them, it didn't last and they've plummeted to near-obscurity apart from a few jokes. However, they still remain popular overseas, particularly in continental Europe and South America. It's to the point where they no longer tour the U.S. due to poor show attendances but still regularly tour everywhere but North America- but for the last few years, they have finally started touring in the states again.
• As Todd in the Shadows pointed out in his "One Hit Wonderland" video on Mr. Big, this is often the case with many Hair Metal bands in Japan as the popularity of Visual Kei leads to bands like Mr Big and Cats n Boots having significant crossover appeal amongst Japanese audiences (to the point where both Mr Big and Cats n Boots had successful reunion tours in Japan) and also because Japan is one of the few places in the world where CD sales are still pretty big. While Mr Big's popularity in the U.S. faded away after "To Be With You" it was just getting started in Japan and endures there to this day. Cats n Boots(a bit of an odd case, as two out of four band members were from Japan originally) meanwhile didn't score any major hits in the U.S. and their albums barely charted at all, however their E.P. was one of the best selling independent releases in Japan, going straight to #1 on the indie-music charts and their official debut "Kicked and Klawed" debuted at #3 on the Billboard charts in Japan and actually surpassed the sales of records of more popular bands such as Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Richard Marx and also reaching top 10 status in the UK.
• 1980s British technopop group Naked Eyes had two huge hits in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand with "Always Something There to Remind Me" (itself a cover of a onetime UK No. 1 hit for Sandie Shaw) and the original "Promises, Promises". Yet neither song came close to seriously denting the British pop chart.
• The British rock band The Outfield, best known for the #6 hit "Your Love", never charted in their homeland, but had a lot of hits in the U.S. They were actually specifically marketed towards an American audience because of their sound (they were mainly successful during the mid to late '80s, and their style was mainly New Wave Music and Power Pop/pop rock). Despite being British, and thus, probably being more familiar with Soccer, the band's names (both "The Outfield" and their original name, "The Baseball Boys") and a few of their album names had baseball references, and the band's guitarist John Spinks, apparently preferred American sports like that and American football because he perceived them as "cleaner" than British football (even using "Soccer" to refer to it as such).
• Variation with Rammstein: One of the (if not the) world's most famous Industrial Metal bands, with sold-out concerts in many parts of the world... yet they can't catch a break in their native Germany. As Paul Landers, their rhythm guitarist, said:
  "We have such a bad reputation in Germany it can’t get any worse elsewhere."
• Though quite successful elsewhere, Sarah Brightman is not very well-liked in her native Britain. There she is still seen as the ex-Hot Gossip dancer made into a star by Andrew Lloyd Webber. His divorce from his first wife to marry Brightman received a lot of negative publicity at the time it happened. Over thirty years later (and long after Lloyd Webber and Brightman's own divorce), the British press still has not moved past it and will not take the soprano seriously. Likely for this reason, Brightman rarely tours there, much to the dismay of the British fans she does have.
• Scatman John was one of the few musicians from the eurodance movement of the mid-'90s to come from the United States. His debut single, "Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)", went to #1 in numerous European countries and performed well in others still, yet it ironically did not do well in America, only reaching #60 on the Billboard Hot 100. Reasoning for this could be that unlike most eurodance hit singles at the time, "Scatman" was a novelty hit performed by a middle-aged stutterer, in contrast to the young male rapper/female singer setup that was customary for eurodance acts. With a few exceptions, novelty dance songs rarely performed well in the United States from the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal in 1990 up until advent of the Spice Girls in 1997.
• Scooter is widely successful both inside Germany (where they are from - no it's not just one guy, the bleached blonde with the megaphone is called H. P. Baxxter) and outside of it, but they enjoy so many detractors in Germany that you have to wonder how they get any copies of their music sold like, at all.
• Folk singer Tracy Chapman, like Lenny Kravitz mentioned above, has a fan base that is mostly white, like the genre as a whole. Black musicians have in turn often disparaged her; Chuck D said in an interview during the late 1980s, when she was selling out shows on college campuses that "black people cannot feel anything" in her music.

