Overshadowed By Controversy / Anime & Manga

• Formerly one of the most popular and biggest dubbing companies in America, 4Kids Entertainment is now primarily remembered for two things: their heavily Bowdlerised English dubs that frequently bordered on straight-up Macekre (most infamously, awkwardly writing around if not outright removing death), combined with the dubs themselves making questionable writing changes and removing any traces of Japanese culture from their source materials, and the lawsuit filed out by TV Tokyo for using unlicensed footage of Yu-Gi-Oh!, which helped descend the company into bankruptcy.^note The company actually remerged in 2012, but filed for another bankruptcy in 2016 before shutting down entirely a year afterwards.
• If you weren't a reader of act-age during its serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump, you most likely only know it as that one manga that was swiftly Cut Short, scrubbed off from Shonen Jump corporate history and withdrawn from circulation worldwide in August 2020 after its writer, Tatsuya Matsuki, was arrested for groping middle school girls.
• The manga The Beautiful Skies of Houou High barely made a blip in the U.S. and is generally despised both by fans and its own English publishers. Why? Because it's a manga that takes the Cure Your Gays route far too seriously, bringing along with it a whole mountain of Values Dissonance regarding lesbianism and gender roles. The English publishers treat it as an Old Shame and don't ever bring it up anymore.
• Bunny Drop started out as an innocent story about a young man taking in what he thought was his illegitimate half-aunt after his grandfather died and learning how to be a responsible parent to an abandoned child. Then the Time Skip happened where a now grown up Rin realizes she has feelings for Daikichi, the father figure who raised her, which he reciprocates. Chapter 54 would handwave this issue by having Rin's deadbeat mother reveal to Rin that she was adopted by Daikichi's grandfather and they really aren't blood relatives. As a result, many fans insist that the post-timeskip never happened, while the anime and Live Action Adaptations would omit it entirely. It's to a point that the term "Usagi Dropped" was born to refer and warn people in case another series ended the same way as Bunny Drop did.
• Cheat Slayer is infamous not just because of its immensely violent, sexual, and problematic content, but in how it got cancelled after a single published chapter due to accusations of Shallow Parody that are closer to straight-up plagiarism of other isekai protagonists, who are portrayed exclusively as horrible, monstrous people that are nothing like their original counterparts, than any of the manga's actual story merits.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball Z Kai was just reaching the end of its initial run when accusations of plagiarism concerning Kenji Yamamoto's soundtrack struck, and all of said music had to be taken out in every re-run and re-release and replaced with pieces from Shunsuke Kikuchi's score for the original series. While Yamamoto's soundtrack for the series was already divisive, its legally obligated censorship only made things worse, with a new base emerging to try and defend Yamamoto's plagiarism.
  • In Latin America, Kai tends to be best remembered for the very negative reception its original run had due to massive censorship^note Toei used the censored version commissioned by Funimation for Nicktoons, instead of the original Japanese version like the one used for the Latin American Spanish dub of Dragon Ball Z. and, more importantly, the fact that almost all of the original cast, whose work reached cult status in the region, were replaced. The fallout from this led Toei to restructure their Latin American division and make it so that, in The Final Chapters, where possible, all characters were voiced by their original voice actors.^note The few exceptions were either due to retirement or death.
  • Dragon Ball Super was hit with this early on, thanks to the decision of making the first two sagas adaptations of the two canon Dragon Ball Z movies, which was seen as very repetitive and invoking It Was His Sled, especially since they had been released very recently at the time of Super's debut, and the notoriously awful animation early on, especially with Episode 5, ended up overshadowing any of the content. The series later improved, but the whole "rehashing the movies" and quality early on remains a stain.
