This week's poll was suggested by Karonhioktha. Most series take place in the country of origin (manga in Japan, manhua in China, manhwa in Korea, etc.), so what other real world locales should be represented instead? 3y6ax

You can submit poll ideas here: https://mangaupdates.cinevost.com/topic/kilkdnn/site-manga-poll-suggestions

Previous Poll Results:

Question: Scanlator is starting to translate a completed series that has lots of extra side content sprinkled throughout the story. They should...

Choices:

• Translate in order of release regardless of main story vs. side content - votes: 1365 (72.9%)
• Prioritize the main story then go back and translate the extras - votes: 508 (27.1%)

There were 1873 total votes. The poll ended: June 7, 2025

Many people pointed out that the side story tends to be only relevant whenever it was released. Without context, a side story tends to be meaningless

A just ruler amongst tyrants

I never saw South Korea even mentioned in Japanese manga. Is there any?

Hikaru no Go. I'm sure there are more.

Considering the nature/quality of the depictions of North African and Middle Eastern cultures I've seen in manhwa/manga, as much as I'd like to see cultures outside of Europe and North America depicted more often, I'm kind of hesitant to actually hope for that, it feels like it would end up being a monkey's paw kind of situation.

I dunno, maybe outside of the romance genre it's not as bad? All I know is in romance/rofan, they have a bad habit of depicting other cultures as "exotic" but violent, barbaric, and regressive, often animalistic, sometimes literally with them being part beast.

Quote from Ruruskadoo

Considering the nature/quality of the depictions of North African and Middle Eastern cultures I've seen in manhwa/manga, as much as I'd like to see cultures outside of Europe and North America depicted more often, I'm kind of hesitant to actually hope for that, it feels like it would end up being a monkey's paw kind of situation.

I dunno, maybe outside of the romance genre it's not as bad? All I know is in romance/rofan, they have a bad habit of depicting other cultures as "exotic" but violent, barbaric, and regressive, often animalistic, sometimes literally with them being part beast.

all of this, plus every poll going forward should have a "i don't agree" and/or "i dont care" type option to it for exactly this reason.

i know im being a bit biased because im automatically, mentally including "manhua" and "manhwa" into the poll question, and the result is basically sickening. a lot of authors don't need to represent any other country, when they don't even have a good grasp of their own. it's like they can't write "exotic" without being "toxic". hard from me, no vote.

Yeah Antartica is such an obvious meme answer that oof...

I went for Western Europe, because lately i am into those kind of manhwas... Romance between Duke and maid or some such...

I am envoy from nowhere in nowhere. Nobody and nothing have sent me. And though it is impossible I exist. © Trimutius

I feel like there is very little representation of South Africa in manga mmm...

If it's Africa, it's usually North Africa, the rare occasion it got mentioned is when Nelson Mandela make it into a trivia mmm...

Other than that, South East Asia is also very rich in culture, it's still pretty rarely included in manga and most of the time it's usually only Thailand with Indonesia in rare occasion mmm...

I will change this world mmm...
So the world can change me mmm...

I’ve seen all these settings in a manga, to varying degrees of good to “ok, I guess we’re in [X location] even though it could be anywhere” to “hmm, wish they’d stuck to what they knew”, but not much of Oceania. So I went with that because I think the sceneries would be pretty. Antarctica would also be fun for a manga on people who are there for research or whatever.

http://i.imgur.com/LxhWm.jpg (will reformat this some day…)

"No vote" for me.

Quite frankly, if we want representation of other cultures in graphic novels, we need those other cultures to start producing their own local graphic novels for their own cultures and then, if there's a good story, have someone do a fan translation... kind of how like it originally worked with Japanese media going global.

China has manhua, Korea has manhwa, and North America has "comics". Other European countries have their own comics.

So no, we don't need to see more representation of other cultures from Japan, we need to see it from those countries.

Don't get me wrong, if an author can—and is willing to—write from another culture's perspective, using that other country's lore and mythologies (in both the academic and colloquial definitions, which are very different from each other), that's great. But we, as an audience, have no right to demand other cultures be represented in/from Japan.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

13% of people voting Western Europe unironically? Come on now, that's like the second most represented real world region in manga (not going to count Magic Europe and Magic Japan).

Anyways my vote's a five way tie between Central or South America or non-east Asia Asia. The Australia area isn't a very common setting whenever they get an English speaker in the series, so that'd be somewhere after.

If they do away with the "rich oil baron" stereotype that was all the rage in otome games and manga for a while, middle east could be interesting (IYKYK but I am so mad that [series] semi retconned their half *handwave Middle Eastern* character into actually being part of a rich oil baron family in the year of our lord 202X. There could be a very interesting character moment about how a family can be very wealthy in their birth country but when they move somewhere else, their class changes for various reasons, like in real life (read Kiterunner for a literary example), but they sure didn't have any of that. I swear this series is a load of wasted potential but I'm still here...)

I read a comic from Vietnam in the style of a manga :> was the only one so far that I saw... Not that I looked lol