Philosophers and Religious Leaders

• Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was born somewhere in the Indian subcontinent (probably Nepal, possibly modern-day India) sometime around 563 BC, and Buddhism was born as a major religion in India before spreading to much of Central, Eastern, and Southeast Asia. By the 13th century, however, Buddhism had died out in the Buddha's homeland, being subsumed by Hinduism (who co-opted the Buddha as another incarnation of Vishnu) or replaced by Islam.
• Christianity is on the way to become this on the Holy Land, falling under 2% of the population in 2023, and not being particularly better off in the Near East as a whole.
• Karl Marx was a German by birth and spent much of his life in England. So naturally, the country that adopted Marx's ideas was... Russia. Amusingly, Marx's own theory predicted Russia was not economically advanced enough to have a communist revolution... though given how said revolution turned out, he was probably right on that count.

Politicians

Americas

• Ladies and gentlemen, The Presidents of the United States.
  • U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his home nation borders on obscurity at best and dislike at worst. Conservatives and libertarians see him as the President who started the growth of the federal government's power and the "imperial Presidency" in the 20th century. Modern liberals and progressives are divided on his legacy, celebrating his role in supporting antitrust law and protections for workers and consumers but also deploring him as the man who segregated the civil service, got America into World War I (after promising he wouldn't), and suppressed anti-war dissidents, and instead prefer to lionize Franklin D. Roosevelt. His PR is much better in Europe, where his "Fourteen Points", support for democracy, self-determination, and the League of Nations, and opposition to imperialism were seen as an idealistic attempt to create a more equitable Europe in the aftermath of the war. In the former Czechoslovakia, for example, he is considered a national hero of sorts for championing their nation's independence, and statues of him are a very common sight.
  • Herbert Hoover is a complicated example. His international legacy is one of great acts of charity, especially relief efforts during and after World War I, leading to him being called "The Great Humanitarian". Stateside, however, his presidency was long vilified for his inability to handle The Great Depression; on the other hand, his charity work both before and after his term have led to him being at least partially Vindicated by History.
  • Two successive presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, are victims of this. Internationally, Carter is best known for his work for Habitat for Humanity (he was actively building homes well into his 90s), while Reagan is best known for his opposition to the Soviet Union, culminating in his "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech. Back home, opinion on the two is decidedly mixed. Carter's Presidency is remembered as a well-intentioned but ineffectual one characterized by economic malaise and several foreign policy humiliations, and while Reagan was beloved in his lifetime, his legacy today is a controversial one, with conservatives viewing him as one of the best Presidents of the 20th century and liberals and progressives viewing him as a disaster.
• Late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (whose son Justin is now the PM) was both widely loved and widely hated by Canadians for a variety of reasons, although his vision of a bilingual country based on individual rights above all else has become widely accepted by Canadians living outside Quebec. Inside Quebec, Trudeau was almost universally hated by francophone Quebecers, who have always seen themselves as being distinct within Canada and now loathe Trudeau due to his opposition to distinct status for his home province and his native people. That being said, he is less vocally hated in Quebec in modern times ^note To the point that his son Justin helped bring the Liberals their strongest results in Quebec in a very long time in the 2015 Federal Election, and that the separatist movement is considerably less popular than it used to be, to the point that the Bloc Québécois, previously the dominant party in the province, had fallen to fourth place in 2015, behind the Liberals, NDP, and even the previously unpopular (within Quebec) Conservative Party.
  • His son Justin is in an interesting position. Justin seems to be more popular in the USA and in Europe among left-wingers (and even centrists) than in Canada, where while he remains very popular in Ontario, Atlantic Canada, and the Territories (and to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Quebec, making this also a downplayed example in the latter), he has been divisive amongst the political spectrum. While Conservatives and right-of-centre Canadians obviously dislike Trudeau, the New Democratic Party and its followers are not too fond of him either. Mainly regarding that his popularity and power in politics was a huge blow for the NDP and social democrats, due to the centre-left gravitating towards him, especially after the Orange Wave^note where in 2011, the New Democratic Party became the second-biggest party for the first time, with an initially collapsed Liberal Party across Canada and Bloc Québécois in Quebec. ended. And to say nothing of his unpopularity in Prairies, especially Alberta (though that may be a case of a regional version of Americans Hate Tingle). That being said, there is still a sense of Enemy Mine between Liberal and NDP supporters (and the Green Party) agreeing on multiple positions, mainly agreeing on progressive policies (like improving LGBTQIA+ rights, supporting alternative energy, and raising the minimum wage).