  • Dragon Ball Z gets a lot of scrutiny from American videophiles because of the Digital Destruction that has plagued all home video releases since the mid-2000s, including, among other things, cropping the whole series to 16:9. Even the first 4:3 release in a long while, made from film elements Funimation happened to still have, got flack for excessive DVNR. It's gotten to the point where videophiles have gone on record as wanting to seek out the seven Dragon Balls to wish that Funimation would simply import and upscale the far superior-looking Dragon Box DVD releases issued by Toei.
• Eagle Riders was a dub of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman's two sequel series, Gatchaman II, and Gatchaman Fighter, produced by Saban Entertainment. Almost all discussions of the series typically revolved around the numerous changes made to the show's story, resulting in several Dub-Induced Plot Hole. The most infamous revolves around Gel Sadra, or Mallanox, who was initially referred to as a male creation of Cybercon (Leader X), then was abruptly changed into being the son of Lukan (Berg Katse), then had her original backstory of being the artificially aged daughter of Dr. Francine Aikens (Dr. Sylvie Pandora) reinstated... only to then have her death scene be completely rewritten into Cybercon further altering her into Happy Boy (Count Egobossler, a separate character in the original version).
• The ecchi manga and OVA Eiken was near-universally despised by viewers and critics, and has made virtually no impact otherwise... well, except for the fact that the girl with the largest breasts in an already exaggerated World of Buxom is only 11 years old.
• Elfen Lied tells a story of an evolutionary species from humanity called Diclonii, the persecution they endure from humans, and their murderous vendetta against humans. However, it is far more known for its excessive use of gore and nudity, far more than is necessary for such a story.
• Idolmaster: Xenoglossia happens to be subject to this from The Idolmaster fandom because, rather than it be about idols like its source material, it was instead a mecha anime. Most of the cast being subject to Adaptational Personality Change as well as the major Adaptational Villainy given to Chihaya (and to a lesser extent, Yukiho) left a bad taste in the mouths of fans of the franchise. While the anime itself has been Vindicated by History, fans would rather not treat it as part of the Idolmaster franchise.
• I Think I Turned My Childhood Friend Into a Girl is a fairly straightforward BL Otokonoko manga, but what is it most known for? A particularly disastrous Translation with an Agenda on the part of Seven Seas Entertainment that changed the gender identity of Hiura, one of the main characters, from a cis boy to a trans girl, leading to accusations of perpetuating the stereotype that feminine men are automatically trans and sparking serious debate amongst readers about whether the original Japanese text supported interpretations of Hiura as transgender to begin with. Even after a more accurate translation was quickly released in response to the backlash, the stigma of the initial translation still remains to this day.
• Kemono Friends is mainly known nowadays by the Troubled Production its second season endured, including the director being pushed out and the blame for everything being shunted over to the voice cast, who had next to nothing to do with the trouble, among other things. The backlash to this, including the harassment of Tomason's staff by disgruntled fans (including an incident where the animation director's name was used to fraudulently sign the studio on for multiple paid online services, resulting in getting swamped with emails and phone calls asking for info) and the massive dislike bombing every episode got on Niconico in protest, is likely not to be forgotten as well.
• If anybody in the West who isn't a big anime fan brings up Kimba the White Lion, chances are it's to talk about the many accusations that The Lion King plagiarized the story.
• Kinnikuman is best known for the controversy surrounding the character Brocken Jr., who is a good guy with a Nazi-themed outfit, complete with swastikas. Due to this character, the series was pulled from broadcast in France shortly after he debuted.
• Kodomo no Jikan (A Child's Time), proposed English title Nymphet, was licensed by publisher Seven Seas Entertainment but never released in America due to its lolicon overtones. They had only seen the first book, which isn't too bad in terms of content. Then the controversy erupted. Initially, Seven Seas defended the title, but a combination of major book chains refusing to stock it and their reading the later volumes, which come very close to violating the PROTECT Act, caused them to change their mind and drop it.
• Koi Kaze is well known for being about an Age-Gap Romance between a 27-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl, who are also siblings who were separated at a young age. Even though the series covers the topic more maturely and realistically than one might expect, it's still controversial due to the premise.