Europe

• The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is internationally seen as an important stateswoman. TIME Magazine even listed her among the most influential people of the 20th century. In the United Kingdom, however, she is a highly divisive if not unpopular figure. In a list of the 100 Worst Britons she was number 3 (compare this to her position in the list with 100 Greatest Britons: #16). The point was driven across after her death, when some people in England hailed her as a hero, while an equal amount of others actually celebrated her death in the streets. Just how unpopular is she in Britain, you ask? On the week of her death, "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" was the number one song for UK iTunes.
• The same goes for Mikhail Gorbachev, who is internationally respected for his reforms in the former USSR, which brought the Cold War to an end. Yet in Russia itself he is not held in high esteem because the poverty rate of his country grew quite a lot after the USSR fell. And some older Russians feel that they lost their global greatness after the mighty Soviet Union collapsed.
• Similar to the above-mentioned politicians, Germany's Helmut Kohl, reunifier of Germany and co-creator of a close Europe is hailed everywhere as one of the great Statesmen. Yet in Germany he is more importantly considered the guy who publicly declared that the economic well-being of his already well-to-do friends is more important than the law and who has been bribed repeatedly, using "Jewish inheritances" of all things as an excuse where the money came from. However, this is hindsight - he won 4 elections (eventually being voted out in 1998, although frankly the last two of those elections were based heavily on support for Kohl in the former East Germany, where the voters liked Kohl for pushing for rapid unification and remained distrustful of the opposition Social Democrats for being socialists; Kohl would have lost without the East, which led many at the time to accuse him of pressing for rapid reunification to save his own political hide rather than any principle) and remains the longest-serving head of government there.
• Former Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenney enjoys a very good reputation outside Ireland as a man willing to make tough choices to restore Ireland's shattered economy. In 2012 he was lauded by Time and named 'European of the Year' by the German magazine industry. In Ireland on the other hand he is seen as meekly kowtowing to unreasonable EU budgetary constraints and satisfaction with his government usually hovered below 20%. (On the other hand, this is still better than the polling for Fianna Fáil, the party that formed the previous government...)
• Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. By the end of his presidency, he had built up a solid reputation on the international stage, but he was a hugely controversial figure at home. Of course, after he lost, the Socialist Party of his successor François Hollande began to lose support and Sarkozy's UMP began to split into factions, to the point where some called for "Sarko" to run again in 2017. He did, not that it ended up mattering—he lost in his party's primary for the 2017 presidential election.
• Current French president Emmanuel Macron is seen in a better light abroad (at least until the unusual Police Brutality at play in the 2018 Gilets Jaunes crisis was scrutinized), while his policies on the national level are deeply unpopular.