• Ask anyone who has heard of the anime adaptation of Kokoro Connect, and you'll hear it be associated with Mitsuhiro Ichiki's controversial treatment during the promotional phase. He was tricked into giving a fake audition for a character that didn't exist, embarrassed himself on TV, and the producer said he didn't regret any of it. This angered many people, including some voice actors.
• Kosuke Fujishima is well known for creating Ah! My Goddess and being the character designer for Sakura Wars and Tales Series. However in 2017, his divorce with his first wife and later engagement to a much younger woman ended up overshadowing his work. It wouldn't be until 2020 with Tales of Crestoria until he was back to doing character designs.
• Kuni Ga Moeru, a series dealing with a family caught up in the Second Sino-Japanese War and later the War in Asia and the Pacific. The series is best known, however, for its lost chapter, dealing with one of the main characters having to witness the Nanking Massacre after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. The mangaka, Hiroshi Motomiya, pulled exactly zero punches in depicting the event. This caused massive backlash when the chapter was published in Weekly Young Jump. Much of the controversy centered on the illustration of a photo, based on a genuine (though its veracity is disputed) photograph, allegedly depicting a Japanese soldier posing by a Chinese woman he had just raped. Due to liberties taken by the artist, as well as criticism concerning the provenance and veracity of the photograph, Motomiya was accused by elements from the nationalist right of trying to libel the Imperial Japanese Army. Shueisha, the publisher, responded by apologizing and having Motomiya putting the series on hiatus and removing that specific chapter from being republished in tankouban form. This caused more outrage from the other side who then began accusing Shueisha of whitewashing history and caving to the right wing of the LDP and then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who had resumed Prime Ministerial visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in 2001. It didn't help that said visits had ignited protests and riots in China and South Korea, due to infamous World War II figures being commemorated at the shrine.^note In another evocation of this exact same trope, the shrine was established after the Meiji Restoration to house the kami, or spirits, of Japanese who had fallen in war. In that case, it was merely intended as a spiritual Arlington Cemetary. However, in 1978, in a secret midnight ceremony that even Emperor Hirohito did not know about, the kami of the executed "Class-A" war criminals including wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo were enshrined. Once Hirohito found out, he declared his disapproval and that he would refuse to visit the shrine evermore, a policy his successors have followed to this day.
• Kuroko's Basketball is infamous as the manga that was targeted by domestic terrorists and is at least as well-known for the Fanwork Ban, which has since been lifted, and removal of merchandise that resulted from the poison threats as it is for its artistic merits and accomplishments. It doesn't help that the terror threats dominated the news in anime circles for over a year. To this day, it's still not known why the suspect who was caught targeted the manga and everyone associating with it even tangentially, or even if he had acted alone in his threats, but it's speculated a personal grudge against author Fujimaki Tadatoshi may have had something to do with it.
• Lotte no Omocha! (Lotte's Toy!) features a female protagonist who is a succubus princess of a fantasy kingdom. Well, OK, nothing bad about it so far until you learn that the female protagonist is also 10 years old, she's expected to start creating her own male harem as part of her royal duties, and she will die if she doesn't drink Life Essence from male beings. It went about as well as you'd expect, and the sheer concentrated lolicon on display is all it's known for.
• The anime adaptation of Love Lab is most well-known for a scene in episode 8 where the main characters attempt to pay tribute to black celebrities by dressing in brown makeup and acting out affectionate parodies of them. While it didn't cause much of a fuss in Japan, the scene caused an uproar in the West thanks to its resemblance to blackface (complete with large, bright lips) and Minstrel Shows. While the intention of the scene is about as well known as its execution, the heavy Values Dissonance of the latter ensured that it would be far better-known than anything else in the series, to the point where "love lab blackface" and "love lab anime racist" are still popularly-suggested search results on Google in a neutral setting.