Films, Animation, TV, and Video Games

• Famed Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, up until his death, was far more popular and acclaimed in the West than in his native country and was even accused by Japanese film critics of being "too Western". When Dodes'ka-den bombed in 1970, most of his small amount of Japanese popularity and acclaim vanished completely and he was considered to be a hack that was beloved in the West for what Japanese critics believed was mere exotica and over-rating by their American counterparts. After his death, his Japanese reputation increased dramatically.
• Irish people tend to be like this with their own culture, particularly from the mid-nineties onwards and especially with Irish cinema. It's only after something has started to be popular abroad that they're willing to admit they like it. The films Once, The Secret of Kells and Zonad were each seen by about ten people and a stray dog on their original releases, and only started to receive any attention after they earned raves abroad. This may have something to do with the way British media dominates there.
• Paul Watson is not liked in many parts of Canada. Especially the seal-hunting areas.
• Scottish actor Michael E. Rodgers was an obscure and less well-known actor from the start of his career, but by the time Thomas and the Magic Railroad was released in the UK, he was somewhat unpopular there due to stealing the spotlight from the engines, alongside with the other live-action characters, even though he didn't have that much screen time, as he first appeared in the middle of the movie. Although, as years went by, the hate dies away and the character he played in the movie was loved by some people, but there are still some people in the UK who bash on him to this day, but they are really obscure.
• While Hercules was hated in Greece and well-liked everywhere else, Pocahontas was panned in its home market of America and decently-liked in other countries. Perhaps justified in these cases because the natives realize just how wrong the filmmakers got their iconic stories.
• The exact same thing happened with Mulan. The movie is generally well-regarded in the West, but it is hated in China. Chinese audiences hate the Broadway-style songs (except "Reflection"), they despise the character of Mushu (the dragon sidekick voiced by Eddie Murphy), and they feel that the movie presents a Theme Park Version of Chinese culture. When Disney released the trailer for the live-action Mulan, Western audiences complained about the lack of Mushu and the fact that it's not a musical, but Disney's intention this time around is to have the movie meet Chinese expectations. It's their legend, after all.
  • The live action remake was also badly received in China anyway.
• Olaf's Frozen Adventure was hated by most American viewers because the short focused on Olaf, considered one of the less popular characters, and because it was a very long short that played in front of a highly anticipated Pixar movie. However, in the United Kingdom, where Frozen is more popular than it is in the United States, the short was enjoyed by everyone who saw it. It helps that over there, it was shown with a re-release of Frozen, meaning that one could leave after watching only the new material rather than having to sit through two new films as was the case in the United States. (Those who saw it in the United States when it got its TV airing also gave it better feedback.) It was also popular in South Africa, to the point where the short is still playing there despite a TV release being announced!
• While South Park was a massive hit worldwide, the cartoon was not well-received back in the setting (and duo Trey Parker and Matt Stone's home state) of Colorado until 2008, where it took eleven years for the state to proudly embrace their setting. In fact, nowadays, It IS the most popular adult cartoon in the state, according to this map.
• Chainsaw Man is popular worldwide, but has a divisive reputation in Japan. It drew backlash from Japanese viewers for being "too western." They even started a petition to reboot the anime with a new director. It did very poor in its' first week of home video sales, but given the series' popularity elsewhere, this is just a bump in the road.
• Arcaea, a mobile rhythm game by the U.K.-based team lowiro, is a smash hit in Asia, including in Japan where one of lowiro's satellite offices is located. However, it is not particularly popular amongst British rhythm game players. lowiro also has core team members in the United States, but the American rhythm game community isn't quite keen on the game either. Most American and British rhythm game players lean more towards dance games and BEMANI games, seeing mobile games in general as "not a real gaming platform", in contrast to Asian gamers who prefer mobile games either because they lend better to a busy lifestyle or because they are a better fit for poor players who are skittish about spending money on a game console, and then the equivalent of 30-60 USD each for traditoinal-business-model games, while mobile games use a device one is quite likely to already have as an essential everyday carry device and often either have a low up-front cost or are free to start (granted, these games make money through often-controversial microtransactions, but the fact that "free-to-play" games can be played at all without spending money is a big point of appeal to low-income gamers). It doesn't help that the game is generally seen as best-played on a tablet, and most people in those two countries don't consider a hundreds-of-dollars/pounds tablet just for a few games to be a worthy investment compared to a gaming PC or dedicated game consoles. Even when the game received a Nintendo Switch port (and thus a port on an "acceptable" home platform), it still didn't garner a lot of praise or sales, although at least it isn't as divisive at it is in Southeast Asia, where many people took to the original version of the game because it's a mobile game, and as such were upset when the Switch version was first announced.

Miscellaneous

• The Argentine soldiers who returned from the Falklands War suffered from this, in one of the most degrading demonstrations of hypocrisy and ingratitude from the same society they came. Said society was brainwashed and manipulated by the corrupt government of that era, anyways, but the ingratitude and hypocrisy are still there.
• Add to this list every single Vietnam War veteran who returned home to be sneered at, because the war they fought in was unpopular. By contrast, many, many people who do not support The War on Terror make it clear that they do care about the health and well being of the men and women who fight it. They respect the soldiers, but not the war itself.
• Following his departure for the Miami Heat in 2010, LeBron James' popularity took a huge hit in his home state of Ohio, where he previously played for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He tended to get booed whenever the Heat played the Cavs in Cleveland... but then he returned to the Cavaliers and his hometown. Fans were somewhat split on that (OK, he came back, but does that excuse his initial treason?)...until the 2016 Finals, in which he led the Cavs to the first title for any major Cleveland sports team in over 50 years.^note The city's last title had been by the Cleveland Browns in 1964. LeBron's mother wasn't even born then. He left again in 2018, this time for the Los Angeles Lakers, but got far less hatred—a combination of said title, the much more classy manner he handled this departure,^note He announced his first departure in a much-maligned hour-long special on ESPN. The second time, it was the standard press and social media release, with all of the key people being given a heads-up beforehand. and the realization even in Cleveland that the Cavs' title window had closed.
• Mobile phone operating systems:
  • Microsoft's Windows Phone OS made a considerable dent in the iOS/Android duopoly in nearly every country... except the United States. This can be attributed significantly to the amount of control American mobile operators have over the market driving most consumers to whoever will spend the most on advertising, specifically Apple and Samsung (a practice that even puts non-Samsung Android phones in a difficult position). That also makes it a case of Americans Hate Nokia. The failure of Windows Phone in the US, in fact, played a big part in Microsoft's decision to eventually discontinue it.
  • Android, too, has a bad reputation in the US that it doesn't have elsewhere. In most of the world, Android is the default mobile phone OS with market share hovering around 80%, while iPhones are seen as luxurious status symbols. In America, though, it's the iPhone that's the default while Androids, with only 45% market share, are associated chiefly with working-class and poor people and have a "ghetto" reputation as a result. Among teenagers especially, 87% use iPhones as their mobile devices. Much of the problem comes down to a bad first impression. Early versions of Android were finicky, unpolished, riddled with bugs and security flaws, and seen as generally inferior to iOS, and while every iOS device was an Apple iPhone built to a uniform standard of quality, Android phones ran (and to some extent still run) the gamut from high-end devices comparable to the iPhone to weird, gimmicky devices aimed at specialized niches to cheap Burner Phones that people only bought because they couldn't afford anything better. By the time better phones were released and the Android OS had been improved (with the 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" build in 2011 seen as its Growing the Beard moment), Apple had first-mover advantage while Android had a reputation as the low-budget version of iOS. Smartphone adoption came slightly later to the rest of the world, but late enough that the early bugs had been worked out by then, meaning that Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans were introduced to Android primarily via an experience comparable to the iPhone and typically at a lower cost.
• Video game publisher Infogrames is hated in France for making bad video games on licensed properties. This was probably one of the reasons why Infogrames nowadays uses the Atari brand, even if they were loved everywhere else for making great games such as the Rollercoaster Tycoon series and Alone in the Dark. (They also managed not to make a hash of Civilization III, though they ended up switching to the Atari brand for the expansions.)
• Business management theories of American statistician W. Edwards Deming revolutionized how Japanese corporations were run in the post World War II era but remained virtually unknown in the United States until Japanese cars and electronics began making significant inroads in the 1980s. Even then, his ideas were not implemented enthusiastically by American corporations because its tenets ran contrary to the way they were traditionally run and undermined the power of both the unions and the management by requiring them to cooperate and yield to each other in a manner that they were not accustomed to.
• Drag Queen Bebe Zahara Benet, winner of the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, is originally from Cameroon (or as Ru put it, "Camerooooooooooon!") before emigrating to the United States at 19 where she started her drag career. Cameroon is notoriously homophobic, and after Bebe's Drag Race win, she received hate mail from Cameroonians threatening to burn her alive if she ever returned. She has only occasionally been to Cameroon since then to visit family, but only as her normal male self and never to perform.
• Spam (the canned meat) is an automatic laugh line in the mainland U.S. as a real-life example of Mystery Meat, to the point where it has a trope of its own. In the U.K., Monty Python's Flying Circus mocked it in a beloved sketch. It also became a term for unwanted email. But in Hawaii, Guam, and other tropical places, it's a staple due to its long shelf life in the heat. In the Philippines, "Spamsilog" is a staple breakfast dish consisting of garlic fried rice, fried egg, and spam.