• The Love Live! franchise is becoming increasingly known for bad press generated by badly-behaving fans. The worst incident was a vandalism incident involving manhole covers bearing the images of the main characters in June 2018, which resulted in the manhole covers being pulled indefinitely.
• The Macross franchise is better known for the sheer amount of legal trouble that it was involved with in the United States. To explain, Big West Advertising, the primary sponsor of the franchise, partnered with Tatsunoko Production to help secure financial funding for the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which gave the latter the rights to the international distribution of the series. Tatsunoko would then license Macross, along with two of its own productions, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, to Harmony Gold USA, who reworked all three of them into a single narrative for syndication purposes: Robotech. Through this, Harmony Gold would claim all the rights to the Macross franchise in the United States. This has lead to Macross producer Studio Nue and the aforementioned Big West to pursue legal action, and has resulted in most of the installments in the franchise never leaving Japan until 2021, when a deal was finally made with the two parties.
• Perhaps the one thing most people remember about Midori (Shōjo Tsubaki), the 1992 film adaptation of Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, is the fact that it was banned by the Japanese government for 14 years because of its graphic depictions of child molestation and animal abuse, rather than being known for its actual plot or the fact that it overtly depicts child molestation and animal abuse in a scathingly negative light.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion became embroiled in controversy when Netflix picked it up for streaming in 2019, as it was completely redubbed and retranslated from the ground up at the insistence of Studio Khara. The announcement of a redub itself was hotly contested by fans of the original ADV Films dub, especially since none of the original English cast returned, but the new translation as a whole became an even greater subject of scrutiny when it was discovered that it was far more literal to the extent of Bowdlerising a number of fan favorite lines from the more Woolseyism-rich ADV dub — including toning down the script's hints at a possible romantic connection between Shinji and Kaworu (e.g. changing most instances of "love" to "like" and replacing Kaworu's description of Shinji as "worthy of love" with "worthy of my grace"), which many LGBT+ and allied fans quickly decried as homophobic. Because of this, it's become difficult to discuss Evangelion in the west without bringing up Khara's stricter handling of it, and despite Netflix having nothing to do with the changes, the controversy surrounding the retranslation is still touted as a microcosm of longstanding issues with their poor treatment of media from outside the Anglosphere.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • The episode "Computer Warrior Porygon"^note more commonly known and referred to as "Electric Soldier Porygon" is known far more for causing nearly 700 seizures in Japan upon its initial airing, and the resulting worldwide ban of the episode, than the actual content itself. This extends to the Pokémon Porygon itself. Despite not being the actual cause of the flashing,^note it was a missile blowing up it's swept under the rug for no other reason than it being the Pokémon featured in the episode. Even its evolutions have been hit with it, as they've made no major appearances in the series.^note Though they did have a cameo in the fifteenth movie's intro. After this incident, OLM, the animation studio behind Pokémon, dropped all strobe lights caused by Pikachu's attacks in future episodes of the anime and re-edited the first 37 episodes to eliminate said effects. This even extended to anime as a whole—ever since this snafu, any fast-paced scenes that could conceivably cause seizures have to be darkened for the broadcast version.
  • Pokémon: The Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon is known less for any of its own merits and more for being associated with the controversy that followed after Pokémon USA, now known as The Pokémon Company International, fired the English voice actors that had been working on the anime since day one in favor of newer, cheaper ones.
  • Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl's Sinnoh League arc suffered from this due to the character of Tobias, infamous for possessing Legendary Pokémon in Darkrai and Latios, which is otherwise usually unheard of in the anime, and curb-stomping every opponent of his with just his Darkrai. When Ash ended up facing him in the semifinals, this lead to Ash suffering a Curb-Stomp Battle from just two of Tobias' Pokémon, made the arc notorious for giving Ash an invincible opponent to make sure he lost, and made Tobias hated by the fandom as a whole.