• While Brazilian Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello has built a respectable, long-running career in the category, having held the record of most races started for ten years^note Kimi Raikkonen broke his mark in the 2021 Qatar GP, in his home country many spectators (mostly the casual ones) regard him as a joke, complete with memes painting him as an outright slowpoke - an unfair reputation which came, first and foremost, from being the closest thing to a successor to Ayrton Senna^note who was a friend and mentor to Barrichello the country had for a long time, but also from the staggering amount of retires he racked up throughout the 90s (he only finished three of the 16 races of the 1997 season, for example^note although that is more because the Stewart cars were badly tuned than anything else; Jan Magnussen, his teammate that year, finished five races, but never got into the scoring zone while Barrichello managed a second place in Monaco) and, once he moved to Ferrari, being forced to play second fiddle to Michael Schumacher (not helped by the infamous 2002 Austrian GP finish line incident). And, since most Brazilians only know Top Gear as that racing game on the Super NES, virtually no one knows of his victory over The Stig.
• The Pac-Man World series never made much of an impact in Japan, and faded into obscurity (infact, you will barely find Japanese content related to these games on the Internet). It may explain why the third entry never got a Japanese release, or for that matter, why not a single element from this series made it into the Super Smash Bros. series^note  And no, Pac-Man's limbed design doesn't count as it is Older Than They Think . However, it had a much better reception internationally, to the point of becoming a Cult Classic, as well gaining a devoted fanbase waiting for a fourth entry or a remake/remaster (the latter of which the first game eventually received in 2022).
• Josephine Baker was ignored and briefly hated in America because she was black and tried to take on William Randolph Hearst, but was revered as a goddess in France because of her pioneering dance style. Her working as a spy for the French Resistance during World War II (which earned her a Croix de Guerre, making her the first American-born woman to receive the honor) didn't hurt her reputation either.
• Charles Dawson was hailed everywhere as a great scientist after he discovered the Piltdown Man. In Sussex, his home, hardly anyone paid any respect to him. Of course, once the Piltdown Man (along with a lot of his less famous "discoveries") was exposed as a forgery, everyone realized the guys simply knew him too well.
• During the '80s, the Boston Celtics won several championships and were by far the city's most popular sports team except with the city's black population due to the fact most of their biggest stars (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, etc.) were all white. Magic Johnson, who played for the Los Angeles Lakers, the team's most hated rival, recalled running into a group of black teenagers when the Lakers arrived in Boston for a game and being shocked when they told him they hated the Celtics and were rooting for him and his teammates.
• In an unusual example of this happening over time, the British luxury brand Burberry had its reputation destroyed in their native UK since the mid-2000s due to the proliferation of knockoffs causing the brand to be embraced by the "chav" and soccer hooligan culture. Elsewhere, they are still a strong luxury brand.
• In most of the world, the American mobile messenger app WhatsApp is the standard for instant messaging, with over a billion and a half users. There are, however, two major countries that it has never been able to crack: China, which banned it in favor of the homegrown alternative WeChat, and the United States itself, where its userbase plateaued at less than 30% of the population. The reason for this comes down to the history of telecommunications development in the US versus the rest of the world.
  • In most of the world, SMS messaging was often prohibitively expensive thanks to cell phone companies charging out the nose to use it. What's more, international charges regularly added up in regions of the world filled with small countries and lots of national borders. Finally, for people living in authoritarian countries specifically, WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption made it possible for people to discuss illegal or controversial subjects away from the prying eyes of law enforcement and state regulators. In these countries, WhatsApp's much lower cost and encryption became a godsend.
  • In the US, however, a perfect storm of factors stalled mass adoption in favor of SMS messaging, Apple's iMessage, and even Meta's own separate Messenger app. First, cell phone companies in the '00s used unlimited SMS texting plans to attract customers, which quickly became the standard, while data (which WhatsApp runs on) became the thing that they charged out the nose to use in the '10s. Second, in a country as big as the US, most people only rarely travel to other countries and face international charges. Third, while most of the developing world leapfrogged over desktop computers and wound up first connected to the internet by smartphones, the US had been the first country to embrace the internet, and so there was already a flurry of competing desktop-oriented services, some of which (like Messenger) migrated to phones. Finally, the purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook (now Meta^note The company changed its name in 2021, though the Facebook social network itself still exists as a subsidiary), a company infamous in the US for data privacy scandals, in 2014 meant that many Americans who were specifically interested in security didn't trust it. The things that made WhatsApp so enticing in the rest of the world were not in play in the US, and many people didn't see the point of a separate app for a function that their phones already had built-in. The largest group of Americans that uses WhatsApp is the exception that proves the rule: immigrant communities, who use it to remain in contact with family and friends in their countries of origin.

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