  • Pokémon: Genesect and the Legend Awakened is mostly remembered for the fan backlash surrounding the inclusion of a second, female Mewtwo and the implied (but eventually debunked) retcon of Mewtwo's backstory that it created, to the point where it has its own folder on the film's YMMV page.^note Years later, it was revealed that the reason for the film's Mewtwo being different was because the estate of Takeshi Shudō held the rights to the Mewtwo from the first movie, so they opted to instead create a lawyer-friendly version of that Mewtwo. This backlash extended to Mega Mewtwo Y, which debuted in the film as the second Mewtwo's Super Mode and was subsequently "tainted." Only when it was used in the Final Smash of the Super Smash Bros. Mewtwo (who is mostly based on the original Mewtwo in Pokémon: The First Movie) was its association with the movie weakened.
  • Pokémon the Series: XY became this over Ash losing the Kalos League. Ash losing the regions league is nothing new nor is fan backlash, but the unprecedented appeal to older fans of XY, Ash's unprecedented skill and maturity as a trainer, his highly built and hyped up Ash-Greninja, the episode's title, promotional materials and other factors^Explanation it was the franchise's 20th anniversary, and the next games were seemingly doing away with traditional Leagues all pointed to him finally winning. Ash's losing the Finals to Alain thus caused unprecedented backlash across both sides of the Pacific as invalidating everything praised about XY by having the seeming payoff of his win never happen and turned the previously well-liked Alain into a fandom pariah. Despite the immediately following Team Flare arc and rest of XY being seen as the best in The Series they're still mostly remembered by fans in terms of the debate if the Kalos League negated all their good or not. Ash won the next series League in what's seen as damage control and creator apology, but rather than forgive XY, fans changed the issue to debating if his winning Kalos would have been better due to its stronger setup (especially because the Alolan league as a whole was a hot button topic both in the anime and in the games).
  • The 2015 Adventures in the Orange Islands DVD is remembered for being infamous for VIZ Media (under orders from TPCI) cutting out two episodes that featured Jynx with her original controversial coloring, one of which was the episode Lorelei (called Prima) appeared in. Making matters worse was the fact that the DVD was billed as a "complete collection" despite the missing episodes.
• In 2017, Rurouni Kenshin returned with a new volume after a nearly twenty-year hiatus... just in time for creator Nobuhiro Watsuki to be arrested for possession of child pornography, scuttling the new series almost as soon as it began and retroactively tainting the old one. Not helping was that it hugely undermined the manga's central message about moral improvement: this coming out in the way it did, instead of the author himself admitting it, makes it hard for fans to rewatch the series without feeling hypocritical. And despite Watsuki expressing regret for his actions, paying a fine, and returning to work in April 2018, the damage is already done and fans are mixed whether to support his work or not. There's also the publisher Shueisha letting him continue to work after six months since the charges, which many people felt was too soon, given that the controversy was (and continues to be) still fresh in the people's minds.
• Sailor Moon:
  • The only thing most know about the DiC/Cloverway dub is that it made several changes to the original, most infamously changing Haruka and Michiru, a lesbian couple, into cousins. However, because a good deal of the romantic subtext wasn't removed, this led many fans to assume that they were not just lesbians, but incestuous to boot.
  • When the anime was airing in Italy, there was a huge controversy in 1997 due to an infamous statement of psychologist Vera Slepoj, who claimed that being a strong fighter is an exclusively manly trait, while a girly/female superheroine is a bad role model for little boys who want to imitate her, making them "sexually confused".^note This happened seven years before Winx Club, an Italian show largely inspired by Sailor Moon. The headline of her article was "Kids, don't watch Sailor Moon, it will turn you into sissies", which was considered outrageous even in the '90s and caused so many discussions that the Italian dub of Sailor Stars (the season that was airing at the time) was ridiculously censored: the Sailor Starlights, women who disguise themselves as men and revert to their female form when transformed, were changed into real men with twin sisters who occasionally take their place.^note The Starlights were voiced by men in their civilian forms, meaning that they couldn't just be made female at all times like in other dubs. This change only applies to episode 188 and you can tell some scenes were redubbed later (in every "twin sisters" scene, Usagi is voiced by Donatella Fanfani instead of her usual voice actress Elisabetta Spinelli). This is dropped like a sack of bricks afterward, but it's such a clumsy workaround that it's easily the most infamous edit from that dub. Not helping matters is that the controversy played a considerable role in Naoko Takeuchi's infamous international embargo that lasted through the better part of the following decade.
• Yuki Suegutsu is chiefly known for two things: her Career Resurrection with Chihayafuru and her earlier career low point with Eden no Hana in which she plagiarized Takehiko Inoue's art, putting all manga serialized in the Bessatsu Friend magazine on an international blacklist for over a decade.
• The life and career of Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata was overshadowed in August 2018 by revelations that he was a Prima Donna Director, being so tough to work under that his exacting standards may have led to the untimely passing of up-and-coming Ghibli talent Yoshifumi Kondō, ^note Kondō died in 1998 from aortic dissection, which was said by his doctors to have been brought on from being overworked. a theory that fellow Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki and Takahata himself were willing to believe. Worse, he died without ever having to account for the damage he might have done, leaving his legacy (if not the enjoyability of his works) up in the air. The controversy never made Takahata's movies' reputations radioactive, but it's still an elephant in the room when it comes to discussing Takahata and his works.
• Previously a major hit series in Japan and a cult favorite in the West, since the late 2010s, it's been difficult to discuss Toriko without bringing up author Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro's 2002 arrest for soliciting sex from a 16-17-year-old, which resulted in a one-year prison sentence and the cancellation of Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi!. While Toriko previously served as a Career Resurrection, the arrest of Nobuhiro Watsuki in 2017 brought Shimabukuro's past to public prominence outside of Japan for the first time, generating so much backlash that Shimabukuro's following series Build King was highly criticized solely for his involvement (it did end up Cut Short, but most likely for other reasons).
• Transformers, being an American toy line created by importing and re-purposing Japanese toys, has had several Japanese media, many of which fall into this:
  • Transformers Kiss Players is undoubtedly best known for its blatantly suggestive imagery involving teenage girls that look prepubescent. Western fans were disgusted by this, while Japanese fans were embarrassed and feared it would irrevocably color perceptions of Japanese Transformers media in foreign countries.
  • Transformers: Armada is mainly remembered for debuting in the U.S. six months before it debuted in Japan, the animation and translation errors that resulted from it, and the first half focusing almost entirely on finding Mini-Cons.
• In the West at least, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is known less for its actual content and more for the frequent debates among audiences regarding the title character's massive chest, which are considered unusually huge for a mainstream Slice of Life series and jar with her otherwise looking significantly younger than she actually is. While the controversy ultimately boosted the anime adaptation's popularity to the forefront of the wider anime fandom, it nonetheless dominated the discussion of both the series and the Summer 2020 anime season as a whole.
• In early February 2018, internet users found the Twitter account of Kazuyoshi Yaginuma, long-renowned for his work on a number of high-profile anime, most notably his direction of the anime adaptation of Recovery of an MMO Junkie, only to find that he's a virulent Neo-Nazi who had been posting and endorsing anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler content since joining Twitter in 2011. The discovery led to Signal.MD terminating their association with Yaginuma, who proceeded to blame his firing on a nonexistent Jewish conspiracy instead of considering that it had anything to do with him being a Neo-Nazi, and his Twitter account was suspended in the fallout of that. Needless to say, discussions surrounding him revolve less on the merits of his artistic output and more on his beliefs and the ethics of supporting the works he contributed to despite them, with MMO Junkie being hit the hardest thanks to both his directorship and the adaptation's recency when the controversy broke out.